The Book of Strange New Things

10. The happiest day of my life

Peter hung suspended between ground and sky, in a net, his body covered with dark blue insects. They weren’t feeding on him, they were just using him as a place to be. Every time he stretched or coughed, the bugs would hover up from his skin or hop elsewhere, then settle back. He didn’t mind. Their legs didn’t tickle. They were quiet.

He’d been awake for hours, resting his cheek on his upflung arm so that his eyes were in line with the horizon. The sun was rising. It was the end of the long night, his fifth night spent among the Oasans.

Not that he was among the Oasans now, strictly speaking. He was alone on his improvised hammock, strung aloft between two pillars of his church. His church-in-progress. Four walls, four internal pillars, no roof. No contents except for a few tools and coils of rope and vats of mortar and braziers of oil. The braziers of oil were cold now, glimmering in the dawn light. Far from serving any religious purpose¸ they had a purely practical function — throughout the long dark spell, for the duration of each working ‘day’, they were ignited to throw light on the proceedings, and extinguished again when the last of the Oasans had gone home and ‘Father Peรี่er’ was ready to retire.

His congregation were labouring as fast as they could to build this place, but they weren’t here with him today; not yet. They were still asleep, he supposed, in their own houses. Oasans slept a lot; they got tired easily. They’d work for an hour or two, and then, whether the task had been arduous or not, they would go home and rest in bed for a while.

Peter stretched in his hammock, recalling what those beds looked like, glad he wasn’t in one now. They resembled old-fashioned bathtubs, sculpted out of a sort of tough, dense moss, as lightweight as balsa wood. The tubs were lined with many layers of a cotton-like material, swaddling the sleeper in a loose, fluffy cocoon.

Three hundred hours ago, when he first succumbed to tiredness after the great exhilarations of his first day, Peter had been offered such a bed. He’d accepted it, in deference to his hosts’ hospitality, and there had been much ceremonial well-wishing for a good long rest. But he hadn’t been able to sleep.

For one thing, it was daytime, and the Oasans felt no need to darken their bedchambers, positioning their cots right under the brightest sunbeams. He’d climbed in anyway, squinting against the glare, hoping he might lose consciousness through sheer exhaustion. Unfortunately, the bed itself was an obstacle to sleep; the bed, in fact, was insufferable. The fluffy blankets were soon drenched with sweat and vapour, they exuded a sickly coconutty smell, and the tub was slightly too small, even though it was larger than the standard model. He suspected it had been carved specially for him, which made him all the more determined to adjust to it if he could.

But it was no good. As well as the absurd bed and the excessive light, there was also a noise problem. On that first day, there were four Oasans sleeping near him — the four who called themselves Jeสีuสี Lover One, Jeสีuสี Lover Fifรี่y-Four, Jeสีuสี Lover สีevenรี่y-Eighรี่ and Jeสีuสี Lover สีevenรี่y-Nine — and all four of them breathed very loudly, creating an obnoxious symphony of sucking and gurgling. Their cots were in another room, but Oasan houses had no closeable doors, and he could hear the sleepers’ every breath, every snuffle, every glutinous swallow. In his bed back home, he was used to the barely audible breathing of Bea and an occasional sigh from Joshua the cat, not this kind of racket. Lying in the house of the Oasans, he reconnected with a long-forgotten episode from his past life: the memory of being lured off the street by a charity worker and put in a hostel for rough sleepers, most of them alcoholics and addicts like himself. The memory, too, of sneaking out of there in the middle of the night, back onto the bitter streets, to look for his own quiet space to doss down in.

So: here he was in a hammock, suspended in his half-built church, in the open air, in the absolute desert stillness of the Oasan dawn.

He had slept well and deeply. He’d always been able to sleep outdoors: a legacy of his homeless years, perhaps, when he’d lain comatose in public parks and doorways, lain so still that people would mistake him for a dead body. Without alcohol, it was a bit more difficult to drift off, but not much. The intrusiveness of the vaporous Oasan atmosphere was easier to deal with, he felt, if he surrendered himself to it. Being indoors and yet not truly enclosed was the worst of both worlds. The Oasans’ houses weren’t sealed and air-conditioned like the USIC base; they were ventilated by open windows through which the insidious atmosphere swirled freely. There was something disconcerting about lying tucked up in a bed, and imagining every minute that the surrounding air was lifting the blankets with invisible fingers and slipping in beside you. Much better to lie exposed, wearing nothing but a single cotton garment. After a while, if you were sleepy enough, you felt as though you were reclining in a shallow stream, with the water flowing gently over you.

On waking today, he’d noted that the exposed flesh of his arms was intricately patterned with diamond-shaped welts, the after-impression of the net. It gave him a crocodilian appearance. For a minute or two, until the marks faded, he enjoyed the fantasy of having turned into a lizard-man.

His hosts had taken his rejection of their bed very well. On that first day, several hours after the formal commencement of communal sleep, when Peter had already been sitting upright for a long while, praying, thinking, fidgeting, taking sips from his plastic bottle of water, filling in the time before he dared to offend everyone by escaping outside, he sensed a presence enter his room. It was Jesus Lover One, the Oasan who’d first welcomed him to the settlement. Peter considered pretending to have been jolted out of a deep sleep, but decided that such childish dissembling would fool no one. He smiled and waved hello.

Jesus Lover One walked to the foot of Peter’s cot and stood there, head bowed. He was fully dressed in his blue robe, complete with hood, boots and gloves, his hands clasped in front of his abdomen. The lowered head and the cowl obscured his grisly visage, allowing Peter to imagine human features in that shadowy occlusion.

Lover One’s voice, when it came, was hushed so as not to wake the others. A soft, suppressed sound, eerie as the creak of a door in a distant building.

‘You are praying,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ whispered Peter.

‘I alสีo am praying,’ said Lover One. ‘Praying in hope for the hearing of God.’

The two of them were silent for a while. In the adjacent room, the other Oasans snortled on. Eventually, Lover One added:

‘I fear all my praying go aสีรี่ray.’

Peter replayed the half-dissolved word in his mind several times. ‘Astray?’ he echoed.

‘Aสีรี่ray,’ confirmed Lover One, unclasping his hands. With one he pointed upwards. ‘God abide there.’ With the other he pointed downwards. ‘Prayer go here.’

‘Prayers don’t travel in space, Lover One,’ said Peter. ‘Prayers don’t go anywhere; they just are. God is here with us.’

‘You hear God? Now?’ The Oasan raised his head in rapt attention; the cleft in his face quivered.

Peter stretched his cramped limbs, aware suddenly of a full bladder.

‘Right now, I only hear my body telling me I need to pass water.’

The Oasan nodded, and motioned for them to go. Peter clambered out of the cot and found his sandals. There were no toilets in Oasan dwellings, as far as he’d been able to tell during the first twenty-odd hours of his visit. Wastes were disposed of out-of-doors.

Together, Peter and Jesus Lover One left the bedchamber. In the adjacent room, they passed the other sleepers, who lay swaddled in their cocoons, immobile as corpses apart from their raucous respirations. Peter tip-toed; Lover One walked normally, the velvety skin of his boots making no noise on the floor. Side by side they passed through a vaulted corridor, and emerged through a curtain of beads into the open air (if the air on Oasis could ever truly be called open). The sun shone into Peter’s swollen eyes, and he was even more aware of how sweaty and itchy the bedding had made him.

Glancing back at the building he’d emerged from, he noticed that, in the hours since his arrival, the Oasan atmosphere had been applying its energies to the WEL COME on the outer wall, loosening the paint’s purchase, transforming it into a perspirous froth that now trickled towards the ground, the letters blurred into Cyrillic patterns.

Jesus Lover One saw him looking at the remains of the message. ‘Word on wall สีoon gone,’ he said. ‘Word, in memory, abide.’ And he touched his chest, as if to indicate where memory abided for his kind, or maybe he was signalling heartfelt emotion. Peter nodded.

Then Jesus Lover One led him through the streets (could unpaved paths be called streets, if they were wide enough?), further into the settlement. There was no one else about, no sign of life, although Peter knew that the throng of people he’d met earlier in the day must be in there somewhere. The buildings all looked the same. Oblong, oblong, oblong; amber, amber, amber. If this settlement and the USIC base constituted the only architecture on Oasis, then this was a world where aesthetic niceties weren’t wanted and utilitarianism ruled. It shouldn’t bother him, but it did. All along, he’d assumed that the church he would build here should be simple and unpretentious, to give the message that its outward form didn’t matter, only the souls inside; but now he was inclined to make it a thing of beauty.

With every step, he grew more desperate to piss, and wondered if Lover One was going to unnecessary lengths to find him a private place to do it. Oasans themselves had no such concern for privacy, at least not when it came to toilet matters. Peter had seen them expelling their wastes freely in the streets, unheedful of the loss. They’d be walking along, solemnly focused on where they were going, and then, out of the bottom of their robes, a trail of turdlets would patter onto the earth: grey-green pellets that didn’t smell and, if accidentally stepped on by other people, disintegrated into a powdery pulp, like meringue. Nor did the faeces linger long on the ground. Either the wind blew it away, or it got swallowed up by the earth. Peter had not seen any Oasan expelling liquid waste. Perhaps they didn’t need to.

Peter most certainly needed to. He was just about to tell Lover One that they must stop right now, anywhere, when the Oasan came to a halt in front of a circular structure, the architectural equivalent of a biscuit tin, but the size of a warehouse. Its low roof was festooned with chimneys… no, funnels — large, ceramic-looking funnels, like kiln-fired vases — all pointing up at the sky. Lover One motioned Peter to enter through the beaded doorway. Peter obeyed. Inside, he was faced with a jumbled array of vats and canisters and kegs, each different and hand-made, each fed from tubes that snaked up to the ceiling. The containers were arranged around the sides of the room, leaving the centre free. An artificial pond, the size of a backyard swimming pool in the wealthier parts of Los Angeles, glimmered with pale emerald water.

‘Waรี่er,’ said Lover One.

‘Very… clever,’ Peter complimented him, having rejected the word ‘resourceful’ as too difficult. The sight of the full pond and the dozens of tubes fogged with moisture made him only more convinced that he was about to wet himself.

‘Enough?’ enquired Lover One, as they turned to leave.

‘Uh… ’ hesitated Peter, nonplussed.

‘Enough waรี่er? We paสี now?’

At last, Peter understood the misunderstanding. ‘Pass water’ — of course! Such collisions between the literal and the colloquial — he’d read about them so often in accounts of other missionary expeditions, and had promised himself he would avoid ambiguity at all times. But Lover One’s acquiescence to his request had been so low-key, so smooth, that there was no hint of a communication glitch.

‘Excuse me,’ said Peter, and strode ahead of Lover One, to the middle of the street, where he hitched up his dishdasha and allowed the urine to squirt free. After what seemed like several minutes of pissing he was ready to turn and face Jesus Lover One again. And as soon as he did, Jesus Lover One released a solitary ball of faeces onto the ground. A gesture of respect for an unfathomable ritual, like kissing a European the correct number of times on the correct sides of the face.

‘Now, again, you สีleep?’ The Oasan pointed back the way they’d come: back towards the sweat-drenched coconut-stinky tub in the house of snorers.

Peter smiled non-committally. ‘First, take me to where our church will be. I want to see it again.’

And so the two of them had walked out of the settlement, across the scrubland, to the chosen site. Nothing had been built yet. The site was marked with four gouges in the soil, to demarcate the four corners of the future structure. And, inside those demarcations, Peter had scratched the basic design of the interior, explaining to the seventy-seven souls gathered around him what the lines represented. Now that he saw his drawing again, on the deserted patch of earth, after a gap of many hours and through eyes bleary with exhaustion, he saw it as the Oasans might have seen it: crude, mysterious gouges in the dirt. He felt unequal to the task ahead of him: grossly so. Bea would no doubt counsel him that this meant he was confusing objective reality with the amount of sleep he’d had, and of course she’d be right.

The site contained a few other traces of the Jesus Lovers’ assembly. The small posset of vomit that one of the infant Oasans had disgorged during Peter’s opening speech. A pair of boots, specially made as a gift for Peter, but several inches too small for him (a mistake which appeared to cause neither embarrassment nor amusement: just mute acceptance). A semi-transparent amber water jug, almost empty. A metallic blister foil (medicine courtesy of USIC) from which the last tablet had been expressed. Two scattered cushions, on which a couple of the younger children had snoozed when the grown-ups’ discussion strayed too far into invisible realms.

Peter hesitated for a few seconds, then fetched the cushions and arranged them one near the other. Then he lowered himself to the ground, pillowing his head and his hip. His weariness immediately began to drain out of his flesh, as if seeping into the soil. He wished he was alone.

‘You were unสีaรี่iสีfied in our bed,’ Jesus Lover One remarked.

The sibilant cluster in the third word rendered it unintelligible to Peter. ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you just…?’

‘You were… unglad,’ said Lover One, clenching his gloves with the effort of finding a pronounceable word. ‘In our bed. สีleep came never.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ conceded Peter, with a grin. ‘Sleep came never.’ Honesty was the best policy, he felt. There would be misunderstandings enough without creating more with diplomacy.

‘Here, สีleep will come for you,’ Lover One observed, indicating, with a wave of his gloved hand, the open space around them.

‘Yes, here sleep will come for me.’

‘Good,’ concluded the Oasan. ‘Then all will be well.’

Would all be well? There seemed reason to hope that it would. Peter had a good feeling about his ministry here. Already, inexplicably felicitous things had happened — small things, true, not strictly miraculous, but enough to indicate that God was taking a special interest in the way things were panning out. For example, when he’d told the story of Noah and the Flood (at the Oasans’ request) and, at the precise instant that the heavens opened in the Scripture, it started raining for real. And then there was that amazing occasion, after they’d all stopped work for the night and the braziers had been extinguished and they’d been sitting there in the dark, when he’d recited the opening verses of Genesis (again at their request) and, at the exact instant that God said ‘Let there be light’, one of the braziers had sputtered back into life, bathing them all in a golden glow. Coincidences, no doubt. Peter was not a superstitious person. Much closer to genuine miracles, in his opinion, were the sincere declarations of faith and fellowship from these people so incredibly different from himself.

Then again, there had been a few disappointments. Or not exactly disappointments, just failures to communicate. And he couldn’t even figure out why these encounters had fallen flat; he didn’t understand what it was he hadn’t understood.

For example, the photographs. If he’d learned one thing over the years, it was that the best — and quickest — way of forging intimacy with strangers was to show them photos of your wife, your home, yourself when younger and decked out in the fashions and haircuts of a bygone decade, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your pets, your children. (Well, he didn’t have children, but that in itself was a talking point. ‘Children?’ people would always say, as if they hoped he was saving the best photos for last.)

Perhaps what had gone wrong with his show-and-tell with the Oasans was that the group was too large. Seventy-odd people examining his photos and handing them on, almost all of those people contemplating an image that was unrelated to the commentary he was giving at that point. Although, to be honest, the responses of the Jesus Lovers who’d been sitting right nearby, who had the opportunity to make the connection between the image and his explanation of it, were just as hard to fathom.

‘This is my wife,’ he’d said, extracting the topmost of the photographs from the plastic wallet and handing it to Jesus Lover One. ‘Beatrice.’

‘Beaรี่riสี,’ repeated Jesus Lover One, his shoulders contorting with effort.

‘Bea for short,’ said Peter.

‘Beaรี่riสี,’ said Jesus Lover One. He held the photograph gently in his gloved fingers, at a strict horizontal angle, as if the miniature Beatrice posing in her mulberry-coloured jeans and imitation cashmere sweater was in danger of sliding off the paper. Peter wondered if these people could even see in the conventional sense, since there was nothing on their faces he could identify as an eye. They weren’t blind, that was obvious, but… maybe they couldn’t decode two-dimensional images?

‘Your wife,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Hair very long.’

‘It was, then,’ said Peter. ‘It’s shorter now.’ He wondered if long hair was attractive or repulsive to those who had none at all.

‘Your wife love Jeสีuสี?’

‘She certainly does.’

‘Good,’ said Jesus Lover One, handing the photograph to the person next to him, who accepted it as though it were a sacrament.

‘This next one,’ said Peter, ‘is the house where we live. It’s in a satellite… uh… a town not far from London, in England. As you can see, our house is much the same as the houses all around it. But inside, it’s different. Just like a person can look the same as those all around him, but inside, because of his faith in the Lord, he’s very different.’ Peter looked up to assess how this simile was going over. Dozens of Oasans were kneeling in concentric circles around him, waiting solemnly for a rectangle of card to be conveyed towards them. Apart from the colours of their robes and some slight variations in height, they all looked the same. There were no fat ones, no musclebound ones, no lanky lunks, no bent-backed crones. No women, no men. Only rows of compact, standardised beings squatting in the same pose, dressed in garments of identical design. And, inside each of their hoods, a coagulated stew of meat that he could not, could not, simply could not translate into a face.

‘Needle,’ said the creature called Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, shuddering. ‘Row of needle. Row of… knife.’

Peter had no idea what he was talking about. The photograph, which showed nothing more than a drab ex-council house and a flimsy metal fence, was handed on.

‘And this one,’ he said, ‘is our cat, Joshua.’

Jesus Lover One contemplated the photo for fifteen or twenty seconds.

‘Jeสีuสี Lover?’ he asked at last.

Peter laughed. ‘He can’t love Jesus,’ he said. ‘He’s a cat.’ This information was greeted with silence. ‘He’s not… He’s an animal. He can’t think… ’ The word ‘self-consciously’ came to his mind, but he rejected it. Too many sibilants, for a start. ‘His brain is very small. He can’t think about right and wrong, or why he’s alive. He can only eat and sleep.’ It felt like a disloyal thing to say. Joshua could do a lot more than that. But it was true he was an amoral creature, and had never worried about why he’d been put on the earth.

‘We love him, though,’ Peter added.

Jesus Lover One nodded.

‘We alสีo love thoสีe who have no love for Jeสีuสี. However, they will die.’

Peter doled out another picture. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘is my church back home.’ He almost repeated BG’s wisecrack about not winning any architecture prizes, but managed to swallow the words. Transparency and simplicity were what was called for here, at least until he figured out how these people ticked.

‘Needle, สีo many needle,’ said one of the Oasans whose Jesus Lover number Peter hadn’t yet learned.

Peter leaned forward to look at the picture upside-down. There were no needles anywhere to be seen. Just the ugly blockish exterior of the church, lent a modicum of style by a faux-Gothic arch in the metal gate surrounding the building. Then he noticed the spikes on the tops of the railings.

‘We need to keep the thieves out,’ he explained.

‘Thief will die,’ agreed one of the Oasans.

Next in the pile was another photo of Joshua, curled up on the duvet with one paw shielding his eyes. Peter shuffled the picture to the back of the pile and selected another.

‘This is the back yard of the church. It used to be a car park. Just concrete. We got the concrete ripped up and replaced with soil. We figured people could walk to church or maybe find parking in the street… ’ Even as he spoke, he knew that half of what he was saying — maybe all of it — must be incomprehensible to these people. Yet he couldn’t stop. ‘It was a risk. But it paid… it was… it led to success. It led to a good thing. Grass grew. We planted shrubs and flowers, even some trees. Now the children play out there, when the weather is warm. Not that the weather is often very warm where I come from… ’ He was babbling. Get a grip.

‘Where you?’

‘Sorry?’

The Oasan held up the photograph. ‘Where you?’

‘I’m not in this one,’ said Peter.

The Oasan nodded, handed the picture to his neighbour.

Peter extracted the next photo from the plastic wallet. Even if the Oasan air had not been so humid, he would have been sweating by now.

‘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 ‘Praiสีe 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 รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี. Then your wife come for you and สีay, I have found the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี. Read now, you. We สีhall noรี่ periสีh, buรี่ have eรี่ernal 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 after-images 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.

Besides, he enjoyed the hours he spent in his hammock, free of anything to do. While he was on the ground, working with his flock, his brain was buzzing constantly, alive to challenges and opportunities. Every encounter might prove crucial in his ministry. Nothing could be taken for granted. The Oasans believed themselves to be Christians, but their grasp of Christ’s teachings was remarkably weak. Their hearts were full of amorphous faith, but their minds lacked understanding — and they knew it. Their pastor needed to concentrate hard every minute, listening to them, watching their reactions, searching for a glimpse of a light going on.

And, more mundanely, he also needed to concentrate on the physical jobs at hand: the carrying of stones, the spreading of mortar, the digging of holes. When the day’s work was over, and the Oasans had gone home, it was bliss to climb into his hammock, and know that he could do nothing more. As though the net had scooped him out of the stream of responsibility and suspended him in limbo. Not the Catholic idea of Limbo, of course. A benign limbo between today’s work and tomorrow’s. A chance to be a lazy animal, owning nothing but its skin, stretched out in the dark, or dozing in the sun.

The net from which his hammock had been fashioned was just one of several on the site. Nets were what the Oasans used for carrying bricks. They carried the bricks from… from where? From wherever the bricks came from. Then across the scrubland to the church. Four Oasans, each with a corner of the net knotted around his (or her?) shoulder, would march solemnly, like pallbearers, carrying a pile of bricks slung in between them. Even though the church site was not far from the main cluster of buildings — just far enough away to give it the necessary status of a place outside the common run of things — it was still quite a long walk, Peter imagined, if you were carrying bricks. There seemed to be no wheeled transport available.

Peter found this a little hard to believe. The wheel was a self-evidently nifty invention, wasn’t it? You’d think that the Oasans, even if they’d never conceived of it before, would have adopted the wheel as soon as they’d seen it being used by the USIC work-force. Pre-technological lifestyle was all very dignified, he wasn’t putting it down, but surely nobody, if they had a choice, would lug bricks around in a fishing net.

Fishing net? He called it that because that’s what it looked like, but it must have been designed for some other purpose — maybe even specifically for carrying bricks. There was nothing else to use nets for, here. There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish.

No fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy… The bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of Heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind… Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?

But no, he mustn’t get too downhearted about this. His problems were far from unique; they were par for the course. Missionaries in Papua New Guinea in the twentieth century had been forced to find a way around the fact that the native people didn’t know what sheep were, and that the local equivalent — pigs — didn’t work so well in the context of the Christian parables, because Papuans regarded their pigs as prey to be slaughtered. Here on Oasis, he would be faced with similar challenges and he would simply have to find the best compromises he could.

All things considered, he and the Oasans were communicating very well so far.

He rolled onto his belly and looked though the netting at the ground below. His sandals were positioned neatly, side by side, directly underneath him, on the smooth cement floor. Oasan cement barely needed trowelling; it spread out almost by itself and dried with a satiny finish, feeling less like concrete to the touch than unvarnished wood. It had just enough traction for the soft leather boots of the Oasans not to slip on it.

Next to his sandals lay one of the few tools on the site: a large spoon, the size of a… how would he describe it to Bea? The size of a small spade? Bicycle pump? Police baton? Anyway, it wasn’t made of wood or metal, but of a kind of glass, as strong as steel. Its function was to stir the mortar in the mortar vat, preventing it from drying too quickly. Last night — that is to say, five or six hours ago — before he’d climbed into his hammock to sleep, he’d spent a good twenty minutes cleaning mortar off this spoon, scraping at it with his fingers. The debris lay scattered all around. He had done a thorough job, despite his tiredness. The spoon was ready for another day’s stirring. Father Peter was the one who did that job, since he was the strongest.

He smiled at the thought of it. He had never been a particularly strong man before. In a past life, he’d been beaten up by other alcoholics, and tossed casually into the lock-up by police. Once, he had done his back in attempting to carry Bea to bed. (‘I’m too fat! I’m too fat!’ she’d cried, thus compounding the embarrassment all round when he was forced to let her fall.) Here, among the Oasans, he was a mighty creature. Here, he stood at the mortar vat and churned its contents with a giant spoon, admired by the weaker beings around him. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but there was something very morale-boosting about it, nonetheless.

The whole process of constructing a house was absurdly simple here, yet effective. The mortar-vat, primitive as a cauldron and stirred by hand, was typical of the level of sophistication. In the church walls as they took shape, there was no skeletal infrastructure: no metal stanchions, no wooden framework. The lozenge-shaped bricks were simply glued to the foundations and then fastened one to the other, layer upon layer. It seemed a dangerously simpleminded way to construct a building.

‘What if there’s a storm?’ he’d asked Jesus Lover One.

‘สีรี่orm?’ The upper parts of the cleft in Lover One’s face — the foreheads of the babies, so to speak — contorted gently.

‘What if a very great wind comes? Will it blow the church to the ground?’ Peter puffed hard and loud through his lips, waved his hands, and mimed the collapse of a building.

Lover One’s grotesque face contorted a little further, into a shape that might signal amusement, or bemusement, or perhaps meant nothing. ‘Bond break never,’ he said. ‘Bond สีรี่rong, oh very สีรี่rong. Wind like… ’ He reached out and stroked Peter’s hair, barely ruffling it, to show how ineffectual the wind was.

The reassurance was no less childlike than the construction method, but Peter decided to trust that the Oasans knew what they were doing. Their settlement, while not exactly impressive architecturally, seemed stable enough. And he had to admit that the mortar which bound the bricks was amazingly strong. When freshly spread, it looked like maple syrup, but within an hour it was hard as amber, and the join was unbreakable.

There was no scaffolding employed in the construction of this church, no ladders, nothing made of wood or metal. Instead, access to the higher reaches of the walls was provided by a method that was at once grossly cumbersome and beautifully practical. Large carved blocks of hardened moss — the same material as was used for the Oasans’ beds — were assembled into staircases, stacked against the outside of the building. Each staircase was about two metres wide and as high as it needed to be; additional steps could be affixed as the level of the bricklaying moved higher off the ground. Over the last few days, the staircases had grown in scale until they were twice Peter’s height, but despite their bulk they were obviously temporary, a building tool that was no more a part of the final conception than a ladder would have been. They were even portable — just. They could be shifted sideways if everyone pitched in. Peter had helped to shift a staircase several times, and although he couldn’t confidently estimate how much it weighed because of the communal musclepower pushing against it, he didn’t think it was heavier than, say, a refrigerator.

The utter simplicity of the technology charmed him. Granted, it wouldn’t be adequate to the task of building a skyscraper or a cathedral, unless the surrounding area could accommodate a staircase the size of a football stadium. But for building a modest little church, it was blindingly sensible. The Oasans would simply walk up the steps, each carrying a single brick. They would pause at the summit of their makeshift staircase and cast their eyes (or eye, or viewing cleft, or whatever) over the wall’s top layer, surveying it as a concert pianist might contemplate his keyboard. Then they would glue the next brick in its correct spot, and walk down the steps again.

By any standards, the work method was labour-intensive. There were perhaps forty Oasans on site at the busiest time of day, and Peter had the impression that there would have been even more were it not for the risk of getting in each other’s way. The work was conducted in an orderly fashion, unhurriedly, but without pause — until each Oasan reached what was evidently his (or her?) limit, and went home for a while. They worked in silence mostly, conferring only when there was some new challenge to master, some risk of getting something wrong. He could not tell if they were happy. It was his fervent intention to get to know them well enough to know if they were happy.

Were they happy when they sang? You would think that if singing was torture for them, they wouldn’t do it. As their pastor, he certainly hadn’t expected them to greet him with a massed chorus of ‘Amazing Grace’, and they could easily have arranged some other gesture of welcome. Maybe they needed a channel for their joy.

Happiness was such an elusive thing to spot: it was like a camouflaged moth that might or might not be hidden in the forest in front of you, or might have flown away. A young woman, newly in Christ, had said to him once, ‘If you could’ve seen me a year ago, going out on the piss with my mates, we was so happy, we was laughing our heads off, we never stopped laughing, people was turning their heads to see what’s so funny, wishing they could be having as good a time as us, we was flying, I was on top of the world, and all the time underneath I was thinking, God help me, I am so fucking lonely, I am so fucking sad, I wish I was dead, I cannot stand this life one minute longer, you know what I mean?’ And then there was Ian Dewar, ranting about his time in the military, complaining about the cheapskates and the beancounters who’d robbed the troops of essential supplies, ‘buy your own binoculars, mate, here’s one flak jacket for every two guys, and if you get your foot blown off take two of these wee tablets ’cause we’ve not got any morphine for you.’ Fifteen minutes into one of these rants, mindful that there were other people patiently waiting to speak to him, Peter had interrupted: ‘Ian, forgive me, but you don’t need to keep revisiting this stuff. God was there. He was there with you. He saw it happen. He saw everything.’ And Ian had broken down and sobbed and said he knew that, he knew that, and that’s why underneath it all, underneath the complaining and the anger, he was happy, truly happy.

And then there was Beatrice, on the day when he proposed to her, a day on which every conceivable thing had gone wrong. He’d proposed at 10.30 in the morning, in sweltering heat, as they stood at an automatic teller machine in the high street, preparing to do some grocery shopping at the supermarket. Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her ‘Yes, let’s’ had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she regarded his proposal as nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. Then the teller machine had swallowed her debit card and she’d had to go into the bank to sort it out, which involved a meeting with the manager and a lamentable episode in which she was grilled for half an hour as if she was an imposter trying to defraud another Beatrice whose card she had stolen. This humiliation ended with Bea cancelling her relationship with the bank in a righteous fury. They’d gone shopping then, but were able to afford barely half the things on their list, and, when they emerged into the car park, they found that a vandal had scratched a crude swastika into the paintwork of their car. If it had been anything other than a swastika — a cartoon penis, a swear word, anything — they would probably have just lived with it, but this they had no choice but to get fixed, and it would cost them a fortune.

And so the day went on: Bea’s phone ran out of battery and died, the first garage they drove to was shut, the second garage was booked up solid and not interested, a banana they tried to eat for lunch was rotten inside, a perished strap on Bea’s shoe snapped, forcing her to limp, the car’s engine started making a mysterious noise, a third garage gave them the bad news about what a new coat of enamel would cost, as well as pointing out that their exhaust was corroded. In the end it took them so long to get back to Bea’s flat that the expensive lamb chops they’d bought had discoloured badly in the heat. That, for Peter, was the final straw. Rage sped through his nervous system; he seized the tray and was about to throw it into the rubbish bin, throw it with wildly excessive force, to punish the meat for being so vulnerable to decay. But it wasn’t him who’d paid for it and he managed — just — to control himself. He put the groceries away in the fridge, splashed some water on his face and went in search of Bea.

He found her on the balcony, gazing down at the brick wall that surrounded her block of flats, a wall crowned with barbed wire and spikes of broken glass. Her cheeks were wet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She fumbled for his hand, and their fingers interlocked.

‘I’m crying because I’m happy,’ she explained, as the sun allowed itself to be veiled in clouds, the air grew milder and a gentle breeze stroked their hair. ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’

11. He realised for the first time that she was beautiful, too

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ a voice called to him.

Dazzled by the light, he turned clumsily, almost falling out of the hammock. The approaching Oasan was a silhouette against the rising sun. All Peter knew was that the voice was not Jesus Lover Fifty-Four’s, the only voice he could put a name to without additional clues.

‘Good morning,’ he responded. The ‘God bless our reunion’ had meant no more than that. Oasans invoked the blessing of God for everything, which either meant they understood the notion of blessedness better than most Christians, or not at all.

‘I come รี่o build our ฐurฐ again.’

Two weeks in these people’s midst had sharpened Peter’s ear; he immediately understood that ‘ฐurฐ’ was ‘church’. He mulled over the voice, matched it with the canary-yellow robe.

‘Jesus Lover Five?’

‘Yeสี.’

‘Thank you for coming.’

‘For God I will do whaรี่ever he wiสีheสี, any thing, any รี่ime.’

Even as he was listening to Lover Five speak, Peter wondered what it was that made this voice different from, say, Lover Fifty-Four’s. Not the sound of it, that was for sure. The marvellous variety of voices he was accustomed to back home — or even at the USIC base — was non-existent among the Oasans. There were no sonorous baritones here, no squeaky sopranos, husky altos, nervous tenors. No shades of brightness or dullness, shyness or aggression, sang-froid or seductiveness, arrogance or humility, breeziness or sorrow. Maybe, in his clueless foreignness, he was missing the nuances, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t. It was like expecting one seagull or blackbird or pigeon to squawk differently from the others of its kind. They just weren’t designed to.

What the Oasans could do was deploy language in distinctive ways. Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, for example, was ingenious in avoiding words he couldn’t pronounce, always managing to come up with a sibilant-free alternative. These evasions (‘lay-a-bed’ for ‘sleep’, ‘give knowledge’ for ‘teach’, and so forth) made his speech eccentric but fluent, promoting the illusion that he was at ease with the alien tongue. By contrast, Jesus Lover Five didn’t bother with avoidance; she just tried to speak conventional English and if there were lots of ‘t’s and ‘s’s in the words she needed, well, too bad. Then again, she made less effort to speak clearly than some of the other Oasans — her shoulders didn’t contort as much when she was coughing up a consonant — and this made her more difficult to understand, sometimes.

Her, her, her. Why did he think of her as female? Was it just the canary-yellow robe? Or did he actually sense something, on a level too instinctive to analyse?

‘There’s not much we can do until the others arrive,’ he said, lowering himself out of the hammock. ‘You could have slept longer.’

‘I wake in fear. Fear you will be gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘UสีIC will come รี่oday,’ she reminded him. ‘รี่ake you home.’

‘The USIC base is not my home,’ he said, fastening his sandals. Squatting to do so, he was almost head-to-head with Jesus Lover Five. She was small for an adult. If she was an adult. Maybe she was a child — no, she couldn’t be. Maybe she was incredibly old. He just didn’t know. He knew that she was forthright, even by the standards of Oasans; that she could only work for twenty or thirty minutes at a time before wandering off; and that she was related to someone who was not a Jesus Lover, which caused her sadness, or something he interpreted as sadness. Actually, he couldn’t even swear that this non-believer was a blood relative of hers; maybe it was a friend. And the sadness thing was kind of a hunch on his part; Oasans didn’t weep or sigh or cover their faces with their hands, so she must have said something to make him come to that conclusion.

He tried to recall other things about Jesus Lover Five, but couldn’t. The human brain was like that, unfortunately: it sifted intimacies and perceptions, allowed them to trickle through the sieve of memory, until only a token few remained, perhaps not even the most significant ones.

He really must write more things down, next time.

‘UสีIC will รี่ake you,’ Jesus Lover Five repeated. ‘I fear you will noรี่ reรี่urn.’

He walked to a gap in the wall that would eventually be a door, passed through it, and stood in the shade of his church, to relieve himself on the ground. His pee was a darker orange than before, making him wonder if he was drinking too little. The Oasans drank sparingly and he’d learned to do the same. One long swig of his plastic bottle first thing upon waking, a few swigs at measured intervals throughout the working day, and that was it. The Oasans refilled his bottle without fuss whenever it ran low, walking all the way back to the settlement with it and back again, but he didn’t want to cause them undue bother.

They’d taken superb care of him, really. An intensely private people, who spent the bulk of their time quietly conversing with close friends and family inside their homes, they had nevertheless welcomed him with open arms. Metaphorically speaking. They were not what you’d call touchy-feely. But their goodwill towards him was unmistakable. At intervals throughout each day, as he worked on the church site, he would glimpse someone walking across the scrubland, bearing a gift. A plate of fried globs resembling samosas, a tumbler of lukewarm savoury gloop, a hunk of something crumbly and sweet. His fellow workers seldom ate on site, preferring to take formal meals at home; occasionally someone might pick a few blossoms of whiteflower straight off the ground, if they were newly sprouted and juicy. But the cooked treats, the little offerings, were for him alone. He accepted them with unfeigned gratitude, because he was hungry all the time.

Less so now. Loath to earn a reputation as a glutton, he’d grown accustomed, over the last three hundred and sixty-odd hours, to a sharply reduced calorie intake, and re-learned something that he’d known well during his wasted years: that a man could survive, and even keep active, on very little fuel. If he was forced to. Or too drunk to care. Or — as was currently the case — happily preoccupied.

When he rejoined Jesus Lover Five, she was seated on the floor, her back propped against a wall. Her posture rucked up her robe so that her thin thighs and the space between them were carelessly exposed. Glimpsing Lover Five’s nakedness, Peter thought he could detect an anus, but nothing that resembled genitals.

‘รี่ell me more from the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ she said.

Male and female created he them, was the phrase that came to his mind.

‘Do you know the story of Adam and Eve?’ he asked.

‘God bleสี all สีรี่ories from the Book. They are all of them good.’

‘Yes, but do you know it? Have you heard it before?’

‘Long before,’ she conceded. ‘Now again.’

‘Did you hear it from Kurtzberg?’

‘Yeสี.’

‘Why isn’t Kurtzberg here to tell you the story again himself?’ Peter had posed this same question in half a dozen different ways since arriving at the settlement. He hadn’t got a satisfactory answer yet.

‘Father Kurรี่สีberg go away. Leave uสี in lack of him. Like you will leave.’ Her clefted face, usually a healthy pink, was whitish pale in its complicated contours.

‘I’m only going for a little while. I’ll be back soon.’

‘Yeสี, keep your propheสีy, pleaสีe.’ She said it neither playfully nor imploringly, as far as he could tell. She was matter-of-fact and, although she spoke no louder than other Oasans, emphatic. Or maybe he was just imagining that. Maybe he was imagining everything, perceiving differences that weren’t there, in his keenness to get a grip on these people. He and Bea had read an article once, in some magazine or other, which explained that cats were not really individuals, despite what their owners liked to think. All the distinctive noises and eccentric behaviours that your cat exhibited were merely standard-issue genetic features built into that particular sub-breed. A horrible article, written by a smug little journalist with a receding hairline. Bea had been thoroughly shaken by it. And it took a lot to shake Bea.

