The Book of Strange New Things(59)

‘This is my wife,’ he’d said, extracting the topmost of the photographs from the plastic wallet and handing it to Jesus Lover One. ‘Beatrice.’

‘Bea???ri??,’ repeated Jesus Lover One, his shoulders contorting with effort.

‘Bea for short,’ said Peter.

‘Bea???ri??,’ said Jesus Lover One. He held the photograph gently in his gloved fingers, at a strict horizontal angle, as if the miniature Beatrice posing in her mulberry-coloured jeans and imitation cashmere sweater was in danger of sliding off the paper. Peter wondered if these people could even see in the conventional sense, since there was nothing on their faces he could identify as an eye. They weren’t blind, that was obvious, but . . . maybe they couldn’t decode two-dimensional images?

‘Your wife,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Hair very long.’

‘It was, then,’ said Peter. ‘It’s shorter now.’ He wondered if long hair was attractive or repulsive to those who had none at all.

‘Your wife love Je??u???’

‘She certainly does.’

‘Good,’ said Jesus Lover One, handing the photograph to the person next to him, who accepted it as though it were a sacrament.

‘This next one,’ said Peter, ‘is the house where we live. It’s in a satellite . . . uh . . . a town not far from London, in England. As you can see, our house is much the same as the houses all around it. But inside, it’s different. Just like a person can look the same as those all around him, but inside, because of his faith in the Lord, he’s very different.’ Peter looked up to assess how this simile was going over. Dozens of Oasans were kneeling in concentric circles around him, waiting solemnly for a rectangle of card to be conveyed towards them. Apart from the colours of their robes and some slight variations in height, they all looked the same. There were no fat ones, no musclebound ones, no lanky lunks, no bent-backed crones. No women, no men. Only rows of compact, standardised beings squatting in the same pose, dressed in garments of identical design. And, inside each of their hoods, a coagulated stew of meat that he could not, could not, simply could not translate into a face.

‘Needle,’ said the creature called Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, shuddering. ‘Row of needle. Row of . . . knife.’

Peter had no idea what he was talking about. The photograph, which showed nothing more than a drab ex-council house and a flimsy metal fence, was handed on.

‘And this one,’ he said, ‘is our cat, Joshua.’

Jesus Lover One contemplated the photo for fifteen or twenty seconds.

‘Je??u?? Lover?’ he asked at last.

Peter laughed. ‘He can’t love Jesus,’ he said. ‘He’s a cat.’ This information was greeted with silence. ‘He’s not . . . He’s an animal. He can’t think . . . ’ The word ‘self-consciously’ came to his mind, but he rejected it. Too many sibilants, for a start. ‘His brain is very small. He can’t think about right and wrong, or why he’s alive. He can only eat and sleep.’ It felt like a disloyal thing to say. Joshua could do a lot more than that. But it was true he was an amoral creature, and had never worried about why he’d been put on the earth.

‘We love him, though,’ Peter added.

Jesus Lover One nodded.

‘We al??o love tho??e who have no love for Je??u??. However, they will die.’

Peter doled out another picture. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘is my church back home.’ He almost repeated BG’s wisecrack about not winning any architecture prizes, but managed to swallow the words. Transparency and simplicity were what was called for here, at least until he figured out how these people ticked.

‘Needle, ??o many needle,’ said one of the Oasans whose Jesus Lover number Peter hadn’t yet learned.

Peter leaned forward to look at the picture upside-down. There were no needles anywhere to be seen. Just the ugly blockish exterior of the church, lent a modicum of style by a faux-Gothic arch in the metal gate surrounding the building. Then he noticed the spikes on the tops of the railings.

‘We need to keep the thieves out,’ he explained.

‘Thief will die,’ agreed one of the Oasans.

Next in the pile was another photo of Joshua, curled up on the duvet with one paw shielding his eyes. Peter shuffled the picture to the back of the pile and selected another.

‘This is the back yard of the church. It used to be a car park. Just concrete. We got the concrete ripped up and replaced with soil. We figured people could walk to church or maybe find parking in the street . . . ’ Even as he spoke, he knew that half of what he was saying – maybe all of it – must be incomprehensible to these people. Yet he couldn’t stop. ‘It was a risk. But it paid . . . it was . . . it led to success. It led to a good thing. Grass grew. We planted shrubs and flowers, even some trees. Now the children play out there, when the weather is warm. Not that the weather is often very warm where I come from . . . ’ He was babbling. Get a grip.

‘Where you?’

‘Sorry?’

The Oasan held up the photograph. ‘Where you?’

‘I’m not in this one,’ said Peter.

The Oasan nodded, handed the picture to his neighbour.

Peter extracted the next photo from the plastic wallet. Even if the Oasan air had not been so humid, he would have been sweating by now.