The Book of Strange New Things(80)

It was true he felt no anger, but he felt disturbingly little of anything else either, aside from stress at his inability to respond. It was difficult, in his current circumstances, to grab hold of feelings and brand them with a name. If he tried his hardest, he could just about make sense of what was happening on Oasis, but that was because he and the events he was grappling with were in the same space. His mind and heart were trapped in his body, and his body was here.

The news of Bea’s pregnancy was like news of some momentous event in Britain’s current affairs: he knew it was important but he had no idea what he could or should do about it. He assumed that any other man would be imagining the intimate realities of being a father: the baby in his arms, the corporeal son or daughter bouncing on his knee, the kid’s high school graduation or whatever. He could imagine such scenes only in the most contrived and generic way, as if they were two-dimensional panels in a comic book written and drawn by shameless hacks. Trying to visualise Bea with a baby inside her was impossible: there was no baby, yet, and if he tried to conjure up a vision of her belly, his mind’s eye played him old footage of her slim abdomen inside the T-shirt she wore to bed. Or, if he tried harder, an x-ray of a pelvis that could have been anyone’s, speckled with cryptic lucencies that could be a grub-like embryo, could be gas, could be cancer.

You must be extra careful now to take care of yourself, he’d written. His use of ‘care’ twice in one short sentence was not ideal, but it had taken him long enough to come up with the words and he meant them so he’d sent them. Sincere as the sentiment was, though, he had to admit it was the sort of thing an auntie or a brother might say.

And since then, he’d not yet managed to write her another letter, despite receiving several from her. More than once, he’d forced himself to sit down and begin, but had got stuck after Dear Bea and taken it no further. Today, he tried to convince himself to type a few words about his visit to the Big Brassiere, but he doubted that his wife was hanging out for information on this topic.

There was nothing new from her today, which was unusual. He hoped nothing bad had happened. To Beatrice, that is. Bad things were happening to the world in general all the time, it seemed.

Of course, the world had always been crowded with mishaps and disasters, just as it had also been graced with fine achievements and beautiful endeavours which the media tended to ignore – if only because honour and contentment were hard to capture on film. But, even allowing for all that, Peter felt that the dispatches he was getting from Beatrice were alarmingly crammed with bad news. More bad news than he knew what to do with. There was only so much calamitous change you could hear about, events that re-wrote what you thought was general knowledge, before your brain stopped digesting and you clung on to older realities. He accepted that Mirah had gone back to her husband and that an American politician’s wife had been shot dead in her swimming pool. He remembered that there was a little girl in Oskaloosa called Coretta who’d lost her father. He accepted, with some difficulty, that the Maldives had been wiped out by a tidal wave. But when he thought of North Korea, he pictured a calm cityscape of totalitarian architecture, with legions of bicycle-riding citizens going about their normal business. There was no room in the picture for a catastrophic cyclone.

No fresh disasters today, though. No news is good news, as some people might say. Uncomforted, he retrieved one of Bea’s older letters and re-read it.

Dear Peter,

I got your message last night. I’m so relieved you’re not angry with me, unless the shortness of what you wrote indicates that you ARE angry but just keeping it under control. But I don’t think so. You must be unbelievably preoccupied with your mission, learning the language and tackling all sorts of challenges that no one has ever faced before.(Please tell me a little more about those, when you have a minute.)

From what you HAVE said, it sounds like you’re adjusting to the weather, at least. That’s not really possible here, because it’s gone haywire again. More torrential rainfall, with the occasional gale force wind as a bonus. The house smells of damp. Mildew on the furniture and walls. Opening the windows lets in fresh air but also rain, it’s hard to know what to do. I know it’s very wet where you are too, but from the little you’ve told me about how the Oasans live, the place seems ‘designed’ for it. Here in England, everything is set up on the basis that the weather will stay mostly dry and moderate. We’re just not very good at planning for emergencies. Denial, I suppose.

Heard from Sheila again. Billy is clinically depressed, she says. Not good in a 14-year-old boy. I arranged to take him out somewhere on the day that the family is scheduled to move house. (Did I mention that Sheila and Mark split up? Neither one of them could meet the mortgage repayments alone so they’ve decided to sell up and move into flats. Actually, Mark is going to Romania.) I’m not convinced it’s wise to move house without letting your kids be part of the process, but Sheila says Billy genuinely doesn’t want to know and it’s better if he just gets delivered to the flat when it’s a fait accompli. She’s given me money to take him to a movie but I’m actually going to take him to a Cat Show which happens to be on at the Sports & Leisure Centre on that day. It’s risky because (A) he may be the sort of kid who gets freaked out at animals being kept in small cages and (B) it will remind him of the snow leopard, but I hope that seeing all those different cats gathered together in one place will reassure him somehow.