‘Tell me, Jesus Lover Five,’ said Peter. ‘The person you love who makes you sad, the one who doesn’t believe in Jesus. Is he your son?’

‘My… brother.’

‘And have you other brothers and sisters?’

‘One alive. One in the earth.’

‘And your mother and father?’

‘In the earth.’

‘Do you have children of your own?’

‘God pleaสีe no.’

Peter nodded, as if he understood. He knew he was not much the wiser, and that he still had no proof of Lover Five’s gender.

‘Please forgive my stupidity, Jesus Lover Five, but are you male or female?’

She didn’t reply, only cocked her head to one side. Her facial cleft did not contort, he’d noticed, when she was confused: not like Jesus Lover One’s. He wondered if this meant that she was smarter, or just more guarded.

‘You just referred… You just told me of your brother. You called him your brother, not your sister. What makes him your brother and not your sister?’

She considered this for a few seconds. ‘God.’

He tried again. ‘Are you your brother’s brother or your brother’s sister?’

Again she pondered. ‘For you, I will name me with the word brother,’ she said. ‘Becauสีe the word สีiสีรี่er iสี very hard รี่o สีpeak.’

‘But if you could say “sister” more easily, is that what you would say?’

She shifted her posture, so that the robe again covered her groin. ‘I would สีay nothing.’

‘In the story of Adam and Eve,’ he pressed on, ‘God created man and woman. Male and female. Two different kinds of people. Are there two different kinds here too?’

‘We are all differenรี่,’ she said.

Peter smiled and looked away. He knew when he was beaten. Through a hole in the wall, which in the very near future would be a beautiful stained-glass window, he spied, in the distance, a procession of Oasans carrying nets full of bricks.

A thought occurred to him, and, along with that thought, the realisation that he hadn’t asked anyone at USIC to show him the Oasans’ old settlement, the one they’d mysteriously abandoned. It was one of those oversights which Bea, if she’d been here, would never have been guilty of. The mere mention of a place called C-2 would have made her curious about C-1. Honestly, what was wrong with him? Beatrice, on the rare occasions she became exasperated with these sorts of lapses, would accuse him of having one of his ‘Korsakoff moments’. That was a joke, of course. They both knew that alcohol had nothing to do with it.

‘Lover Five?’ he said.

She didn’t respond. Oasans didn’t waste words. You could take it for granted that they were listening, waiting for you to get around to the part of your question they could answer.

‘When Kurtzberg was with you,’ he continued, ‘in the previous… in the settlement where you lived before, the one near the USIC base, did you build a church there?’

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Why not?’

She thought about it for a minute. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Where did you worship?’

‘Father Kurรี่สีberg came รี่o uสี in our houสีe,’ she said. ‘The whole day, he go from one houสีe รี่o another houสีe รี่o another houสีe. We waiรี่ for him. We waiรี่ a long รี่ime. Then he come, read from the Book, we pray, then he go.’

‘That’s one way of doing it,’ said Peter diplomatically. ‘A very good way. Jesus himself said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”’

‘We สีaw never Jeสีuสี,’ said Jesus Lover Five. ‘ฐurฐ iสี beรี่er.’

Peter smiled, unable to suppress a surge of pride. He sincerely hoped that a physical church would, indeed, be better.

‘But where did Kurtzberg live?’ he pushed on. ‘I mean, where did he sleep, while he was here with you?’ He imagined Kurtzberg swaddled in a bathtub-shaped cocoon, sweating all night into fancy pyjamas. As a short man, the pastor would at least have been the right size to fit into an Oasan bed.

‘Father Kurรี่สีberg have car,’ said Jesus Lover Five.

‘Car?’

‘Big car.’ With her hands, she sketched a shape in the air: a crude rectangle that did not suggest any particular kind of vehicle.

‘You mean he would just drive off to spend the night… uh… to sleep at the USIC base?’

‘No. Car have bed. Car have food. Car have everything.’

Peter nodded. Of course. It was the obvious way to tackle the challenge. And no doubt such a vehicle — maybe even the same vehicle Kurtzberg had used — would have been made available for him, too, if he’d requested it. But he’d deliberately decided not to go down that route, and he didn’t regret it. There was, he sensed, a distance between Kurtzberg and his flock, a barrier which no amount of mutual respect and fellowship had been able to remove. The Oasans regarded their first pastor as an alien, and not just in the literal sense. Camping out in his car, Kurtzberg signalled that he was perpetually ready to switch on the ignition, press the accelerator and drive away.

‘Where do you think Kurtzberg is now?’

Lover Five was silent for a while. The other Jesus Lovers were very near now, the tread of their soft boots making only a slight noise on the soil. The bricks were no doubt heavy but the Oasans bore them without grunting or flinching.

‘Here,’ said Lover Five at last, waving her hand in front of her. She seemed to be indicating the world in general.

‘You think he’s alive?’

‘I believe. God willing.’

‘When he… uh… ’ Peter paused to compose a question that was specific enough for her to answer. ‘Did he say goodbye? I mean, when you saw him last. When he was leaving, did he say, “I’m going away and not coming back”, or did he say “I’ll see you next week” or… what did he say?’

Again she was silent. Then: ‘No goodbye.’

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ a voice called to him.

And so the Oasans came to build their church, or, as they put it, their ฐurฐ. Peter hoped one day to wean them off that word in favour of another. Here these folk were, constructing a church brick by brick, and yet they couldn’t pronounce the name of what they were labouring so devotedly to make. There was something unfair about that.

Lately, as often as possible without overselling the idea, Peter used the phrase ‘our haven’ instead of ‘church’. ‘We build our haven,’ he’d say (no sibilants at all!), or he would link the two words together in the same sentence. And, mindful to nip any misunderstandings in the bud, he took care to explain that ‘haven’ was different from ‘Heaven’. Both places offered a safe, welcoming home for those who’d accepted Jesus into their heart, but one was a physical locale and the other was a state of eternal spiritual union with God.

A few of the Oasans had started using the word; not many. Most preferred to say ‘ฐurฐ’ even though it convulsed their bodies. And the ones who did say ‘haven’ pronounced it no differently from ‘Heaven’, despite reassuring him that they understood the difference.

‘Heaven there,’ Jesus Lover Fifteen said, pointing up into the sky. Then, pointing at the half-built church: ‘Heaven here.’

Peter had smiled. In his own belief, Heaven was not located up in the sky; it had no astronomical coordinates; it co-existed with all things everywhere. But perhaps it was too soon to engage the Oasans in such metaphysics. They could distinguish between the place they were building and the God they wanted to be part of: that was good.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘Praiสีe Jeสีuสี,’ Jesus Lover Fifteen replied, sounding, as he spoke, like a foot pulled out of sucking mud.

‘Praise Jesus,’ agreed Peter, a little sadly. It was a pity, in a way, that Jesus had been christened ‘Jesus’. It was a fine name, a lovely name, but ‘Daniel’ or ‘David’ or even ‘Nehemiah’ would have been easier here. As for ‘C-2’, or ‘Oasis’, or the little girl from Oskaloosa who’d named it, they were best not even mentioned.

‘What do you call this place?’ he’d asked several people several times.

‘Here,’ they said.

‘This whole world,’ he specified. ‘Not just your homes, but all the land around your homes, as far as you can see, and the places even further that you can’t see, beyond the horizon where the sun goes down.’

‘Life,’ they said.

‘God,’ they said.

‘What about in your own language?’ he’d insisted.

‘You could noรี่ สีpeak the word,’ Jesus Lover One said.

‘I could try.’

‘You could noรี่ สีpeak the word.’ It was impossible to tell if this repetition signalled testiness, obstinacy, an immovable force, or if Lover One was calmly making the same assessment twice in a row.

‘Could Kurtzberg speak the word?’

‘No.’

‘Did Kurtzberg… When he was with you, did Kurtzberg learn any words of your language?’

‘No.’

‘Did you speak any words of our language, when you first met Kurtzberg?’

‘Few.’

‘That must have made things very difficult.’

‘God help uสี.’

Peter couldn’t tell whether this was a rueful, good-humoured exclamation — a sort of upwards roll of the eyes, if there had been eyes to roll — or whether the Oasan was literally stating that God had helped.

‘You speak my language so well,’ he complimented them. ‘Who taught you? Kurtzberg? Tartaglione?’

‘Frank.’

‘Frank?’

‘Frank.’ Presumably this was Tartaglione’s Christian name. Speaking of which…

‘Was Frank a Christian? A Jesus Lover?’

‘No. Frank a… language lover.’

‘Did Kurtzberg teach you too?’

‘Language, no. He รี่eaฐ only the word of God. He read from the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี. In the beginning, we under-สีรี่and nothing. Then, with help of Frank, and with help of God, word upon word we underสีรี่and.’

‘And Tart… Frank. Where is he now?’

‘Noรี่ with uสี,’ said a voice from inside the hood of an olive-green robe.

‘He go away,’ said the voice from inside the hood of the canary-yellow robe. ‘Leave uสี in lack of him.’

Peter tried to imagine what questions Bea might ask if she were here — what bigger picture she would see. She had a knack for noticing not just what was present, but what was absent. Peter cast his eyes over the congregation, dozens of small people clothed in pastel colours, weird-faced inside their hoods, slightly soiled on the soles of their booties. They gazed at him as if he were an exotic obelisk, transmitting messages from afar. Behind them, blurred in the humid mist, the blockish structures of their city glowed amber. There was room in there for many more than were seated here before him.

‘Did Frank teach only Jesus Lovers?’ he asked. ‘Or did he teach anybody who wanted to learn?’

‘Thoสีe who have no love for Jeสีuสี alสีo have no wiสีh for learning. They สีay, “Why สีhould we สีpeak a language made for other bodieสี?”’

‘Are they… The ones who don’t wish to learn English, are they angry that USIC came here?’

But it was no use asking the Oasans about feelings. Especially the feelings of others.

‘Is it difficult,’ he asked, trying a different tack, ‘to produce the food that you give to USIC?’

‘We provide.’

‘But the quantity… Is it… Are you struggling to come up with that much food? Is it too much?’

‘We provide.’

‘But is it… If USIC wasn’t here, would your lives be easier?’

‘UสีIC bring you to uสี. We are graรี่eful.’

‘But… uh… ’ He was determined to winkle out some insight into how those Oasans who weren’t Jesus Lovers regarded USIC’s presence. ‘Every one of you works to produce the food, is that right? The Jesus Lovers, and the… uh… others. You all work together.’

‘Many hand make brief work.’

‘OK. Sure. But is there anyone among you who says, “Why should we do this? Let the USIC people grow their own food”?’

‘All know the need for mediสีine.’

Peter chewed on this for a moment. ‘Does that mean you’re all… uh… Are all of you taking medicine?’

‘No. Only few. Few of few. All Jeสีuสี Lover here รี่oday need no mediสีine, praiสีe Jeสีuสี.’

‘And what about the ones who don’t love Jesus? Are they more likely to be sick?’

This provoked some disagreement — a rare thing among Oasans. Some voices seemed to be saying yes, the non-Lovers were more susceptible to illness. Others seemed to be saying no, it was the same regardless of belief. The last word was given to Jesus Lover One, whose take was that everyone was missing the main point.

‘They will die,’ he said. ‘With mediสีine or with no mediสีine, they will die for ever.’

And then, all too soon, his time was over. Grainger arrived pretty much when she’d promised she would: three hundred and sixty-eight hours from when they’d last spoken. At least, he assumed it was Grainger.

She’d warned him that she would be driving a bigger vehicle next time, a proper supply truck rather than the jeep. Sure enough, a truck was what came into view, approaching C-2 from the shimmering obscurity of the horizon, camouflaged by the morning glare. Peter supposed that the settlement must strike Grainger as a ghost town, because, as usual, there was no outward sign of the sociable life that hummed within. To the Oasan mind, streets were nothing more than conduits from one house to another, not public spaces to be frequented.

The truck came to a halt outside the building with the star on it. Truck? It was more what you’d call a van, a vehicle of the kind that might scoot around a British town delivering milk or bread. The USIC logo on its side was small and discreet, a tattoo rather than a vainglorious trademark. USIC the florists. USIC the fishmongers. Hardly a display of megacorporate might.

Peter was working on the church grounds, stirring the mortar, when the vehicle came. He observed its arrival from a distance of several hundred metres. The Oasans, whose concentration on appointed tasks was unswervingly intense, whose vision was shortsighted, and whose hearing was difficult to gauge, failed to notice it. He wondered what would happen if he pretended he hadn’t noticed either, and simply carried on here with his congregation. Would Grainger eventually get out of the truck and walk over to meet them? Or drive the truck to the church grounds? Or lose patience and drive away?

He knew it was ungracious, even childish, of him to keep her waiting, but he wished she would come out of her metal shell and make proper contact with these people whom she refused to call ‘people’, these people who gave her ‘the creeps’. There was really nothing scary or distasteful about them at all. If you stared into their faces long enough, their physiognomy ceased to appear grisly, and the eyeless cleft was no different from a human nose or brow. He wished Grainger could understand that.

Just as he was about to announce to his co-workers that he must take his leave of them for a little while, he spotted a flash of movement in the doorway of the building marked with the star. An Oasan had emerged. It was no one he had met, as far as he knew. The Oasan’s robe was mouse-grey. The door of Grainger’s vehicle swung open and she stepped out, a vision in white.

Peter turned to make his announcement. But there was no need: his co-workers had noticed the arrival, and stopped working. Everyone put down whatever he or she was holding, carefully and quietly. Jesus Lover Fifty-Two — a female, in Peter’s arbitrary estimation — was halfway up the staircase, a brick in her hands. She paused, looked down at the brick, and up at the wall where the syrupy mortar would soon dry out. The choice between continuing and not continuing was plainly a difficult one for her, but after hesitating a few seconds more, she began to descend the staircase. It was as though she’d decided the gluing of the brick was too important a task to be attempted when there were such sensational distractions.

The other Oasans were talking amongst themselves, in their own language. The only word Peter could understand — the only word that evidently did not exist in their vocabulary — was ‘mediสีine’. Jesus Lover One approached Peter hesitantly.

‘Pleaสีe, Peรี่er,’ he said. ‘If God will be noรี่ diสีappoinรี่ful… If Jeสีuสี and Holy สีpiriรี่ will be noรี่ diสีappoinรี่ful… I will leave now the building of our ฐurฐ, and help delivery of mediสีine.’

‘Of course,’ said Peter. ‘Let’s go together.’

There was a palpable relief of tension, passing through the assembled Oasans like a communal shiver. Peter wondered if Kurtzberg had instilled fear of God’s displeasure into them, or if they were merely over-eager to please their new pastor. He made a mental note to speak to them at the earliest opportunity about God’s compassion and indulgence: My yoke is easy and my burden is light and all that sort of thing. Except he might have to find an alternative to the animal husbandry metaphor.

Peter and Jesus Lover One set off across the scrubland. The other Oasans stayed on site, as though not to alarm the USIC representative with their massed advance, or perhaps in deference to Jesus Lover One as their official go-between.

The grey-robed Oasan who’d come out of the settlement to meet Grainger hadn’t moved from his position near the vehicle. A white cardboard box had been handed over to him, and he held it with all the solemnity of a priest holding a sacrament, even though the box resembled a jumbo pizza carton. He seemed in no hurry to carry it away. If he and Grainger had exchanged any words, the conversation was dormant now, as he stared at Jesus Lover One and Peter traversing the distance between the construction site and the settlement.

Grainger watched too. She was dressed, as before, in her white smock and cotton slacks, with a headscarf loosely draped around her hair and neck. Boyishly proportioned though she was, she appeared bulky next to the Oasan.

‘Who’s that?’ Peter said to Lover One as they drew near.

‘สีคฉ้นรี่ณ,’ replied Lover One.

‘Not a Jesus Lover?’

‘No.’

Peter wondered if there was any hope for him to learn the Oasan language. Without any English to bind it together, it sounded like a field of brittle reeds and rain-sodden lettuces being cleared by a machete.

‘Have you missed your chance to get a share of the medicine?’

‘Mediสีine for all,’ said Lover One. Peter couldn’t tell if the tone of voice was serenely confident, plaintively indignant or grimly resolute.

The four of them rendezvoused in the shade of the building with the star. The WEL COME had blurred into illegibility now. It could have been the remains of a paint bomb against the wall.

Jesus Lover One bowed to Grainger. ‘I am regreรี่ful for your lingering long here,’ he said.

‘I’ll try to leave pronto,’ she responded. Despite the wisecrack, she was obviously tense. The engine of her vehicle was still running, in defiance of a USIC sticker on the side window that said CONSERVE GAS, IT’S A LONG WAY TO VENEZUELA.

‘Hello, Grainger,’ said Peter.

‘Hi, how ya doin’?’

Her voice sounded more American than he remembered, like a caricature of Yankeeness. All at once, he missed Bea with an ache that was like a shove in the stomach. It was as though, having endured all this time without her company, he’d promised himself that she would be there to meet him afterwards. The USIC truck should have been a plum-coloured Vauxhall, with Bea standing next to it, waving to him in that unguarded childlike way she had, greeting him in her lovely Yorkshire-inflected voice.

‘Been sleeping under the sky?’ said Grainger.

‘Is it that obvious?’

Her eyes narrowed as she gave him the once-over. ‘Some people tan. Some people just burn.’

‘I don’t feel burnt.’

‘Looked in a mirror lately?’

‘Forgot to bring one.’

She nodded, as if to say That figures. ‘We’ll get some cream onto you in a minute. A bit late for first aid, I guess, but hey… ’ She glanced at Jesus Lover One and the other Oasan. ‘Speaking of which, I’ve still gotta do this medicine handover. Uh… who am I dealing with here? Which of you do I give the run-down to?’

‘I underสีรี่and more than the other one here,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Eสีplain me the mediสีine of รี่oday.’ Then, to his compatriot: ‘สีคฉ้นรี่ณ, ฉ้คน รี่รนฉ้ร.’

The other Oasan stepped closer, lifted the lid of the box and angled it so that Grainger and Jesus Lover One had access to the contents. Peter kept his distance, but glimpsed lots of plastic bottles and little cardboard packets, a few of them colourfully commercial, the majority identified with machine-printed pharmacy labels.

‘OK,’ said Grainger, pointing to each of the items in turn. ‘We have aspirin and acetaminophen, as usual. These ones here are generics.’

‘Name from where all other name come,’ said Jesus Lover One.

‘Exactly,’ said Grainger. ‘Then there’s ten packets of branded acetaminophen: Tylenol. You’ve had it before. And these blue and yellow packets, Soothers, they’re like candies, but they’ve got some dextromethorphan and phenylephrine — a cough suppressant and nasal decongestant. I mean, I don’t know if you… uh… ’ She coughed. It was unclear whether she was imitating a cough for the Oasan’s benefit, or whether she genuinely had something stuck in her throat. ‘And this one here is diclofenac. It’s an analgesic too, and an anti-inflammatory, good for arthritis — pain in the muscles and joints.’ She wiggled her elbow and gyrated one of her shoulders, to mime the discomfort of arthritis. ‘Also good for migraines and… uh… menstrual cramps.’ Grainger’s voice was tainted with despondency. Clearly, she had little faith that her words made any sense to the recipients. She spoke faster and less distinctly as she went on, almost gabbling. Peter had witnessed that sort of behaviour before, in inexperienced or ineffectual evangelists who were trying to win over a hostile audience and sensed they were losing the battle. Mumbled invitations to come along to church sometime, spoken as if to satisfy a watchful God that the invitations had been made, rather than with any real hope that anyone would come.

‘Also, cortisone creams, the ones you like, in the blue and white tubes,’ Grainger went on. ‘And a bunch of antibiotics. Gentamicin. Neomycin. Flucloxacillin. A broad range of uses, as I’ve explained to you before. Depends on the individual. If you ever… uh… if you’re ever ready to give me some feedback on your experience with a particular antibiotic, I may be able to advise you better.’

‘Anรี่ibioรี่ic welcome,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘But painkiller welcome more. You have other aสีpirin and paraสีeรี่amol, in other colour and name?’

‘No, what I’ve told you is what there is. But remember there’s the diclofenac also. It’s highly effective, and well tolerated too, in most… uh… people. Maybe some gastro-intestinal side-effects, same as with other analgesics.’ She rubbed her abdomen perfunctorily. Peter could tell she was in distress, and not from gastrointestinal causes.

‘Also,’ she continued, ‘we’ve got something totally different this time, nothing to do with pain. You won’t have seen this one before. I don’t know if it’s any use to you. I mean, not you personally, but… uh… anyone here.’

‘The name?’

‘The name on the packet is GlucoRapid. That’s the brand name. Insulin is what it is. It’s for diabetes. Is diabetes something you know about? When the body can’t regulate its glucose levels properly?’

The Oasans did not speak nor make any gesture of response, but kept their faces attentively pointed at Grainger’s.

‘Glucose is like, uh, sugar,’ she said, voice faltering. She pressed her fingers hard against her perspiring brow, as if she could use a couple of painkillers herself. ‘I’m sorry, this is probably making no sense whatsoever. But the insulin is spare, so… ’

‘We are graรี่eful,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘We are graรี่eful.’ And he put Grainger out of her misery by signalling for his compatriot to close the box.

Things moved swiftly after that. The grey-robed Oasan and Jesus Lover One conveyed the medicine box into the building with the star. Minutes later, they returned, each of them carrying a bulbous sack, cradled against their chests like a baby. They stashed the sacks in the back of the van, then went to fetch more. After a few such trips, other Oasans, none of them familiar to Peter, joined in to help. As well as the sacks — containing whiteflower in various dried or powdered forms — there were large plastic tubs for the cleverly processed concoctions whose destiny, when USIC’s chefs added water, was to become soups and spreads and desserts and goodness knows what else. Smaller tubs and bags contained condiments and spices. Every sack and bag and tub was labelled in crude block-letters with marker pen. Whether by USIC personnel or by some small gloved Oasan hand, impossible to tell.

Peter and Grainger sat inside the vehicle, at Grainger’s request. She complained that the humidity was getting to her, but Peter could tell from her face that she didn’t expect him to believe her and that the handover of the medicines had wiped her out, psychologically and physically. The air-conditioned cabin — sealed off from the back section where the food was being stockpiled — was a haven where she could recover. She kept her eyes averted from the robed figures filing past the windows. Every few minutes, the chassis was subtly jogged by the deposit of another sack or tub in its rear. Evidently, long-term experience had confirmed that the Oasans could be trusted one hundred per cent to fulfil their part of the exchange. Or maybe Grainger was supposed to check, but couldn’t bring herself to do so.

‘You’re gonna give yourself cancer if you’re not careful,’ she said, uncapping a tube of ointment.

‘I feel fine,’ Peter protested, as she dabbed the goo onto his nose and brow with her middle finger. The touch of woman’s hand — not Bea’s — gave him a melancholy frisson.

‘Your wife won’t be very happy if she finds out your face has been fried.’ Grainger reached up for the rear-view mirror and twisted it sideways so he could see his reflection. The sheen of ointment was unsightly but, as far as he could tell, the underlying damage to his face was minimal: a few blotches, a bit of peeling.

‘I’ll survive,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’

‘Anything else you need,’ she said, wiping her fingers clean on a paper tissue, ‘just let me know when we get back to civilisation.’

‘The Oasans are pretty civilised, I’ve found. But it must be tough for you as a pharmacist not to have a clue what’s going on with them health-wise.’

‘Peter… ’ She let her head fall back against the seat and sighed. ‘Let’s not go there.’

‘That’s what people always say about places where they already are.’

She readjusted the mirror so that her own face was reflected in it. With a corner of the paper tissue she traced a line underneath her left eye, to neaten up the blurred mascara there. She did the same to her right eye. Peter was pretty sure she hadn’t worn mascara the last time they’d met.

Outside, a mishap. One of the Oasans, attempting to carry a tub in each hand, dropped one on the ground. A cloud of reddish-brown powder sprang up, covering his boots, shins and the lower parts of his pale blue robe. Another Oasan stopped to survey the damage and said, ‘สีinnamon.’

‘สีinnamon,’ he confirmed.

The two of them stood still for a few seconds, contemplating. The moist, swirling breeze carried off the loose whiteflower cinnamon, absorbing it into the atmosphere in general. The powder on the robe darkened into a glistening stain. Then, without further comment, the two Oasans resumed their labours.

Peter rolled down the window, to check if the air smelled cinnamon-spiced. It didn’t. But the artificial cool of the car’s interior was immediately spoiled by a big balmy influx.

‘Please,’ Grainger complained.

He rolled the window back up and let the air conditioning resume its campaign. The trapped currents of humid vapour flew around the cabin, as if sensing themselves pursued. In their search for escape or absorption they passed across his face, his knees, the back of his neck. Grainger felt it too, and shuddered.

‘Did you see them spill the cinnamon?’ Peter said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s so nice the way they didn’t make a big drama out of it. The one who dropped the tub didn’t put on a show of guilt or frustration. And his friend didn’t criticise him or make a fuss. They just noted what had happened and moved on.’

‘Yeah, it’s real inspiring. I could sit here and watch them drop our food on the ground all day.’

‘Although I must say,’ Peter remarked, ‘that the USIC personnel seem quite sensible and relaxed, too.’ Even as he said it, he had to concede that Grainger could be an exception.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Drama is a no-no.’

‘You mean… there’s an actual rule? Like, a regulation?’

She laughed. ‘No. We’re free to be our sweet little selves. Within reason.’ The air was growing cooler again, and she wrapped her shawl around her throat.

The Oasans were still carrying supplies to the back of the van. The sacks were all stowed now, but the plastic tubs kept coming, all filled with ingenious whiteflower creations. An awful lot of work had gone into this food, both agricultural and culinary; it seemed like an excessive amount of labour and material to exchange for a few packets of medicine. Well, quite a few packets, but still…

‘How come USIC has so many drugs spare?’ he said.

‘We don’t,’ she said. ‘We get extra supplies sent specially for this purpose. Every ship has a fresh lot on board: a bunch for us, a bunch for them.’

‘Sounds like quite an operation,’ he said.

‘Not really. Expenditure-wise, logistics-wise, it’s no problem at all. Drugs don’t take up much room and they weigh very little. Compared to magazines or… uh… raisins… or Pepsi. Or human beings, of course.’

It looked as though the last item had been deposited in the rear. Peter peered through the tinted window to find Jesus Lover One. He couldn’t see him anymore. ‘I’ll do my best to justify my freight costs,’ he said.

‘Nobody’s complaining,’ said Grainger. ‘These… people — the Oasans, as you call them — wanted you, and they got you. So everybody’s happy, right?’

But Grainger did not look happy. She adjusted the rear-view mirror to its correct position, which took a bit of fiddling, and her sleeve slipped off her wrist as far as her elbow. Peter noticed scars on her forearm: old self-harm, long-healed, but indelible. History written on the flesh. He’d known so many self-harmers. They were always beautiful. Seeing Grainger’s scars, he realised for the first time that she was beautiful, too.

12. Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened

The engine purred as it bore him back towards what Grainger called civilisation. Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was cool and filtered. Outside, the landscape had been abruptly transformed. For hundreds of hours, it had been the ground beneath his feet, a changeless environment for his daily routine, rock-solid under slowly evolving skies, familiar in every detail. Now it was insubstantial: a display of images flickering past tinted glass. The sun had slipped out of sight, hidden by the roof. Peter leaned his face near to the window and tried to look back, to catch a glimpse of the settlement. It was already gone.

Grainger drove with her usual careless competence, but seemed preoccupied, irritable. As well as keeping the steering wheel steady, she tapped keys on the dashboard and made numbers and symbols dance on an emerald-green screen. She rubbed at her eyes, blinked hard and, evidently deciding that there was too much air blowing onto her contact lenses, adjusted the air-con settings.

How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he’d been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn’t spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.

‘Looks like you’re the King of Freaktown,’ Grainger remarked breezily. Then, before he could take her to task for boorish disrespect: ‘… as some of my USIC colleagues would no doubt put it.’

‘We’re working together,’ said Peter. ‘The Oasans and I.’

‘Sounds cosy. But they’re doing exactly what you want, right?’

He looked across at her. She had her eyes fixed on the terrain ahead. He half-expected her to be chewing gum. It would have matched her tone.

‘They want to learn more about God,’ he said. ‘So we’re building a church. Of course it’s not essential to have a physical place; you can worship God anywhere. But a church provides a focus.’

‘A signal that you mean business, huh?’

Again he looked across at her, this time staring hard until she acknowledged him with a sideways glance.

‘Grainger,’ he said, ‘why do I get the feeling our roles are reversed here? In this conversation, I mean? You’re the employee of a giant corporation, establishing a colony here. I’m the leftie pastor, the one who’s supposed to be concerned about whether the little guys are being exploited.’

‘OK, I’ll try to be more stereotypical,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe a coffee will do it.’

She fetched a Thermos up from the floor and balanced it next to her thigh. With her left hand on the steering wheel, she attempted, with her right hand, to unscrew the firmly-sealed cap. Her wrist trembled.

‘Let me do that for you.’

She handed it over. He unscrewed the cup and poured her a coffee. The oily brown liquid was no longer hot enough to give off steam.

‘Here.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and took a sip. ‘This tastes like shit.’

He laughed. Grainger’s face looked odd to him when he saw it up close. Beautiful yet unreal, like a plastic doll’s head mould. Her lips were too perfect, her skin too pale. But maybe it was the golden sunrise thing all over again: maybe he had already, in the last three hundred and sixty-eight hours, adjusted to the way Oasans looked, and begun to accept their faces as the norm. Grainger didn’t fit.

‘Hey, I just thought of something,’ he said. ‘The drugs you give the Oasans are requisitioned especially for them, right?’

‘Right.’

‘But, from what you were saying back there, when you were talking to Jesus Lover One… ’

‘Jesus what?’

‘Jesus Lover One. That’s his name.’

‘The name you’ve given him?’

‘No, the name he’s given himself.’

‘Oh. OK.’

Her face was impassive, with perhaps just the hint of a smirk. He couldn’t tell if she disapproved of him deeply, or thought the whole thing was just ridiculous.

‘Anyway,’ he pressed on, ‘when you were talking about diabetes, I got the impression the Oasans don’t even know what diabetes is. So why offer them insulin?’

Grainger finished her coffee and screwed the cup back onto the thermos. ‘I guess I didn’t want it to go to waste,’ she said. ‘The insulin wasn’t meant for them; it was our own supply. But we don’t need it anymore.’ She paused for a couple of beats. ‘Severin died.’

‘Severin? The guy I travelled with?’

‘Yup.’

‘He’s a diabetic?’

‘Was.’

Peter tried to recall the journey he’d shared with Severin. It felt like something that had happened in another phase of his life, much longer ago than a few weeks.

‘When did he die?’

‘Last night. That phrase doesn’t mean much here, I know. Toward the end of the night.’ She consulted her watch. ‘About eighteen hours ago.’ Another couple of beats’ pause. ‘You’re conducting the funeral service. If you’re willing, that is.’

Again, Peter tried to cast his mind back to the time he’d shared with Severin. He recalled BG asking Severin what religion he was, and Severin replying, I’m nothing, and that’s the way it’s staying.

‘Severin might not have wanted a funeral service. He didn’t have a religion.’

‘A lot of people here don’t have a religion. But the thing is, we cannot throw a dead person into an incinerator without giving him some kind of a send-off.’

Peter pondered this a moment.

‘Can you… er… give me a rough idea what sort of send-off the majority of the personnel might consider… ’

‘Totally up to you. We’ve got some Catholics, we’ve got some Baptists, we’ve got some Buddhists… You name it, we’ve got some. I wouldn’t sweat about that. You were chosen because… Well, let’s just say that if you were a strict Pentecostal or a strict anything, you wouldn’t be here. Somebody studied your resumé and made a judgement that you can handle it.’

‘Handle funerals?’

‘Handle… whatever.’ She clenched her fists on the steering wheel, drew a deep breath. ‘Whatever.’

Peter sat in silence for a while. The landscape continued to flicker by. A rich, fragrant smell of whiteflower in various forms began to suffuse the cabin, seeping in from the back.

Dear Peter, wrote Bea. We are in big trouble.

He was sitting in his quarters, still unwashed, and naked. Goose-pimples prickled on his flesh: big trouble.

His wife’s words had been sent a fortnight ago, or twelve days to be precise. She had kept silent for the first forty-eight hours of his stay among the Oasans, evidently counselling herself that anything she wrote would go unread until his return. But after two days she’d written regardless. And written again the next day, and the next. She’d written eleven more messages, all of them now stored in glowing capsules at the bottom of his screen. Each capsule bore a number: the date of transmission. To his wife, these messages were already History. To him, they were a frozen Present, yet to be experienced. His head buzzed with the urgent need to open them all, to crack open those capsules with eleven rapid-fire jabs of his finger — and buzzed also with the knowledge that he could only take them in one at a time.

He could’ve started reading them an hour earlier, in the vehicle on the way back from the settlement. But Grainger’s odd mood during the drive had discouraged him from asking her to tell him when they were close enough to the USIC base for the Shoot to work. Although he wasn’t usually secretive or prone to embarrassment, he’d felt self-conscious at the prospect of reading his wife’s personal communications right next to Grainger. What if Bea made some unguardedly intimate reference? A gesture of sexual affection? No, it was better to restrain his eagerness and wait until he had privacy.

On entering his USIC apartment, he’d stripped off his clothes, determined to shower before he tackled anything else. These last couple of weeks, working with the Oasans and sleeping out in the open, he’d become inured to sweat and dust, but his journey back to base in the air-conditioned vehicle had awakened his awareness of the muck that clung to him. It was a feeling he remembered well from his homeless years: being invited into somebody’s immaculate home and perching on the edge of their pale velour sofa, self-conscious about tainting it with his grimy arse. So, as soon as he stepped into his apartment, he decided that while the Shoot was warming up, doing its routine checks of its electronic innards, he could have a quick wash. Unexpectedly, however, Beatrice’s messages loaded in at once. Their sudden arrival was a potent presence in the room, forcing him to sit down, dirty as he was.

We are in big trouble, Bea said. I don’t want to worry you when you’re so far away and there’s nothing you can do. But things are falling apart fast. I don’t mean you and me of course darling. I mean things in general, the whole country (probably). In our local supermarket there are apology stickers on most of the shelves, empty spaces everywhere. Yesterday there was no fresh milk and no fresh bread. Today, all the UHT milk, flavoured milk, condensed milk, even coffee whitener has gone, likewise all the muffins, bagels, scones, chapattis, etc etc. I overheard two people in the checkout queue having a testy discussion about how many cartons of custard one person should be allowed to buy. The term ‘moral responsibility’ was used.

The news says that the supply problems are due to chaos on the motor-ways because of the earthquake in Bedworth a few days back. That makes a kind of sense, judging by the footage. (You know the way the top of a cake bursts open when it’s risen dramatically in the oven? — well, a long stretch of the M6 looks like that.) Of course the other roads are jammed solid now, trying to accommodate the diverted traffic.

But on the other hand, you would think there must be lots of bakeries and dairies located south of the quake site. I mean, surely we’re not dependent on a truck coming down the M6 all the way from Birmingham to bring us a loaf of bread! I suspect what we’re seeing here is sheer inflexibility in the way supermarkets operate; I bet they just aren’t equipped to negotiate with a different bunch of suppliers at such short notice. If the market was allowed to respond more organically (no pun intended) to an event like this, I’m sure that bakeries and dairies in Southampton or wherever would be delighted to step into the breach.

Anyway, the Bedworth quake is not the full story, regardless of what the news says. Food supplies have been erratic for ages. And the weather just gets weirder and weirder. We’ve had sunshine and mild conditions here (the carpets have finally dried out, thank goodness) but there have been freak hailstorms in other places, so bad that a couple of people have been killed. Killed by hailstones!

It’s been a good week for the news networks, I must say. The footage of the quake, the hailstorms and — stand by, folks! — a spectacular riot in central London. It started as a peaceful protest against the military action in China, and ended with cars being set alight, mass brawling, baton charges, the whole shebang. Even the cleaning up afterwards made for good pictures: there was fake blood (red paint) dripping off the stone lions in Trafalgar Square and real blood splattered on the ground. The cameramen must have been peeing themselves with delight. Sorry to sound cynical but the media gets so energised by this sort of thing. Nobody ever seems sad about it, there’s no moral dimension, it’s just the latest action-packed event. And while these photogenic calamities are flashed past, ordinary people get on with their lives, just doing their best to come to terms with everyday unhappiness.

Anyway, I shouldn’t try so hard to understand the Big Picture. Only God understands that, and He’s in control. I have my life to lead, work to go to. It’s early morning here, beautiful light, chilly, with Joshua perched on top of the filing cabinet snoozing in a sunbeam. My shift doesn’t start till 2.30, so I’m going to do some chores and cook tonight’s dinner so that when I come home from work I can just tuck in, instead of eating peanut butter on toast like I usually do. I should eat some breakfast now to boost my energy but there’s nothing in the house I fancy. The plight of a cereal addict in withdrawal! I’m sipping stale jasmine tea (left over from when we had Ludmila staying with us) because normal tea without milk tastes wrong to me. Too much compromise!

OK, back again. (I just went to the front door to pick up the mail.) Nice postcard from some people in Hastings thanking us for our kindness — Can’t think what kindness they’re referring to, but they invite us to visit them. Could be difficult for you right now! Also a letter from Sheila Frame. Remember her? She’s the mother of Rachel and Billy, the kids who made our Noah’s Ark wall-hanging/collage. Rachel is 12 now and ‘doing OK’ says Sheila (whatever ‘OK’ means) and Billy is 14 and seriously depressed. That’s why Sheila is writing to us. Her letter doesn’t make much sense, she must have written it when she was stressed out. She keeps mentioning ‘the snow leopard’, assuming we must know all about ‘the snow leopard’. I’ve tried to phone but she’s at work, and by the time I get home tonight it’ll be 11.30 at least. I might try to phone from the ward during my meal break.

