The Book of Strange New Things(92)

He cried about the ‘Quilts For Peace’ that his mother sewed for charity auctions. Even when her fellow Quakers took pity and put in a few bids, those quilts never fetched much because they were gaudy patchworks that clashed with every décor known to civilised man. He cried for the quilts that had gone unsold and he cried for the quilts that had found a home and he cried for the way his mother had explained, with such lonely enthusiasm, that all the colours symbolised national flags and the blue and white could be Israel or Argentina and the red polka dots were Japan and the green, yellow and red stripes with the stars in the middle could be Ethiopia, Senegal, Ghana or Cameroon depending on which way you were sleeping.

He cried about his Cubs uniform, eaten by silverfish. Oh, how he cried about that. Each vanished thread of fibre, each pathetic little hole in the useless garments, caused a swelling in his chest and stung his eyes anew. He cried about not having known that the final time he attended the Scout hall was the final time. Someone should have told him.

He cried about stuff that had happened to Bea, too. The family photograph of her when she was six, with a livid rectangular rash across her mouth and cheeks, caused by the adhesive tape. How could someone do that to a kid? He cried about her doing her homework in the toilet while the kitchen was full of strangers and her bedroom was out of bounds. He cried about other incidents from Bea’s childhood as well; all of them from before he met her. It was as though different vintages of sadness were stored in different parts of his mind, stacked chronologically, and his tear ducts were on the end of electrical wires that didn’t touch any recent decades – just went straight to the distant past. The Bea he wept for was a pretty little ghost conjured up from his wife’s stash of photos and anecdotes, but no less pitiable for that.

Towards the end of his weeping fit, he cried about the coin collection his father had given him. It was shop-bought but serious, a handsomely packaged starter set that included a French franc, an Italian lira, a 10-drachma bit, a German 50-pfennig with a woman planting a seedling on it, and other commonplace treasures which, to a clueless boy, seemed like relics from an ancient epoch, the prehistoric empire of numismatics. Ah, happy innocence . . . but not long afterwards a schoolfriend murmured in his ear, serpent-like, that this prissy little collection was not valuable at all, and persuaded him to swap the lot for a single coin that had been minted, he said, in 333 AD. It was misshapen and corroded but it had a helmeted warrior engraved on it and Peter fell under its spell. His father was furious, when he found out. He kept saying ‘If genuine . . . ’, ‘If genuine . . . ’ in a fastidiously dubious tone, and lecturing Peter about the extreme commonness of Constantine copper coins, and how damaged this one was, and how the whole damn business of collecting was infested with fakery. Peter kept protesting, hotly, ‘You weren’t there!’, referring not just to the reign of Constantine but also to the moment when a small, impressionable boy was defeated by a bigger, cleverer one. For years, that poisonous repetition of ‘If genuine . . . ’ festered in his mind, proof of everything that was creepy and cold about his father. By the time Peter was ready to understand that the quarrel was bluster and that his dad had simply been hurt, the old man was in his grave.

About all these things and more, Peter wept. Then he felt better, as if purged. His raw eyelids, which would have needed careful pampering if he’d been anywhere but here, were soothed by the oily moistness of the warm air. His head, which had started to pound towards the end of his crying jag, felt light and pleasantly anaesthetised.

‘A very long ??ong,’ said Jesus Lover Five, sitting with her back against the lectern. He hadn’t noticed her arrive. This wasn’t the first time she’d come to the church to visit him, at an hour when most others of her kind were sleeping.

‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ he asked, heaving himself up on one elbow. He could barely see her; the entire church was lit with nothing more powerful than a couple of oil flames floating in ceramic soup-bowls: toy braziers.

‘Awake,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.

He replayed her comment in his head. A very long song. Evidently, to her, his weeping sounded no different from singing. The distress in his voice was lost in translation; she heard only the horn-like music of whimpering, the rhythm of sobs. Maybe she would have liked to join in, but couldn’t make out any words.

‘I was remembering things from long ago,’ he explained.

‘Long ago,’ she echoed. Then: ‘Long ago, the Lord ??aid ???o I??rael, I have loved you, my people.’

The quote from Jeremiah surprised him, not because she had managed to memorise it, but because it was from a more modern translation than the King James – the New Living, if he wasn’t mistaken. Did Kurtzberg pick and choose between different Bibles? In the King James, ‘long ago’ was ‘of old’, while the original Hebrew meant something more like ‘from afar’.

Long ago and far away . . . maybe they were the same thing after all. Rousing himself from his scholarly fog, he opened his mouth to ask Jesus Lover Five why she had quoted that bit of Scripture, what it meant to her.

But Lover Five’s head was slumped onto her chest. Whatever the reason for her insomnia at home in her own bed, she had found sleep here, with him.

It was during his second sojourn with the Oasans, also, that Peter experienced his first death. His first dead Oasan, that is.