The Book of Strange New Things(60)

‘This is me as a child,’ he said. ‘It was taken by an auntie, I think. The sister of my mother.’

Jesus Lover One examined the snapshot of Peter at age three. In it, Peter was dwarfed by his surroundings but still conspicuous in a bright yellow parka and orange mittens, waving at the camera. It was one of the few family photos found in Peter’s mother’s house when she died. Peter hoped the Oasans didn’t ask to see a photograph of his dad, because his mother had destroyed them all.

‘Very high building,’ commented Jesus Lover Fifty-Four. He meant the tower block in the background of the picture.

‘It was a horrible place,’ said Peter. ‘Depressing. And dangerous, too.’

‘Very high,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, passing the square of card on to the next in line.

‘We moved to somewhere better not long after that,’ he said. ‘Somewhere safer, anyway.’

The Oasans hummed approvingly. Moving to somewhere better and safer was a concept they could understand.

The already handed-out photos, meanwhile, were making their way among the crowd. One of the Oasans had a question about the photo of Peter’s church. In the picture, a few members of the congregation were gathered outside the building, queuing to enter the blue door. One of them was Ian Dewar, the Afghanistan veteran who got around on crutches, having refused the MoD’s offer of an artificial leg because he valued any opportunity to talk about the war.

‘Man have no leg,’ observed the Oasan.

‘That’s right,’ said Peter. ‘There was a war. His leg was badly injured and the doctors had to cut it off.’

‘Man dead now?’

‘No, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine.’

There was a communal murmur of wonder, and several utterances of ‘Prai??e the Lord’.

‘And this,’ said Peter, ‘is my wedding day. Me and my wife Beatrice, on the day we got married. Do you have marriage?’

‘We have marriage,’ said Jesus Lover One. A mildly amused retort? Exasperated? Weary? Simply informative? Peter couldn’t tell from the tone. There was no tone, as far as he could hear. Only the straining of exotic flesh to imitate the action of vocal cords.

‘She introduced me to Christ,’ added Peter. ‘She brought me to God.’

This provoked a more excited reaction than the photos.

‘Your wife find the Book,’ said Jesus Lover Seventy-something. ‘Read, read, read, read before you. Learn the ???echnique of Je??u??. Then your wife come for you and ??ay, I have found the Book of ?????range New Thing??. Read now, you. We ??hall no??? peri??h, bu??? have e???ernal life.’

Summarised like that, it sounded more like the serpent’s overtures to Eve in the Garden of Eden than Bea’s matter-of-fact allusions to Christianity in the hospital ward where she first met him. But it was interesting that the Oasan went to such strenuous effort to quote from John 3:16 verbatim. Kurtzberg must have taught them that.

‘Did Kurtzberg teach you that?’

The Jesus Lover who’d spoken did not reply.

‘Whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life,’ said Peter.

‘Amen,’ said Jesus Lover One, and the whole congregation murmured likewise. The word ‘amen’ seemed mercifully tailored to their mouths, or whatever part of their bodies they used to speak with. ‘Amen, amen, amen.’

The wedding photo reached an Oasan in an olive-green robe. He – or she? – recoiled.

‘Knife,’ the Oasan said. ‘Knife.’

It was true: in the picture, Peter and Bea were both clutching the hilt of an outsized knife, ready to cut the ceremonial slice from their wedding cake.

‘It’s a custom,’ said Peter. ‘A ritual. It was a very happy day.’

‘Happy day,’ echoed the Oasan, in a voice like wet bracken being crushed underfoot.

Peter shifted in his hammock, turned away from the rising sun. The molten orange light was getting a little intense. He lay on his back, staring up into the sky, and watched the purple retinal afterimages dancing in the cloudless expanse. Soon the afterimages vanished and the sky was a uniform gold. Were the sunrises back home ever gold like this? He couldn’t recall. He could remember golden light on the bed, lighting up Joshua’s fur and the exposed curves of Bea’s legs if it was a warm morning and she’d kicked the sheets off. But that wasn’t the same as the whole sky being gold; the sky outside their bedroom would be blue, surely? He was annoyed with himself for forgetting.

There was so much to tell Bea, and he’d written too little of it down. When the next opportunity came for him to transmit a letter, he would no doubt manage, with the help of the notes he’d scribbled in his notebooks, to list the most significant things that had happened in the last three hundred and sixty hours. But he would miss the nuances. He would forget the quiet, unspoken moments of intimacy between him and his new friends, the unexpected glimmers of understanding in areas of communication that he’d assumed would be hopelessly dark. He might even forget to mention the gold sky.

His notebooks were in his rucksack, somewhere below. Perhaps he should’ve kept them up here in the hammock, so that he could jot down his thoughts and reflections whenever they came to him. But then he might stab himself in his sleep with the pencil, or the pencil might fall through the net onto the hard floor below. A pencil could land in such a way that the internal sliver of graphite got shattered in a dozen places, rendering it unsharpenable. Peter’s pencils were precious to him. Properly taken care of, they would continue to be of service when all the ballpoint pens had leaked and all the felt-tips had dried up and all the machines had malfunctioned.