Enough about my routine & uneventful life without my dear husband. Please tell me what’s been happening with you. I wish I could see your face. I don’t understand why the technology that allows us to communicate with each other like this can’t stretch to sending a few pictures as well! But I suppose that’s being greedy. It’s miraculous enough that we can read each other’s words at such a mind-boggling distance. Assuming you can still read them, of course… Please write soon to let me know you’re all right.

I feel I ought to have more specific questions & comments about your mission, but to be frank you haven’t told me very much about it. You’re more of a speaker than a writer, I know that. There have been times I’ve sat in the congregation when you’ve preached, and I see you glancing down at your notes — the same notes I’ve seen you scribbling the night before — and I’m aware that on that little scrap of paper there’s just a few disjointed phrases, and yet this wonderful, eloquent, coherent speech comes out, a beautifully formed story that keeps everyone spellbound for an hour. I admire you so much at those times, my darling. I wish I could hear what you’re saying to your new flock. I don’t suppose you’re writing any of it down afterwards? Or keeping a record of what they’re saying to you? I don’t feel I KNOW these people at all; it’s frustrating. Are you learning a new language? I suppose you must be.

Love,

Bea

Peter rubbed his face, and the sweaty, oily dirt accumulated into dark, seed-like particles in the palms of his hands. Reading his wife’s letter had made him agitated and confused. He hadn’t felt that way until now. For the duration of his stay with the Oasans, he’d been calm and emotionally stable, just getting on with the job. If he’d been occasionally bewildered, it was a happy sort of bewilderment. Now he felt out of his depth. There was a tightness squeezing his chest.

He moved the Shoot’s cursor to the next capsule in chronological sequence, and opened a message that Beatrice had sent him a mere twenty hours after the last. It must have been the middle of her night.

I miss you, she wrote. Oh, how I miss you. I didn’t know it would feel like this. I thought the time would fly and you would be back. If I could just hold you once, just hug you tight for a few minutes, I could cope with your absence again. Even ten seconds would do it. Ten seconds with my arms around you. Then I could sleep.

And, next day:

Horrible, ghastly things in the news; I can’t bear to read, can’t bear to look. Almost took the day off work today. Sat weeping in the toilets at break time. You are so far away, so incredibly far away, further away than any man has ever been from his woman, the sheer distance makes me ill. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Forgive me for spilling my guts like this, I know it can’t be helping you do whatever you’re doing. Oh, how I wish you could be in touch now. Touching me. Holding me. Kissing me.

The words hit him hard. They were the sort of thing he’d wanted to receive from her but now that he’d received them, they caused him distress. A fortnight ago, he had missed her sexually and craved confirmation that she felt the same. She’d assured him that she missed him, that she wanted to hold him, sure, but the overall tone of her letters was sensible, preoccupied, as though his presence was a luxury rather than a necessity. She’d seemed so self-reliant, he’d wondered if he was indulging in testosterone-fuelled self-pity — or if that’s how she saw it.

Once he’d taken his place among the Oasans, this insecurity had evaporated. He didn’t have time for it. And, trusting in the easy mutuality that he and Bea had always enjoyed, he’d assumed — if he thought about it at all — that Bea was in the same state of mind, that she was simply getting on with the daily business of life, that her love for him was like the colour of her eyes: constantly there, but not in any way an impediment to useful activity.

Instead, while he’d been laying the stones of his church and dozing happy in his hammock, she was in pain.

His fingers hung suspended over the keyboard, poised to respond to her. But how could he, when she’d written nine more messages to him, in hours and days that were already gone from her, but of which he knew nothing?

He opened another capsule.

Dear Peter,

Please don’t worry about me. I’ve got a grip now. I don’t know why I went off the deep end like that. Too little sleep? The atmosphere has been oppressive these last few weeks. Yes, I know I said it was a beautiful weather here and that’s true, in the sense that it’s warm and sunny. But at nights it’s close and rather hard to breathe.

A large chunk of North Korea was wiped out a few days ago. Not by a nuclear strike, or even a nuclear accident, but by a cyclone called Toraji. It came off the Sea of Japan and swept inland ‘like a ceremonial sword’ (I didn’t make that simile up, obviously). Tens of thousands dead, probably more than a million homeless. The government denied the severity of the damage at first, so all we had were satellite pictures. It was surreal. Here’s this woman in a tailored yellow outfit, with immaculate hair and manicured nails, standing in front of this giant projected image, pointing at the various smudges and blobs, interpreting what they mean. You got the message that there were lots of wrecked houses and dead bodies in there somewhere, but all you could see was these beautifully buffed hands gesturing over what looked like an abstract painting.

Then the government let some South Korean and Chinese aid workers in, and the proper video footage started coming through. Peter, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t seen. Maybe that’s why I got so frantic about missing you. Of course I love you and miss you and need you. But I also needed to see these things WITH you, or else be spared from seeing them at all.

I saw a huge concrete enclosure, like a giant pig kennel, or whatever you call the enclosures where they farm pigs, the roof of it just peeping out of a huge lake of slimy water. A team of men were hacking at the roof with pick-axes, not achieving much. Then they blew a hole in it with explosives. A weird mixture of soupy stuff gurgled out of the hole. It was people. People and water. Half-blended, like… I don’t want to describe it. I will never forget it. Why do we get shown these things? Why, when we can’t help? Later I saw villagers using dead bodies as sandbags. Rescue workers with candles strapped to their heads, the candle-fat running down their cheeks. How can such things be possible in the 21^st century? I’m watching a high-resolution video clip that was recorded with a micro-camera hidden in somebody’s hat-brim or whatever, and yet the technology of life-saving is straight from the Stone Age!

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.

‘Listen to your heart beat,’ said Peter. ‘Feel the ever-so-slight tremor inside your chest as your body miraculously keeps functioning. It’s such a gentle tremor, such a quiet sound, that we don’t appreciate how much it matters. We may not have been always aware of it, we may scarcely have given it a thought from day to day, but we were sharing the world with Art Severin, and he was sharing it with us. Now the sun has come up on a new day, and Art Severin has changed. We are here today to face up to that change.’

The mourners numbered fifty-two. Peter wasn’t sure how big a proportion of the total USIC staff this was. There were only six women, including Grainger; the rest were males, making Peter wonder if Severin had failed to win the respect of his female colleagues, or whether this simply reflected the gender distribution of the base. Everyone was dressed in the clothes they might usually wear at work. Nobody wore black.

BG and Tuska stood in the forefront of the crowd. Tuska, clad in a loose green shirt, military camouflage trousers and his trademark tennis shoes, was nevertheless almost unrecognisable, having shaved off his beard. BG was unmistakable as ever, the biggest body in the room, his facial hair maintained with scalpel-fine precision. A white T-shirt clung to his musculature like paint. A wrinkled white sirwal hung off his hips, its cuffs puddling over incongruous polished shoes. His arms were folded across his chest, his face composed and imperiously tolerant. A few people in the ranks behind him were looking more quizzical, nudged off-balance by the eulogy’s opening salvo.

‘Arthur Laurence Severin died young,’ said Peter, ‘but he lived many lives. He was born in Bend, Oregon, forty-eight years ago, to parents he never knew, and was adopted by Jim and Peggy Severin. They gave him a happy and active childhood, mostly in the open air. Jim repaired and maintained campsites, hunting lodges and military outposts. Art could drive a tractor by the time he was ten, operate a chainsaw, shoot deer, all that dangerous stuff that kids shouldn’t be allowed to do. He was all set to take over the family business. Then his adoptive parents divorced and Art started getting into trouble. His teenage years were spent in and out of juvenile corrective institutions and rehabilitation programmes. By the time he was old enough to go to jail, he already had a long record of crack cocaine abuse and DUI offences.’

The mourners were not so blank-faced now. A thrill of unease was passing through them, a thrill of interest and anxiety. Heads tilted, brows knitted, lower lips folding under top ones. Faster breathing. Children drawn in by a story.

‘Art Severin got time off for good behaviour and was soon back on the streets of Oregon. But not for long. Frustrated at the lack of employment opportunities in the US for young ex-crims, he relocated to Sabah, Malaysia, where he started a tool supply business with some drug dealing on the side. It was in Sabah that he met Kamelia, a local entrepreneur who supplied female companionship to the timber industry. They fell in love, married, and, although Kamelia was already in her forties, produced two daughters, Nora and Pao-Pei, always known as May. When Kamelia’s brothel was shut down by the authorities and Art’s business was squeezed by competition, he found work in the timber trade, and it was only then that he first discovered his lifelong fascination with the mechanics and chemistry of soil erosion.’

With measured assurance, Peter began to walk towards the coffin. The hand in which he had been holding his Bible swung at his side, and everyone could see that his thumb was pressed against a small scrap of hand-scribbled paper inside the Scripture.

‘Art Severin’s next life was in Australia,’ he said, gazing down at the casket’s lustrous surface. ‘Sponsored by a company that recognised his potential, he studied geotechnics and soil mechanics at the University of Sydney. He graduated in record time — this young man who’d dropped out of high school only nine years before — and was soon being headhunted by engineering firms because of his deep understanding of soil behaviour, and also because of his custom-made equipment. He could’ve made a fortune in patents, but he never saw himself as an inventor, merely as a worker who, as he put it, “got mad at crap tools”.’

There was a murmur of recognition in the crowd. Peter laid his free hand on the coffin lid, gently but firmly, as if laying it on Art Severin’s shoulder. ‘Whenever he found that the available apparatus couldn’t deliver the quality of data he demanded, he simply designed and built technology that would. Among his inventions was… ’ (and here he consulted the scrap of paper inside his Bible) ‘… a new sampling tool for use in cohesionless sands below ground-water level. Among his academic papers — again, written by this man whose high school teachers considered him a hopeless delinquent — were “Undrained triaxial tests on saturated sands and their significance to a comprehensive theory of shear strength”, “Achieving constant pressure control for the triaxial compression test”, “Stability gain due to pore pressure dissipation in a soft clay foundation”, “Overhauling Terzaghi’s principle of effective stress: some suggested solutions to anomalies at low hydraulic gradients”, and dozens more.’

Peter closed his Bible and hugged it to his abdomen, directly under the crucifix-shaped stain. His dishdasha had been laundered and pressed, but fresh sweat was already spreading in patches all over it. The assembled mourners were perspiring too.

‘Now, I’m not going to pretend I have much of a clue what those titles mean,’ said Peter with a faint grin. ‘Some of you will. Others won’t. The important thing is that Art Severin turned himself into a world-renowned expert on something more useful than taking drugs. Although… he didn’t let his old skills lapse entirely. Before he worked for USIC, he used to smoke fifty cigarettes a day.’ A ripple of chuckles passed through the crowd. There had been a solitary, suppressed snort earlier on when he’d referred to the female companionship supplied by Kamelia’s business, but this laughter now was unashamed, relaxed.

‘But we’re getting ahead of the story,’ he cautioned. ‘We’re leaving out some of his lives. Because Art Severin’s next life was as a consultant on major dam-building projects in a dozen countries from Zaire to New Zealand. His time in Malaysia had taught him the value of staying out of the limelight, so he rarely took the credit for his achievements, preferring to let politicians and corporate heads bask in the glory. But glorious indeed were the dams he nurtured to completion. He was especially proud of the Aziz Dam in Pakistan, which, if you’ll forgive an unintended pun, was truly ground-breaking: a rock-filled earth dam with an impervious clay core. The entire project required a high degree of attention to detail, since it was in an earthquake fault zone. It still stands today.’ Peter raised his chin, looked out of the nearest window at the alien emptiness beyond. His congregation looked likewise. Whatever was out there symbolised achievement, hard-won achievement within a vast environment that did not change unless dedicated professionals made it happen. A few eyes glinted with moisture.

‘Art Severin’s next life was not a happy one,’ said Peter, on the move again, as though inspired by Severin’s own restlessness. ‘Kamelia left him, for reasons he never understood. Both his daughters were badly affected by the break-up: Nora turned against him, and May was diagnosed schizophrenic. A few months after a gruelling and expensive divorce settlement, Art was investigated by tax authorities and billed for money he didn’t have. Within a year, he was drinking heavily, on welfare, living in a motor home with May, watching her get worse, and getting sicker and sicker himself, with undiagnosed diabetes.

‘But here’s where the story takes an unexpected direction,’ he said, turning abruptly, making eye-contact with as many of his listeners as he could. ‘May went off her medication, committed suicide, and everybody who’d been watching Art Severin’s decline assumed he would completely hit the skids and be found dead one day in his trailer. Instead, he sorted out his health, tracked down his real father, borrowed some money, shipped himself back to Oregon, and found work as a tour guide. He did it for ten years, refusing offers of promotion, refusing opportunities to get back into the geotechnics industry — until finally USIC came along. USIC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: the chance to test out, on a grand scale, his theories on the use of soils and soft rocks as engineering materials.

‘That grand-scale testing ground,’ declared Peter, ‘is here. It’s what we are standing on today. Art Severin’s skills helped to take this fantastically ambitious experiment as far as it has reached, and, because of Art’s generous sharing of his expertise, his skills will live on in his colleagues, you who knew him. I’ve talked mostly about Art’s past, a past many of you may have been scarcely aware of, because Art seldom spoke of it. He was, as I’m sure some of you would agree, a hard man to get to know. I won’t pretend to have known him myself. He showed kindness to me on my journey here, but by the time we arrived, we’d exchanged some tense words. I was looking forward to catching up with him later, after I’d settled in to my own work here; I was looking forward to smoothing things over between us. But that’s the way it goes with the dead and those they leave behind. Each of you will have your last memory of Art Severin, the last thing you said to him, the final thing he said to you. Maybe it’s the smile you shared over some detail of your work together, a smile that will mean something more to you now: a symbol of a relationship that was in pretty good order, pretty much ready to be severed clean. Or maybe you’ll remember a look he gave you, one of those what-the-hell-did-he-mean-by-that moments, something that makes you wonder whether there was anything you could or should have done, to make his absence now seem more natural. But either way, we’re struggling to make sense of his unreachability, the fact that he’s in a different dimension from us now, he’s no longer breathing the same air, no longer the same sort of creature. We know there was more to him than the body that’s stored in this casket, just as we know that there’s more to us than our kidneys and our intestines and our earwax. But we don’t have accurate terminology for what that extra thing is. Some of us call it the soul, but what is that, really? Is there a research paper on it that we can read, that will explain the properties of Art Severin’s soul, and tell us how it differs from the Art Severin we knew, the guy with the discoloured teeth and prickly temperament, the guy who found it difficult to trust women, the guy who had a habit of drumming on his knees to rock music that played in his head?’

Peter had been walking forwards slowly, getting closer to his congregation, until he stood within arm’s-reach of the front row. BG’s forehead was contorted with wrinkles, his eyes shone with tears. The woman next to him was weeping. Tuska’s jaw was set, his lopsided grin trembling slightly. Grainger, somewhere in the back row, was bone-pale, her expression softened by pain.

‘People, you know I’m a Christian. For me, that all-important research paper is the Bible. For me, that vital missing data is Jesus Christ. But I know that some of you are of different faiths. And I know that Art Severin professed to have none. BG asked him what religion he was, and he said “I’m nothing”. I never got a chance to discuss with him what he really meant by that. And now, I’ll never get that chance. But it’s not because Art Severin is lying here, dead. No. It’s because this body here isn’t Art Severin: we all know that, instinctively. Art Severin isn’t here anymore; he’s somewhere else, somewhere where we can’t be. We’re standing here, breathing air into those funny spongy bladders we call lungs, our torsos shaking slightly from the pump action of that muscle we call a heart, our legs getting uncomfortable from balancing on our foot-bones too long. We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh. We get to hang around in there for a certain number of years, and then we go where souls go. I believe that’s into the bosom of God. You may believe it’s somewhere different. But one thing’s for sure: it’s somewhere, and it’s not here.’

Peter walked back to the coffin, laid his hand on it once again.

‘I can’t say for sure if Art Severin really, truly believed he was nothing more than the contents of this coffin. If so, he was wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t get into another argument with him now; maybe it’s in bad taste. But Art: forgive me, forgive us, we’ve got to tell you: you weren’t nothing. It wasn’t true that you were going nowhere. You were travelling on the great human journey, and yesterday you broke through the final checkpoint, and you’ve reached the destination. You were a brave man who lived many lives, and each life required more courage than the last, and now you’re in the next life, where your body won’t let you down anymore, and you don’t need insulin and you don’t crave nicotine, and nobody betrays your trust, and every mystery you racked your brains about is clear as day now, and every hurt you ever suffered is OK now, and you’re feeling pity for us down here, still dragging our heavy bodies around.’ There was a grunt of surprise from the audience: BG had lifted his massive arm to wipe his eyes, and his elbow had accidentally bumped against someone’s skull.

‘Art Severin,’ proclaimed Peter — and, despite the muffled acoustics of the room, there seemed somehow to be a churchy reverb after all — ‘we are here today to dispose of your old cage of bone, your parcel of flesh. You don’t need that stuff anymore. It’s crap tools. But if it’s all right with you, please let us keep a few little souvenirs: our memories. We want to keep you with us, even as we let you go. We want you to live on in our minds, even though you’re living somewhere bigger and better than that. One day, we too will go where souls go, where you have travelled before us. Until then: Goodbye, Arthur Laurence Severin. Goodbye.’

Back in his own quarters, after he’d spent some time with a few of the mourners who hadn’t wanted to leave even after the coffin had been consumed, Peter seated himself once more in front of the Shoot. His clothing was sodden with sweat. He wondered how long the interval was between full water supplies to the shower. His head buzzed with the intimacies and confidences that USIC employees had just shared with him, facts about their lives that he must store in his memory, names he must make sure not to forget. His wife’s unopened capsules hung suspended on the screen. Nine more messages he hadn’t had time to read until now.

Dear Peter,

Excuse what will probably be a short, garbled message. I’m tired out. Sheila Frame and the two kids — Rachel and Billy — were here all afternoon and most of the evening. For them it was the weekend, but I’d worked an early shift, after a late shift the day before. Rachel is a handful. Still kind of sweet but full of borderline obsessive-compulsive habits, quite exhausting to watch. Hormones, I suppose. You wouldn’t recognise her, physically. Looks like a porn starlet/pop star/heiress party girl — the usual mix for pubescent females these days. Billy is painfully polite and shy. Small for his age, and a bit chubby with it. Barely spoke the whole time he was here, and obviously undergoing agonies of embarrassment the more chatty/nervy his mother became. Sheila smelled a little boozy, or maybe it was just very strong cologne, I don’t know. She’s buzzing with stress, the whole house is still full of it even though they left an hour ago. How I wished that you and I could have tackled them together — one of us calming Sheila down, the other relating to the kids, maybe taking it in turns. I don’t know why they stayed so long; I can’t imagine I was much use to them. Billy’s one and only moment of candour was when I parked him in front of my computer to play a game. He took one look at the Noah’s Ark display and his whole face flinched like someone had hit him. He told me that the snow leopard is extinct. The last surviving specimen died in a zoo a few weeks back. ‘The snow leopard was my favourite,’ he said. Then he sat down at the computer and within about 30 seconds he was lost in a realistic prison interior, shooting the guards’ heads off, blowing doors open, getting killed.

Must go to bed immediately. Up at 5.30 tomorrow morning. I drank some of the wine that Sheila brought, so she wouldn’t be self-conscious about drinking alone. I will regret it when that alarm clock goes off!

Please tell me a little more about how your mission is going. I want to talk specifics with you. It feels so strange not to. Peter, it HURTS not to. I feel like I’m your sister or something, sending you a long screed of complaint, chattering about things that you can’t possibly care about. I’m still the same person you’ve known, the one you can always rely on to give you perspective and confirmation. I just need to have a clearer sense of what you’re seeing and doing and experiencing, my darling. Give me some names, some particulars. I know you can’t right now, because you’re at the settlement and there’s no way to read this message. But when you get back. Please. Take some time out to reflect. Let me be there for you.

MUST go to bed now.

Love,

Bea.

Peter rocked on the chair, overloaded with adrenalin, but also tired. He wasn’t sure if he should, or even could, read Beatrice’s other eight messages without answering this one. It felt cruel, perverse, not to respond. As though Bea were calling out to him, over and over, and he was ignoring her cries.

Dear Bea, he wrote on a fresh page.

Today I conducted a funeral. Art Severin. I didn’t know he was a diabetic; he died suddenly while I was away at the settlement. I was given a comprehensive file on his life and about three hours to prepare something. I did my best. Everyone seemed to appreciate it.

Love,

Peter

He stared at the words on the screen, aware that they needed expansion. Details, details. A woman called Maneely had confessed to him that she hadn’t given a thought to Christianity since she was a small child, but that she’d felt the presence of God today. He considered telling Bea that. His heart was thumping strangely. He left his message in draft form, unsent, and opened another capsule.

Dear Peter,

Are you sitting down? I hope so.

Darling, I’m pregnant. I know you’ll think that’s not possible. But I stopped taking the Pill a month before you left.

Please don’t be angry with me. I know we agreed to wait another couple of years. But please understand that I was scared you’d never come back. I was scared there’d be an explosion at the launch and your mission would be over before it began. Or that you’d disappear somewhere along the way, just disappear into space, and I would never even know what became of you. So, as the departure date got closer and closer, I got more and more desperate for some part of you to be here with me, no matter what.

I prayed and prayed about it but just didn’t feel I’d got an answer. In the end I left it in God’s hands whether I would be fertile so soon after coming off the Pill. Of course it was still my decision, I’m not denying that. I wish the decision had been ours together. Maybe it was — or could have been. Maybe if we’d discussed it, you would have said it was exactly what you’d been wanting to suggest yourself. But I was terrified you’d say no. Would you have? Just tell me straight, don’t spare me.

Whatever you feel, I hope it makes some difference to you that I’m proud and thrilled to be carrying your baby. Our baby. By the time you come back, I’ll be 26 weeks along the way and getting pretty enormous. That’s assuming I don’t have a miscarriage. I hope I don’t. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and we could try again, but it would be a different child. This one I’m carrying feels so precious — already! You know what I was thinking when you made love to me on the way to the airport? I was thinking, I’m ready, this is the moment, this is exactly the right moment, all it needs now is one tiny seed. And I bet that was when it happened. Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened.

13. The engine kindled into life

‘And this is where it all started,’ said the woman solemnly. ‘This is what it looked like in the beginning.’

Peter nodded. He kept his jaw rigid and didn’t dare try to make the appropriate interested noises, for fear of breaking into a grin or even laughing out loud. The official opening of this facility was a momentous occasion for everyone gathered here today.

‘We put an extra-thick layer of epoxy on the top of the downstream surface,’ the woman continued, pointing to the relevant parts of the scale model, ‘to control the migration of water through the foundation. These tubes on the downstream side were connected to pressure transducers.’

If she’d been breezy or casual, it wouldn’t be so bad, but she was deadly earnest and that made it funnier, and everybody but him seemed to understand what she was talking about, which made it funnier still. Then there was the inherent comicality of an architectural scale model (so dignified, so full of symbolic importance, and yet so… dinky, like something from a children’s playground). And, added to that, the shape of the model itself: two inverted cups joined together, fully justifying the ‘Big Brassiere’ nickname.

The real buildings, from a distance, hadn’t struck him as particularly comical. He’d seen them, along with everyone else, looming on the horizon earlier in the afternoon as USIC’s convoy of vehicles drove across the scrubland, each vehicle ferrying half a dozen employees. The sheer size of the structures, and the fact that one partially obscured the other on approach, made them appear like nothing less than what they were: mighty works of architecture. When the convoy finally cruised to a standstill in front of the foremost structure, the vehicles parked in an area of shade so large that its contours were difficult to tell. Only once Peter and the other USIC personnel were gathered together in the entrance hall, contemplating a replica barely a metre high, was the design of this place revealed in all its bulbous symmetry. The officiating woman, Hayes, an engineer who’d worked closely with Severin, waved her hand in the air over the twin structures, oblivious to the fact that she appeared to be miming a caress of a sofa-sized bosom.

‘… the desired g-level… self-weight displacements… overtopping simulation… ’ Hayes droned on. ‘… uplift pressures with five transducers… proximity probe… ’

Peter’s urge to laugh had passed. Now, he could scarcely keep awake. The entrance hall was stiflingly warm and poorly ventilated; it felt rather like being enclosed inside an engine — which was basically what it was, of course. He swayed slightly on his feet, took a deep breath, and made an effort to stand straighter. Bubbles of trapped sweat squelched in his sandals; his eyes stung and Hayes became blurry.

‘… recorded in real time… ’

He blinked. Hayes muddled back into focus. She was a tiny woman with a military-style masculine haircut and the sort of dress sense that made anything she wore look like a uniform even when it wasn’t. He’d made her acquaintance several days ago in the mess hall when she was shovelling her way through a plate of whiteflour mash and gravy. They’d conversed for ten, fifteen minutes and she’d been perfectly pleasant in a dull sort of way. She was from Alaska, used to like dogs and sledding but was content nowadays to read about them in magazines, and didn’t believe in any religion, although she kept ‘kind of an open mind about poltergeists’, having had a weird experience in an uncle’s house when she was twelve. Her low-pitched monotone was, he’d thought, mildly attractive, reminding him slightly of Bea’s melodious croon. But when delivering a lecture on thermodynamics and dam design, it wasn’t so scintillating.

Even so, the fact that he was having trouble staying awake annoyed him. Boring experiences didn’t normally affect him like this. Usually, he had exceptional tolerance for tedium; homelessness had taught him that. But living in the USIC base was worse than homelessness somehow. He’d been back a week, and his sunburned face had peeled and healed, but his brain wasn’t recovering so well. He was wired and wakeful when he should be sleeping, and dopey when he should be alert. And here he was, nodding off, when he should be admiring the engineering genius of USIC’s brand new Centrifuge & Power Facility.

‘… mutually exclusive functions… couldn’t be done… Severin… vacuum net… the vision to let go of photo-voltaics… ’

It was impressive what had been wrought here: a feat of engineering that stretched the limits of what was thought possible. Under normal conditions — that is to say, the conditions everyone was used to back home — rain fell over a large area and accumulated in great pools, or flowed into rivers which moved across the landscape gathering speed. Either way, a substance which, to a person standing under a rainshower, was perceived as individual droplets falling through the air, was transformed by time and volume and momentum into a vast force that could power a hundred thousand engines. These principles did not apply on Oasis. The raindrops manifested, dropped onto the sponge-like terrain, and were gone. If you happened to be outdoors while it was raining and held out a cup, it would be filled, or you could quench your thirst more simply than that, by leaning back with your mouth wide open. But when it was over, it was over, until the next rainfall.

The Big Brassiere’s grand bipartite structure defied these limitations. One part of it was designed to suck the rain from the sky, gather the diffuse droplets into a cyclonic whirl, tug the condensed water into a gigantic centrifuge. But that was only half of the project’s audacious ingenuity. The amount of electricity required to power this centrifuge was, of course, colossal — far beyond the yield of USIC’s existing solar panels. So, the harvested water was not merely flung into a reservoir; it was first put to work in a giant boiler, where fearsome volumes of trapped steam set turbines spinning.

Each of the two buildings fed into each other, providing the energy to catch the water, providing the water to generate the energy. It wasn’t exactly a perpetual motion machine — two hundred solar panels stationed in the scrubland all around the facility kept the sun’s rays beaming in — but it was mind-bogglingly efficient. Oh, if only a few of these Big Brassieres could be installed in famine-ravaged countries like Angola and Sudan! What a difference they would make! Surely USIC, having just achieved this technological marvel and proved what could be done, must be negotiating such projects? He would have to ask someone about that.

But now was not the time.

‘And in conclusion… ’ Hayes was saying. ‘One last practicality. We’re cognisant of the fact that there’s been some reluctance to use the official title of this facility, the Centrifuge & Power Facility. We’re further cognisant of the fact that there’s a nickname currently being usaged that is not what we want to hear. Some people may think it’s funny but it’s not exactly dignified and I think we owe it to Severin, who worked so hard on this project along with the rest of us, to give it a name that we can all live with. So, in recognition of the fact that a lot of people prefer names that are short and snappy, here’s the deal. Officially, we are here today to celebrate the opening of the USIC Centrifuge & Power Facility. Unofficially, we suggest you call it… the Mother.’

‘Because it’s one big motherfucker!’ someone called out.

‘Because necessity is the mother of invention,’ Hayes explained patiently.

With that, the opening ceremony speech more or less came to an end. The remainder of the visit was, or pretended to be, a guided tour of the facility, to demonstrate how the principles established by the scale model were put into full-sized practice. However, so many of the facility’s important features and mechanisms were encased in concrete or submerged in water or accessible only by vertiginous steel ladders that there was nothing much to see.

Only when they were driving away, back to the USIC base, in their little convoy, did Peter finally feel the surge of inspiration he hadn’t been able to muster during Hayes’s speech. Squashed between two strangers on the back seat of a steamy vehicle, he sensed the world darkening a little. He craned round and wiped the condensation off the rear window with his sleeve. The great power utility was already receding in the distance, shimmering slightly in the haze of spent fuel coming out of the jeep’s exhaust. But what could be seen more clearly now was the multitude of solar panels — heliostats — that were arranged in a far-flung semi-circle on the landscape all around the Mother. Each of them was meant to catch the sunlight and redirect it straight to the power station. But by coincidence the sun was partially obscured by passing clouds. The heliostats swivelled on their podiums, adjusting the angle of their mirrored surfaces, adjusting, adjusting, adjusting again. They were only rectangular slabs of steel and glass, not in the least human-looking, but still Peter was moved by their insensate confusion. Like all creatures in the universe, they were only waiting for the elusive light that would grant them purpose.

Back in his quarters, Peter checked for messages on the Shoot. He felt guilty checking for fresh communications from Bea when he’d let so much time lapse since writing one himself. In his last letter, he’d reassured her that he was delighted to hear she was pregnant and that, no, of course he wasn’t angry with her. The rest of the letter was padded out with mission-related stuff he couldn’t recall. The entire letter had been maybe fifteen lines long, twenty at most, and had taken him several hours of sweat to produce.

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.

Whew! If you could have heard the crash that just reverberated through the house! It almost gave me a heart attack. The window of the bathroom is shattered, hundreds of glass shards in the bathtub and on the floor. I thought it was vandalism at first, but it was the wind. A big gust ripped an apple off the tree in the backyard and flung it against our window. But fear not! Someone from the church is coming to fix it ASAP, within two hours, he said. Graeme Stone. Remember him? His wife died of cirrhosis.

I went to the supermarket yesterday, it was closed. No explanation, just a sellotaped piece of paper saying it wouldn’t open until further notice. Quite a lot of people outside, would-be customers peering through the glass. Inside, the lights were on, everything looked as normal, the shelves stocked up. A couple of security guys stationed near the doors. A few staff(?) walking around the aisles talking calmly, as though nobody could see them, as though they were in their own living room instead of on public display in the high street. Weird. I stood there for about five minutes, I don’t know why. Eventually a cheeky young West Indian man called through the glass to one of the security guys, saying ‘Can I have a packet of 20 Benson & Hedges, mate?’ No response, so he adds, ‘It’s for me mum, mate!’ A ripple of laughter went through the crowd. It was one of those communal things, when something small and funny happens that everyone ‘gets’, and for just an instant everyone’s united. I love those moments. Anyway it was obviously downhill from there so I walked to the 24-hour convenience store and tried to score some milk there but no joy.

What are you eating, my darling? Anything I would fancy a bite of?

The USIC mess hall was bathed in orange light. It was afternoon. It would be afternoon for ages yet.

He ordered cream of chicken soup and a bread roll from the food counter. A woman was working there today, a Greek-looking beauty he hadn’t yet got to know. He’d made conversation with most of the USIC personnel, to gauge whether he could be of use to anyone on a spiritual level, and had found them to be an uncommonly phlegmatic, self-contained bunch. This Greek woman was a new one on him, though, and there was a look in her eyes that offered hope that there might be a God-shaped hole in her life. He wondered if he should pursue the opportunity. But he was hungry and besides his mind was full of the Oasans. His next departure was less than an hour away.

The soup was tasty, despite containing neither cream nor pieces of chicken. It had a rich chicken stock flavour, no doubt transported here in powder form. The whiteflower roll was crisp on the outside and spongy on the inside, still slightly warm — exactly as a bread roll should be. He ate and gave thanks to God for every mouthful.

The sound filtering through the PA was some sort of Dixieland jazz he couldn’t identify. Ancient music wasn’t his specialty. Every few minutes, a recorded announcement recited a list of trombonists and trumpeters and pianists and so on.

He finished his meal and returned the bowl to the counter.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ the woman said. Her wrist, as she picked up the bowl, was knobbly yet delicate, like Bea’s. He wished he could link fingers with Bea just for three seconds and feel the bone of her wrist against his own flesh. The need of it struck him as he stood there, his eyes misted over; then he pulled himself together.

He returned to his seat, to allow the food to settle in his stomach. Stroking his palm down the front of his tunic, he was stung by a spark of static electricity, a phenomenon he’d noticed often before when he was too full of anticipation. He closed his eyes and sent a prayer to God for calm. A measure of calm was granted.

On the public address system, the Dixieland jazz had given way to something less hectic. He started to leaf through magazines from the racks near his armchair, spending a couple of minutes on each one before neatly replacing it.

His initial impression had been that USIC offered a comprehensive selection of what might be on sale in a newsagent’s back home. Now that he examined the magazines more carefully, he wasn’t so sure. House & Garden, Hot Goss, Aquarium Fish, Men’s Health, Lesbian Action, The Chemical Engineer, Classic Jazz, Vogue… Yes, they were fairly recent, having arrived on the same ship that brought him to Oasis. And yes, they covered a broad range of interests, but… there was no hard news in any of them. He scanned the buzzwords and the teasers emblazoned on the covers. They were the same buzzwords and teasers that had appeared on these sorts of publications for decades. Absent from the racks was any magazine that reported on what was happening on the front lines, so to speak. You could read about jazz or how to harden your abdominal muscles or what to feed your fish, but where were the political crises, the earthquakes, the wars, the demises of major corporations? He picked up Hot Goss, a showbiz tattle mag, and flipped through it. Article after article was about celebrities he’d never heard of. Two pages came loose in his hand, alerting him to the fact that another two pages further on had been torn out. He found the relevant place. Sure enough, the numbering jumped from 32 to 37. He flipped back to the contents page and consulted the blurbs for a clue to the missing material. ‘Umber Rosaria Goes To Africa! Our fave party girl swaps rehab for refugee camps’.

‘Hey, preacher!’

He looked up. A sardonic-looking man with several days’ growth of stubble was standing over him.

‘Hi, Tuska,’ said Peter. ‘Good to see you. Growing the beard back?’

Tuska shrugged. ‘No big deal. Different display panel, same machine.’ He sat down in the nearest armchair and nodded towards the Hot Goss in Peter’s hands. ‘That crap will turn your brain to jelly.’

‘I’m just checking out what’s available here,’ said Peter. ‘And I noticed a couple of pages have been torn out.’

Tuska leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. ‘Only a couple? Jeez, you should check out Lesbian Action. A third of it is gone, easy.’ He winked. ‘We’d probably need to break into Hayes’s quarters to get it back.’

Peter maintained eye contact with Tuska but did not allow his face to express approval or disapproval. This often acted as a moral mirror, he’d found, reflecting back at a person what they’d just said.

‘No disrespect meant, you understand,’ added Tuska. ‘She’s a damn good engineer. Keeps herself to herself. Like all of us here, I guess.’

Peter replaced Hot Goss on the racks. ‘Are you married, Tuska?’

Tuska raised one bushy brow. ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ he intoned theatrically, wiggling his fingers in the air to emphasise the antiquated pop-culture reference. Then, in his normal voice. ‘Haven’t heard from her in twenty years. More.’

‘Is there a special person in your life right now?’

Tuska narrowed his eyes pensively, play-acted a thorough scrutiny of the available data. ‘Nope,’ he said after four or five seconds. ‘Can’t say that there is.’

Peter smiled to signal that he understood the joke, but somewhere in his eyes there must have been a stray glint of pity, because Tuska felt provoked to explain further.

‘You know, Peter, I’m surprised you got through the USIC screening process. Real surprised, as a matter of fact.’ For several beats, he kept Peter waiting for elaboration. ‘If you look at the guys and gals working here, you’ll find that pretty much all of us are… ah… free agents. No wives or husbands back home. No steady girlfriends, no dependent children, no moms checking the mailbox. No strings.’

‘Because of the high risk of us dying on the way here?’

‘Dying? Who’s dying? We’ve had one accident in all these years and it had nothing to do with the Jump, it was a freak thing that could’ve happened to a commercial jet plane on its way to LA. The kinda thing insurance companies call an Act of God.’ He winked, then got back to the point. ‘Nah, the screening process… it’s about conditions here. Life here. What can I say? “Isolated” would be a fair word for it. The big risk, for anybody, is going crazy. Not psycho-killer, axe-murderer crazy, just… crazy. So-o-o… ’ He drew a deep, indulgent breath. ‘So it’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals that understand what it’s like to be in permanent… limbo. To have no other plans… nowhere else to go… nobody in the picture who particularly gives a damn. Know what I’m saying? People who can deal with that.’

‘A team of loners? Sounds like a contradiction in terms.’

‘It’s the Légion Étrangère is what it is.’

‘Sorry?’

Tuska leaned forward, in storyteller mode now. ‘The French Foreign Legion,’ he said. ‘An elite army corps. They fought in lots of wars back in the day. A great team. You didn’t have to be French to join. You could come from anywhere. You didn’t have to tell them your real name, your past, your criminal record, nothing. So, as you can imagine, a lot of those guys were trouble with a capital T. They didn’t fit in anywhere. Not even in the regular army. It didn’t matter. They were Legionnaires.’

Peter considered this for a few seconds. ‘Are you saying everybody here is trouble with a capital T?’

Tuska laughed. ‘Ah, we’re pussycats,’ he schmoozed. ‘Fine and upstanding citizens one and all.’

‘In my interviews with USIC,’ reflected Peter, ‘I didn’t get the impression I could’ve lied about anything. They’d done their research. I had to get medical checks, certificates, testimonials…’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Tuska. ‘We’re all hand-picked here. My analogy with the Legion is not that there’s no questions asked. Far from it. My analogy is that we can deal with being here, period. Legio Patria Nostra, that was the motto of the Legionnaires. The Legion Is Our Homeland.’

‘Yet you’ve been back,’ observed Peter.

‘Well, I’m the pilot.’

‘And BG and Severin; they went back a couple of times too.’

‘Yeah, but they spent years here in between trips. Years. You’ve seen Severin’s files. You know how much time he spent in this place, doing his job every day, drinking green water, pissing orange piss, moseying on down to the mess hall every evening and eating adapted fungus or whatever the hell it is, maybe leafing through some year-old magazines like you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room, going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling. That’s what we do here. And we deal with it. You know how long the first USIC workers here lasted? The first couple batches of personnel, in the very early days? Three weeks, on average. We’re talking about ultra-fit, highly trained, well-adjusted people from loving families blah blah blah. Six weeks, max. Sometimes six days. Then they would go out of their skulls, weeping, begging, crawling up the walls, and USIC would have to send them back. Back ho-ome.’ While uttering this last word, he made a grandiloquent sweep of his arms, to add a sarcastic halo of importance to the concept. ‘OK, I know USIC has a lot of money. But not that much money.’

‘What about Kurtzberg?’ said Peter quietly. ‘And Tartaglione? They didn’t go home, did they?’

‘No,’ conceded Tuska. ‘They went native.’

‘Isn’t that just a different way of adapting?’

‘You tell me,’ said Tuska with a hint of mischief. ‘You just came back from Freaktown and now you’re going again. What’s your hurry? Don’t you love us anymore?’

‘Yes, I love you,’ said Peter, aiming for a light, good-humoured tone that might simultaneously convey that he really did love everyone here. ‘But I wasn’t brought here… uh… USIC made it clear I shouldn’t expect… ’ He faltered, dismayed. His tone was neither bantering nor sincere; it was defensive.

‘We’re not your job,’ summarised Tuska. ‘I know that.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Peter noticed that Grainger had entered the mess hall, ready to drive him to the settlement. ‘I do care,’ he said, suppressing the urge to bring up Severin’s funeral, to remind Tuska how hard he’d tried to come up with something decent at short notice. ‘If you… if anyone actually… reached out to me, I’d be there for them.’

‘Sure you would,’ the pilot shrugged. Leaning back in his seat again, he noticed Grainger edging nearer, and gave her a casual salute.

‘Your chariot awaits,’ announced Grainger.

Rather than taking the cafeteria exit and walking round the building to where the vehicle was parked, Grainger escorted Peter through a maze of internal corridors, postponing when they’d have to wade into the muggy air. This route through the base took them past the USIC pharmacy, Grainger’s domain. It was shut and Peter would have walked right by without noticing it, if not for the bright green plastic cross mounted on its otherwise nondescript door. He paused for a proper look, and Grainger paused with him.

‘The serpent of Epidaurus,’ he murmured, surprised that whoever had made this cross had bothered to embellish it, in silver metallic inlay, with the ancient symbol of the snake encircling the staff.

‘Yeah?’ she said.

‘It symbolises wisdom. Immortality. Healing.’

‘And “Pharmacy”,’ she added.

He wondered if the door was unlocked. ‘What if someone shows up while we’re gone, wanting you?’

‘Unlikely,’ she said.

‘USIC doesn’t keep you that busy?’

‘I do lots of other things besides the drugs. I analyse all the food, to check we’re not poisoning ourselves. I do research. I pitch in.’

He hadn’t meant to make her justify her wage; he was only curious about that door. Having burgled quite a few pharmacies in his time, he struggled to believe that a storehouse of pharmaceutical goodies wouldn’t be a temptation for even one of the people here. ‘Is it locked?’

‘Of course it’s locked.’

‘The only door in the whole place that’s locked?’

She shot him a suspicious glance. He felt she’d peered straight into his conscience, eavesdropping on his guilty memory of trespassing in Kurtzberg’s quarters. What had possessed him to do that?

‘It’s not that I think anybody would steal anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just… procedure. Can we go now?’

They walked to the corridor’s end, where Grainger took a deep breath and opened the door to the outside. The cool, neutral air of the interior was sucked from behind them into the atmosphere beyond, exerting a tug on their bodies as they stepped out of the building. Then the flood of gaseous moisture enveloped them, a shock as always, until you got used to it.

‘I overheard you tell Tuska you love him,’ said Grainger as they approached the vehicle.

‘He was bantering,’ said Peter, ‘and I was… uh… bantering back.’ The air currents ruffled his hair, ran under his clothing, blurred his vision. Distracted, he almost blundered against Grainger, having followed her to the driver’s side before he remembered that he should be heading for the passenger’s side. ‘But on a deeper level,’ he said, as he backtracked, ‘yes, it’s true. I’m a Christian. I try to love everybody.’

They took their seats in the front of the van and slammed the doors shut, sealing themselves into the air-conditioned cabin. The short time they’d spent in the open air had been enough to dampen their skin all over, so that they both shivered at the same instant, a coincidence which made them smile.

‘Tuska isn’t very lovable,’ Grainger remarked.

‘He means well,’ said Peter.

‘Yeah?’ she said tartly. ‘I guess he’s more fun if you’re a guy.’ She dabbed her face dry with a hunk of her shawl and, peering up into a mirror, brushed her hair. ‘All that sex talk. You should hear him sometimes. Real locker room stuff. So much hot air.’

‘You wouldn’t want it to be more than hot air, would you?’

‘God forbid,’ she scoffed. ‘I can imagine why his wife left him.’

‘Maybe he left her,’ said Peter, wondering why she was drawing him into this peculiar conversation, and why they weren’t moving yet. ‘Or maybe it was a mutual decision.’

‘The end of a marriage is never a mutual decision,’ she said.

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.

Even so, ‘Freaktown’ was a problem, and needed fixing.

‘Tell me,’ he said, when the settlement was within sight. ‘If you had to give this place a new name, what would you call it?’

She turned towards him, still wearing her dark shades. ‘What’s wrong with C-2?’

‘It sounds like something you’d see on a canister of poison gas.’

‘Sounds neutral to me.’

‘Well, maybe something less neutral would be an improvement.’

‘Like… let me guess… New Jerusalem?’

‘That would be disrespectful to the ones who aren’t Christians,’ he said. ‘And anyway, they have a lot of trouble pronouncing “s” sounds.’

Grainger thought for a minute. ‘Maybe this is a job for Coretta. You know, the girl from Oskaloosa… ’

‘I remember her. She’s in my prayers.’ Anticipating that Grainger might have trouble with this, he immediately lightened his tone. ‘Although, maybe this isn’t a job for Coretta. I mean, look at “Oasis” — it has two “s”s in it. Maybe she’s really hooked on “s”s. Maybe she’d suggest “Oskaloosa”.’

The joke fell flat and Grainger remained silent. It seemed his mention of prayer had been a mistake.

Abruptly the wilderness ended and they were driving into the town’s perimeter. Grainger steered the vehicle towards the same building as before. The word WELCOME, in man-sized letters, had been painted afresh on the wall, although this time it read WEL WEL COME as if to add emphasis.

‘Just drive straight to the church,’ said Peter.

‘The church?’

He doubted she could have failed to notice the construction site last time she picked him up, but, OK, fine, she needed to play this game and he would indulge her. He pointed towards the horizon, where the large, vaguely Gothic structure, still lacking a roof or a spire, was silhouetted against the afternoon sky. ‘That building there,’ he said. ‘It’s not finished, but I’ll be camping out in it.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I still have to do my drug delivery.’ And she jerked her head towards the paint-daubed building they’d just left behind.

Glancing backwards, he noted all the vacant space in the rear of the vehicle, and the box of medicines in the middle of it. ‘Sorry, I forgot. Would you like some moral support?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I really don’t mind staying with you for as long as it takes. I should have remembered.’

‘Not your job.’

She was already steering the car across the scrubland towards the church. There was no point trying to persuade her to turn back and get her drug delivery over with first, even though he was convinced she’d be less stressed if she had company, less spooked if someone of her own kind was at her side. But he couldn’t push. Grainger was a touchy character — and getting touchier the longer he knew her.

They slowed to a standstill, alongside the western wall of the church. Even without the roof on, the building was big enough to cast shade all over and around them.

‘OK, then,’ said Grainger, removing her sunglasses. ‘Have a good time.’

‘I’m sure it will be interesting,’ said Peter. ‘Thanks again for driving me here.’

‘All the way to… Peterville,’ she quipped, as he unsealed the car door.

He laughed. ‘Out of the question. They have trouble pronouncing “t” sounds too.’

The humid atmosphere, kept at bay for so long, swirled gleefully into the cabin, licking their faces, clouding the window, slipping into their sleeves, stirring the locks of their hair. Grainger’s face, small and pale inside her swaddle of headscarf, was balmed over with perspiration within a couple of seconds. She frowned irritably, and sweat twinkled in the lush brown hairs where her eyebrows almost met.

‘Are you really praying for her?’ she said abruptly, just as he was about to climb out of his seat.

‘You mean Coretta?’

‘Yes.’

‘Every day.’

‘But you don’t know her at all.’

‘God knows her.’

She winced. ‘Can you pray for one more person?’

‘Of course. Who?’

‘Charlie.’ She hesitated. ‘Charlie Grainger.’

‘Your father?’ It was a guess, an intuition. Brother was a possibility; son he didn’t think was likely.

‘Yes,’ she said, her cheeks blossoming red.

‘What’s the main concern in his life?’

‘He’s going to die soon.’

‘Are you close?’

‘No. Not at all. But… ’ She pulled her scarf down off her head, shook her bared head like an animal. ‘I don’t want him to suffer.’

‘Understood,’ said Peter. ‘Thanks. See you next week.’ And he left her in peace, and walked through the door of his church.

The Oasans had made him a pulpit. God bless them, they’d made him a pulpit, carved and moulded from the same amber material as the bricks. It stood proudly inside the four walls as if it had sprung up from the soil, a tree in the shape of a pulpit, growing in the open air. Just before his departure, Peter had hinted that the roof should be put on as soon as possible, but there was no roof. Nor had any progress been made on the windows, which were still just holes in the walls.

Standing here reminded him of childhood visits to medieval ruins, where tourists would potter around the remains of a once-thriving abbey abandoned to the elements. Except that this church wasn’t a ruin, and there was no need to worry about the effects of exposure. The roof and windows, when they finally came, would be a grand gesture of completion but, in truth, this church had been ready for use since the moment it was conceived. It was never going to be a hermetically sealed bunker like the USIC base. The roof would serve to keep a downpour out, but the air inside would be the same as the air outside, and the floor would still be trampled earth. The church would contain no perishable bric-a-brac or fragile fabrics that could be ruined by weather; the Oasans regarded this place purely as a gathering-point for bodies and souls — which boded well for their growth in Christ.

And yet, they’d made him a pulpit. And they had finished the entrance. The two halves of the door which, when he was here last, had lain flat on the ground, fresh from the kiln, had been lifted into place and affixed. Peter swung them open and closed, open and closed, admiring the smooth motion and the perfectly straight line where the two halves met. No metal hinges or screws had been used; instead, the joints were cleverly dovetailed: finger-like appendages on the inner edges of the doors nestled snugly in matching holes in the jambs. He was pretty sure that if he were to seize hold of these doors and lift them, they would come away from the jambs as easily as a foot from a shoe — and could be replaced just as readily. Was it foolhardy to construct a building in such a way that a mischievous vandal could pull its doors off? Even if there were no vandals here to cause such mischief? And did building a church on this spongy earth qualify as ‘building a house on sand’, as warned against in Matthew 7:24–26? He doubted it. Matthew was speaking metaphorically, making a point not about architecture but about faith in action.

The Oasans were slow workers, pathologically careful, but they never gave less than their best. The door had been decorated with intricate carvings. When first carried here across the scrubland, the two halves were smooth as glass. Now they were scored with dozens of tiny crosses, executed in such a variety of styles that Peter suspected each individual Jesus Lover had added one of his or her own. Near the tapered pinnacle of the door were three outsized human eyes, arranged in a pyramid. They had a blind look to them, pictorially elegant but produced without any understanding of what makes an eye an eye. There were also some gouges which might be mistaken for abstract curlicues but which he knew were meant to be shepherds’ staffs — or ‘สีรี่affสี’ as the Oasans had struggled to identify them when they’d discussed it.

He had offered to learn their language, but they were reluctant to teach him and, deep down, he conceded it might be a waste of time. In order to imitate the sounds they produced, he’d probably need to rip his own head off and gargle through the stump. Whereas the Oasans, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Tartaglione and Kurtzberg, and to the zeal of their own faith, had made extraordinary progress in English — a language they were as unsuited to learn as a lamb was unsuited to climb a ladder. Yet they climbed, and Peter felt keenly the pathos of their strivings. He could tell, from the Bible verses they’d managed to memorise, that Kurtzberg had made no concessions to their physical handicaps: whatever was printed in Scripture was what they must voice.

Peter was determined to show more sensitivity than that. During his sleepless week back at the USIC base, he’d done a lot of work translating Bible terms into equivalents that his flock would find easier to pronounce. ‘Pastures’, for example, would be ‘green land’. ‘Righteousness’ would simply be ‘Good’. ‘Shepherd’ would be ‘he who care for me’ (niceties of grammar were less important than the meaning, and anyway, the phrase had quite a poetical ring to it). ‘Staff’ would be ‘care wand’. He’d sweated over that one. The hint of hocus pocus was regrettable, and ‘care wand’ lacked the straightforward vigour of ‘staff’, but it was better than ‘crook’ (too much potential for confusion with the concept of crookedness), it was merciful on the Oasan throat, and it incorporated the right elements of pastoral concern and divine potency.

The fruits of these labours were in his rucksack. He swung it off his shoulder and dumped it next to the pulpit, then sat down next to it. A feeling of tranquility descended, like a warm infusion of alcohol spreading through his system. The awkward drive with Grainger faded from his mind; the earlier conversation with Tuska already seemed long ago; he had difficulty retrieving anything from Bea’s most recent letter except that she intended to take Billy Frame to a cat show. Oddly enough, the Noah’s Ark wall-hanging that Billy and Rachel had made was vivid in his memory, as though it had come on the journey with him and was hanging somewhere nearby.

He was so looking forward to living with the Oasans again. It truly was a privilege. Ministering to his congregation in England was a privilege, too, but it was also difficult sometimes, what with the perverse, immature behaviour that various individuals were liable to spring on you. That Asian woman, Mirah, and her violent husband… She giggly and gossipy, he fat and peevish, poncing about like an overfed sultan… they were precious souls, sure, but not exactly restful company. The Oasans were a tonic for the spirit.

He sat for a while, in a state of prayer without forming any words, just allowing the membrane between himself and Heaven to become permeable. A small red insect, like a ladybird but with longer legs, settled on his hand. He aligned his fingertips in a triangle and let the creature walk up the incline of one finger and down the slope of another. He let the creature nibble the surplus cells from the surface of his skin. It wasn’t greedy; he barely felt it and then it flew away.

Ah, the power of silence. He’d first experienced it as a small boy, parked next to his mother at her Quaker meetings. A room full of people who were content to be quiet, who didn’t need to defend the boundaries of their egos. There was so much positive energy in that room that he would not have been surprised if the chairs had started to lift off the floor, levitating the whole circle of worshippers to the ceiling. That was how it felt with the Oasans, too.

Maybe he should have been a Quaker. But they had no ministers, and no God — not in any real, fatherly sense. Sure, it was peaceful to sit in a community of companions, watching the play of sunlight on the pullover worn by the old man opposite, allowing yourself to be mesmerised by glowing wool-fibres as the sunlight moved slowly from one person to another. A similar state of peacefulness could sometimes be granted when you were homeless: a time in the afternoon when you’d found a comfortable spot, and you’d managed to get warm at last, and there was nothing to do but watch the sunlight’s incremental shift from one paving-stone to the next. Meditation, some might call it. But in the end, he preferred something less passive.

He took up his position at the pulpit, and rested his fingertips on the burnished toffee-coloured surface where he might spread out his notes. The pulpit was slightly too low, as though the Oasans had made it for as tall a creature as they could imagine but, in his absence, had still underestimated his height. Its design was modelled on the spectacular carved pulpits of ancient European cathedrals, where a massive leatherbound Bible might lie on the spread wing-span of an oaken eagle.

As a matter of fact, the Oasans had a photograph of just such a pulpit, given them by Kurtzberg, torn from an old magazine article. They’d shown it to Peter with pride. He’d tried to reassure them that worship was an intimate communication between the individual and God, nothing grandiose about it, and that any props should reflect the local culture of the worshippers, but this was not an easy concept to get across when you had a crowd of foetus-like heads jostling around you, murmuring their admiration for a fragment of a Sunday supplement as though it was a holy relic.

In any event, his pulpit did not much resemble the intricately feathered eagle in the photo. Its streamlined surface, inscribed with randomly chosen letters from the alphabet, might just as easily be an aeroplane’s wings.

‘Iสี iรี่ good?’ A soft voice, which he recognised at once. Jesus Lover Five. He’d left the door of the church open and she’d walked in, dressed in her canary-yellow robe as usual.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘A lovely welcome.’

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

He looked past her small form, through the doorway behind her. Several dozen Oasans were making their way across the scrubland, but they were far away still; Lover Five had hurried ahead. Hurrying was unusual among her people. She appeared none the worse for it.

‘I’m happy to see you,’ said Peter. ‘As soon as I left, I wanted to come back.’

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’ Slung on her shoulder was a net haversack, with a furry, yellow lump stashed in it — the same intense hue as her robe. He thought it might be a shawl, but she pulled it out and held it up for him to examine. It was a pair of boots.

‘For you,’ she said.

Smiling shyly, he plucked them from her gloved hands. Unlike the petite booties he’d been given on his first visit, these looked as though they might actually be his size. He removed his sandals — whose inner soles were misshapen and almost black from constant wear — and slipped the boots onto his feet instead. They fitted perfectly.

He laughed. Bright yellow boots and an Islamic gown that resembled a dress: if he’d had any ambition to be a macho man, this combo would have spelled the end of it. He lifted one foot and then the other, displaying to Lover Five how excellent her handiwork was. Having witnessed the Oasans making clothes on a previous visit, he knew how much labour this project must have cost her — and how much obsessive concentration. Oasans handled sewing-needles with the same care and respect that humans might handle chainsaws or blowtorches. Each stitch was such a ponderous ritual that he couldn’t bear to watch.

‘They’re excellent,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘For you,’ she said again.

They stood together by the open door, watching the rest of the Jesus Lovers make progress towards them.

‘How’s your brother, Jesus Lover Five?’ asked Peter.

‘In the ground.’

‘I mean the other one,’ said Peter. ‘The one who’s causing you sorrow because he doesn’t love Jesus.’

‘In the ground,’ she repeated. Then, helpfully, she added: ‘Alสีo.’

‘He died? In the last week?’

‘The laสีรี่ week,’ she said. ‘Yeสี.’

Peter stared into the shadowed cleft of her hooded head, wishing he could guess what emotion lay behind her impeded speech. His experience so far had made him suspect that Oasans’ emotions were expressed in the rustlings and burbles and squimphs they uttered when not straining to imitate an alien language.

‘What did he die of? What happened?’

Lover Five stroked herself perfunctorily over her arms, chest and midriff, to indicate the entire body. ‘Inสีide him, many thingสี gone the wrong way. Clean thingสี became foul. สีรี่rong thingสี became weak. Full thingสี became empรี่y. Cloสีed thingสี became open. Open thingสี became cloสีed. Dry thingสีbecame filled with wa รี่er. Many other thingสี alสีo. I have no wordสี for all the thingสี.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear this.’

She bowed her head, a gesture of shared regret perhaps. ‘For a long รี่ime already, my brother waสี สีick. Life remained in him, but with a plan รี่o leave. I go every day รี่o my brother, and hiสี life สีpoke รี่o me when he fall aสีleep, สีaying, I am here another day, but I will noรี่ remain here another day more, I am noรี่ welcome in thiสี body. While life remained in my brother, grief remained in me. Now he iสี in the ground, my grief iสี in the ground. God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er. รี่oday will be สีunday.’

Peter nodded, although in truth he didn’t know if it was a Sunday. He’d lost track of his accustomed measures of time. But it didn’t matter. He and the Oasans were about to worship. That was no doubt what Lover Five meant by ‘Sunday’. And she was right.

‘I have something for you, too,’ said Peter, striding over to where he’d left his rucksack. Her head moved down and up, following the motion of his hands as he fetched out the booklets he’d prepared.

‘Bibles,’ he said. ‘Or the beginnings of Bibles, anyway. For you to keep.’ He’d managed to produce twenty pages of Scripture rendered in an English that the Oasans could speak with a minimum of trouble, printed in King James-style columns on ten sheets of paper folded double and stapled in the middle. Not the handsomest display of bookbinding since Gutenberg, but the best he could come up with the tools available at the USIC base. On the front cover of each booklet, he’d hand-drawn a cross, and coloured it gold with a highlight marker.

‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Five, as her fellow converts began to file into the church. Treading slowly in their padded boots, they made almost no sound on the soft earth, but Lover Five heard them come in, and turned to greet them. ‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี,’ she repeated, pointing at the booklets that Peter was piling up on his pulpit. ‘For uสี to keep.’

There was a murmuring and sighing among the new arrivals. To his shame, Peter recognised individuals only by the colour of their robes. He hoped their colour-coding hadn’t changed since last week. He’d trained himself to tell the difference between brown, bronze, auburn and copper, crimson, burgundy and coral, at least in his mind. Each shade reconnected him with conversations — however brief and stumbling — he had had with that person.

‘Friends,’ he announced, when everyone was in. ‘I’m very happy to see you. I have brought you these gifts. Small gifts from me, containing much bigger gifts from our Saviour.’

There were, he estimated, about ninety souls gathered within the four walls, a dazzling flock of different hues. As a minister, he was well-practised in casting a quick eye over a congregation to do an approximate head count. If his estimate was correct, it suggested the number of Christians had swollen by ten or twenty during his time away.

‘As I explained to some of you before,’ he said, ‘the Bible that you’ve seen me carry — and Kurtzberg carry — is a very thick book. Too thick for most people to read. But it was never meant to be read all at once. The Bible is a storehouse of messages, which grew for hundreds of years, as our Lord shared more and more of his thoughts and intentions with whoever was ready to listen.’ As he spoke, he handed booklets to Lover Five, and she distributed them to her fellow worshippers. Each recipient took the computer-printed pamphlet into his or her gloved hands as though it were a fragile egg.

‘When Jesus walked the earth,’ Peter continued, ‘people wrote down what He said and did, and after that, they wrote down the things that happened to His followers. But the Bible was begun in the time before Jesus came, the more ancient time when God seemed much further away and more mysterious, and it was harder to know for sure what He wanted. In those days, people told stories about God, and those stories are in the Bible too. Some of these stories require a lot of knowledge of the customs and places that existed before Jesus. Even among my own people, many don’t have that knowledge.’

He noticed, as he spoke, that every tenth person, rather than taking a booklet from Lover Five, elected to share one with his neighbour. Peter had brought eighty booklets, having judged his congregation to be slightly under that number, not expecting it to grow in his absence. Evidently, the Oasans had counted, at a glance, the number of booklets and — without any consultation or awkwardness — adjusted the logistics of distribution to ensure that the last few people in line weren’t left with nothing.

‘You have told me,’ he said, and gestured towards a robe of saffron and a robe of pale lavender, ‘— you, Jesus Lover Twelve and Jesus Lover Eighteen — that Kurtzberg once told you the story of Nebuchadnezzar, and the story of Balaam and the angel, and of the destruction of Jerusalem, and other stories that you struggled hard to understand and could not understand. Please take heart, my friends. There will be time to understand those stories later, when you have grown in Christ. But for now, Nebuchadnezzar can wait. When God decided to become Jesus, He did it because He wanted to spread His word among strangers, among those who’d never heard of Him, among those who didn’t care for religion or understand it. The stories He told were simple. I’ve tried to put some of the best, most useful ones in your Bibles.’ He picked up one of the booklets and opened it. ‘Your books are small and thin, not because I doubt your hunger for Scripture, nor your power to think, but because I’ve tried to use only words that you and I can speak together in this church, and that you can speak amongst yourselves, with ease. I’ve worked as fast as I can, yet, as you can see from the smallness of the books, I’ve been slow. I promise that in future, I’ll be faster. As you grow in Christ, your Bibles will grow. But we must begin somewhere. And on this wonderful Sunday, as I stand here filled with happiness to see you all here with me, we will begin with… this.’

And, from the first page, he read Psalm 23. ‘The Lord be He who care for me. I will need no more… ’ and so on, until he reached ‘I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’

Then he read it again.

And again.

Each time he read it, more of the Oasans read it aloud with him. Were they reading or reciting? It didn’t matter. Their communal voice was swelling, and it sounded melodious and clear, almost entirely free of vocal impairments. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my สีoul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all thiสี, for He be God.’

By the fifth repetition, his own voice was lost in the mighty unison.

15. Hero of the moment, king of the day

A wise man once asked Peter: ‘Do you know what you are?’

‘What I am?’

‘Yes.’

It was a question that could mean so many things, depending on who was posing it. It had, for example, been uttered to him on several occasions by angry thugs who’d supplied the answer themselves — ‘A stupid cunt’, or some similar insult — and then beat him up. It had been asked of him by officials and bureaucrats who regarded him, for one reason or other, as a thorn in their side. It had been said affectionately and admiringly too, by people who went on to tell him he was ‘a total sweetie’, ‘a treasure’, or even ‘my rock’. Big things to live up to.

‘I try not to think about myself too much. I hope I’m just a man who loves God.’

‘You’re a people person,’ the wise man said, nodding decisively. ‘That will take you a very long way.’ The wise man was the pastor of a church that Peter would soon inherit. He was an elderly soul, and had that special mixture of benign tolerance and stoic disappointment typical of a minister who’d been in the job too long. He was intricately familiar with all the ways his parishioners were resistant to change, all the ways they could be a pain in the arse — though he would never use such language, of course.

‘You like people. That’s actually quite rare,’ the old pastor went on.

‘Isn’t it basic human nature to be sociable?’

‘I’m not talking about that,’ said the old man. ‘I don’t think you’re necessarily that sociable. A bit of a loner, even. What I mean is, you’re not disgusted or irritated by the human animal. You just take them as they come. Some people never get fed up with dogs; they’re dog people. Doesn’t matter what sort of dog it is, big or small, placid or yappy, well-behaved or naughty — they’re all lovable in their own way, because they’re dogs and dogs are a good thing. A pastor should feel that way about human beings. But you know what? — not many do. Not many at all. You’ll go far, Peter.’

It had felt odd to be told this, with such certitude, by a sage old-timer who wasn’t easily fooled. Peter’s co-existence with his fellow humans had not always been a happy one, after all. Could someone who’d behaved as badly as he did when he was in his teens and twenties — lying and breaking promises and stealing from any altruistic fool who gave him the benefit of the doubt — truly be said to love people? And yet the old pastor was well aware of his history. There were no secrets between shepherds.

Now, Peter was sitting cross-legged, dazzled by the light, half-delirious. Right in front of him, also cross-legged, sat a small boy — himself when eight or nine years old. He was a Cub Scout. He was proud and happy to be a Cub Scout, possessor of a green shirt and sewn-on badges and arcane knowledge about knots and tent pitching and the proper way to light a fire. He was looking forward to becoming a fully-fledged Scout soon, not just a Cub, so that he could learn archery and go hiking in the mountains and save the lives of strangers who had been buried under avalanches or bitten by snakes. As it turned out, he would never get to be a Scout — his family circumstances would soon become too awkward, and the Cubs membership would be cancelled and his uniform would sit neatly folded in the cupboard until finally the silverfish ruined it — but at eight he didn’t know that yet, and he was sitting cross-legged in his shorts and neckerchief, almost levitating with pleasure to be here amongst his wolf pack.

Sweat trickled from his brow into his eyes. He blinked and the blurry world sharpened into view. The child sitting before him was not himself at the age of eight. It was not even a child. It was Jesus Lover Seventeen, a creature unlike him in almost every imaginable way, except that she, or he, or it could sit cross-legged and clasp hands in prayer. Her robe was spinach-green, and so were her soft boots, albeit speckled with brown dirt. The sun, almost directly overhead, cast a shadow under her hood, swallowing her face in blackness.

‘What are you thinking, Jesus Lover Seventeen?’ he asked.

There was, as always, a pause. The Oasans were unaccustomed to thinking about thinking, or maybe they just found it difficult to translate their thoughts into English.

‘Before you came,’ said Jesus Lover Seventeen, ‘we were all alone and weak. Now, รี่ogether, we are สีรี่rong.’

There was something poignant about the fact that her tongue, or vocal cords, or whatever it was she spoke with, could manage the words ‘alone’ and ‘weak’ without much trouble, but that the words ‘together’ and ‘strong’ were almost impossible for her to utter. Her petite form made her look all the more vulnerable, but then everyone sitting round about her was petite and vulnerable-looking, too, with their thin arms and narrow shoulders and grubby mittens and booties. He might be ministering to a tribe of children and shrunken old people, a tribe that had lost all its full-sized men and women.

That wasn’t a fair view of them, of course; it was a failure to perceive their bodies as the norm, and his own as the aberration. He tried as hard as he could to adjust his vision, until the hundred-odd beings squatting before him grew to a mature scale, and he became a hulking monster.

‘The Book,’ suggested Jesus Lover One, from his preferred spot near the middle of the congregation. ‘Give word from the Book.’

‘The Book,’ several other voices agreed, relieved, perhaps, to be voicing two words that did not humiliate them.

Peter nodded, to signal he would comply. His Bible was always close to hand, shrouded in plastic wrapping inside his rucksack to keep the moisture out, and the Oasans would make noises of appreciation whenever he brought it to light. But oftentimes he didn’t even need to fetch it, because he had such an exceptional memory for Scripture. He looked inside his head now, and almost instantly found something appropriate, from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. His brain was a weird organ, that’s for sure; sometimes he visualised it as a grubby cauliflower covered with scars and scorch-marks from the life he’d led, but at other times it seemed more like a spacious storehouse in which whatever verses he needed at any given moment were on display, already underlined.

‘Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners,’ he quoted, ‘but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God.’

A murmur of approval — satisfaction, even — emanated from the brightly dressed creatures sitting before him. The Bible verses were like a particularly mellow alcoholic drink that had been passed around. This was King James liquor — the real stuff. Oh, sure, the Oasans were grateful for the paraphrased booklets Peter had prepared for them. The pages were already much-thumbed, rippled with damp, and the words had been sung and recited often in these long, balmy days that he and his flock had spent together. And yet, Peter could tell that the booklets were not quite the solution he’d hoped they would be. They were referred to as ‘our Word-in-Hand’, a phrase which delighted him at first, until he realised that it served to differentiate the booklets from the genuine Book of Strange New Things. The hand-made pamphlets were seen as a local home-brew, a moonshine compromise, whereas the big King James, with its machine-tooled faux-leather cover and gold-embossed spine, was considered pure and definitive — the True Source.

Now, drinking in the verses from Ephesians, the Oasans were truly contented. Their hooded heads hung lower, casting all their faces into even deeper shadow. Their clasped hands moved gently in their laps, as though re-tracing, re-savouring, the rhythm of the rhetoric. Such subtle movements were their equivalent of a Southern Baptist congregation hollering ‘Hallelujah!’

Fond as he was of the King James, Peter was uneasy about the awe it inspired among his flock. It was just a translation, after all, with no greater claim to authenticity than many other translations. Jesus hadn’t expressed himself in Jacobean English, nor had Paul or the Old Testament prophets. Did the Oasans understand that? He doubted it. Which was a shame, because once it dawned on you that everyone who wasn’t a native speaker of Canaanite Hebrew, Koine Greek or Galilean Aramaic was at an equal disadvantage, you could relax and feel that Scripture in your own tongue was as good as Scripture in anyone else’s. Yet he thought he detected, in the Oasans, a sense of inferiority, which troubled him. He didn’t want to be like some old-fashioned imperialist missionary, poncing about like Moses in a safari suit, capitalising on a misconception that he was from the same tribe as Jesus and that God was an Englishman.

He’d considered gently disabusing the Oasans of their veneration of ‘the Book’, with an informative talk on the various languages that lay behind the seventeenth-century text, but decided that such a lecture would only make things more complicated, especially since the Oasans were very attached to key scriptures they’d learned in Kurtzberg’s time, and Kurtzberg had evidently been a King James fan. And no wonder. Any Christian preacher who loved language was bound to love the King James: you just couldn’t beat those cadences. So maybe, when dealing with these people, 100 %-proof Jacobean followed by a chaser in plain English was the way to go.

‘What Saint Paul is saying to his new friends,’ Peter explained, ‘is that once you’ve heard the word of God, it doesn’t matter how foreign you are, how far away you live. You become part of the community of Christians, all the Christians who’ve ever existed, including the ones who were alive when Jesus walked the earth. Then Paul goes on to compare us to a house. A house is built from many bricks or stones fitted together to make a big structure, and all of us are stones in the house that God is building.’

Dozens of hooded heads nodded. ‘All are สีรี่oneสี.’

‘We built our church together,’ said Peter, ‘and it’s a beautiful thing.’ Almost in choreographed formation, the Oasans turned their heads to look at the church, a building they considered so sacred that they set foot in it only for formal services, despite Peter’s urging that they should treat it as their home. ‘But you — all of you, gathered together here today, just sitting in the sun — are the real Church that God has built.’

Jesus Lover Five, in the front row as always, swayed to and fro in disagreement.

‘ฐurฐ iสี ฐurฐ,’ she stated. ‘We are we. God iสี God.’

‘When we are filled with the Holy Spirit,’ said Peter, ‘we can be more than ourselves: we can be God in action.’

Jesus Lover Five was unconvinced. ‘God never die,’ she said. ‘We die.’

‘Our bodies die,’ said Peter. ‘Our souls live for ever.’

Jesus Lover Five pointed a gloved finger straight at Peter’s torso. ‘Your body noรี่ die,’ she said.

‘Of course it will die,’ said Peter. ‘I’m just flesh and blood like anyone else.’ He certainly felt his flesh-and-bloodness now. The sun was giving him a headache, his buttocks were going numb and he needed to pee. After a some hesitation, he relaxed his bladder and allowed the urine to flow out onto the soil. That was the way it was done here; no point being precious about it.

Jesus Lover Five had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg one of those Lutheran-flavoured fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies — magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure — and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was death, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.

‘Tell me,’ he said to those assembled. ‘What have you heard about life after death?’

Jesus Lover One, in his self-appointed role as custodian of the Oasans’ history in the faith, spoke up.

‘Corinthian.’

It took Peter a while to recognise the word — intimately familiar to him, and yet so unexpected here and now. ‘Corinthians, yes,’ he said.

There was a pause.

‘Corinthian,’ Jesus Lover One said again. ‘Give word from the Book.’

Peter consulted the Bible in his head, located Corinthians 15:54, but it wasn’t a passage he’d ever felt moved to quote in his sermons, so the exact wording was indistinct — something corruptible something-something incorruption… The next verse was memorable enough, one of those Bible nuggets that everybody knew even if they ascribed it to Shakespeare, but he figured Jesus Lover One wanted more than a one-liner.

With a grunt of effort, he got to his feet. A hum of anticipation went through the crowd as he walked to his rucksack and extracted the Book from its plastic sheath. The gold-embossed lettering flashed in the sun. He remained standing, to give his muscles a change of tension, as he flicked the pages.

‘So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,’ he recited, ‘and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’

Reading the words aloud, Peter reconnected with why he hadn’t ever used them in his sermons. The sentiments were sound enough but the rhetoric was a bit more bombastic than he felt comfortable with. To do those words justice, you’d need a highly dramatic delivery, a touch of thespian pomp, and he just wasn’t that kind of orator. Low-key sincerity was more his style.

‘What Paul is saying here,’ he explained, ‘is that when we give our souls to Christ, the part of us that dies and decays — the body — is clothed with something that cannot die or decay — the eternal spirit. So we have nothing to fear from death.’

‘Nothing,’ echoed several of the Oasans. ‘Fear.’

Peter’s second sojourn in the place USIC called Freaktown was as bewildering and exciting as the first. He got to know the Oasans better — that was to be expected — but he also saw changes in himself, changes he couldn’t articulate but which felt profound and important. Just as the atmosphere penetrated his clothes and seemed to pass through his skin, something unfamiliar was permeating his head, soaking into his mind. It wasn’t in the least sinister. It was as benign as benign could be.

Not all of it was enjoyable, though. Halfway into his stay, Peter went through a strange phase which, looking back on it afterwards, he could only call the Crying Jag. It happened during one of the long, long nights and he woke up somewhere in the middle of it with tears in his eyes, not knowing what he had dreamt to make him weep. Then, for hours and hours, he continued to cry. Upsurges of sorrow just kept pumping through his bloodstream, as if administered at medically supervised intervals by a gadget inside his body. He cried about the weirdest things, things he had long forgotten, things he would not have imagined could rank very high in his roll-call of griefs.

He cried for the tadpoles he’d kept in a jar when he was a kid, the ones that might have grown into frogs if he’d left them safe in their pond instead of watching them turn to grey sludge. He cried for Cleo the cat, stiff on the kitchen floor, her matted chin stuck to dried gravy on the rim of her plate. He cried for lunch money he’d lost on the way to school; he cried for a stolen bicycle, recalling the exact feel of its rubbery handles in his palms. He cried for the bullied classmate who killed herself after her tormenters squirted ketchup in her hair; he cried for the swallow that flew against his bedroom window and fell lifeless to the concrete far below; he cried for the magazines that kept arriving for his father each month, shrinkwrapped, long after his father had left home; he cried for Mr Ali’s corner newsagency and off-licence that went out of business; he cried for the hapless anti-war marchers pushing on through the bucketing rain, their placards drooping, their children sullen.

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 สีong,’ 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 สีaid รี่o Iสีrael, 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.

He still had no clear idea of the size of the settlement’s population, but was inclined to think that it might be a few thousand, and that the Jesus Lovers represented only a tiny minority of the souls living in this great hive of dwellings. Birth and death must surely be going on as normal inside those amber walls, the same as in any other big town, but he had no access to it — until, one day, Jesus Lover One came and told him that his mother had died.

‘My mother,’ he announced. ‘Dead.’

‘Oh! I’m so sorry!’ said Peter, instinctively putting his arms around Lover One. He could tell at once that it was the wrong thing to do, like embracing a woman who absolutely doesn’t want to be touched by anyone other than her husband. Lover One’s shoulders cringed, his body stiffened, his arms trembled, his face turned away lest it brush against Peter’s chest. Peter released him and stepped back in embarrassment.

‘Your mother,’ he blurted. ‘What an awful loss.’

Lover One gave this notion some deliberation before responding.

‘Mother made me,’ he said at last. ‘If mother never be, I never be alสีo. Mother therefore very imporรี่anรี่ man.’

‘Woman.’

‘Woman, yeสี.’

A few more seconds passed. ‘When did she die?’ asked Peter.

Again there was a pause. Oasans had difficulty choosing the linguistic boxes into which they felt obliged, by others, to put their conceptions of time. ‘Before you came.’

‘Before I came to… Oasis?’

‘Before you came with Word-in-Hand.’

Last few days, then. Maybe even yesterday. ‘Is she… Has there been a funeral?’

‘Few…?’

‘Have you put her in the ground?’

‘สีoon,’ said Jesus Lover One, with a pacifying motion of the glove, as if giving his solemn promise that the procedure would be attended to as soon as it was feasible. ‘Afรี่er the harveสีรี่.’

‘After the…?’

Lover One searched his vocabulary for a pronounceable alternative. ‘The reaping.’

Peter nodded, although he didn’t really understand. He guessed that this reaping must be the harvest of one of the Oasans’ food crops, a job so time-sensitive and labour-intensive that the community simply couldn’t fit a funeral into their schedule. The old lady would have to wait. He imagined a wizened, slightly smaller version of Lover One nestled motionless in her bed, one of those cots that already so closely resembled a coffin. He imagined the fluffy wisps of bedding being wrapped around her like a cocoon, in preparation for her burial.

As it turned out, there was no need to guess or imagine. Lover One, speaking in the same tone he might have used to invite a guest to see a notable monument or tree (if this place had had such things as monuments and trees), invited him to come and see the body of his mother.

Peter tried and failed to think of a suitable reply. ‘Good idea’, ‘Thank you’, and ‘I’d like that’ all felt wrong somehow. Instead, in silence, he put on his yellow boots. It was a brilliant morning, and the shade inside his church ill-prepared him for the dazzling sunshine.

He accompanied Jesus Lover One across the scrubland to the compound, taking two steps for every three or four of the Oasan’s. He was learning many things on this visit, and how to amble was one of them. There was an art to walking slower than your instinct told you to, keeping pace with a much smaller person, yet not appearing exasperated or clumsy. The trick was to pretend you were wading through waist-deep water, watched by a judge who would award you points for poise.

Side by side, they reached Jesus Lover One’s house. It looked identical to all the others, and had not been adorned with any flags, accoutrements or painted messages proclaiming an inhabitant’s death. A few people were walking around nearby, no more than normal, and they were getting on with business as usual, as far as Peter could tell. Lover One led him around the back of the building, to the patch of ground where clothing was washed and hung, and where children often played with คฐฉ้ฐ, the Oasan equivalent of boules, soft dark balls made of compacted moss.

Today, there were no children or คฐฉ้ฐ, and the washing line strung between two houses was bare. The yard was given over to Jesus Lover One’s mother.

Peter gazed at the small body lying uncushioned and uncovered on the ground. It had been stripped of its robe. This alone would have made Peter unable to tell whether he’d known this person or not, as he was still dependent, to a shameful degree, on fabric colour. But even if he’d managed to remember some distinctive aspect of this creature’s physiognomy — some variation in skin texture or the shape of facial bulges — it wouldn’t have helped now, as the body was obscured under a shimmering, shivering layer of insects.

He looked aside at Jesus Lover One, to gauge how alarmed he should be at this nightmarish spectacle. Maybe when Lover One had set off earlier this morning, the corpse had been free of parasites and they’d all seized their opportunity in his absence. If so, Lover One didn’t seem perturbed by the swarm. He contemplated the insects as calmly as if they were flowers on a shrub. Admittedly, these bugs were every bit as beautiful as flowers: they had iridescent wings, glossy carapaces of lavender and yellow. Their buzz was musical. They covered almost every inch of flesh, giving the corpse the appearance of a twitching, breathing effigy.

‘Your mother… ’ Peter began, lost for further words.

‘My mother gone,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Only her body remain.’

Peter nodded, striving to hide the queasy fascination provoked in him by the insect horde. Lover One’s philosophical attitude to the situation was perfectly sound — it was what Peter himself would have tried to persuade him to feel, had Lover One been terribly distraught. But the fact that Lover One wasn’t terribly distraught, or didn’t appear to be, confused Peter. It was one thing to deliver a funeral address to a bunch of unbelieving USIC workers, urging them to regard the body merely as a vehicle for the immortal soul; it was quite another thing to be standing next to someone who’d taken that principle so deeply to heart that they could watch their own mother’s body being overrun with insects. Peter’s eyes were drawn to one of the woman’s feet: the bugs, in their restless fidgeting, had exposed the toes. There were eight of them, very small and narrow. He’s assumed, because the Oasans were five-fingered, that they’d be five-toed, too. The mistakenness of that assumption made him realise how far he had to go before he truly understood these people.

‘Forgive me for not remembering, Lover One,’ said Peter, ‘but did I ever meet your mother? Before today?’

‘Never,’ Lover One replied. ‘Walk from here รี่o our ฐurฐ… รี่oo far.’

Peter wondered whether this was an ironic comment, implying that she’d never summoned up sufficient motivation to visit, or whether it literally meant she’d been too weak or ill to walk the distance. Most likely it was literal.

‘My mother begin — only begin — รี่o know Jeสีuสี,’ Lover One explained. He made a gesture in the air, gently rotating his hand to indicate slow, stumbling progress. ‘Every day, we carry your wordสี away from ฐurฐ in our handสี, and we bring them รี่o her. Every day, wordสี go in her like food. Every day, สีhe come more near รี่o the Lord.’ And he turned his face in the direction of Peter’s church, as if watching his mother walk there after all.

In the days that followed, Peter learned what was really meant by ‘the harvest’. He realised that Jesus Lover One’s reason for fetching him to see the corpse had nothing to do with emotions. It was educative.

The alighting of the bugs on the flesh was just the first step in an industrious husbandry managed by the Oasans in every detail. The body, Peter learned, had been painted with a poison which intoxicated the bugs so that when they’d finished laying eggs, they were semi-conscious, unable to fly. The Oasans then collected them and, with great care, pulled them to bits. The legs and wings, when ground up and dried, made a fearsomely potent seasoning: one pinch could flavour a vat of food. The bodies yielded a rich nectar which was mixed with water and whiteflower to make honey, or processed into a vivid yellow dye. And, while various members of the Oasan community were busy transforming the insects’ remains into useful materials, the insects’ eggs were busy hatching. Peter was fetched at regular intervals to witness how things were getting on.

Like most people he’d ever known, except for one frankly barmy biology teacher at school, Peter was not very keen on maggots. Wise and practical though it might be to accept the naturalness of death and decay, the sight of those opportunistic little larvae always disgusted him. But the maggots on the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother were like nothing he’d ever seen before. They were calm and fat, rice-white, each the size of a large fruit-pip. There were many thousands of them, densely packed and pearlescent, and if you stared at them long enough they didn’t look like maggots at all, but like a cornucopia of albino raspberries.

These, too, the Oasans harvested.

When, at last, the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother had yielded all the bounty it was going to yield, she lay exhausted on the ground, in the shade of a couple of gently swaying garments that hung on the washing line nearby. Since she was the only Oasan Peter had seen completely naked, he had no way of telling how much of the grotesquery he saw before him was due to decay and how much of it was what he would have found under the clothing of any healthy, living Oasan. Her flesh, which smelled fermented but not foul, had turned grey as clay, and was pitted with pocks and cavities. She had no breasts or anything else suggesting human femaleness — or maleness. The paradigm he had in his head, based on photographs of human corpses in famines and concentration camps, was of flesh shrunk down to a thin parchment of skin to hold the bones together. That wasn’t what confronted him here. Lover One’s mother apparently had no ribs, no skeleton, just solid flesh that was liquefying. The holes eaten into her arms and legs exposed a ribbed black substance like liquorice.

Monster, was the word that came to his mind as he suppressed a shudder. But then Creatura: created thing, he reminded himself.

‘Now we puรี่ her in the ground,’ said Lover One on the third day. There was no urgency or ceremonial portent in his voice, nor was it clear what he meant by ‘now’. As far as Peter was aware, no grave had been dug and there was no evidence of the community preparing for a solemn ritual.

‘Would you like me to… say something?’ suggested Peter. ‘At the funeral?’

‘Funeral?’

‘It’s the custom of our… ’ he began. Then, ‘When Christians… ’ he began again. Then, ‘Where I come from, when a person dies and is being buried, someone usually makes a speech before the body is put into the ground. They talk about the person who’s died, and they try to remind his friends and family about what made that person special.’

Lover One bowed his head in courtesy. ‘You never know my mother,’ he pointed out, with stonkingly obvious good sense.

‘That’s true,’ Peter conceded. ‘But you could tell me some things about her, and I could turn those things into a… speech.’ Even as he made the offer, it seemed absurd.

‘Word can make no ฐange in my mother now,’ said Lover One.

‘Words can comfort the friends and family left behind,’ said Peter. ‘Would you like me to read from the Book?’

Jesus Lover One smoothed his hands over an invisible molehill in the air, signalling that this would not be necessary. ‘Kurรี่สีberg give uสี word from the Book, long before.’ And he recited them for Peter’s approval.

A trickle of lisping nonsense entered Peter’s ears. It took him a few seconds to re-play the meaningless syllables and translate them into a Bible verse, a verse which in fact was not from the Bible but from the Book of Common Prayer:

‘Aสีheสี รี่o aสีheสี, duสีรี่ รี่o duสีรี่.’

For several dozen hours after this incident, Peter lived in fear that some generous soul would bring him, as a special treat, a dish made from maggots. The Oasans were always bringing him snacks and — who knows? — they might think he was getting fed up with whiteflower. Surprise dessert for Father Peter!

He knew his revulsion was irrational, as the food would no doubt be delicious and probably very good for him too. Moreover he was aware that every country had its culinary challenges which provoked disgust in squeamish foreigners — the Japanese with their giant fish eyeballs and cod semen and still-squirming octopus, the Africans with their goat heads, the Chinese with their bird’s nest soup that was really saliva, and so on. If he’d been ministering in any of these places, chances were he’d be honoured with one of these specialties. Wasn’t there even an Italian cheese that was rotten and maggot-infested? Casu marzu, it was called. (Amazing how he could retrieve that term, which he probably read just once in a magazine years ago, when only yesterday he’d blanked on the name of the street where he lived.)

Of course, he’d never had to eat any of these outlandish substances. All of his ministries, until now, had been in England. The most exotic thing he’d ever been served, at an outreach convention in Bradford, had been caviar, and his problem hadn’t been the fish eggs themselves, but the money that the organisers had channelled into the catering when they were supposed to be raising funds for the city’s homeless.

Anyway: this wasn’t about maggots per se. It was about the vivid memory of Jesus Lover One’s mother, and the unerasable, emotionally charged connection between her and the maggots that had fed on her. His mind boggled at how her own son could bear to eat a foodstuff that had been produced in this way.

To this question, as with so many others, God organised a very specific and enlightening answer. Jesus Lover One showed up at the church one evening, carrying a hamper of food. Wordlessly he unpacked it in front of Peter as they sat down together on the bed behind the pulpit. The food smelled wholesome and was still warm. It was whiteflower soup in its mushroom guise, and several hunks of whiteflower bread with brown crusts and pale insides, fresh from the oven.

‘I’m glad it’s whiteflower,’ Peter said, deciding to be totally frank. ‘I was worried you would bring me something made from… the creatures you harvested from your mother’s body. I don’t think I could eat that.’

Lover One nodded. ‘I alสีo. Other can. Noรี่ I.’

Peter absorbed the words, but couldn’t interpret their meaning. Maybe Lover One was informing him of the etiquette governing this particular ritual. Or was it an openhearted disclosure? Tell me more, he thought, but he knew from experience that keeping silent in the hope that an Oasan would fill the silence didn’t work.

‘It’s a very good and… admirable idea,’ he said, ‘to… do what you people do. With someone who’s just died.’ He wasn’t sure how to go on. The bottom line was that no amount of admiration could prevent him being disgusted. If he put that into words, he’d be lecturing Lover One on the irreconcilable differences between their species.

Again Lover One nodded. ‘We do all thing รี่o make food. Make food for many.’ A bowl of soup sat balanced in the lap of his tunic. He had eaten none of it yet.

‘I’ve been dreaming of your mother,’ Peter confessed. ‘I didn’t know her as a person, I’m not saying… ’ He took a deep breath. ‘The sight of her covered in insects, and then in maggots, and everyone just… ’ He looked down at Lover One’s boots, even though there was no possibility of eye-to-eye confrontation anyway. ‘I’m not used to it. It upset me.’

Lover One sat unmoving. One gloved hand rested on his abdomen, the other held a piece of bread. ‘I alสีo,’ he said.

‘I thought… I got the impression you… all of you… were afraid of death,’ continued Peter. ‘And yet… ’

‘We fear death,’ Lover One affirmed. ‘However. Fear cannoรี่ hold life in a body when life iสี over. Nothing can hold life in a body. Only the Lord God.’

Peter stared straight into the unreadable face of his friend. ‘There can be moments in a person’s life,’ he suggested, ‘when grief over the loss of a loved one is stronger than faith.’

Lover One waited a long time before responding. He ate a few spoonfuls of the soup, which was now cold, thick and congealed. He ate some bread, tearing off small pieces and inserting them gently into the lipless, toothless hole in his head.

‘My mother very imporรี่anรี่ woman,’ he said at last. ‘For me.’

In this second sojourn among the Oasans, God took care to keep Peter’s experiences in balance. His first death was followed, not too long afterwards, by his first birth. A woman called ฐสีคน — not a Jesus Lover, evidently — was having a baby and Peter was invited to the delivery. Jesus Lover One, his escort, implied that this was a great honour; it was certainly a surprise, because he’d never been formally acknowledged by the settlement’s unbelievers. But this was an event so joyous that the usual reticence was put aside and the entire Oasan community was united in hospitality.

The contrast between the death and the birth was striking. Whereas the body of Lover One’s mother had lain unattended in a back yard, mourned by no one except her son, left in solitude to attract insects, then treated as if it was nothing more than a vegetable patch, the woman who was about to give birth was the focus of an enormous amount of fuss. The streets leading to the house were remarkably busy, and everyone seemed to be heading for the same place. When Peter first saw the house, he thought it had caught fire, but the vapour wafting out of the windows was incense.

Inside, the expectant mother was not lying in a bed surrounded by medical equipment, or suffering the trials of labour under the supervision of a midwife, but walking around freely, socialising. Dressed in a snow-white variant of the Oasans’ usual attire — looser, thinner, more like a nightgown — she held court, accepting visitors’ congratulations one by one. Peter couldn’t tell if she was happy or anxious, but she was obviously not in pain, nor could he detect any swelling in her trim little body. Her gestures were elegant and formalised, like a medieval dance, with a whole host of partners. This was ฐสีคน’s Big Day.

Peter knew that the Oasans didn’t celebrate marriages. Their sexual pairings were private arrangements, so discreet as to be seldom alluded to. But the day of childbirth was a flagrantly public highlight in a woman’s life, a ritual exhibition every bit as extravagant as a wedding party. ฐสีคน’s house was heaving with well-wishers, dozens of bustling bodies dressed in bright colours. All the pencils in the Aquarelle set, thought Peter, as he strove to discern the difference between one robe and another. Vermillion, coral, apricot, copper, cerise, salmon — those were just some of the pinks he could put a name to; others were beyond his vocabulary. Across the room, weaving through the crowd, a person clad in pale violet was reunited with an old acquaintance clad in unripe plum, and only when they touched each other, glove to arm, did Peter see that two robes which he would otherwise have perceived as identical in colour were, in fact, unique. And so it went on, all over the house — people greeting each other, waving at each other, needing no more than a glance to know and be known. In the midst of this easily intimate hubbub, Peter appreciated he would need to develop a whole new relationship with colour if he was ever to recognise more than a couple of dozen individuals among this city’s multitudes.

It was a lovely party, Peter might have said, if he’d been asked to describe it for someone who wasn’t there. The only problem was, he felt surplus to requirements. Jesus Lover One had ushered him in, but kept meeting up with friends who drew him into conversations which, to Peter’s ears, were just gargles and wheezes. Asking for translations seemed rude and, in any case, there was no reason to suppose that a stranger would understand much of what was being discussed.

For a while he felt oafishly out of place, towering over everyone here, literally casting a shadow over them, and yet… irrelevant. But then he relaxed and began to enjoy himself. This gathering wasn’t about him: that was actually the beauty of it. He was privileged to observe, but he wasn’t on duty, nothing was expected of him; he was, for the first time since coming to Oasis, a tourist. So, he sat on his haunches in a corner of the room, allowed the blueish fog of incense to go to his head, and watched the expectant mother being garlanded with affection.

After what felt like hours of meeting and greeting, ฐสีคน abruptly signalled that she’d had enough. Exhaustion had apparently overcome her, and she sat on the floor, surrounded by a puddle of her gown’s white cloth. Her friends backed away as she pulled the hood off her head, revealing livid flesh sheened with sweat. She bent her head between her knees, as though she was about to faint or vomit.

Then the fontanelle in her head yawned open, and a large pink mass bulged out, glistening with frothy white lather. Peter jerked back in shock, convinced he was witnessing a violent death. One more convulsion and it was over. The baby was disgorged in a slithery spasm, sliding into the mother’s waiting arms. ฐสีคน raised her head high, her fontanelle puckering shut, the fleshy kernels of her face still livid. The whole room erupted in a whuffle of applause and a mass of voices joined forces to make an eerie cooing sound, as loud as a chord pumped out of a cathedral organ.

The baby was alive and well, already squirming to be released from its mother’s grasp. It had no umbilical cord and looked amazingly unlike a foetus: instead, it was a perfect miniature person, its arms, legs and head all in adult proportion. And, like a newborn horse or calf, it immediately tried to stand on its legs, figuring out the knack of balance even while its feet were still slippery with placental goo. The crowd applauded and cheered some more. ฐสีคน ceremoniously acknowledged the ovation, then set about cleaning the gunge off her child’s flesh with a damp cloth.

‘สคฉ้รี่,’ she announced. Another great cheer went up.

‘What did she say?’ Peter asked Lover One.

‘สคฉ้รี่,’ said Lover One.

‘Is that the baby’s name?’

‘Name, yeสี,’ said Lover One.

‘Does that name have a meaning, or is it just a name?’

‘Name have a meaning,’ Lover One replied. Then, after a few seconds: ‘Hope.’

The child now stood firmly balanced on the floor, its arms stretched out like unfledged wings. ฐสีคน sponged the last of the muck off its skin, whereupon someone emerged from the crowd with an armful of soft offerings. A robe, booties, gloves, all in dusky mauve, all tailored exactly to size. Together, ฐสีคน and the gift-bearer, who might have been a grandmother or aunt, began to dress the infant, who tottered and swayed but did not resist. When the job was done, the child was exquisitely smart and adorable, serenely content to be on display. A male, Peter decided. Unbelievable, the craftsmanship that had gone into those minuscule gloves, each finger snug and velvety! Extraordinary, how the child accepted this second skin!

By this time, Peter was no longer squatting; his legs had begun to ache and he’d stood up to stretch them. The baby, wondrously alert, took the measure of all the creatures in the room, an array of virtual replicas of himself. There was only one creature that didn’t fit the picture, only one creature that made no sense in his freshly configured view of the universe. Head tilting back, the child stood arrested, mesmerised by the alien.

ฐสีคน, noticing her son’s quandary, likewise turned her attention to Peter. ‘ฐสฐรี่ ฉ้สีฉ้ฉ้รี่,’ she called across the room.

‘What did she say?’ Peter asked Lover One.

‘Word,’ said Lover One. ‘Word from you.’

‘You mean… a speech?’

Lover One inclined his head diplomatically. ‘Few word, many word, any word. Any word you can.’

‘But she’s not… she’s not a Jesus Lover, is she?’

‘No,’ conceded Lover One, while ฐสีคน made an urgent gesture to speed up Peter’s compliance. ‘On thiสี day, all word are good.’ And he touched Peter’s elbow, which, by Lover One’s standards, was tantamount to a shove.

So there it was: he was an accessory. A bonus performance to enhance the mother’s Big Day. OK, nothing wrong with that. Christianity was used for such purposes all the time. And who knows? — maybe it wasn’t even his status as a pastor that this woman wanted to exploit, but his status as a visitor. He stepped forward. Phrases and themes tumbled around in his brain, but one thing was clear: he wanted this speech to be for the benefit of Lover One, so dignified in his bereavement, as much as for the mother and child. Often in his past ministries, he’d had a sudden insight into a staunch member of his congregation, a member who was constantly declaring the joy of knowing Christ, the bountiful blessings of faith, but who was — Peter would realise in a flash — achingly, inconsolably sad. Jesus Lover One might well be one of those souls.

‘I’ve been asked to speak,’ he said. ‘To a few of you, what I say will have meaning. To most of you, maybe not. One day, I hope to speak your language. But wait — did you hear it? — I just spoke that wonderful word: hope. The name of a feeling, and also the name of this child who has come to live with us today.’

The baby lifted first one boot, then the other, and toppled backwards. His mother caught him smoothly and eased him to the floor, where he sat in apparent thought.

‘Hope is a fragile thing,’ Peter continued, ‘as fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can’t believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say: See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilisations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible.’

The congregation — if he could be so bold as to call it that — was hushed, as if considering the import of each word, although they must surely be quite lost. He knew he should regard his speech as a kind of music, a brief burst of melody from a foreign guest invited to demonstrate an exotic instrument.

‘The most cherished of hopes, as we all know,’ he said, ‘is a new child. The Bible — the book that some of you love as much as I do — contains many fine stories about the birth of children, including the birth of Jesus, our Lord. But this is not the time and place for me to tell Bible stories. All I will say is that the ancient words of Ecclesiastes have helped me make sense of what I’ve seen in the last few days. Ecclesiastes says: To everything there is a season. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to plant seeds, and a time to reap. An old person — the mother of Jesus Lover One — has died. That was a very sad thing. A new person — สคฉ้รี่ — has been born today. That is a very happy thing. Let us honour the equal importance of each: in celebrating a new life we remember losing those who’ve left us, and then in the midst of sadness our spirits are lifted as we welcome new life. So, to little สคฉ้รี่, most beautiful and precious gift to our community, I say: welcome!’

He hoped he’d invested the last word with sufficient resonance to signal that this was the end of his speech. Evidently he had: the audience emitted a mass murmur, applauded and waved. Even the baby, catching the prevailing mood, extended his tiny gloves. The room, so hushed in the preceding minutes, was once again filled with cooing and conversation; the people who’d briefly been transformed into an audience turned back into a crowd. Peter bowed and retreated to his former spot against the wall.

For one instant, in the midst of the renewed celebrations that followed, his mind was tickled by a thought of his own baby, growing inside the body of his wife far away. But it was just a thought, and not even a properly formed thought — a half-glimpsed reflection of a thought, which couldn’t compete with all the commotion right in front of him: the brightly dressed crowd, the excited gestures, the unearthly cries, the watchful newborn with its spindly limbs, hero of the moment, king of the day.

16. Toppling off an axis, falling through space

On the fifth day, a day of rain and almost unbearable beauty, it slipped Peter’s mind that Grainger was coming for him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come, and it wasn’t that she’d ceased to be real to him. Every now and then, during the three hundred and sixty-odd hours leading up to their scheduled rendezvous, she had been in his thoughts. He wondered, for example, if she would let him help her with her next drug delivery; he recalled the scars on her forearms and speculated about what anguish might have led her younger self to inflict them; and sometimes, at nights before drifting off, he replayed a fleeting vision of her pale, troubled face. However, his life here among the Oasans was very full, and there were so many things he must try to hold in his head. Observe the opportunity, as Ecclesiastes urged him. Be not ignorant of anything great or small.

Oh, he didn’t forget to pray for Charlie Grainger and Coretta, and he thought of Grainger each time he did so. But when he woke up on the morning of the fifth day, the long night was finished, the sun had risen, and the rains were drawing near — and that was that. His appointment with USIC’s moody pharmacist was erased from his brain.

Keeping track of schedules had never been his strong suit anyhow. The longer he spent among the Oasans, the less point he could see in clinging to ways of telling time that were, frankly, irrelevant. A day for him had ceased to feel like twenty-four hours and it certainly didn’t consist of 1,440 minutes. A day was a span of daylight, divided from the next by a spell of darkness. While the sun shone, he would stay awake for twenty, maybe twenty-five hours at a stretch. He didn’t know exactly how long, because his father’s watch had stopped working, ruined by damp. Sad, but there was no point grieving.

Anyway, life wasn’t about measurement, it was about getting the most out of each God-given minute. There was so much to do, so much to digest, so many people to commune with… When darkness fell, Peter would slip into comatose sleep, his consciousness sinking fast and irretrievable like a car dumped in a lake. After an age spent down on the bottom, he would float up into shallower fathoms where he would doze and dream, get up to pee, then doze and dream some more. It was as though he’d discovered the secret of Joshua — Joshua the cat, that is. The secret of snoozing for hours and days on end without boredom, storing up energy for a future occasion.

And then when he’d slept as much as he possibly could, he would lie awake, staring up at the sky, familiarising himself with the eighty-seven stars, giving them each a name: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, Shuah, Sheba and so on. All those genealogies in Genesis and Exodus had come in useful after all. They had begat a new constellation.

Mostly, by the light of slow-burning resin candles, he would sit up in bed, working on his paraphrases of Scripture. The King James Bible spread open on his lap, a notepad cradled on his forearm, a pillow for his head whenever he needed to mull over the alternatives. Unto every province according to the writing thereof, and unto every people after their language — Mordecai’s publishing manifesto, sometime during the Israelites’ Babylonian exile. If the Oasans couldn’t have the Gospel in their own words, they deserved the next-best thing: a version they could speak and sing.

More than once, he’d walked out from his church into the darkness, knelt in the area of scrubland where he buried his faeces, and asked God to tell him honestly if he was falling prey to the sin of Pride. These translations he was spending so much energy on — were they really needed? The Oasans had never asked to be delivered from consonants. They seemed resigned to their humiliation. Kurtzberg had taught them to sing ‘Amazing Grace’, and how sweet the sound had been — yet how excruciating, too. And wasn’t that the point? There was grace in their strenuous approximation. More grace, for sure, than you’d find in some complacent congregation in a British village, singing facile hymns while their minds were half-preoccupied with football or soap operas. The Oasans wanted their Book of Strange New Things; maybe he shouldn’t dilute its strangeness.

He prayed for guidance. God did not caution him. In the stillness of the balmy Oasan night, with the stars shining greenish in the azure heavens, the overwhelming message he felt in the atmosphere around him was: All shall be well. Goodwill and compassion can never be wrong. Continue as you began. Nothing could tarnish the memory of the day when the Oasans sang ‘Amazing Grace’ for him — it was Kurtzberg’s gift to them, which they’d passed on to their next pastor. But he, Peter, would give them different gifts. He would give them Scripture that flowed forth from them as easily as breath itself.

Close to a hundred and twenty Jesus Lovers were in the fold now, and Peter was determined to know them all as individuals, which took a lot more effort than simply keeping a mental record of robe colours and Jesus Lover numbers. He was making headway (so to speak) with telling the difference between the faces. The trick was to quit waiting for the features to resolve themselves into a nose, lips, ears, eyes and so on. That wasn’t going to happen. Instead, you had to decode a face as you’d decode a tree or a rock formation: abstract, unique, but (after you’d lived with it for a while) familiar.

Even so, to recognise was not the same as to know. You could train yourself to identify a certain pattern of bulge and colour, and realise: this is Jesus Lover Thirteen. But who, really, was Jesus Lover Thirteen? Peter had to admit he was finding it difficult to know the Oasans in any deeper sense. He loved them. For the time being, that would have to do.

Sometimes, he wondered if it would have to do for ever. It was hard to remember individuals if they didn’t behave like humans, with their circus displays of ego, their compulsive efforts to brand themselves on your mind. Oasans didn’t work that way. No one engaged in behaviours that screamed Look at me! or Why won’t the world let me be myself? No one, as far as he could tell, was anxiously pondering the question Who am I? They just got on with life. At first, he’d found that impossible to believe, and assumed this equanimity must be a front, and any day now he would discover that the Oasans were as screwed up as anyone else. But no. They were as they appeared to be.

In one way, it was really kind of… restful, to be spared the melodramas that made things so complicated when you dealt with other humans. But it meant that his tried-and-true method of gaining intimacy with new acquaintances was totally useless here. He and Bea had pulled it off so many times, in all the places where they’d ministered, from opulent hotel lobbies to needle exchanges, always the same message to open people up: Don’t worry, I can see that you’re not like everybody else. Don’t worry, I can see that you’re special.

The Oasans didn’t need Peter to tell them who they were. They bore their individuality with modest self-confidence, neither celebrating nor defending the eccentricities and flaws that distinguished them from others of their kind. They were like the most Buddhist-y Buddhists imaginable — which made their hunger for the Christian religion all the more miraculous.

‘You’re aware, aren’t you,’ he’d said to Jesus Lover One a while back, ‘that some of my people believe in different religions from the Christian one?’

‘We have heard,’ Lover One replied.

‘Would you like me to tell you something about those religions?’

It seemed the decent thing to offer. Lover One did the fidgety thing with the sleeves of his robe that he always did when he wanted a conversation to go no further.

‘We will have no other God than God our สีaviour. In Him alone we have hope of Life.’

It was what any Christian pastor might yearn to hear from a new convert, yet hearing it stated so baldly, so calmly, was a bit unsettling. Ministering to the Oasans was a joy, but Peter couldn’t help thinking that it was too easy.

Or was it? Why shouldn’t it be easy? When the window of the soul was clear, not smeared and tarnished with the accumulated muck of deviousness and egomania and self-loathing, there was nothing to stop the light from shining straight in. Yes, maybe that was it. Or maybe the Oasans were just too naïve, too impressionable, and it was his responsibility to give their faith some intellectual rigour. He hadn’t worked it out yet. He was still praying on it.

Then there were the ones who weren’t Jesus Lovers, the ones whose names he couldn’t even pronounce. What was he to do about them? They were no less precious in the eyes of God, and no doubt had needs and sorrows every bit as serious as anyone else’s. He should be reaching out to them, but they ignored him. Not aggressively; they just behaved as if he wasn’t there. No, that wasn’t quite right; they acknowledged his presence as one might respect a fragile obstacle — a plant that mustn’t be stepped on, a chair that mustn’t be knocked over — but they had nothing to say to him. Because, of course, they literally had nothing to say to him, nor he to them.

Determined to do more than just preach to the converted, Peter strove to get to know these strangers, noting the nuances of their gestures, the way they related to each other, the roles they seemed to play in the community. Which, in a community as egalitarian as the Oasans’, was not easy. There were days when he felt that the best he’d ever achieve with them was a sort of animal tolerance: the kind of relationship that an occasional visitor develops with a cat which, after a while, no longer hisses and hides.

Altogether there were about a dozen non-Christians he recognised on sight and whose mannerisms he felt he was getting a grip on. As for the Jesus Lovers, he knew them all. He kept notes on them, indecipherable notes scrawled sometimes in the dark, smudged with sweat and humidity, qualified with question marks in the margins. It didn’t matter. The real, practical knowledge was intuitive, stored in what he liked to think of as the Oasan side of his brain.

He still had no clear idea how many people lived in C-2. The houses had many rooms, like beehives, and he couldn’t guess how many of them were inhabited. Which meant he also couldn’t estimate how tiny, or not so tiny, the proportion of Christians was. Maybe one per cent. Maybe a hundredth of one per cent. He just didn’t know.

Still, even a hundred Christians was an amazing achievement in a place like this, more than enough to accomplish great things. The church was coming ahead. The building, that is. It had a roof now, sensibly sloped, watertight and utilitarian. His polite requests for a spire had been deflected (‘we do all other thing, pleaสีe, before’); he sensed that they would deflect it for ever.

As a compensation, the Oasans had promised to decorate the ceiling. Kurtzberg had once shown them a photograph of a place they called, almost unintelligibly, the สีiสีรี่ine ฐapel. Inspired by the handiwork of Michelangelo, the Oasans were keen to create something similar, except they suggested that all the incidents should be from the life of Jesus rather than from the Old Testament. Peter was all for it. Apart from giving the church some much-needed colour, it would give him an insight into the unique nature of these people’s perception.

Lover Five, as always, was quickest off the mark, showing him her sketch of the scene she proposed to paint. It was the one outside Jesus’s tomb, where Salome and the two Marys find the stone rolled away. Evidently, this story was already familiar to her. Peter couldn’t guess which of the four gospel accounts Kurtzberg had used, whether it was Luke’s ‘two men in dazzling raiment’ story, Matthew’s angel descending from Heaven with earthquake accompaniment, Mark’s lone young man sitting on a rock, or John’s pair of angels inside the tomb. Whichever it was, Lover Five had rejected these characters and replaced them with the risen Christ. Her mourners, daintily proportioned and clad in hooded robes like herself, confronted a scarecrow-thin figure wearing a loincloth. This Jesus stood erect with arms spread wide, an eye-shaped hole in each palm of His starfish-shaped hands. Above His neck, where His head should be, Lover Five had left a blank space surrounded by a porcupine profusion of lines, to indicate radiance from an incandescent light source. On the ground between Him and the women lay a bagel-like object which Peter realised after a minute must be the discarded crown of thorns.

‘No longer dead,’ Lover Five explained, or maybe that was the title of her drawing.

Lover Five may have been first with her sketch, but she was not the first to get a painting mounted on the church ceiling. That distinction belonged to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three, an extremely shy individual who communicated mainly in gestures, even among his (her?) own people. The Oasans were scrupulous in their respect for others, and gossip was not their style, but Peter gradually got the message that Lover Sixty-Three was disfigured or malformed in some way. Nothing specific was said, only a general sense that Lover Sixty-Three was a pathetic character, soldiering on as though he was normal when everyone could see he wasn’t. Peter tried his best, without staring, to see what the problem might be. He noted that the flesh of Lover Sixty-Three’s face appeared less raw, less glistening, than other people’s. It looked as if it had been dusted with talc, or briefly cooked, like fresh chicken whose pinkness fades to white after a few seconds in boiling water. In Peter’s eyes, this made him, if anything, a little easier to behold. But to his neighbours, it was evidence of a pitiable disability.

Whatever Lover Sixty-Three’s handicap was, it didn’t affect his artistic skill. His painted panel, already affixed to the church ceiling directly above the pulpit, was the sole finished contribution so far, and any subsequent offerings would have to be impressive indeed to equal its quality. It glowed like a stained-glass skylight, and had an uncanny ability to remain visible even when the sun was on the wane and the church’s interior grew dim, as though the pigments were luminescent in their own right. It combined bold Expressionist colours with the intricate, exquisitely balanced composition of a medieval altarpiece. The figures were approximately half life-sized, crowded onto a rectangle of velvety cloth that was bigger than Jesus Lover Sixty-Three.

His choice of Biblical scene was Thomas the Doubter’s meeting with his fellow disciples when they tell him they’ve seen Jesus. A most unusual subject to tackle: Peter was almost certain that no Christian painter had ever attempted it before. Compared to the more sensational finger-in-the-wound encounter with the resurrected Christ, this earlier episode was devoid of visual drama: an ordinary man in an ordinary room voices his scepticism about what a bunch of other ordinary men have just told him. But in Lover Sixty-Three’s conception, it was spectacular. The disciples’ robes — all in different colours, of course — were scorched with tiny black crucifixes, as though a barrage of laser beams from the radiant Christ had sizzled brands onto their clothing. Speech bubbles issued from their slitty mouths, like trails of vapour. Inside each bubble was a pair of disembodied hands, in the same starfish design as Lover Five had used. And in the centre of each starfish, the eye-shaped hole, adorned with an impasto glob of pure crimson which could either be a pupil or a drop of blood. Thomas’s robe was monochrome, unmarked, and his speech bubble was a sober brown. It contained no hands, no images of any kind, only a screed of calligraphy, incomprehensible but elegant, like Arabic.

‘This is very beautiful,’ Peter had said to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three when the painting was formally delivered.

Lover Sixty-Three lowered his head. Assent, embarrassment, acknowledgement, pensiveness, pleasure, pain, who knew?

‘It also reminds us of a very important truth about our faith,’ said Peter. ‘A truth that’s especially important in a place like this, situated so very far away from where Christianity began.’

Lover Sixty-Three stooped lower still. Perhaps his head weighed too heavy on his neck.

‘Jesus allowed Thomas to put his finger into His wounds,’ said Peter, ‘because He understood that some people cannot believe without proof. It’s a natural human response.’ Peter hesitated, wondering if the word ‘human’ needed qualification, then decided it must be obvious by now that he regarded the Oasans as no less human than himself. ‘But Jesus was aware that it would not be possible for everyone, everywhere, forever afterward, to see and touch Him the way Thomas did. So He said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” And that’s us, my friend.’ He laid a hand gingerly on Lover Sixty-Three’s shoulder. ‘You and me, and all of us here.’

‘Yeสี,’ said Lover Sixty-Three. For him, that constituted fulsome conversation. A group of other Jesus Lovers, who’d accompanied him to the church for the delivery of the painting, made trembling motions with their shoulders. Peter realised that this was probably their equivalent of laughter. Laughter! So they did have a sense of humour after all! He was constantly learning important things of this kind, things which made him feel that the gulf between him and these people was growing shorter with every sunrise.

Lover Sixty-Three’s painting was solemnly raised and affixed to the ceiling, inaugurating the church’s devotional display. The next day, it was joined by Jesus Lover Twenty’s interpretation of Mary Magdalene being purged of her seven devils. The devils — ectoplasmic vapours with vaguely feline shapes — exploded from her torso like fireworks, ignited by Jesus, who stood behind Mary in a spread-armed pose. It was a cruder piece of work than Lover Sixty-Three’s, but no less strong, and it, too, glowed with an unfeasible luminescence.

The next day, no one brought a painting, but they did bring Peter a bed, to replace the bundle of rags and nets he’d been sleeping on since his hammock had come down. The Oasans had accepted his hammock unquestioningly, and would have been quite prepared to worship with it dangling in their midst, but Peter had cut it down when he judged the church was so close to finished now that the hammock marred its dignity. The Oasans, noting that their pastor did not necessarily require to hang suspended in order to be comfortable, had quietly constructed a bed for him, according to their usual bathtub/coffin template, albeit larger, shallower and less crammed with swaddly cotton. It was carried across the scrubland to the church, ushered through the door and installed right behind the pulpit, without any pretence that it was anything other than a bed. During the first prayer meeting after its arrival, Peter joked that if he got too tired while speaking, he could always just fall backwards and have a sleep. His congregation nodded indulgently. To them, it was a sensible idea.

On the morning that Grainger came to fetch him, Peter awoke to anticipation. Anticipation of the rain. For the natives, this was not unusual; rain occurred at predictable intervals, and they’d had a lifetime to accustom themselves to its rhythms. But Peter was not so attuned, and the rains always caught him by surprise. Until now. He stirred in his bed, slippery with sweat, thick-headed, squinting from the window-shaped rectangle of light that warmed his chest. Yet, dazed as he was, he knew at once that he must lose no time coming to the surface or trying to recall his dreams or continuing to rack his brains for a pronounceable alternative to ‘Baptist’, but that he should get up and go outside.

The rains were about a quarter of a mile away, gaining ground fast. They truly were rains, plural. Three colossal networks of water were advancing independently, separated by substantial spaces of clear air. Each network had its own internal logic, replicating and reassembling its glittering patterns over and over, shifting slow and graceful like one of those complex computer graphics that purport to show a city or a spider-web in three dimensions from all angles. Except that here, the screen was the sky, and the display was an awe-inspiring vista on a par with an Aurora Borealis or a nuclear mushroom cloud.

If only Bea could see this, he thought. Every day, provoked by some event or other, he regretted her absence. It wasn’t a physical yearning — that came and went, and it was at an ebb just now — but rather an uneasy awareness that a huge, complicated phase of his life was passing by, crowded with significant and deeply emotional experiences, none of which Bea was seeing, none of which she was remotely involved in. And again now: these three great shimmering veils of rain, swirling majestically across the plains towards him: they were indescribable, and he would not describe them, but seeing them would leave a mark on him, a mark that would not be left on her.

The rains covered what was left of the distance in minutes. By the time the settlement was gently engulfed, Peter could no longer perceive them as three separate entities. The air all around him was ecstatic with water, bursting with it. Silvery lariats of droplets lashed against the ground, lashed against him. He remembered how, when he was a kid, he would play with the girl at the end of the street and she’d spray him with the garden hose and he’d jump to avoid it but get caught anyway, which was the whole point and pleasure of it. Knowing that it would get you, but that you wouldn’t come to harm and you’d love it really.

Soon he was dripping wet and slightly dizzy from watching the patterns swirl before him. So, to give his eyes a rest, he did what the Oasans did: he stood with his head craned back, mouth open, and let the rain fall straight in. Drink the downpour direct from source. It was a sensation which, back home, every child attempts to indulge in once or twice before learning that there’s no point standing there gaping like an idiot, straining to catch raindrops which are too far apart and too small. But here, the undulating arcs of the rainfall meant that you would get nothing for a moment or two and then a generous sprinkle, a splash on the tongue. Moreover, the taste of melon was stronger when it came straight out of the sky. Or maybe he only imagined this.

He stood for a long while, getting drenched, drinking the rain. Water filled his ears, and the auditory world inside his head became muted. Rarely had he felt such mindless satisfaction.

But rain, on the Oasan settlement, was not a selfish experience. It was communal and it prompted communal action. Just as the chants of the muezzin called Muslims to prayer, the rains called the Oasans to work. Hard work. Now that Peter knew just how hard, he insisted on labouring in the field alongside the Oasans, putting his muscle into helping them.

Whiteflower was not the only crop the Oasans cultivated. There was also a cotton-like substance called สีค๙, which erupted from the soil in sticky white froth that quickly hardened into a fibrous weed. It was from this weed that the Oasans’ nets, shoes and clothing were derived. Then there was คڇสีค, a kind of moss which grew at an amazing rate, completing its metamorphosis from specks of mould to verdant fluff in a single afternoon. What was it for? He had no idea, but he learned how to harvest it.

As for whiteflower, there was, he learned, a catch to its wondrous versatility: each plant had to be individually and frequently assessed to ascertain what stage of its growth cycle it had reached, because different things could be made with it depending on when it was pulled from the ground. On a given day, a plant’s roots might be good for ‘mushroom’ soup, its fibre good for ‘liquorice’, its flowers good for bread, its nectar good for ‘honey’, whereas on another day, its roots might be good for ‘chicken’, its fibre good for rope, its flowers good for ‘custard’, its dried sap good for ‘cinnamon’, and so on. Timing was most crucial straight after rainfall, because that’s when the oldest plants yielded their best. Morbidly porous, they swelled with water, lost what little stiffness they had left, slumped to the earth, and would swiftly begin to rot if they were not plucked out. Found in time, they were the most useful agricultural product of all, for they provided yeast.

Aware that the Oasans would already be on their way to the field, Peter stopped guzzling the rain and walked back into the church. Water ran down his legs as he crossed the floor, and each step left a paddle-shaped puddle. He strapped on his sandals (the yellow boots were too precious for filthy labour), combed his hair flat against his scalp, took a few bites of a dark-brown pumpernickel-like substance the Jesus Lovers called Our-Daily-Bread, and set off.

The rain dwindled as he walked. The watery swirls still made distinctive shapes in the air but some of the arcs softened into vapour, and there was less force, less impact on the skin. He knew the downpour would last only a few more minutes, and then the sky would clear for a good while — if ‘clear’ was the right word for a sky that was always saturated with moisture. After that, the rains would return once more, then lay off for twenty hours or so, then return twice more again. Yes, he was getting the hang of it now. He was almost a local.

Three hours later, if he’d been counting hours, which he most definitely hadn’t, Peter returned from the whiteflower fields. His hands and forearms were stained whitish-grey with the powdery slough of the harvested plant. The front of his dishdasha, from chest to stomach, was so filthy from the armfuls of whiteflower he’d been loading onto the carry-hammocks that the inky crucifix could scarcely be seen. Further down, where his knees had made contact with the ground, the fabric was slimy with sap and soil. Specks of pollen fell from him as he walked.

Emerging from the outskirts of the settlement, he began to cross the stretch of prairie between the town and the church. More conscious of his ridiculously grubby state with every step, he peered up into the sky, looking for signs of the next burst of rain, which was due very soon. The rain would rinse him clean. All he need do was stand naked under the deluge and rub his hands over his flesh, maybe with the aid of the bar of soap he’d brought from home. He would stand just outside his church and the rain would wash him and when he was clean he would hold up his clothes and the rain would wash them too. After that there would be a long sunny spell, excellent drying weather.

As he strode across the wasteland his eyes were focused squarely on the silhouetted church building, and, in anticipation of reaching it, he yanked off his garment and flapped it a couple of times to shake off the excess dirt.

‘Whoah!’ called a voice.

He swung round. About twenty metres to his left, parked alongside the wall whose welcoming graffiti had long vanished, stood the USIC van. And, leaning against the vehicle’s grey metal hull, with a large water-bottle clutched to her breast, stood Grainger.

‘Excuse me for interrupting you,’ she remarked. Her eyes were levelled at his face.

He draped his clothing in front of his genitals. ‘I… I’ve been working,’ he said, moving towards her with slightly clumsy steps. ‘In the fields.’

‘That’s what it looks like,’ she said, and took another swig from her bottle. It was almost empty.

‘Uh… Bear with me,’ he said, gesturing, with his free hand, at the church. ‘I just need to have a wash; do a few things. I can be getting on with that while you’re busy handing over the medicines.’

‘The drugs handover is done,’ she said. ‘Two hours ago.’

‘And the food?’

‘Also done. Two hours ago.’

She downed the last of the water, tipping the bottle almost vertical against her lips. Her white throat pulsed as she swallowed. Sweat twinkled on her eyelids.

‘Oh, my… gosh,’ he said, as the implications sank in. ‘I’m so sorry!’

‘My fault for not bringing a magazine, I guess,’ she said.

‘I just lost… ’ He would have spread his arms helplessly, had one of them not been covering his nakedness.

‘Track of time,’ she confirmed, as though it might still be worth saving a few precious seconds by finishing his sentence for him.

On the drive back to USIC, Grainger was less peeved than Peter expected. Perhaps she had passed through all the stages — irritation, impatience, rage, worry, boredom, indifference — in the two hours she’d hung around waiting, and she was beyond it all now. Whatever the reason, she was in reasonable humour. Maybe the fact that she’d found him in such an unsavoury state, and had caught a glimpse of his shrunken penis clinging to his pubic hair like an albino garden slug, was contributing to her mood of benign condescension.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ she remarked, as they sped across the flat, featureless terrain. ‘Has anybody been feeding you?’

He opened his mouth to reassure her he’d been eating like a king, but realised it wouldn’t be true. ‘I haven’t been eating a lot, I admit,’ he said, laying one palm on his stomach just under the ribs. ‘Just… snacks, I suppose you’d call them.’

‘Very good for your cheekbones,’ she said.

As a reflex, he appraised Grainger’s facial features. Her cheekbones weren’t particularly good. She had the sort of face that was beautiful only if she watched her diet and didn’t get much older than she was now. As soon as age or over-indulgence filled out her cheeks and thickened her neck, even a little, she would cross a line from elfin allure into mannish homeliness. He felt sad for her, sad about the ease with which her physical destiny could be read by anyone who cared to cast a glance over her, sad about the matter-of-factness with which her genes stated the limits of what they were willing to do for her in the years to come, sad in the knowledge that she was at her peak now and still not fulfilled. He thought of Beatrice, whose cheekbones were worthy of a French chanteuse. At least, that’s what he’d told her sometimes; he couldn’t actually picture Bea’s cheekbones now. A vaguer, more impressionistic vision of his wife’s face flickered in his brain, half-obliterated by the sunlight beaming through the vehicle’s windscreen and the swirl of recent memories of various Jesus Lovers. Troubled, he strained to envisage her in sharper focus. A string of pearls in the dimness of another time and place, a white bra with familiar flesh inside. Jesus Lover Nine asking to be baptised. The stranger in the fields who’d handed him a scrap of fabric inscribed with the word คคڇ๙ฉ้, patted her (her?) chest and said: ‘My name’. ‘Say it for me again,’ he’d replied, and, when she did so, he’d contorted his mouth, his tongue, his jaw, every muscle in his face and said ‘คฐڇ๙ฉ้’, or something sufficiently similar for her to clap her gloved hands in approval. คฐڇ๙ฉ้. คฐڇ๙ฉ้. She would assume that he’d forget as soon as she was out of his sight. He must prove her wrong. คฐڇ๙ฉ้.

‘Hello? Are you with us?’ Grainger’s voice.

‘Sorry,’ he said. A delicious smell was wafting up his nostrils. Raisin bread. Grainger had unsealed a packet of it and was eating a slice.

‘Help yourself.’

He took some, self-conscious about his soil-grimed fingernails touching the food. The bread was sliced thick — three times as thick as any Oasan would have it — and felt luxuriously spongy, as though it had come out of the oven fifteen minutes ago. He stuffed it into his mouth, suddenly ravenous.

She chuckled. ‘Couldn’t you have put in a request for some loaves and fishes?’

‘The Oasans took good care of me,’ he protested, swallowing hard. ‘But they’re not big eaters themselves and I just sort of… fell in with their routine.’ He extracted another slice of raisin bread. ‘And I’ve been busy.’

‘I’m sure.’

Up ahead, two bodies of rain were coming into view. By chance, the sun was perfectly positioned in the clear space between. The peripheries of each body of rain shimmered with subtle rainbow colours, like an inexhaustible launch of noiseless fireworks.

‘Are you aware,’ asked Grainger, ‘that the tops of your ears are burnt to a crisp?’

‘My ears?’ He felt them with his fingertips. The texture of the outer lobes was rough. Like fried bacon, toughened on a forgotten plate overnight.

‘There’s gonna be scars,’ prophesied Grainger. ‘I can’t believe that didn’t hurt like hell when it was happening.’

‘Maybe it did,’ he said.

The two bodies of rain had moved much nearer now, their approach given the illusion of greater acceleration by the car’s speedy progress towards them. A slight turn of the steering wheel, dictated by the navigation computer, meant that the sun had slipped behind a watery veil.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. He wished she wouldn’t interrupt the wonder of nature so often; it buzzed his nerves. Then, in an effort to communicate with her sincerely, he mused: ‘I don’t actually think about whether I’m OK or not. I just… am.’

‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ she said. ‘But I recommend you take some sunscreen next time. And look in the mirror occasionally. You know, just to check that all your bits are still intact.’

‘Maybe I should leave that up to you.’ Neither of them meant this exchange as a bawdy pun, but once it was spoken it hung in the air, and they both smiled.

‘I didn’t think they’d have you doing heavy labour,’ said Grainger. ‘I thought they wanted you for, like, Bible study and stuff like that.’

‘It wasn’t their idea for me to work in the fields. It was mine.’

‘Well, I guess you’ll get a tan. Once the sunburn settles down.’

‘The thing was,’ he persisted, ‘I realised that the food that gets loaded onto this truck each week doesn’t come out of nowhere — even though it might seem that way to USIC.’

‘As a matter of fact, I grew up on a farm,’ said Grainger. ‘So if you’ve got me tagged as one of those people who think corn is made in the nachos factory, you’ve got it wrong. But tell me: these fields you were working in: where are they? I’ve never seen them.’

‘They’re right in the centre.’

‘The centre?’

‘Of the settlement. That’s why you haven’t seen them. They’re hidden by the buildings.’

She shook her head. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

‘The town is built in a circle around the arable land,’ he explained. ‘Which means that whenever there’s work to be done, the people come from all directions and converge in the middle, and they’ve all got a more or less equal distance to walk. It’s a beautifully logical idea, don’t you think? I can’t imagine why it never occurred to all the generations of humanity.’

She shot him a come-off-it glance. ‘You really can’t imagine? It’s because farming is tough, boring work and most people would rather somebody else did it for them. Preferably someplace far away. Because in the city, they need the space for a shopping mall.’

‘Is that what USIC has planned here?’

It was the sort of comment that might have offended her before, but she seemed unconcerned. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Not for the foreseeable future. Our brief is to build a sustainable environment first. Clean water. Renewable power. A team that gets along. A native population that doesn’t hate our guts.’

‘Noble aims,’ he said, leaning back in his seat, hit by a wave of weariness. ‘Funny no one thought of them before.’

They drove into the rain. The windscreen was dry one second, inundated the next. Elaborate raindrop patterns criss-crossed the glass until swept aside by the wipers. He was inside a metal and glass shell, in an artificially maintained atmosphere of cool air, divided off from the rain that could wash him clean. He should be out there, standing naked under it, letting it flow across his scalp, letting it blur his vision, letting it pelt the bony surfaces of his feet.

‘Are you really OK?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he said, with effort. ‘It just feels a bit… strange… being enclosed in such a small space.’

She nodded, unconvinced. He could tell she was worried about him. He regretted not having insisted that she wait a little longer back at the settlement, so that he could prepare a little better for this return to the base. He would have been in much better shape if he could have had even ten, fifteen minutes to himself before stepping into the vehicle.

‘We’re within Shoot range now,’ she said, after a long silence.

He looked at her uncomprehendingly, as if she’d just told him that they were liable to be killed by snipers.

‘The Shoot. The messaging system,’ she said. ‘You could check if there’s anything from your wife.’

Not yet, he thought. Not yet.

He considered saying, ‘Thanks, but I’d prefer to wait until I’ve had a shower, changed my clothes, unwound a bit… ’ It would be the truth. But this truth would make him appear, in Grainger’s eyes, less than eager to know how his wife was getting on. He didn’t want her to doubt his love for Bea. And besides, here was Grainger showing sensitivity to his needs, or what she guessed his needs might be. She should be rewarded for that.

‘Yes, please,’ he said. The windscreen wipers were squeaking against the glass: the sky was clear above them. Peter twisted in his seat to look at the vista receding behind the vehicle. The rains were on their way to C-2. Soon they would unleash their sweet sussurus on the roof of his church.

‘OK, we’re connected,’ said Grainger. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, she used the other to swivel the Shoot screen over his lap, ready for him to use.

He typed in his password, followed the instructions as usual. There were at least a dozen messages from Bea, maybe even twenty. They were electronically dated, but the dates made no sense to him. He opened the oldest. A large quantity of print swarmed onto the screen. His wife was telling him she loved him. Peter, I love you, she said. He re-read her greetings several times, not to savour them, but to wait until the words were something more than pixels configured on a plastic screen, until he could hear her voice.

Just found out why the supermarket was closed. It’s gone bust! Incredible. This is Tesco we’re talking about, one of the biggest corporations in the world! They had huge fortunes to play with — which was what brought them down, apparently. There was a full report on one of the news sites, a sort of post-mortem, which made me realise it was bound to happen — totally inevitable. It’s just that the inevitable can still come as a surprise, can’t it? A vast amount of Tesco’s money was tied up with ExxonMobil, who’ve been in trouble ever since the Chinese grabbed the oilfields in Iraq, Iran and Kazakstan (sp?). They also had big interests in shipping companies, which have been hammered by the upsurge in piracy, also a lot of their empire was based in Thailand until the military coup. Plus they were hit hard when Barclays went down the plughole a few years back and took Tesco Stakeholder and Tesco Swipe down with it. Those are the bits I remember from the programme, there was a lot more to it. The corporation had its fingers in a hundred pies, all sorts of businesses you wouldn’t think of when you’re walking down the pet food aisle looking for Joshua’s niblets, and suddenly a critical number of those businesses went pear-shaped and hey presto, no more Tesco. ‘The end of an era,’ as a news presenter put it — rather pompously, I thought.

Have you ever noticed the way news presenters always round off their reports with a resonant phrase? They even modulate their voices when they’re reading the last couple of lines of the script. It’s a special kind of vocal music that signals ‘The End’.

Sorry, I’m rambling. Usually I’m the one who teases you about ruminations like this, and here I am indulging in it myself. Maybe I’m trying to fill the silence with my own imitation of your voice! Or maybe it’s true what they say, that married people end up blurring their identities, finishing each other’s sentences.

Today was the day that the Frame family moved house. Sheila dropped Billy off with me, as agreed. I took him to the cat show. It was a hoot and he seemed to enjoy it immensely despite whispering to me how stupid it all was and how ridiculous the handlers looked. But as I’d hoped, the charm of the animals won him over! And I must admit I was gawping happily at all those different moggies too. God must have had such terrific fun designing all those distinct varieties of furry mammal. (Although maybe I’m showing my own prejudices there. Maybe he had even more fun with the fish and the insects and so on.)

Anyway, Billy and I kept the conversation light most of the day, but just before his mum came to fetch him, he opened up. I asked him how he felt about his father going to another country. He said, ‘My dad says there aren’t any countries anymore. They don’t exist. England and Romania are just different parts of the same thing.’ For a moment I thought, how nice, Mark is reassuring his kid that we’re all one world-wide community. But no. Billy said Mark asked him to visualise the world map as a huge thick sheet of plastic floating on the sea, like a raft, with crowds of people balancing on it. And sometimes too many people stand together on one bit and it starts to sink. You just run to another bit where it’s better, he said. Then when THAT bit starts to sink, you move again. There’s always places where things aren’t so bad: cheaper accommodation, cheaper food, cheaper fuel. You go there and it’s OK for a while. Then it stops being OK and you get the hell out. It’s what animals do, he said. ‘Animals don’t live in countries, they just inhabit territory. What do animals care if a place has a name? Names don’t mean shit.’ That’s the word Billy used, so I presume that’s the word his father used. Quite a heavy lecture in geopolitics for a little boy to swallow! And of course the bit that Mark left out of his analysis was the bit about going off with a 27-year-old concert promoter called Nicole. Who happens to be Romanian. But enough of that.

I’ve got a blanket over my knees as I type this. You’re probably expiring from the heat but it’s cold here and I’ve been without gas for a week now. Not because of any accident or failure in the supply, just because of sheer bureaucratic insanity. The gas company we’re with — used to be with, I should say — was being paid by direct debit out of our Barclays bank account. But when Barclays went under and we changed over to Bank of Scotland, something went wrong with the debit arrangement. A computer glitch. And suddenly I got this final demand. I tried to pay it, but here’s where it gets insane — they wouldn’t talk to me, because I’m not the ‘account holder’. I kept offering to pay them, and they kept saying ‘Sorry madam, we need to speak to the account holder’, ie, you, Peter. I must have spent hours on the phone about this. I considered getting the next door neighbour to pop round and talk into the phone in a deep voice, which would have been morally wrong, of course, but they probably would have asked him your mother’s maiden name. In the end, I had to concede that it just wasn’t possible to fix. I’ll wait until they take us to court and hope it gets sorted out then. In the meantime, I’ve signed with a different gas supplier but it will be a few days before they can come and connect it. They say that the freak weather in various parts of England has been causing havoc with utilities and (to quote the engineer I spoke to) ‘there’s engineers dashing about all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off’. Give that man a job in PR!

Do you remember Archie Hartley? I bumped into him in the cafeteria of the hospital the other day and he

Again he rested his head back against the seat, breathed deeply. Despite the dry cool of the air conditioning, he was sweating. Droplets tickled his forehead and ran into his eyebrows.

‘Finished already?’ said Grainger.

‘Uh… just a minute… ’ He felt as though he might be in danger of passing out. ‘Bad news?’

‘No, I… I wouldn’t say that. It’s just… You know, there’s a lot to catch up on… ’

‘Peter, listen to me,’ said Grainger, enunciating each word with earnest emphasis. ‘This happens. This happens to all of us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re here. She’s there. It’s natural.’

‘Natural?’

‘The rift,’ she said. ‘It grows and grows, and finally… there’s too much of it to cross. It’s like… ’

Words failed her, and she resorted to a gesture instead. Releasing her grip on the steering wheel for a few seconds — a safe enough risk, given that the ground was flat and there was nothing visible in any direction to collide with — she held up her hands, palms parallel, separated by a few inches, as though about to press them together in medieval prayer. But instead, she parted them wider, letting the fingers splay limply, as though each hand was toppling off an axis, falling through space.

17. Still blinking under the word ‘here’

Without Peter inside it, the dishdasha hung like a ghost from the ceiling. Its frayed lower parts swelled gradually with water and began to release drips from the sleeves and hem, slow as melancholy teardrops, even though Peter had wrung the fabric as hard as he could. Never mind: it would dry quickly. He’d adjusted the air conditioning of his quarters, allowing the temperature to rise to the level of the air outside. That was the way he wanted it, even if he hadn’t had wet washing to dry. He felt disoriented enough, back in the USIC environment, without the additionally confusing sensation of being trapped in an artificial bubble of chilled oxygen.

His dishdasha — clean now, apart from the ink stain which had faded to a blurry lilac — was suspended from an indoor clothesline operated by a simple mechanical pulley. Once again, Peter was struck by USIC’s apparent preference for low-tech solutions. He would’ve expected an electric clothes dryer with a menu of computerised choices; a million megawatts of energy on tap just to rinse the sweat out of a pair of socks. Even the washing machine — which he hadn’t used yet — had a placard stuck to the top saying CONSERVE WATER — COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED? To which a previous occupant of the room had added, in felt-tip: ARE YOU OFFERING, LADY?

Who wrote this? One of the nameless employees who hadn’t lasted more than a couple of weeks before going insane? Mind you, the way Grainger had looked at him when she picked him up, it was clear she wondered if he was going insane too. Or if he was about to disappear over the same horizon as Tartaglione and Kurtzberg.

Still naked after his shower, Peter stood in front of the mirror and examined the changes that his sojourn among the Oasans had wrought. It was true that the tips of his ears were burnt. There were also ridges of crusted sunburn along the furrows of his brows. Nothing spectacular. Overall, his skin was tanned and healthy-looking. He’d lost weight, and his ribs were showing. He’d just shaved off his beard, and noted that the slight swell of fat under his chin had gone, giving him a sharper facial appearance, a less mild-mannered look. That look had always been deceptive, anyway. In his homeless years, he’d exploited his soft features, radiating an air of bourgeois decency to make people think it was safe to leave him alone in their kitchen or in the back seat of their car for ten minutes. During which he would steal their cameras, their mobiles, their jewellery, whatever was in easy reach. And an hour later he would be selling it, and half an hour after that he would be snorting or swallowing the proceeds.

All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. That was one of the main verses that had saved him, in the end: one of those Bible soundbites that everybody knows but nobody really understands until they’re going down for the last time, choking to death on their own filth.

He sprinkled talcum powder in the clefts of his groin, which were a little sore. His scrotum had a few small scabs on the tender flesh — from scratching, obviously, although he couldn’t remember breaking the skin. The scabs were dark and clean. Within a day or two, they would vanish. The tops of his ears and the furrows of his brow would shed feathery shreds of white epidermis, revealing hard fresh pink underneath. His concave stomach would fill out, if he ate a few hearty meals. The fungal growth between his toes would clear up after a few applications of the lotion Grainger had given him. The pads of oedema in his knees and ankles would shrink away.

If Bea saw him right now, she might be alarmed at the state he was in. She hated to see his skin broken; she would fuss over the merest scratch on his hand, insist on putting Band-Aids on cuts that would be half-healed by the evening. One of her favourite places to kiss him was on his fingertips, whenever he’d bitten a nail to the quick. She’d have plenty to kiss at the moment.

He had not yet written to her. There were at least twenty-five messages banked up. Three or four had arrived in the last few hours, since Bea had calculated he must be back. He was not ready to face her, not even through the veil of the written word. He needed to reacclimatise to life outside the Oasan settlement. He needed to adjust to the complicated trivia of human intercourse.

‘So, how were the folks in Freaktown?’

Tuska was smiling broadly, to show he meant no offence. His beard was quite thick by now, mostly grey, which made him look older, and his neck was red from scratching where the wiry hairs tickled his skin. Peter could tell at a glance that the beard’s days were numbered: Tuska would shave it off very soon. Why did humans have this compulsion to change their outward appearance, only to revert to what suited them? What on earth was the point?

‘Uh… they were fine,’ he replied, a few seconds too late. ‘They’re good people.’

‘Yeah?’ said Tuska. ‘How can you tell?’

They were sitting at a table in the USIC mess hall. Tuska was tucking into spaghetti Bolognese (whiteflower spaghetti, whiteflower ‘mince’, imported tomato sauce, imported herbs) and Peter was eating a pancake (100 % local). The air was full of noises: the sound of rain pelting rhythmically against the windows, the mingled conversations of other employees, the clattering of meal trays, the scraping of chairs, the opening and shutting of doors, and Frank Sinatra crooning ‘My Funny Valentine’. It all seemed a grossly excessive amount of bustle and chatter to Peter, but he knew the problem was his perception, and he must try to get in the swing of it. The metaphorical swing, that is: no amount of effort could reconcile him to Frank Sinatra.

A pair of fingers clicked near his face. ‘Peter, are you with us?’ said Tuska.

‘Sorry. I really dislike this kind of music.’

It was an evasive answer, but also true. Sinatra’s self-congratulatory gargle, amplified to be audible over the din, was nudging him across a threshold of tolerance, like repeated pokes in the ribs from a prankster.

‘I can live with it,’ shrugged Tuska. ‘It’s just ripples in the airwaves, Peter. Molecules getting excited for a few seconds and then settling down again. Nothing to get riled about.’

‘Each day is Valentine’s day,’ smarmed Sinatra, as Tuska assembled another forkload of spaghetti.

‘Somebody dissing Ol’ Blue Eyes?’ A woman who’d been seated at a nearby table sidled over, carrying her dessert bowl. She was a colleague of BG’s: they had a similar physique, although this woman was white and blonde. She levelled a mock-censorious stare at Peter. ‘Did I hear you blaspheming against the godlike Frank?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should know better.’

‘The consummate American songbook,’ she informed him, deadpan. ‘Never equalled. One of the great achievements of humankind.’

Peter nodded humbly. ‘Maybe I’m the wrong age to appreciate it.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-three.’

‘I’m thirty-two!’

‘Well, I’m English, that’s another thing… ’

‘Al Bowlly, Noël Coward, Shirley Bassey?’ She spoke the names as though any British-born person would swell with pride to hear them.

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Peter. ‘I’m… uh… out of my depth here.’

There was a pause, during which Frank Sinatra launched into a ditty about a little old ant and a rubber tree plant. ‘It’s OK,’ said the woman, indulgently. ‘It’s OK. Not everyone likes the same things. It’s allowed.’

He remembered her name now: Iris. Iris Berns. She came from a Pentecostal family and was an atheist. She liked to play card games, she once had a sister who drowned in a back-yard swimming pool, she had a running joke with BG about centrifugal force, and she was heterosexual despite her butch appearance. None of these bits of information quite fitted into any sensible remark Peter could think of making at this point. Even calling her Iris might come across as an attempt to show off something he’d recalled too late, and anyway, she might want him to call her Berns like everybody else.

Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn’t people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?

‘Give him a break,’ said Tuska. ‘He’s just come back from a long spell in Freaktown.’

‘Yeah?’ said Berns, plonking down her dessert and taking a seat at the table. ‘You should take some suntan lotion next time.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Peter. He was aware that he was more red-faced than he needed to be, because he’d foolishly worn a sweater over his T-shirt. It had seemed a good idea at the time: a signal that he was a regular urban guy, not some freaky desert-dweller.

‘I’m surprised you got so much sun,’ said Berns, stirring a dollop of dark red syrup through the yoghurt-like substance in her bowl until the white turned pink. ‘They’re not exactly outdoors types, are they?’

Peter pulled the neck of his sweater down, to let air in. ‘They work outside almost every day,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Growing and harvesting food for us.’

Berns ate a few spoonfuls of dessert. ‘You know, I’ve driven all the way round that settlement, and I never saw a plantation, greenhouses, nothing.’

‘That’s because they’re right in the centre.’

‘The centre?’

‘Of the settlement.’ Peter took a deep breath. His forehead stung with perspiration. ‘Haven’t we been through this already?’

‘Must’ve been with a different woman, honey.’

‘Don’t call him honey,’ said Tuska. ‘He’s a preacher.’

‘The fields are inside the settlement,’ Peter explained. ‘The buildings are built in a circle around them.’

‘It figures,’ said Berns.

‘Figures? Why?’

‘They’re real secretive.’

Peter wiped his brow with his sleeve. ‘It’s not because… ’ His voice was too soft. A flotilla of children had come along to assist Sinatra on the chorus of ‘High Hopes’. Peter’s motivation to explain the Oasans’ relationship with agriculture faltered under their assault.

Berns stood up and called across the room: ‘Hey, Stanko! Can we have something instrumental? Our pastor here is having difficulty!’

‘No, really,’ protested Peter, as the eyes of everyone in the mess hall turned on him. ‘You shouldn’t… ’ But he was relieved when the voices of Frank and the school choir disappeared in mid-syllable and were replaced by the tinkling of a piano and some languorously shaken maracas.

Berns sat back down and polished off her dessert. Tuska ate the rest of his Bolognese. Peter had consumed only a few mouthfuls of his pancake but felt stuffed. He leaned back in his chair, and the amiable conversation of several dozen people rustled past his ears, a gentle hubbub of engineering jargon, small talk about food, polite disagreements about solving practical challenges, and the Jabberwocky mishmash of half-heard words and phrases, all interwoven with a Brazilian samba.

‘What music do you like, Peter?’ said Berns.

‘Uh… ’ His mind went blank. The names he might usually have rattled off were gone. ‘To be honest,’ he said, after taking a deep breath, ‘I’m not that keen on recorded music. I like music best when it’s performed live and I’m actually there when it’s happening. That way, it’s less like being expected to admire a thing, and more a celebration of the moment, of people doing something together in public. Something that could go horribly wrong, but through a combination of talent and trust and enthusiasm, it comes out sublime.’

‘Well, you should join our Glee Club,’ said Berns.

‘Glee club?’

‘Our singing group. A bunch of us meet up every hundred and eighty hours and sing together. It’s real informal. You’d love it. You a tenor?’

‘I… I think so.’

‘BG is the bassiest bass you ever heard. You gotta hear him in action.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘We don’t do any Sinatra.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

‘Well, I hope it is.’ Her tone was sincere. He realised all of a sudden that she was trying to prevent him drifting away from the bosom of their community, to stop him going native.

‘How big is the group?’ he asked.

‘Depends on our workload. Never less than six. Sometimes up to ten. Anyone’s welcome, Peter. It’s good for the soul. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘Does Tuska sing with you?’

Tuska guffawed. ‘No chance. Voice like an extractor fan. A malfunctioning extractor fan.’

‘Every person can sing,’ insisted Berns. ‘It just takes practice. And confidence.’

‘Oh, I got loads of confidence,’ said Tuska. ‘And a voice like an extractor fan.’

Berns looked at him pityingly. ‘You got sauce on your beard, honey.’

‘Holy shit — pardon my French.’ Tuska patted at his facial growth with his fingers. ‘That does it: this beard has got to go.’

‘Clean-shaven suits you, Tuska,’ said Berns, wiping her lips with a table napkin. (A linen napkin: USIC didn’t go in for disposable paper.) Then, to Peter: ‘Your beard looked OK, though. I saw you when Grainger brought you back in. Kinda stylish.’

‘Thank you, but… I just didn’t have an opportunity to shave while I was away. I use an electric razor, you see, and there wasn’t… uh… ’ What garbage I’m talking, he thought. Is this the best we can come up with?

‘So, ‘said Berns, ‘conditions in C-2 really are as primitive as they say?’

‘Who says they’re primitive?’

‘Everybody who’s been there.’

‘Who’s been there?’

‘Grainger… ’

‘Grainger doesn’t venture further in than the perimeter.’ Even as he spoke the words, he was alarmed at his inability to keep the judgemental overtone out of his voice. ‘I don’t think she’s ever set foot inside an Oasan’s house.’

Berns raised an eyebrow at the word ‘Oasan’, but she caught on instantly. ‘So what is it like? How do they live?’

‘Well, their living spaces are kind of… minimalist. I wouldn’t use the word primitive. I think that’s how they prefer it.’

‘So no electricity.’

‘They don’t need it.’

‘What do they do all day?’

It took all his focus to hide from Berns how exasperated this question made him. ‘Work. Sleep. Eat. Talk to each other. Same as us.’

‘What do they talk to each other about?’

He opened his mouth to reply, but found that the part of his brain where he went to fetch the answers was filled with incomprehensible babble, abstract whispers in a foreign language. How strange! When he was with the Oasans and overheard them conversing, he was so used to the sound of their voices, and so familiar with their body language, that he almost thought he understood what they were saying.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you say “Hello, pleased to meet you” in their language?’

‘Sorry, no.’

‘Tartaglione used to try that one out on us all the time… ’

Tuska snorted. ‘That’s what he thought it meant. He was just repeating what those guys said to him when they met, right? Hell, it could’ve been “Step right up, dude, it’s a long time since we’ve eaten Italian!”’

‘Jeez, Tuska,’ said Berns, ‘can you quit it with the cannibal jokes? These guys are totally harmless.’

Tuska leaned across the table, fixing his gaze on Peter. ‘Which reminds me: you didn’t answer my question. You know, before Frank Sinatra so rudely interrupted us.’

‘Uh… can you refresh my memory…?’

‘How can you tell that these guys are “good people”? I mean, what do they do that’s so good?’

Peter gave this some thought. Trickles of sweat were tickling the back of his neck. ‘It’s more that they don’t do anything bad.’

‘Yeah? So what’s your role?’

‘My role?’

‘Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So… what sins are these guys committing?’

‘None that I can see.’

‘So… don’t get me wrong, Peter, but… what exactly is the deal here?’

Peter wiped his brow again. ‘Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz: that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tuska, deadpan. ‘You can just see that radiating off of the folks in Freaktown.’

Berns, worried that the two men were about to have a serious dispute, touched Peter’s forearm and directed his attention to his dinner plate. ‘Your flapjack’s getting cold.’

He looked down at the rolled-up pancake. It had dried out somewhat, and resembled a rubber dog bone.

‘I think I’ll have to leave the rest of this,’ he said. He got to his feet, realising as he did so that he was unbearably sleepy, and that he’d been mistaken to think he was in any state for socialising. It took all his effort to move smoothly, rather than lurch like a drunk. ‘I think I need to lie down for a bit,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me.’

‘Decompression,’ said Tuska, and winked.

‘Get yourself rested,’ said Berns. And, as he shambled towards the exit: ‘Don’t be a stranger, now.’

Back in his quarters, he collapsed on the bed and slept for half an hour or so, then woke with an urgent need to vomit. He spewed the undigested pancake into the toilet bowl, drank some water, and felt better. He wished he had a stalk of คฉ้รี่ค to chew on, to keep his mouth fresh without needing to drink. In the settlement, he’d grown accustomed to drinking very little, probably less than a litre a day, despite the heat. Taking in any more just felt excessive, like trying to pour a bucket of water into a small bottle. Your body wasn’t big enough to hold it all; your system was pushed to find a way of getting rid of it.

The dishdasha was still damp but drying fast. In anticipation of being able to put it on again, he stripped down to his underpants. Then, a few minutes later, he took those off too. They irritated him.

Peter, why aren’t you writing to me? wrote Bea in the most recent of her messages, freshly arrived. I know you must be very busy but things are difficult here and I’m having trouble coping without your support. I’m just not used to spending day after day without any contact. I won’t deny that being pregnant is probably making me feel extra vulnerable and I don’t want to come across like a needy, hormonal female but on the other hand the silence from you is deafening.

He felt the blood flush into his face, right to the tips of his ears. He was failing his wife, he was failing his wife. He had promised he would write every day. He’d been busy and bewildered and Bea understood that, but… he’d broken his promise and was still breaking it, over and over. And now, under pressure of the anguish he’d caused, she was telling him straight.

If only she’d sent him just that first paragraph — a five-line message — maybe he could have shot a five-line response back, instantly. A quick shot of reassurance. But there was more. So much more.

I’m off work, she went on. My right hand is bandaged up and apart from the hygiene issue I can’t nurse one-handed. It’s not serious, but it will take a while to heal. It was my own stupid fault. The bathroom window is broken, as you know, and Graeme Stone said he would come and fix it but when days went by and he didn’t show up I phoned him and he was very embarrassed — he’s moved away. To Birmingham. ‘That’s sudden,’ I said. Turns out his mum’s house was ransacked last week by a gang of thugs and she was left for dead. So he’s moved in with his mum. He’ll take care of her and fix up the place at the same time, he says. Anyway, I phoned up a window repair company next but they said there’s a huge backlog because of all the storms and vandalism recently, and it could be a long wait. Our bathroom is a mess, muck everywhere, it’s too cold to wash in there, I’ve been washing at the kitchen sink, and the wind keeps slamming doors all through the house. Plus it’s not safe, anyone could climb in. So I thought I’d replace the broken pane with a sheet of plastic and some duct tape, and before I knew it I had a gash in my hand. Lots of blood, five stitches. This morning I washed myself left-handed at the kitchen sink while the wind howled through the house and the surviving windows rattled and the toilet door slammed constantly. I had a bit of a cry, I must admit. But then I reminded myself of the extreme suffering and misfortune all over the world.

You won’t have heard, but a volcanic eruption has destroyed one of the most densely populated cities in Guatemala, I’m not going to attempt to spell the name of the place but it sounds like an Aztec deity. Anyway, a volcano called Santa Maria blew its stack and spewed ash and lava for hundreds of miles around. The people had 24 hours warning, which only made it worse. There were zillions of vehicles jammed onto the roads, everybody was trying to escape with as many of their possessions as they could carry. Roof racks with half a house teetering on top, bicycles with baby cots balanced on them, crazy stuff like that. Cars were trying to take shortcuts through shops, cars were trying to drive on top of other cars, trapped motorists were smashing through their own windscreens to climb out because they couldn’t open the doors, the army wanted to demolish some buildings to widen the bottlenecks but there were too many people in the way. There was nowhere for planes to land or take off, the entire region just became one vast mass grave. People with only seconds to live were filming the lava with their phones and sending the footage to their relatives overseas. And get this: THERE IS NO RESCUE EFFORT. Can you imagine that? There’s nothing and nobody to rescue. The city has ceased to exist, it’s just part of the volcano now, it’s a geological feature. All those people had so many reasons to live and now what are they? Just chemical traces.

The ash cloud is colossal and has stopped planes flying, not just over central America but all over the world. Flights had only just resumed after the bombing of Lahore Airport and now they’re grounded again. The airline that took you to the USA has gone out of business. I felt such a surge of distress when I heard that, a lurch in my gut. I remembered standing at Heathrow watching the planes take off and wondering which one was yours and looking forward to you coming back. The airline going bust seems symbolic. It’s like a sign that you won’t be able to come home.

Everywhere, things are breaking down. Institutions that have been around forever are going to the wall. We’ve seen this happening for years, I know, but it’s accelerating suddenly. And for once, it’s not just the underdogs that suffer while the elites carry on as usual. The elites are being hit just as hard. And I’m not only talking about bankruptcy. Some of the wealthiest people in America were murdered last week, dragged out of their homes and beaten to death. Nobody knows exactly why, but it happened during a power blackout in Seattle that lasted four days. All the systems that keep the city functioning ground to a halt. No pay cheques, no automatic teller machines, no cash registers, no electronic security locks, no TV, no traffic control, no petrol (I didn’t know petrol pumps need electricity to work, but apparently they do). Within 48 hours there was widespread looting and then people started killing each other.

The situation here in the UK is not so stable either. It’s got rapidly worse since you left. Sometimes I feel as though your leaving caused things to fall apart!

And there was more. And, in the backlog of previous messages, more still. An inventory of things that were going wrong in the house. Complaints about farcically difficult communications with utilities companies. The sudden impossibility of obtaining fresh eggs. Riots in Madagascar. Joshua pissing on the bed; the washing machine being too small for a queen-sized duvet; the local launderette having closed down. The cancellation of the church’s Saturday morning crèche service. Martial law in Georgia. (Georgia in the Russian Federation or Georgia in the USA? He couldn’t remember whether Bea had made this clear, and he didn’t feel like trawling through the screeds again to check.) Mirah and her husband emigrating to Iran, leaving Mirah’s £300 debt to Bea unpaid. A power surge that blew all the lightbulbs in the house. Government-employed ‘nutrition experts’ defending steep rises in the price of full-cream milk. Smashed windows and ‘For Sale’ signs at the Indian restaurant across the road. Bea’s morning sickness and what she was taking to suppress it. The sacking of a prominent UK government minister who, in a newspaper interview, had described Britain as ‘completely fucked’. Bea’s unrequited cravings for toffee cheesecake and for intimacy with her man. Updates on mutual acquaintances whose faces Peter could not call to mind.

But, through it all, the uncomprehending hurt that he wasn’t writing to her.

This morning, I was so frantic about you, I was sure you must have died. I’d been counting the hours until you were due back from the settlement and as soon as I figured you were back, I checked for messages every two minutes. But… nothing. I had visions of you dying of an exotic disease from eating something poisonous, or being murdered by the people you’re ministering to. That’s how most missionaries die, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of any other reason why you would leave me in the dark for so long. Finally I cracked and wrote to that USIC guy, Alex Grainger — and got a reply almost immediately. He says you’re fine, says you have a beard now. Can you imagine how I felt, begging a stranger for hints of how my own husband is doing? I’ve eaten many slices of humble pie in my life but that one was hard to swallow. Are you sure you’re not angry with me, deep down, for getting pregnant? It was bad of me to stop taking the Pill without telling you, I know that. Please, please forgive me. I did it out of love for you and out of fear that you would die and there’d be nothing of you left. It wasn’t a selfish thing, you must believe me. I prayed and prayed about it, trying to figure out if I was just a female hankering for offspring. But in my heart, I can’t see it. All I see is love for you and for the baby that will carry some of you into the future. OK, I broke our agreement that we would wait, and that was wrong, but remember we also had an agreement that you would never drink again and then you went AWOL from the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse and I had to pick up the pieces. I understand why you went off the rails and we got over it and it’s in the past, and I’m tremendously proud of you, but the point is that you made me a solemn promise and you broke it, and life went on and so it should. And although I hate to appear as though I’m jockeying for higher moral ground, your going on a bender in Salford wasn’t done out of love, whereas my getting pregnant was.

Anyway, enough of that. My hand is throbbing from typing this and your head is probably throbbing from having to read it. I’m sorry. I should lighten up. A workman from the window company is thumping about downstairs, fixing the bathroom. I’d given up hope; I’m ashamed to say I’d even given up praying for it. After all, I’d been told that the waiting list stretched ahead for weeks. But lo and behold: bright and early this morning, the guy showed up and said his boss had told him to shift his schedule around and do our place first. God forgets nothing!

My darling Peter, please write. It doesn’t have to be the definitive statement on everything. A few lines would make me so happy. One line even. Just say hello.

Your loving wife,

Bea

He felt feverish and dehydrated. He walked to the fridge and had a swig of water, then stood for a minute with his hot forehead pressed against the cool shell of the machine.

He sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet lay the loose pages of a Bible chapter he was adapting for his flock. Luke 3. John the Baptist announcing that there was someone coming soon ‘the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose’. Oh, that awkward word ‘latchet’. And its even more awkward alternatives, ‘strap’ and ‘shoelace’. He’d considered ‘leather band’, but there was the additional problem that Oasans’ footwear had no straps or laces and the entire concept might require explanation, which might be more trouble than it was worth, theologically speaking. If only he could think of an equivalent detail to replace the shoe stuff with… ‘whose (something) I am not worthy to (something)’… Obviously, to mess around with the metaphors and similes of Jesus was unacceptable, but this was John, a mere mortal, no more divine than any other missionary, his utterances no more sacred than Peter’s own. Or were they? The Oasans had made it clear that they preferred their Scripture as literal as possible, and his misguided attempt to translate ‘manna’ as ‘whiteflower’ had caused murmurs of –

‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?’

He flinched. The voice — low-pitched, male and loud — had spoken right near his ear. He wheeled round. No one had entered the room. And God, surely, did not resort to four-letter words.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

I’m so sorry for my silence. I’ve been busy, true, but that’s not the reason I haven’t been writing. The real reason is hard to explain but it certainly isn’t that I’m angry with you and CERTAINLY not because I don’t love you.

This mission has turned out very different from what I anticipated. The things I expected to have a lot of trouble with have gone astonishingly smoothly but I feel out of my depth in other ways I never imagined. I assumed that I would be fighting an uphill battle to minister to the Oasans and that it would take me weeks, maybe even months, to construct even the flimsiest, most provisional bridge between these very foreign minds/hearts and the love of God awaiting them on the other side. But what has actually tested me beyond my abilities is the gulf that has opened up between you and me. I don’t mean an emotional gulf, in that my feelings for you have changed in any way. I mean a barrier that circumstances has pushed between us. Of course, physically, we are a huge distance apart. That doesn’t help. But the main thing I’m having to confront is that our relationship, until now, has totally depended on us being together. We’ve always seen and done things as a team and discussed everything as it’s come up, day by day, minute by minute — even second by second. Suddenly we’re on different paths. And your path has veered off in a frighteningly strange direction.

All these disasters that are befalling the world — the tsunamis and earthquakes and financial meltdowns or whatever — are just so alien to my life here. They don’t feel real. I’m ashamed to admit this because obviously to the people suffering through them they’re very real indeed but I have enormous trouble getting my head around them. And I very quickly reach a point where I think ‘If she tells me about one more disaster my brain will seize up.’ Of course I’m horrified by this failure of compassion, but the more I strain to overcome it the worse it becomes.

Another problem is that I find it almost impossible to talk about the Oasans to anyone who doesn’t know them. Not just to you, to the USIC guys as well. My communion with my new brothers and sisters in Christ seems to happen on a different plane, as though I’m speaking their language even though I’m not. Trying to describe it afterwards is like trying to explain what a smell looks like or what a sound tastes like.

But I must try.

The basics: The church is built. We worship in it regularly. I’ve taught the Oasans adapted versions of hymns that they can sing without too much difficulty. (The insides of their faces aren’t like ours; they have throats but I’m not convinced they have tongues.) I read to them from the Bible, which they insist on calling The Book of Strange New Things. They have a marked preference for the New Testament over the Old. Thrilling OT adventure stories like Daniel in the lions’ den, Samson & Delilah, David & Goliath, etc, don’t connect with them. They ask comprehension-type questions but you can tell that even on an ‘action’ level they don’t really get it. What floats their boat is Jesus and forgiveness. An evangelist’s dream.

They are gentle, kind, humble, hardworking people. It’s a privilege to live amongst them. They call themselves Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Two, etc. Jesus Lover One was the very first convert, dating back to the early days of Kurtzberg’s ministry. I wish I could show you pictures as I’m hopeless at describing them. Their behaviour is not that distinctive compared to ours, eg, I wouldn’t call some of them extrovert & others introvert, some good-humoured & others bad-tempered, some well-balanced & others crazy, etc. They’re all pretty low-key and the differences between them are quite subtle. It would take a novelist’s skill to capture those nuances in words and, as I’ve discovered to my embarrassment, I totally lack that skill. Also, they look physically very similar. Pure, unadulterated genetic stock. I never thought about this before coming here, but when we need to tell the difference between people, we get a lot of help from all the cross-breeding and migration that’s gone on in human history. It’s given us such a smorgasbord of different physical types — caricatures almost. By ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people in the cosmopolitan West, of course. If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, ‘She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three’ and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say ‘He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes’, and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd. Bea, I’m rambling here but the point is that the Jesus Lovers would all look the same to you except for the colours of their robes. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, I guess. In a future letter I’ll tell you about the contributions that some of the individual Jesus Lovers have made to the church.

He paused; recognised that Bea might have reason to doubt he would keep his promise. He racked his brains.

For example, he went on, Jesus Lover Five finally delivered her painting to be hung on the ceiling with the others. (Oh how I wish you could see them.) Her painting shows Salome and the two Marys outside Christ’s tomb, with the risen Jesus manifesting to them. He has His arms spread and He looks as though he’s made of light. It’s dazzling, I don’t know how she managed to achieve this with just pigment and cloth; it hits your eyeballs like car headlights on a dark night. You look up to the ceiling when you’re singing or preaching and you see this crucifix-shaped creature up there, blazing out of the dimness. So that’s Jesus Lover Five. A very talented lady (or maybe gentleman — I’m still not 100 % sure).

What else should I tell you? I’m struggling to think, which is incredible because so many significant, precious things have happened on this mission and I see so much evidence of God’s grace during each hour that I spend in these people’s company. So many moments when, if you could only have been by my side, I’m certain we would have exchanged a glance that said: ‘Yes! God is at work here.’

He broke off and stretched. He was coated with sweat, from his greasy brow to the tips of his fingers. His naked buttocks squelched on the vinyl seat. Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off the air conditioning and let this stagnancy take hold. He got to his feet and walked to the window. Another tumbleweed of rain was on its way, swirling across the scrublands towards the base. In five minutes it would be here, streaming down the windows. He looked forward to that. Although there was something sad about enjoying rain on the other side of a glass barrier. He should be out there.

Tired, he threw himself on the bed for a minute. The dishdasha hung between him and the window, silhouetted against the brilliance of daylight. He shielded his eyes with his hands, shuttering his peripheral vision so that he could see the dishdasha without the glare on either side; the garment changed colour from dark grey to white. Optical illusions. The subjectivity of reality.

He thought of Bea’s wedding dress. She’d insisted on getting married in white, in a church, and on him wearing a white suit. An odd decision for two people who usually avoided ostentation and formality. Plus, there would be alcohol at the reception. He’d wondered if it mightn’t be better all round if they just ducked into a registry office in their casuals. No way, said Bea. A registry office wedding would be giving in to shame about their past. As if to say: a guy who used to crawl around in shit-smeared public urinals has no right to repackage himself in a spotless suit; a woman with Bea’s family history should forget all about standing up in a church dressed in white. Jesus died on the cross precisely to wipe out that sort of shame. It was like the angel in Zechariah 3:2–4 taking off the priest’s filthy clothes. Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. A clean slate. And there was no bolder celebration of a clean slate than the wedding of Peter and Beatrice.

And in the end, quite a few of the guests got sloshed but Peter didn’t touch a drop. And everyone read their speeches from pre-prepared scripts and he hadn’t written a thing but when the time came God gave him inspiration and he spoke about his love for Beatrice in elegant, flowing sentences that made people weep.

Then he and his wife went home and Beatrice lay on their bed with her white gown still on, and he thought she was having a rest before getting changed but it soon became obvious that she was inviting him to join her. ‘We might get it dirty,’ he said, ‘and it was so expensive.’ ‘All the more reason,’ she said, ‘not to shove it into a box with a bunch of mothballs after one day. It’s actually a very nice dress. It feels good to touch.’ And she guided his hand.

She must have worn that dress twenty, thirty times after that. Always indoors, always without any ceremonial flourish or spoken allusion to its symbolic significance: merely as though she’d decided, on a mundane whim, to wear a white dress that evening rather than a green one; an embroidered bodice rather than a V-necked jumper. He never wore his wedding suit again, though.

The rain hit the window at last. Peter lay on his bed as the semen cooled on his midriff. Then he got up, showered again, and returned to the Shoot. The cursor on the screen was still blinking under the word.here

18. I need to talk to you, she said

The news that Dr Matthew Everett had died meant nothing to Peter. He’d never met the man. He visited doctors as seldom as possible and, before the obligatory tests that gave him a clean bill of health for the Oasis mission, it had been ages since he’d set foot in any sort of clinic. A doctor had once threatened him that if he continued drinking he would be dead within three months. He’d continued drinking for years. Another doctor, affiliated in some way with the police, had branded him psychopathic and was keen to get him locked up in an institution. Then there was the registrar at Bea’s hospital who’d made trouble for her when she ‘developed an unprofessional attachment to a patient with a history of substance abuse and manipulative behaviour’.

No, doctors and Peter had never got on. Not even in the years since he’d become a Christian. When medical practitioners heard about your faith, they didn’t respond like most people — with bemusement or combative scorn, ready to get into an argument about why-does-God-allow-suffering. Rather, they kept their faces blank and their conversation non-committal, and you felt they were making a mental note in some sort of file on your health issues: Irrational religious beliefs, right under Blepharitis and Rosacea.

‘You should go see Doc Everett,’ several USIC people had told him since his arrival. They meant: to check that you’re back in shape after the Jump, or, to get treatment for that sunburn. He’d made polite noises and carried on regardless. And now Doctor Everett was dead.

The fatality had come out of the blue and reduced the USIC medical team from six to five: two paramedics, a nurse called Flores, an MD and surgeon called Austin, and Grainger.

‘It’s very bad this has happened,’ said Grainger when Peter met up with her outside the pharmacy. ‘Very bad.’ She wasn’t wearing her shawl this morning, and her hair was slick with water, newly washed. It sharpened her features, accentuated the scar on her forehead. He imagined a younger Alexandra Grainger, dead drunk, pitching forwards, her head splitting open against a metal tap, blood in the sink, blood on the floor, so much blood to be mopped up when she was hauled away. You’ve been there, he thought. I’ve been there too. Beatrice, much as he loved her, had never been there.

‘Were you close?’ he said.

‘He was a nice guy.’ Her frown and preoccupied tone suggested that her personal relationship with Everett was irrelevant to how bad a thing his death was. Without any further conversation she escorted Peter from the pharmacy into a passageway that led to the medical centre.

The medical centre was surprisingly big for the number of personnel it served. It was built on two levels and had many rooms, some of which were only half-furnished and waiting to be kitted out with equipment. Two of the three operating tables in the surgical theatre were shrouded in plastic wrapping. One particularly large space that Peter peeked into as he passed was painted a cheerful yellow and almost blindingly inundated with daylight from bay windows. It was empty apart from some stacked boxes neatly labelled NEO-NATAL.

The morgue had the same seldom-visited, overly spacious feel as most of the centre, even though it was possibly busier than it had ever been: three of the five remaining medical staff were gathered there once Grainger walked in, and Peter was politely introduced — firm handshakes, head-nods — to Dr Austin and Nurse Flores. ‘Glad to meet you,’ said the chimpanzee-like Flores, not sounding glad at all, and sat straight back down in her chair, arms folded over her dowdy uniform. Peter wondered what nationality she was. She was four foot ten, tops, and her head looked shrunken. Whatever genetic code had produced her was very different from the one that had produced him. She was almost as alien-looking as the Oasans.

‘I’m from England,’ he said to her, not caring how gauche he sounded. ‘Where are you from?’

She hesitated. ‘El Salvador.’

‘Isn’t that in Guatemala?’

‘No, but we’re… neighbours, you could say.’

‘I heard about the volcano in Guatemala.’ His mind went into overdrive as he attempted to recall enough details from Bea’s letter to support a conversation with Flores. But she held up one wizened hand and said:

‘Spare me.’

‘It’s just so awful to think — ’ he began.

‘No, really: spare me,’ she said, and that was the end of that.

For a few seconds, the mortuary lapsed into silence, apart from a rhythmic groaning sound that was not human in origin. Dr Austin explained that this noise was coming from the freezers, due to their having been only recently switched on.

‘It just didn’t make sense to keep a room full of freezers running with nothing in them, year after year,’ he elaborated. ‘Especially before we got our energy usage properly sorted out.’ Austin was Australian, by the sound of him, or perhaps a New Zealander; athletic, muscular, with movie-star good looks apart from an untidy scar gouged into his jawline. He and Flores had been absent from Severin’s funeral service, as far as Peter could recall.

‘You’ve done very well, lasting all this time,’ said Peter.

‘Lasting?’

‘Not needing to switch the freezers on. Until now.’

Austin shrugged. ‘In the future, as this community grows, we’ll need a morgue for sure. In the future, we’ll probably have murders, poisonings, all the thrills and spills you get when your population passes a certain point. But these are early days. Or were.’

The freezers groaned on.

‘Anyway… ’ sighed Austin, and unlatched the drawer containing the deceased, as though Peter had finally requested to see Dr Everett and shouldn’t be kept waiting. Austin pulled at the handles and the plastic crib slid out, exposing the naked body as far as the navel. Matthew Everett’s head was nestled on a wipe-clean pillow and his arms lay supported on banana-shaped cushions. He was a presentable middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, a permanent vertical frown creasing his brow, and dimpled cheeks. His eyes were almost but not quite closed, and his mouth hung open. There was a pale dusting of frost on his tongue, and subtle ice-twinkles on his pale flesh. Other than this, he looked well.

‘Of course we’ve had a few deaths over the years,’ conceded Austin. ‘Not many; well below average for a community this size, but… it happens. People have diabetes, heart conditions… Their pre-existing pathology catches up with them. But Matt was healthy as a horse.’

‘My horse died,’ said Grainger.

‘Beg pardon?’ said Austin.

‘I used to have a horse, when I was a kid,’ said Grainger. ‘He was wonderful. He died.’

There was nothing to say to that, so Austin pushed the drawer shut again and fastened the latches. Once again, Peter was struck by the simplicity of the technology: no computerised locking system to be placated with a keypad or a coded swipe-card, just a drawer with a couple of handles. He realised all of a sudden that this simplified design was not the result of cheapskate make-do, a weird mismatch between USIC’s colossal wealth and a penchant for outmoded discards. No, these freezers were new. And not just new, but custom made. Some obstinate designer had paid extra for nineteenth-century practicality, had bribed a manufacturer to leave out the computerised sensors, microchipped programs, flashing lights and smart options that an up-to-date mortuary freezer would contain.

Dr Austin washed his hands in a sink, using a cake of astringent-smelling soap. He dried himself with an ordinary clean towel, then unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and popped it in his mouth. He held the packet out to Peter, a generous gesture since gum was an imported item.

‘No thanks,’ said Peter.

‘God knows why I eat it myself,’ mused Austin. ‘Zero nutritional value, a ten-second hit of sugar, and your salivary glands give your stomach the message that there’s food on the way — which there isn’t. Complete waste of time. And bloody expensive here. But I’m addicted.’

‘You should try คฉ้รี่ค,’ said Peter, recalling the pleasant sensation of this plant between his fingers, the burst of sweet juice on his tongue as his teeth first pierced its tough hide, the delicious pulp that yielded hints of fresh flavour even after half an hour of chewing. ‘You’d never want gum again.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘คฉ้รี่ค.’

Austin nodded tolerantly. Probably adding Speech impediment to his mental file of the pastor’s health issues.

Silence fell, or what passed for silence in the USIC morgue. Peter thought that the freezers were groaning a bit less noisily than before, but maybe he was just acclimatising to the sound.

‘Did Dr Everett have family?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ said Austin. ‘He didn’t talk about it.’

‘He had a daughter,’ said Grainger quietly, almost to herself.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Austin.

‘They were estranged,’ said Grainger.

‘It happens,’ said Austin.

Peter wondered why — given that this meeting wasn’t exactly abuzz with convivial chatter — somebody didn’t just hand over a dossier on Everett and set a deadline for the funeral address.

‘So,’ he said, ‘I imagine I’ll be doing a funeral service?’

Austin blinked. The concept had caught him by surprise. ‘Uh… Maybe,’ he said. ‘Not for a while, though. We’re keeping him at negative temp. Frozen, in other words. Until another pathologist arrives.’ He glanced over to the mortuary drawers, then out the window. ‘The big concern, of course, is whether there’s anything in this environment that might cause people to become ill. That’s been a concern from the start. We’re breathing air we’ve never breathed before, eating food that’s totally new to our digestive systems. So far, all the evidence suggests it’s not a problem. But only time will tell. Lots of time. And it could be very bad news that we’ve now got a man who had no health problems whatsoever, no reason for him to die, and he’s dead.’

Peter began to shiver. He’d worn as much clothing as he could tolerate nowadays, even within the USIC base — his dishdasha, a loose sweater, jogging pants, tennis shoes — but it wasn’t enough to withstand the chill of the mortuary. He wished he could fling open the window, let the comforting balmy atmosphere swirl in.

‘Have you done a… uh… ’ The word had slipped out of his vocabulary. Without even intending to, he sliced at the air with an invisible scalpel.

‘Autopsy?’ Austin shook his head ruefully. ‘Matt was the one who had the skills in that area. That’s why we’ve got to wait. I mean, I can do autopsies if they’re straightforward. I could’ve determined a cause of death for Severin; that was no mystery. But if you’ve got no clues, you’re better off with an expert. And our expert was Matt.’

No one spoke for a minute. Austin seemed lost in thought. Grainger stared down at her shoes, which tapped restlessly in the air. Flores, who hadn’t uttered a peep since introducing herself, gazed out the window. Maybe she was dumbstruck with grief.

‘Well… ’ said Peter. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Can’t think of anything off-hand,’ said Austin. ‘We were actually wondering if there’s anything we can do to help you.’

‘Help me?’

‘Not with your… ah… evangelising, obviously,’ the doctor smiled. ‘But medically.’

Peter’s fingers flew up to his brow, touching the flaking skin there. ‘I’ll be more careful next time, I promise,’ he said. ‘Grainger’s given me some excellent suntan lotion.’

‘Sunscreen,’ Grainger corrected him irritably. ‘SPF 50.’

Austin said: ‘I actually meant the natives. The Oasans, as you call them. We’ve been supplying them with basic medicines virtually since we first got here. It’s the only thing they seem to want from us.’ He smirked in deference to Peter’s mission. ‘Well, just about the only thing. But you know, not one of them has ever shown up here for treatment. Not one! Which means not one of them has ever been checked out or diagnosed properly. We would love to know what’s up with them.’

‘Up?’ echoed Peter.

‘What ails them,’ said Austin. ‘What they’re dying of.’

Peter had a vivid mental image of his congregation in all their colours, singing hymns and swaying shoulder to shoulder.

‘The ones I’ve been dealing with seem quite healthy to me,’ he said.

‘Do you know what drugs they’re taking?’ persisted Austin.

The question annoyed Peter and he tried not to show it. ‘I’m not aware of them taking any. One of my Jesus Lovers — one of my congregation — had a close relative who died not long ago. I never met him. Another one has a brother — or maybe a sister — who’s in constant pain, apparently. I imagine that’s where some of the painkillers are going.’

‘Yes, I imagine so.’ Austin’s tone was neutral — breezy, even. There wasn’t a milligram of sarcasm detectable in it. But once again, Peter felt that his fellowship with the Oasans was being assessed with a jaundiced eye. The intimacy he shared with the Jesus Lovers was profound, built on a foundation of a thousand solved problems, disentangled misunderstandings, shared history. But as far as the USIC staff could see, his intimacy with the inhabitants of Freaktown hadn’t even got off the ground. The quaint Christian had nothing to show for his labours that a rational person could respect. People like Austin had a list of questions which they assumed needed answers before the word ‘progress’ could be uttered.

But that was what the Godless were always so good at, wasn’t it? Asking the wrong questions, looking for progress in the wrong places.

‘I appreciate why you’re curious,’ said Peter. ‘It’s just that the Oasans I see every day aren’t ill. And the ones who are ill don’t come to our church.’

‘Don’t you… uh… ’ Austin waved one hand vaguely around, to indicate door-to-door evangelism.

‘Normally I would,’ said Peter. ‘I mean, when I first arrived, I assumed I’d be visiting homes, looking for ways to make contact. But they’ve been coming to me. A hundred and six of them, last time we met. It’s a big congregation for just one pastor with no backup, and it’s growing. I’m giving them all my attention, all my energy, and still there’s more I could do if I had time — and that’s before I even think of knocking on the doors of the ones who’ve been keeping away. Not that they have doors… ’

‘Well,’ said Austin, ‘if you do find a sick one who’d be willing to come here and, you know, let us check him over… Or her… ’

‘Or whatever,’ said Flores.

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Peter. ‘The thing is, I don’t have any medical knowledge. I’m not even sure I could recognise a specific disease… in one of us, let alone in an Oasan. The signs and symptoms, I mean.’

‘No, of course not,’ Austin sighed.

Nurse Flores spoke up again, her simian face unexpectedly illuminated with sharp intelligence. ‘So, the ones you’re dealing with could be sick and you wouldn’t know it. Every last one of them could be sick.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Peter. ‘We’ve built up a lot of trust. They tell me what’s on their mind. And I work beside them, I see how they move. They’re slow and careful, but that’s their way. I think I’d be able to tell if something was badly wrong.’

Flores nodded, unconvinced.

‘My wife’s a nurse,’ said Peter. ‘I wish she were here with me.’

Austin raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve got a wife?’

‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘Beatrice.’ The mention of her name felt desperate somehow, an attempt to lend her an individual status she could never truly have for these strangers.

‘And she’s… ’ Austin hesitated. ‘She’s in the picture?’

Peter thought for a moment; remembered his conversation with Tuska: Is there a special person in your life right now? Nope, can’t say that there is. ‘Yes.’

Austin cocked his head, intrigued. ‘It’s not often we get someone here who’s got… you know… a partner waiting for them back home. I mean, a partner who’s… ’

‘In the picture.’

‘Yeah.’

‘She would’ve loved to come too,’ said Peter. For the first time in ages, his mind retrieved a vividly complete recent memory of Beatrice, sitting beside him at the USIC office, still dressed in her nurse’s uniform, her face flinching in distaste at the horribly strong tea she’d been handed. Within a microsecond, she adjusted her expression to imply that the tea was merely too hot, and she turned back towards the USIC examiners with a smile. ‘It would’ve made such a difference,’ Peter went on. ‘To me and to the whole project. USIC didn’t agree.’

‘Well, she must have failed the suitability tests,’ said Austin, with an air of commiseration.

‘She wasn’t given any tests. USIC interviewed us together a couple of times, and then they made it clear that the rest of the interviews were for me alone.’

‘Take it from me,’ said Austin. ‘She failed her ESST. Was Ella Reinman there at the interviews? Small, thin woman with very short grey hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘She does the ESSTs. That’s what her questions are all about. Your wife got analysed on the spot and disqualified, take it from me. The amazing thing is that you didn’t. You must’ve given very different responses.’

Peter felt himself blush. His clothing was suddenly plenty warm enough. ‘Bea and I do everything together. Everything. We’re a team.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Austin. ‘I mean, I’m sorry she didn’t get to come with you.’ He stood up. Flores and Grainger stood up, too. It was time to leave the mortuary.

After that, there was nowhere to go but his quarters, and his quarters depressed him. He was not, by nature, a depressive person. Self-destructive, yes; he’d been that at times. But not gloomy. There was something about his room in the USIC base that sapped his energy and made him feel boxed in. Maybe it was simple claustrophobia, although he’d never been claustrophobic before, and had once even bedded down inside an industrial garbage skip with the lid closed over him — and was grateful to have the shelter. He could still remember his sense of wonder when, at some point during the night, the mound of garbage on which he lay started heating up, enveloping his half-frozen body with warmth. This unlikely, unexpected generosity from a non-human agency was an early foretaste of how he would feel in the bosom of Christ.

But his quarters at USIC gave him no such feeling. The room might be spacious and clean, yet it seemed to him dismal and tawdry — even when the shutters were lifted and the sunlight made the walls and furnishings almost too bright to behold. How was it possible for a place to be sunlit and yet dismal?

He couldn’t get the temperature right, either. He’d killed the air conditioning, as it literally gave him the shivers, but ever since then, he’d been too warm. It was no good having the heat of Oasis without the compensatory caress of the air currents. The Lord knew what He was doing when He made this world, just as surely as He knew what He was doing when He made all the others. The climate was an exquisitely clever system, perfect and self-adjusting. Fighting it was foolish. More than once, Peter had stood at the window of his quarters, his palms pressed against the glass, fantasising about pushing so hard that the glass shattered and a wave of sweet, balmy air poured in through the hole.

The window-blind allowed him to simulate a few hours of nighttime whenever he needed it, which was not possible in the settlement, where the sun shone in on him for seventy-odd hours straight. In theory, this should mean he slept better at USIC base, but no, he slept worse. On waking, he would have a hangover-style headache and feel irritable for an hour or more. Pushing back the doldrums, he would work on his Scripture translations and assemble booklets for the Jesus Lovers, but found that he had less stamina than when he was in the settlement. There, he could push through the exhaustion barrier and remain productive for eighteen, nineteen, even twenty hours, but in his room at USIC he was ready to drop after twelve or thirteen. Nor did he find it easy to fall asleep. He would lie on his firm, well-sprung mattress and stare up at the featureless grey ceiling above him, counting the pock-marks, and each time he began to drift into unconsciousness he would be nudged back into wakefulness by a flash of confusion: Why was the ceiling blank? Where had the beautiful paintings gone?

The only thing the USIC base was essential for was the opportunity to read Bea’s messages. Even if he wasn’t answering them as often as he should, he still wanted to receive them. As for his laxness, well, that was partly down to how depressed he felt in his quarters. It was obvious he should be writing to Bea in the field, where the action was. How many times had he wished he could send her a quick message immediately after some significant experience with the Oasans, when it was fresh in his thoughts? Dozens! Maybe hundreds! And yet, he had a suspicion that USIC had deliberately fixed things so he couldn’t make contact with her anywhere but here. But why? There must be a way to install some sort of electrical generator or relay apparatus in the Oasan settlement! These people could build rain centrifuges, for goodness’ sake — they should be able to solve a modest challenge like this. He’d have to discuss the practicalities with Grainger. She kept saying she was there to help. Well, she should help.

If he could communicate with Bea in the field, he’d have the best of both worlds. Out in the field, his mind was clearer, he was more relaxed. Plus, on a practical level, he’d be making better use of the available time. On his mission, there were regular intervals when he must concede that his day was over (regardless of how brilliantly the sun was shining) and he must sit in his bed behind the pulpit, reviewing recent progress and preparing for sleep. Sometimes he’d sit idle for hours, when his mind refused to shut down but his body was weary and the Oasans had all gone home. Those would be the ideal times for writing to Bea. If he could have a Shoot installed in his church, next to his bed, he could write to her at length, each day — each twenty-four hour period, that is. Or even oftener. Their communion would be more like conversation and less like… like whatever it threatened to become.

Dear Peter,

It was such an enormous relief and pleasure to receive your letter. I’ve been missing you so much. Even more so because I’m realising how incredibly rare it is — yet how incredibly NECESSARY — to be in touch with at least one person in this life who we can love and trust. Oh sure, we discuss stuff with colleagues at work and we do things for people in need and we have conversations with strangers and shopkeepers and ‘friends’ we’ve known for years but don’t feel close to at all. It’s all fine as far as it goes but sometimes I feel as if half my soul is missing.

Please don’t obsess about what you SHOULD write — just WRITE. Don’t hold back! Every time you decide against mentioning an incident, it stays invisible and I’m kept in the dark. Every little detail you describe lights up a precious glimpse of you.

It all sounds fascinating and exciting. And puzzling. Can the Oasans really be as benign as you suggest? No dark side at all? I would imagine they’re keen to make a good impression on you, but who knows what will emerge when they relax and ‘let it all hang out’. I’m sure you’ll find that they’re more individual and eccentric than they appear. Every creature is. Even cats who are from the same breed and look totally identical reveal all sorts of quirks when you get to know them.

Speaking of which… Joshua is becoming VERY neurotic. The period when the bathroom window was broken and all the doors were slamming in the wind really didn’t do him any good. He jerks at any unfamiliar noise and has taken to sleeping under the bed. I hear him snoring, rustling about amongst the shoes and tissues and defunct alarm clocks and whatever else is under there. I’ve tried to drag him out but he just crawls straight back. He’s jumpy when he eats, too, glancing behind him every few mouthfuls. I’ve got him on my lap as I type this and I really need to pee but I don’t want to dislodge him in case he disappears for the rest of the night. Yesterday I was in the kitchen and I sat down to read an incomprehensible letter from the gas people, and Joshua jumped on my lap. I stayed put for ages with nothing to do and my feet turning to ice. Then an ambulance passed by the house with siren wailing and he jumped off. Should I take him to a cat psychiatrist, I wonder? Right now he’s purring. I wish you could hear him. I wish HE could hear YOU and understand that you haven’t left forever.

More about your letter…I will try not to talk so much about the awful things that are going on in the world right now. I understand that you’re in a very different headspace up there, and it must be hard to absorb all the details and implications of what’s happening here. As long as you realise that it’s not easy for me to absorb this stuff either. It’s equally overwhelming and mind-boggling for me. And terrifying.

But today is a good day. My hand is feeling better, healing up nicely. I’m hoping to be back at work next week. The house has just about dried out and the bathroom is back to normal. And I got a letter from the insurance company which, if I interpret the arcane language correctly, suggests that they will cover the damage. Which is a big surprise, I must admit — thank the Lord! The tabloids have been running a campaign of ‘naming and shaming’ the insurance companies that are reneging on claims — lots of picture stories about decent, obese working-class people paying premiums all their lives and being badly let down when their house gets trashed by vandals or whatever. EPIDEMIC OF BETRAYAL, it says here. Such big words for a Daily Express headline! I wonder if this is the first time they’ve had a headline with two trisyllabic words in it. What’s the world coming to! (Sorry, I promised I’d go easy on that topic, didn’t I?)

As you know, I don’t usually read the tabloids but the Daily Express promised a free Bounty bar for every reader and it’s too long since I’ve had one of those. Chocolate (or the lack of it) looms large in my life right now and I’ve become an expert in where to get my fix. Biscuit-based bars like Twix and Kit Kats are relatively easy to procure, and there are plenty of Snickers knock-offs that have Arabic writing all over them. But there’s something about the insides of a Bounty bar — that almost camphorous aftertaste that goes right up your sinuses — that nothing else can supply. At least not if you’re pregnant. But it turned out that the ‘for every reader’ offer was a bit of a scam. It was a voucher that you had to redeem at particular shops that don’t exist around here.

But, Bounty bars aside, I’m pretty happy with the food situation today. I’ve just had a gluttonous fry-up of eggs, tinned mushrooms and bacon. The eggs and bacon came from a street stall, a sort of farmers market that was set up in the car park of where the Tesco used to be. The eggs aren’t stamped or dated or anything, they’re different sizes with feathers and chicken crap stuck to them. They’re fresh and delicious and I doubt very much if these farmers are legally allowed to sell them direct to the public. And the bacon was just wrapped in paper and sliced quite crudely — sliced by the farmer’s very own hand, with a knife! Again, probably against regulations. The market was doing brisk business even though it wasn’t advertised. The farmers were restocking their trestle tables from out of the backs of their vans, and there wasn’t much left in there. Good luck to them, I say. Maybe the collapse of big corporations won’t be as disastrous as everybody’s been saying. Maybe ordinary people will just trade and sell things locally — the way we SHOULD have been doing all along. I always thought that buying bacon that’s been transported all the way from Denmark was crazy anyway.

I shouldn’t be eating bacon at all, I suppose. Billy gave me a lecture about meat-eating when we were on our way to the cat show. He’s a vegetarian. So was Rachel, but she relapsed. That was the word Billy used. He and his sister are quarrelling a lot — maybe that’s one of the reasons Billy is so depressed. Sheila says he lives on baked beans, toast and bananas, because he’s not actually that keen on vegetables. A very English vegetarian, then! But he’s right about the suffering of factory-farmed animals.

It’s so complicated, isn’t it? Animals suffer, but Jesus ate meat, and he hung around with fishermen. I’ve been craving fish lately — I must need the vitamin D — and I don’t feel any guilt when I squash a bunch of sardines onto a piece of toast, even if I can see their little eyes staring up at me. They’re feeding our baby, that’s how I rationalise it.

You haven’t talked much about the personnel at USIC. Are you still ministering to them as well, or are you focusing solely on the Oasans? Remember that the unwilling and uninterested are just as precious as those who’ve already given their hearts to Christ. I imagine there must be serious problems among the USIC community, working so far from home in what I suppose are very challenging conditions. Is there a lot of alcohol abuse? Drug abuse? Gambling? Sexual harassment? I imagine there must be.

I phoned up Rebecca to discuss when I’ll be going back to work, and she mentioned she’s mostly been in A&E and there’s been a shocking increase in alcohol-related violence and injury. Sorry, does that count as me telling you about calamities befalling the world? It’s hardly on the scale of earthquakes or large corporations going bust. But it’s very noticeable on the streets of our town when I go out for a walk in the mornings. I’m certain there never used to be vomit on EVERY corner. I wish children and old people didn’t have to see that. I’ve seriously considered hauling a bucket and mop all around the neighbourhood myself. Yesterday I even filled a bucket with soapy water, but when I tried to lift it, I realised it was a bad idea. So I just mopped the vomit off our front porch. Every man must bear his own burdens before bearing another’s, as Galatians says, or something to that effect. You would know the verbatim verse, no doubt.

He sat at the Shoot and flexed his fingers. He’d switched on the air conditioning again and the room was cool. He was dressed in his dishdasha, socks and a pullover, feeling reasonably comfortable if somewhat ridiculous. He had prayed. God had confirmed that there was nothing more urgent or important right now than making contact with his wife. The mission was going well; it could go better still if he devoted himself to it every minute of every day, but God did not expect such superhuman dedication. In another place, far away from this one, God had joined together a man and a woman, and the man had allowed himself to neglect his wife. It was time to make amends.

Dear Bea, he wrote.

I’ve written too little and too late. I’m sorry. I love you very much. I wish you were here with me. Today I found out that Ella Reinman — that skinny woman at the USIC meetings who looked like a meerkat — was some sort of psychologist who was assessing you, and that she disqualified you from coming here. This news upset me enormously. I felt so outraged on your behalf. Who is she to judge your suitability for a mission like this on the basis of a few snatches of conversation? She only saw you a couple of times and you’d come straight from work and your head was still full of that. You’d had no time to unwind. I can still see that Reinman woman so clearly — her weird head sticking out of her cashmere polo-neck. Judging you.

The sun is going down here. Finally. It’s a lovely time of day and lasts for many hours.

I will try harder to paint you a picture. It’s been a shock to me how bad I am at describing things in letters. It’s a shortcoming we never had to face before, being together every day of our lives. It’s made me read the Epistles in a different light. Paul, James, Peter and John didn’t say much about their context, did they? Scholars have to dig between the lines to get even the faintest clue about where the apostles might have lived at the time. If only Paul could have spent a few words on describing his prison…

Speaking of which, my quarters here are driving me

He paused, then deleted the incomplete sentence. To complain about his living conditions to Bea, who had recently suffered so much discomfort and inconvenience, would be in bad taste.

Speaking of Paul, he tried again, the verse you alluded to is a bit different in its verbatim form and I’m not sure I agree that ‘bearing one’s own burdens first’ is what Galatians 6:5 is really getting at. It’s a tricky chapter and the focus changes from verse to verse but overall I think Paul is talking about striking a balance between dissuading others from sin and keeping in mind that we are sinners ourselves. It’s not the most crystal-clear passage he ever wrote (and this one was hand-written, too, not dictated like some of the other epistles!) and I must admit that if I were trying to paraphrase it for the Oasans I’d have my job cut out for me. Fortunately, there are plenty of other Bible passages whose meaning is much more transparent and which I’m confident will be vivid and meaningful for my new friends in Christ.

Again he paused. Pictures. Bea needed pictures. Where were the pictures?

I’m sitting at the shoot wearing my dishdasha and the olive-green pullover and black socks. I look like a complete berk, I imagine. My hair is growing longer all the time. I’ve considered hacking it shorter with some scissors or even establishing a relationship with the USIC hairdresser, but I’ve decided to let it go until I’m back with you again. You cut my hair better than anyone. Plus, it’s a like a symbol of what we do for each other. I don’t want to lose those little rituals.

He thought some more.

I’m so glad to hear that your hand is healing up. You need that hand, and not just for work! I wish I could feel it pressed against the small of my back. Your hand is warm and always so dry. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just that it’s never clammy, it’s always soft and dry, like the finest leather. Like an incredibly expensive glove without any seams. Oh boy, that sounds terrible. I don’t have any future as a metaphysical love poet, do I?

Sorry to hear about Joshua. Poor thing, what a state he’s in. All I can say to give us hope is that although cats are creatures of habit, the habits don’t necessarily stay the same forever. Remember how Joshua went through a phase of attacking/chewing your nursing shoes and then he suddenly moved on to something else? And remember how when we had poor old Titus, we thought we’d have to take him back to the animal shelter, because he went through a phase of howling all night and we were completely exhausted? And then one day he just stopped doing it. So let’s not despair about Joshua. The broken window and the wind have obviously spooked him but now that the house is warm and quiet again, I’m sure he’ll calm down. I think you’re wise not to pull him out from under the bed. He’ll come out himself when he’s ready. I also don’t think there’s any need for you to sit in a state of nervous tension when he’s on your lap, afraid to move in case he jumps off. He will sense that you’re anxious and it may reinforce his own anxiety. My advice is, make a gentle fuss of him when he first jumps on your lap. Enjoy him being there. Then, when you need to go to the toilet or fetch something from another room, tell him affectionately that you’ve got to get up now, and lift him smoothly and swiftly down onto the floor. Stroke his head once or twice and then walk away. Train him to understand that these interruptions are temporary and no big deal.

My pastoral role here in the USIC base has been pretty limited, I must admit. I’ve done one funeral service, as you know, and afterwards I had a good discussion with a few of the mourners who stayed behind, particularly a woman called Maneely who said she’d felt the presence of God and seemed keen to take it further. But I haven’t seen her since except for once in the corridor coming out of the mess hall where she said ‘Hi’ in a nice-to-see-you-but-don’t-stop-me-I’m-busy sort of tone. Everyone is busy here. Not in a frantic way, just getting on with what they do. They’re not as low-key as the Oasans, but there’s definitely less stress than you’d expect.

In fact, I’d have to say that the USIC personnel are an amazingly well-behaved and tolerant lot. They don’t quarrel much at all. Just a bit of teasing and low-level bickering sometimes, as you’d expect in any context where a bunch of very different people are trying to get along. As far as I’m aware — and I’ve only just realised this, talking to you now — there’s no police force here. And the strange thing is, it doesn’t seem strange, if you know what I mean. All my life, when I’ve walked around the streets or been in workplaces or at school, I’ve immediately sensed how instinctively, how INTENSELY people resent other people. Everyone’s continually at the limit of their patience, on the brink of losing their cool. You sense the potential for violence. And so the concept of a police force seems logical and necessary. But in a context where everyone’s a grown-up and they’re just getting on with their appointed tasks, who needs a bunch of guys in uniform circling around? It seems absurd.

Of course, part of the credit has to go to the booze-free environment. In theory, alcohol is available here — it costs a preposterous amount, a substantial chunk of the USIC staff’s weekly wage — but nobody buys it. They occasionally make jokes about intending to buy it, they josh each other about procuring booze the way people josh about having sex with people they’d never truly have sex with. But when it comes down to it, they don’t seem to need it. Some of the men make references to taking drugs, too. I’ve learned that this is just male bravado, or maybe an affirmation of who they used to be, once upon a time. I can sniff drugs a mile off (so to speak) and I’m willing to bet there aren’t any here. It’s not that the USIC staff are fitness freaks or health nuts — they’re quite a mixed bag of physical specimens, with some borderline obese ones, some runty ones, and quite a few who look like they used to inflict a lot of punishment on themselves. But they’re in another phase now. (Like Joshua soon will be, God willing!)

What else did you raise? Oh yes, gambling, I’ve seen no evidence of that, either. I’ve asked plenty of people how they fill their time. ‘We work,’ they say. And when I specify ‘But what do you do in your leisure hours?’, they cite harmless activities — they read books about their area of expertise, they flip through old magazines, they go to the gym, they swim, they play cards (not for money), they wash their clothes, they knit fancy covers for pillows, they hang out in the mess hall and talk about work with their colleagues. I’ve listened in on the most extraordinary discussions. A pitch-black Nigerian and a pale, blond Swede will be sitting shoulder to shoulder, drinking coffee and swapping ideas about thermodynamics non-stop for an hour, in vocabulary of which I understand about three words in every ten. (Mostly ‘and’, ‘if’ and ‘so’!) At the end of the hour, the Swede will say, ‘So, my idea’s dead in the water, eh?’ and the other guy will just shrug and flash him a big grin. That’s normal for a Tuesday evening here! (I use ‘Tuesday’as a figure of speech, of course. I haven’t the foggiest notion what day it is anymore.)

Oh, and another leisure activity. A bunch of them also sing in a choir — a glee club, they call it. Easy, popular old songs. (No Frank Sinatra, I’ve been assured by a lady who urged me to join, but nothing gloomy or difficult either.) I haven’t seen any evidence that any of them write stories or paint or sculpt. They’re average people, not in the least arty. Well, when I say average, I don’t mean of average intellect, because they’re obviously highly skilled and smart. I mean they’re interested only in practicalities.

As for sexual harassment

There was a knock on the door. He saved what he’d written as a draft and went to meet the visitor. It was Grainger. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen from weeping, and the sight of him standing there in a gown, pullover and socks was not sufficiently comical to bring a smile to her lips. She looked in desperate need of a hug.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.

19. He would learn it if it killed him

On Peter’s bed lay a pile of things Grainger could not quite identify. Or at least, she was obviously having trouble imagining what the hell they were doing there.

‘Let me help you out,’ said Peter with a smile. ‘They’re balls of wool.’

She didn’t comment or even say ‘Uh-huh’, just stood motionless, staring at the bed. There were only three possible places for a visitor to sit in Peter’s quarters — two chairs and the bed. One chair was positioned in front of the Shoot, whose screen displayed his private correspondence with his wife, the other chair was occupied by a large stack of papers, and the bed was covered with a mound of multicoloured balls of wool. Purple, yellow, white, baby blue, scarlet, grey, lime green and many more. Each had a large sewing needle stuck in it, trailing furry thread.

‘I’m making booklets,’ he explained, motioning to the stack of papers. He fetched up a finished one and splayed it open against his chest, showing her the woollen binding sewn through the folded middle.

She blinked in bemusement. ‘We could have given you a stapler,’ she said.

‘I tried that,’ he said. ‘And discovered that the Oasans are worried about pricking themselves on staples. “Needle-needle hiding from finger”, as they put it.’

‘Glue?’

‘Glue would just dissolve in the watery atmosphere.’

She continued to stare. He guessed she was thinking there were too many colours, too much wool, for the purpose.

‘This way, each Jesus Lover can have their own personal copy of Scripture,’ he said. ‘The different coloured thread makes each one unique. That, and my… er… haphazard sewing technique.’

Grainger raked a hand through her hair, in a this-is-all-too-weird gesture.

Peter tossed the booklet onto the wool-pile, and hastened to remove the stack of Scripture printouts from the chair. He motioned to Grainger to sit. She sat. She rested her elbows on her knees, clasped her hands, stared at the floor. Thirty seconds of silence followed, which, in the circumstances, felt quite long. When she finally spoke, it was in a dull, uninflected tone, as if she were musing to herself.

‘I’m sorry Austin showed you that dead body. I didn’t know he was going to do that.’

‘I’ve seen bodies before,’ he said gently.

‘It’s horrible the way they still look like the person but the person is gone.’

‘The person is never gone,’ he said. ‘But yes, it’s sad.’

Grainger raised a hand to her mouth and, with abrupt vehemence, like a cat, chewed at the nail of her pinkie. Just as abruptly, she desisted. ‘Where did you get the wool from?’

‘One of the USIC personnel gave it to me.’

‘Springer?’

‘Of course.’

‘Gay as pink ink, that guy.’

‘That’s not a problem here, surely?’

Grainger sighed and let her head sag low. ‘Nothing is a problem here. Haven’t you noticed?’

He gave her another half a minute, but it was as though she was mesmerised by the carpet. Her bosom rose and fell. She was wearing a white cotton top with sleeves not quite long enough to cover the scars on her forearms. Each time she breathed in, her breasts swelled against the thin fabric of her top.

‘You’ve been crying,’ he said.

‘I haven’t.’

‘You’ve been crying.’

She raised her head and looked him in the eyes. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘What’s causing you this pain?’

She managed a smirk. ‘You tell me, doctor.’

He knelt at her feet and got himself comfortable. ‘Grainger, I’m no good at this cat and mouse stuff. You came here to talk to me. I’m ready. Your heart is grieving. Please tell me why.’

‘I guess it’s what you’d call… family problems.’ She fiddled with her fingertips. He realised she’d once been a smoker and was hankering for the comfort of a cigarette — which made him realise, furthermore, how strange it was that none of the other USIC personnel exhibited those mannerisms, despite the high likelihood that some of them had been heavy smokers in their earlier lives.

‘People keep telling me that nobody here has any family to speak of,’ he said. ‘La Légion Étrangère, as Tuska puts it. But yes, I haven’t forgotten. I pray for Charlie Grainger every day. How is he?’

Grainger snorted and, because she’d just been crying, sprayed some snot onto her lips. With a grunt of irritation, she wiped her face on her sleeve. ‘God doesn’t tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Tell you if the people you’re praying for are OK.’

‘God isn’t… my employee,’ said Peter. ‘He’s not obliged to send me progress reports. Also, He’s well aware that I don’t actually know your dad. Let’s be honest: Charlie Grainger is just a name to me, until you tell me more.’

‘Are you saying God needs more data before he can…?’

‘No, no, I mean that God doesn’t need me to tell Him who Charlie Grainger is. God knows and understands your father, right down to… to the molecules in his eyelashes. The purpose of my prayer is not to bring your dad to His attention. It’s to express… ’ Peter groped for the right word, even though he’d had this same conversation, more or less, with many people in the past. Each time felt unique. ‘It’s to convey to God my love for another person. It’s my opportunity to solemnly voice my concern for the people I care about.’

‘But you just said my dad is just a name to you.’

‘I meant you. I care about you.’

Grainger sat rigid, jaw clenched and eyes unblinking. Tears welled up, glimmered, and fell. For a few seconds it looked as if she might start sobbing outright, then she pulled herself together — and got annoyed. Annoyance, Peter realised, was her defence mechanism, a prickliness that protected her soft underbelly like porcupine spines.

‘If prayer is just a way of voicing concern,’ she said, ‘what’s the point of it? It’s like politicians expressing their “concern” about wars and human rights abuses and all that other bad stuff they’re gonna sit back and let happen anyway. It’s just empty words, it doesn’t change a damn thing.’

Peter shook his head. It felt like years since he’d been challenged like this. In his ministry back home, it was an almost daily encounter.

‘I understand how you feel,’ he said. ‘But God isn’t a politician. Or a policeman. He’s the creator of the universe. He’s an unimaginably huge force, a trillion times bigger than the solar system. And of course, when things go wrong in our lives, it’s natural to be angry, and to want to hold someone responsible. Someone who isn’t us. But blaming God… It’s like blaming the laws of physics for allowing suffering, or blaming the principle of gravity for a war.’

‘I never used the word “blame”,’ she said. ‘And you’re distorting the issue. I wouldn’t get down on my knees and pray to the laws of physics, ’cause the laws of physics can’t hear me. God is supposed to be on the case.’

‘You make Him sound — ‘

‘I just wish,’ she said, ‘that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.’ And, with a strangled gasp of pain, she broke down and started weeping aloud. Peter leaned forward, still kneeling, and put his arm round her back as she convulsed. They were awkwardly matched, but she leaned forward in the chair and pressed her small head into his shoulder. Her hair tickled his cheek, arousing and confusing him with its intimate softness and alien smell. He missed Bea with a rush of distress.

‘I didn’t say He didn’t care,’ he murmured. ‘He cares about us very much. So much that He became one of us. He took human form. Can you imagine that? The creator of everything, the shaper of galaxies, got Himself born as a human baby, and grew up in a lower-class family in a small village in the Middle East.’

Still sobbing, she laughed into his pullover, possibly snotting it. ‘You don’t really believe that.’

‘Believe me, I do.’

She laughed again. ‘You are such a nutcase.’

‘No more than anyone else here, surely.’

They kept still for a minute, not speaking. Grainger had relaxed now that her anger was purged. Peter drew comfort from her warm body — more comfort than he’d expected when he reached out to her. No one, since BG and Severin had hauled him out of his crib on the flight, had made contact with his flesh other than to shake his hand in greeting. The Oasans were not touchy-feely people, not even with each other. They occasionally stroked each other on the shoulder with gloved hands, but that was about it, and they possessed no lips to kiss with. It had been a long time — too long — since he’d had this contact with a fellow creature.

But his back was getting sore from the unfamiliar position; muscles he seldom used were under strain. If he didn’t break the embrace soon, he would lose his balance. The arm which was now laid supportively around her midriff would suddenly bear down on her with his body’s weight.

‘Tell me a bit about your dad,’ he said.

She shifted back in the chair, allowing him to move away without appearing to have done so deliberately, just as he’d hoped. A glance confirmed that the weeping hadn’t done her any good — her face was blotched, puffy and unfeminine, and she knew it. He looked gallantly askance while she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve, pecked at her hair with her fingers, and generally tried to compose herself.

‘I don’t know much about my dad,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him since my mom died. That was twenty-five years ago. I was fifteen.’

Peter did the maths. It wasn’t the right time for a compliment, but Grainger looked much younger than forty. Even after a bout of crying.

‘But you know he’s sick?’ he prompted. ‘You told me he was going to die soon.’

‘I guess. He’s an old man now. I shouldn’t care. He’s had his time.’ She fidgeted with a phantom pack of cigarettes again. ‘But he’s my dad.’

‘If you haven’t had contact for so long, isn’t it possible he’s passed away already? Or maybe he’s living in retirement somewhere, enjoying a healthy, happy old age.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’ She shot him a mistrustful look, then softened, as though willing to give him another chance. ‘Do you ever get intuitions?’

‘Intuitions?’

‘When you get a feeling about something, something you’re sure is happening right at that instant, and there’s no way you can technically know it, but you just know it. And then a little while later, you find out… you get absolute proof, from somebody else maybe, some eyewitness, that what you thought was happening really did happen, exactly when you thought of it, in exactly the way you pictured it. Like it was being beamed straight into your brain.’

He held her gaze, resisting the reflex urge to nod. There seemed no acceptable response to her question except to agree and start swapping anecdotes about uncanny hunches that had been proved true. The thing was, he’d never had much interest in psychic phenomena, and he and Bea had often noted that the sort of people who were most deeply enthralled by the science of the supernatural were also least able to spot the glaringly obvious reasons why their own lives were in chaos. He couldn’t say that to Grainger, of course. He was just about to say something diplomatic about how faith was a bit like an intuition that didn’t depend on rare coincidences, when she pressed on:

‘Anyway, a few months ago I got this intuition about my dad. I saw him in my mind. He was being wheeled down the corridor of a hospital, on a trolley, real fast, by a bunch of medics who were like, “Gangway!” It was so clear, it was like I was running along behind. He was conscious but confused, his arm was attached to an IV drip but he was fumbling around for the pocket of his pants, looking for his wallet. “I can pay, I can pay!” He knew he was in deep shit and he was terrified he’d be refused treatment. His face… it wasn’t like I remembered, it was unrecognisable, he looked like an old bum that they just scooped off the street. But I knew he was my dad.’

‘And have you had any other… intuitions about him since then?’

She closed her eyes, tired out by revisiting her clairvoyance, or by her intimacy with him. ‘I think he’s hanging in there.’ She didn’t sound at all sure.

‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘I’m praying for him.’

‘Even though it makes no difference to the shaper of galaxies, huh?’

‘Grainger… ’ he began, but the formality of the surname suddenly exasperated him. ‘Can’t I call you Alex? Or Alexandra, if that’s what it’s short for?’

She froze as if he had just put his hand between her legs. ‘How did you…?’

‘You wrote to my wife. Remember?’

She considered it for a moment. ‘Stick to Grainger,’ she said, but not coldly. And then, when he looked perplexed, she elaborated: ‘Surnames just work better here. I guess it reminds us that we’ve all got jobs to do.’

He sensed she was finished with the encounter. She had got from it, or failed to get from it, whatever she’d come for. He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy — insignificant in itself — to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

‘Spoken like a trouper,’ he said. ‘But tell me, Grainger: what do you think my job is?’ He was thinking that maybe the conversation could still be steered back into the waters of faith.

‘Keeping the Oasans happy,’ she said, ‘so they keep helping us set up this place. Or at least so they don’t get in the way.’

‘That and nothing else?’

She shrugged. ‘Making Springer’s day by taking an interest in his gross collection of knitted cushion covers.’

‘Hey, he’s a lovely guy,’ protested Peter. ‘So friendly.’

Grainger stood up to leave. ‘Of course he is, of course he is. Friendlyfriendlyfriendly. We’re all friendly, aren’t we? Pussycats, as Tuska says.’ She paused for effect, then, in a clear, serenely dismissive voice that chilled him to his soul: ‘Fucked-up pussycats. With their balls cut off.’

A few minutes later, alone and ill-at-ease, Peter resumed his letter to Bea.

As for sexual harassment, there doesn’t seem to be any of that either.

He stared at the screen for a while, trying to decide where to go from here. He felt compassion for Grainger, certainly, and wanted to help her, but he had to admit that wrestling with her troubled spirit had drained him. Strange, because in his ministry back home he was exposed to troubled spirits every day, and it never tired him at all: indeed, he’d always be energised by the thought that this encounter he was having with an angrily defensive soul might lead to a breakthrough. It could happen anytime. You could never predict the moment when a person would finally be able to see that they’d been rejecting their own Creator, fighting against Love itself. For years they blundered and stumbled through life wearing cumbersome armour that was supposed to protect them, and then one day they saw it for the chafing, imprisoning, useless baggage it was, and cast it off, allowing Jesus to enter them. Those moments made everything worthwhile.

I’ve just spent some time with Grainger, he wrote, figuring he should share the experience with Bea while it was still fresh. Who, contrary to what you assumed in one of your messages, is a woman. She won’t let me call her by her first name, though. Nobody here does. Even the ones who are very friendly prefer to stick to surnames.

Anyway, Grainger is by far the most vulnerable person I’ve met at the USIC base. She can be in a fine mood one second and then suddenly it’s as if you’ve pressed the wrong button and she changes in a flash. Not nasty, just irritable or withdrawn. But she opened up more today than she has on previous occasions. She’s harbouring some deep, unresolved hurts, and it would take a very long time to get to the bottom of them, no doubt about that. It’s a wonder she was selected for this team, actually. She must have come across more grounded and easy-going during the interviews than she does now. Or maybe she really WAS more grounded at the time. There are times of our lives when we feel indestructible even though quite a lot of things are going wrong, and other times when everything is going well yet we feel anxious and fragile from the moment we wake up. Not even the most steadfast Christian is immune to the mysteries of equilibrium. Anyway, Grainger’s main source of grief seems to be a difficult relationship with her father, who she hasn’t seen in 25 years. I’m sure you can relate to that! In fact, I’m sure you would be the ideal person to discuss these things with her, if only you were here.

Speaking of which, I found out the real reason why you are NOT here. A few hours ago I met

In the pause while he searched his brain for Doctor Austin’s name, he recalled that he’d already written about this at the beginning of the message, before Grainger interrupted him. He deleted the redundant words, feeling more tired every second.

I’m going to say goodbye and send this letter now. It was hanging around unfinished all the time that Grainger was here and I’m ashamed that I’ve kept you waiting so long between responses. You are right to chide me for my perfectionism. I’m going to do better from now on! (Joke) Speed up my responses. Send this one flying towards you while I’m working on the next one.

Love,

Peter.

True to his word, he sent the message, then opened up another of Bea’s letters and refamiliarised himself with its contents. This time, he let go the idea that he must dutifully address each and every point she raised. She didn’t need that. What she needed was two simple things: an acknowledgement that he’d read her letter, and some sort of message from him in return. His eyes lit upon the part where she described the almost-healed wound on her hand: ‘pale and pink and a bit waxy from the swaddling, but looking good!’ Immediately he began to compose a letter of his own.

Dear Bea,

I’m so happy to hear that your hand is healing so well. I was horrified to hear you’d hurt yourself and this is a great relief. Please don’t be in a hurry to go back to work. You need to be fully well in order to take care of others. Plus there are lots of bugs lurking around in the hospital, as you know — and I’m not just referring to

He pondered for a minute or two, to recall another name that eluded him, but it wasn’t retrievable, despite the fact that he and Bea had mentioned this person every day, probably, for the last two years.

your paranoid colleague with the curly hair.

Despite making good progress here, I’m missing you and wishing you were with me. Upset that you were disqualified. For my own selfish sake, of course, but also considering the bigger picture. Whatever USIC’s criteria were, they made a big mistake. Someone like you is exactly what’s missing here. The whole set-up feels… how can I put this? Quite overwhelmingly (overweeningly?) male. I mean, there are plenty of women around, but they don’t make much difference to the prevailing atmosphere, the esprit de corps, if you like. It’s a kind of camaraderie that you associate with the armed forces or maybe a major construction project (which I suppose it is). The women don’t rock the boat, they don’t try to feminise the place, they just adjust their natures to fit in.

Maybe that’s an unfair generalisation. After all, women shouldn’t have to conform to preconceptions of femaleness I have in my head. But even so, I must admit that this base is not an environment I feel comfortable in, and I can’t help thinking that it would be hugely improved if there could be a few women like you added to the mix.

That’s not to suggest that there are lots of women like you in the world! Of course there is only one.

As for gender politics amongst the Oasans, that’s a tricky proposition. I still haven’t got to the bottom of their sexes, yet — they don’t understand my questions on that score and I don’t understand their answers! From what I’ve observed, they don’t have genitals where you’d expect. They do have children — not very frequently, I gather, but it does happen, so some of my Jesus Lovers are mothers. I wouldn’t say that the ones that are mothers behave more maternally than the ones who aren’t. They’re ALL quite nurturing and connected. In their own way. I’ve grown very fond of them. I think you would, too, if you could have shared this adventure with me.

Another thing I should say about them is that they’re very kind. Very caring. It’s not evident at first, and then it dawns on you. During our most recent gathering in the church, we were all singing, and suddenly one of the paintings fell off the ceiling (not fastened securely enough — it’s difficult when you’re not allowed to use nails, screws or other sharp objects!). The painting fell right onto Jesus Lover Five’s hand. We all got a big fright. Fortunately the painting wasn’t very heavy and Lover Five was OK — nothing broken, just a bruise. But the way the others rallied round her was extraordinary. They each took turns to embrace and stroke her with the utmost tenderness. I have never seen such an outpouring of communal love and concern. She went very shy — and she’s usually quite verbal! She’s my favourite.

Again he paused. This praising of other females — human or otherwise — was perhaps not so diplomatic, if his own wife was feeling insecure. He and Bea had always had the sort of relationship where either of them could feel free to comment on the admirable points of anyone, regardless of gender, confident that their own relationship was rock-solid and inviolable. But even so… He deleted ‘my favourite’ and wrote:

the one I communicate with best.

There was still something not quite right there.

But of course none of this matters as much to me as our rare and precious relationship, he wrote. I had such a vivid memory of our wedding not long ago. And your wedding dress, and how you wore it in the years since.

Please write again soon. I know you’ve written a lot already and I’ve been very lax in responding, but it doesn’t mean I don’t value the contact from you. I do miss you terribly. And I’m sorry I gave you the impression that certain topics are out of bounds. Write about anything you like, darling. I’m your husband. We have to be there for each other.

Love,

Peter

The words were sincere but felt a little forced. That is, he would have spoken them spontaneously if Bea had been cradled in his arms, her head nestled under his shoulder, but… Typing them onto a screen and sending them into space was a different thing. It changed the colour and tone of the sentiments, the way a cheaply photocopied photograph loses warmth and detail. His love for his wife was being cartoonised and he lacked what it took to display it as the vividly figurative painting it should be.

He opened a third letter of Bea’s, intending to fire off a third reply, but even as he read ‘Dear Peter’ and anticipated typing ‘Dear Bea’, he worried that she might think he was trying to earn Brownie points. Worried, too, that it might be true. He scanned her message, a long one. There was something in the second paragraph about a bunch of mail that had arrived recently, including a letter from the council urging him to re-register on the electoral roll. A form to be filled in because ‘your situation has changed’. How did they know? Bea couldn’t figure out if this was just a more aggressive kind of routine canvassing or a real threat that might have actual consequences. But what was he supposed to do about it? And what did it matter? Did she think he was anxious not to lose the right to vote in the next elections? In case the wrong faceless bureaucrat got in? Why was she telling him this?

Write about anything you like, darling, he’d just told her. He might as well have added: Except the stuff I don’t want to deal with.

He swung off his chair, knelt on the floor, clasped his hands between his knees and prayed.

‘Lord, please help me. I’m tired and confused, and the challenges I’m facing feel beyond my powers just now. Give me strength and clarity of purpose and… poise. My wonderful Bea is lonely and hassled: grant her energy and focus too. Thank You, Lord, for healing her hand. Thank You, also, for revealing Yourself to Jesus Lover Fourteen in her hour of need. She’ll be all right now, I hope. I pray for Jesus Lover Thirty-Seven, whose brother still rejects him for his faith in You. Give him comfort. I pray that in the fullness of time, his brother may come to us too. Please sharpen my thoughts and perceptions when I’m next dealing with Jesus Lover Eight. There’s something he wants from me that he’s too shy to say and I’m too stupid to guess. I pray for Sheila, Rachel and Billy Frame — especially Billy as he continues to struggle with his parents’ divorce. I pray for Ray Sherwood as his Parkinson’s gets worse.’

He faltered. Maybe Ray was dead by now. It had been a long time since he’d had any news. Ray and his Parkinson’s had been a recurring feature in his prayers for years, for no better reason than it seemed callous to cease praying for him just because they’d lost touch. Besides, Peter still cared. Ray’s face, smiling but tinged with fear at the grim future he and his treacherous body were heading into, manifested clearly in his memory.

‘I pray for Charlie Grainger,’ he went on. ‘I pray he may see his daughter again one day. I pray for Grainger. I sense she’s in danger of being poisoned by bitterness. And Tuska: a lifetime of disillusionment has given him a hard skin. Soften his skin, Lord, if it be your will. I pray for Maneely. I pray that the moment when she glimpsed her need for You may prove to be more than just a fleeting impulse. Please may it strengthen into a serious search for Christ. I pray for Coretta, who named this place and had such hopes that her life would get better rather than worse. Make her life better, Lord.’

His stomach was rumbling. But he knew that he’d not yet given God the naked sincerity He deserved. If he left his prayer at this point, there would be something practised, even slightly glib about it. ‘I pray for the people of the Maldives and North Korea and… uh… Guatemala. They’re not real to me as individuals, and I’m so ashamed of that. But they’re real to You. Forgive me for, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen.’

Unsatisfied still, he reached for his Bible and opened it at random, allowing God to decide which page would come under his eye. He’d done this thousands of times, probably wearing out the spines of several Bibles. Today, the page chosen by the Almighty was 1267, and the first words Peter saw were: ‘Do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.’ It was Paul’s exhortation to Timothy in 68 AD, but it was also God’s advice to Peter right now. Full proof of his ministry? What was full proof? Wasn’t he already doing as much as he could? Evidently not, or God wouldn’t have directed his gaze to these verses. But what else should or could he do? He scanned the rest of the page for clues. The word ‘learn’ recurred several times. He glanced across at page 1266. Another verse leapt out at him: ‘Study to shew thyself approved unto God.’ Study? Study the Bible? He’d devoted endless hours to that. So… what was God telling him to study?

He walked over to his window and peered through the glass. The sun had risen but was still quite low in the sky, half-blinding him with its glare. He cupped a hand against his brow. Out on the deserted tarmac, he saw an optical illusion of a legion of human bodies edging forward from behind a far wing of the base. He blinked to make the illusion vanish. It didn’t.

A few minutes later, he joined the throng of USIC personnel outside. It seemed the entire population of the base had left the building and was walking en masse towards the scrubland beyond the tarmac. Peter’s first thought was that this must be a fire drill, or that there’d been some sort of accident that had filled the base with toxic fumes. But everyone appeared relaxed and in good spirits. Some still carried mugs of coffee. A black man smiled at him and nodded; he was the guy who’d tossed Peter a muffin on the first day but whose name (Rude? