The Book of Strange New Things(84)

He nodded, as if deferring to her greater wisdom on this point. Still she made no move to start the vehicle. ‘Are there any married couples here?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. We’ve got work to do, we’ve all got to get along.’

‘I get along with my wife,’ he said. ‘We’ve always worked together. I wish she was here.’

‘You think she’d enjoy it here?’

He almost said, That wouldn’t matter, she’d be with me, then realised how incredibly arrogant that would sound. ‘I hope so.’

‘My guess is she wouldn’t be a happy bunny,’ said Grainger. ‘This is not the place for a real woman.’

You’re a real woman, he wanted to say, but his professional intuition warned him against it. ‘Well, there are a lot of women working here,’ he said. ‘They seem real enough to me.’

‘Yeah? Maybe you need to look at them a bit closer.’

He looked at her a bit closer. A pimple had flared up on her temple, on the tender skin stretched tight just above her right eyebrow. It looked sore. He wondered if she was pre-menstrual. Bea got flare-ups of acne at certain times of the month, and was liable to start strange conversations full of non sequiturs, criticise work colleagues – and talk about sex.

‘When I first started working here,’ Grainger went on, ‘I didn’t even notice that nobody hooked up with anybody else. I figured it was probably going on behind my back. The way BG talks, and Tuska . . . But then time goes by, years go by, and you know what? – it never happens. Nobody holds hands. Nobody kisses. Nobody skips work for an hour and comes back with their hair all mussed up and their skirt inside their panties.’

‘Do you want them to?’ The decorous reserve of the Oasans had made him less impressed than ever with the reckless ruttings of humans.

She sighed, exasperated. ‘I’d just like to see some signs of life sometimes.’

He stopped short of telling her that she was being too harsh. He only said: ‘People don’t have to be sexually active to be alive.’

She looked at him askance. ‘Hey, you’re not . . . uh . . . I forgot the word . . . when priests take, like, a vow . . . ?’

‘Celibate?’ He smiled. ‘No. No, of course not. You know I’m married.’

‘Yeah, but I didn’t know what the deal was. I mean, there are all kinds of deals between a man and a woman.’

Peter shut his eyes, tried to transport himself back to the bed with the yellow duvet, where his wife lay naked and waiting for him. He couldn’t picture her. Couldn’t even picture the yellow duvet, couldn’t even recall the precise hue. Instead, he saw the yellow of Jesus Lover Five’s robe, a distinct canary-yellow he’d trained himself to be able to distinguish from other yellows worn by other Jesus Lovers, because she was his favourite.

‘Ours is . . . the full thing,’ he assured Grainger.

‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’ Whereupon, with a touch of her hand, the engine kindled into life.





14


Lost in the mighty unison



His body jerked erect. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you,’ he said.

‘It’s OK,’ she said.

‘Was I out for long?’

She consulted the dashboard. ‘Maybe twenty minutes. A catnap. At first, I figured you were deep in thought.’

He checked the view through the side window, then faced front. The landscape looked exactly the same as when he’d nodded off.

‘Not much to look at, I know,’ said Grainger.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘I just haven’t been sleeping well.’

‘Happy to help, go right ahead.’

He examined her face, trying to judge whether she was annoyed with him, but she’d put on dark glasses at some point during the drive, and her whole head was ablaze with sunlight.

‘Your lips,’ she said, ‘are too dry. You’re not drinking enough.’ Keeping one hand on the wheel, she used the other to fetch up a water bottle from the floor between her legs. She handed it over to him, only momentarily taking her eyes off her driving, and fetched up another bottle for herself. Hers was already opened; his was still sealed.

‘Remember to keep drinking,’ she said. ‘Dehydration is a killer. And be careful in the sun. Don’t get burned like last time.’

‘You’re talking like my wife,’ he said.

‘Well, maybe between the two of us, we can keep you alive.’

He uncapped the bottle and drank deep. The colourless liquid was chilled and it tasted harsh – so harsh that he almost coughed. As discreetly as he could, he glanced at the label, which read, simply, WATER: $50 PER 300ml. She was giving him an expensive imported gift.

‘Thank you,’ he said, trying to sound chuffed, while actually thinking how strange it was that someone who’d lived on Oasis longer than him could fail to appreciate the superiority of the local water. When his mission was over and he had to return home, he would certainly miss the taste of honeydew.

Near the end of the long drive, Peter decided that the Oasan settlement deserved a better name than C-2 or Freaktown. He’d tried to find out what the Oasans themselves called it, so he could refer to it by that name, but they appeared not to understand the question, and kept identifying their settlement, in English, as ‘here’. At first he assumed this was because its real name was unpronounceable, but no, there was no real name. Such marvellous humility! The human race would have been spared a great deal of grief and bloodshed if people hadn’t been so attached to names like Stalingrad, Fallujah and Rome, and simply been content to live ‘here’, whatever and wherever ‘here’ might be.