The Book of Strange New Things(74)

I want to write more, even though I don’t want to remember. I wish I could send you the images, even though I also wish I could erase them from my mind. Is it the lowest form of selfishness to want to share the burden like this? And what IS my burden, exactly, sitting on my sofa in England, eating liquorice allsorts, watching foreign corpses swirling around in muddy whirlpools, foreign children queuing for a scrap of tarpaulin?

Someone at work said to me this morning, ‘Where is God in all this?’ I didn’t rise to the bait. I can never understand why people ask that question. The real question for the bystanders of tragedy is ‘Where are WE in all this?’ I’ve always tried to come up with answers to that challenge. I don’t know if I can at the moment. Pray for me.

Love,

Bea.

Peter clasped his hands. They were tacky with grime: new sweat on old sweat. He stood up and walked to the shower cubicle. His erection nodded comically with each step. He positioned himself under the metal nozzle and switched on the water, letting it douse his upturned face first. His scalp stung as the stream penetrated his matted hair, finding little scratches and scabs he hadn’t realised were there. Stone-cold at first, the water warmed up fast, dissolving the dirt off him, enfolding him in a cloud. He kept his eyes closed and let his face be bathed, almost scalded, under the pressurised spray. He cupped his testicles in his hands, and, with his wrists, pressed his penis hard against his belly until the semen came. Then he soaped himself up from head to toes, and washed thoroughly. The water that swilled around the plughole was grey for longer than he would have thought possible.

When he was clean, he continued to stand under the hot stream, and might have remained there for half an hour or more, if the water hadn’t suddenly sputtered to a trickle. An LED display inside the shower dial flashed 0:00. He hadn’t twigged the significance of the gauge until now. Of course! It made perfect sense that duration of water use should be limited by a built-in timer. It’s just that USIC were an American corporation and the idea of a frugal, resource-conscious American corporation almost defied belief.

As soon as the drain stopped gurgling, he was able to discern that a noise he’d been aware of for a while, which he’d attributed to the pipes, was in fact someone knocking at the door.

‘Hi,’ said Grainger when he opened it. Her eyes barely flickered at the sight of him standing there wet, clad only in a bath towel knotted around his waist. She had a dossier clutched to her bosom.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,’ he said.

‘I knocked real loud,’ she said.

‘I suppose I expected there to be a doorbell, or a buzzer or an intercom or something.’

‘USIC isn’t big on unnecessary technology.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that. It’s one of the unexpectedly admirable things about you.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ said Grainger. ‘You say the sweetest things.’

Behind him, the Shoot emitted a soft noise, like an electronic sigh: the sound it made when its screen went dark to conserve power. He remembered North Korea.

‘Have you heard about North Korea?’ he said.

‘It’s a country in . . . uh . . . Asia,’ she said.

‘There’s been a terrible cyclone there. Tens of thousands of people are dead.’

Grainger blinked hard; flinched, almost. But a moment later, she’d regained her composure. ‘That’s tragic,’ she said. ‘Nothing we can do about it, though.’ She held the dossier out to him. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Arthur Severin but were afraid to ask.’

He took the file. ‘Thank you.’

‘The funeral is in three hours.’

‘Right. How long is that in . . . uh . . . ’ He gestured vaguely, hoping that a wave of his hand might convey the difference between time as he’d always known it and time here and now.

She smiled, patient with his stupidity. ‘Three hours,’ she repeated, and raised her wrist to display her watch. ‘Three hours means three hours.’

‘I wasn’t expecting quite so little notice,’ he said.

‘Relax. Nobody’s expecting you to write fifty pages of rhyming poetry in his honour. Just say a few words. Everyone understands you didn’t know him too well. That kind of helps.’

‘The impersonal touch?’

‘It’s what the great religions offer, isn’t it?’ And she lifted her wristwatch again. ‘I’ll come and collect you at 1330.’

She left without another word and shut the door behind her, at exactly the instant that his towel fell off.

‘We are gathered here,’ said Peter to the hushed and solemn assembly, ‘to honour a man who, only one sunrise ago, was a living, breathing person just like us.’

He cast a glance towards the coffin that sat on a rack of metal rollers in front of an incinerator. Instinctively, everyone else in the room looked at it, too. The coffin was made of recycled cardboard, with a lustrous gloss of vegetable glaze to give it that solid-wood effect. The rack was just like the ones attached to x-ray machines at airports.

‘A person who drew air into his lungs,’ Peter continued, ‘lungs that were a bit the worse for wear, perhaps, but still working fine, delivering oxygen to his blood, the same blood that’s pumping in all of us as we stand here today.’ His voice was loud and clear without amplification, but lacked the reverb resonance it was granted in churches and assembly halls. The funeral room, while large, was acoustically cramped, and the furnace inside the incinerator generated a noise like a distant jet plane passing by.