The Book of Strange New Things(35)

This was news to him. He strained to recall their walk together, on that first day. The words had evaporated. All he recalled, vaguely, was her presence at his side.

‘Forgive me. I was very tired.’

‘You’re forgiven.’

They travelled on. A few hundred metres ahead and to the side of them, there was another isolated swirl of rain, cartwheeling along the land.

‘Can we drive through that?’ Peter asked.

‘Sure.’

She swerved slightly, and they ploughed through the whirl of brilliant water-drops, which enveloped them momentarily in its fairy-light display.

‘Psychedelic, huh,’ remarked Grainger, deadpan, switching on the windscreen wipers.

‘Beautiful,’ he said.

After another few minutes of driving, the shapes on the horizon had firmed up into the unmistakable contours of buildings. Nothing fancy or monumental. Square blocks, like British tower blocks, cheap utilitarian housing. Not exactly the diamantine spires of a fantastical city.

‘What do they call themselves?’ asked Peter.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Grainger. ‘Something we couldn’t pronounce, I guess.’

‘So who named this place Oasis?’

‘A little girl from Oskaloosa, Iowa.’

‘You’re kidding.’

She cast him a bemused glance. ‘You didn’t read about it? It’s gotta be the only thing the average person knows about this place. There were articles about this little girl in magazines, she was on TV . . . ’

‘I don’t read magazines, and I don’t have a TV.’

Now it was her turn to say, ‘You’re kidding.’

He smiled. ‘I’m not kidding. One day I got a message from the Lord saying, “Get rid of the TV, Peter, it’s a huge waste of time.” So I did.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to take you.’

‘Straight,’ he said. ‘Always straight. Anyway: this little girl from . . . uh . . . ’

‘Oskaloosa. She won a competition. “Name A New World”. I’m so amazed you didn’t hear about it. There were hundreds of thousands of entries, most of them unbelievably wrong. It was like a nerd jamboree. The USIC staff in the building where I worked kept an internal dossier of the worst names. Every week we’d have new favourites. We ended up using them for a competition we ran ourselves, to name the janitor’s supply room. “Nuvo Opportunus”, that was a great one. “Zion II”. “Atlanto”. “Arnold” – that had real pizzazz, I thought. “Splendoramus”. Uh . . . “Einsteinia”. I forget the rest. Oh, yeah: “Traveller’s Rest”, that was another one. “Newfoundplanet”. “Cervix”. “Hendrix”. “Elvis”. They just kept on coming.’

‘And the little girl?’

‘She got lucky, I guess. There must’ve been hundreds of other people who came up with “Oasis”. She won $50,000. The family needed it, too, because the mother had just lost her job, and the father had been diagnosed with some kind of rare disease.’

‘So how did the story end?’

‘Just like you’d expect. The dad died. The mom talked about it on TV and became an alcoholic. Then the media moved on and you never got to know what happened next.’

‘Can you remember the girl’s name? I’d like to pray for her.’

Grainger butted her palms against the steering wheel irritably, and rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Puh-lease. There were a million Americans praying for her, and it didn’t stop her life going down the toilet.’

He shut up, faced front. They drove in silence for forty seconds or so.

‘Coretta,’ she said at last.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter. He tried to picture Coretta, so that she wouldn’t be just a name to him when he prayed. Any sort of face was better than none at all. He thought of the children he knew, the kids in his congregation back home, but the ones that sprang to mind were too old or too young or the wrong sex. In any case, as a minister, in his own church, he wasn’t so involved with the little ones; Bea took them into another room for play activities during his sermons. Not that he was unaware of them while he preached: the walls were so thin that if he paused for effect between sentences, the silence was often filled by laughter or snatches of song or even the galumphing of small feet. But he didn’t know any of the kids particularly well.

‘This Coretta,’ he said, pushing his luck with Grainger. ‘Is she black or white?’ One child had popped into his memory: the daughter of that new Somali couple, the cheeky girl who was always dressed like a miniature nineteenth-century Southern belle . . . what was her name? – Lulu. Adorable kid.

‘White,’ said Grainger. ‘Blonde hair. Or maybe a redhead, I forget. It was a long time ago, and there’s no way of checking.’

‘Can’t look her up?’

She blinked. ‘Look her up?’

‘On a computer or something?’ Even as he said it, he realised it was a stupid suggestion. Oasis was far beyond the reach of any information superhighways; there were no world-wide webs laden with morsels of trivia, no industrious search engines offering up millions of Oskaloosas and Corettas. If what you wanted to know was not to be found in the stuff you’d brought along with you – the books, the magic discs, the memory sticks, the old copies of Hydraulics magazine – you could forget it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not thinking clearly.’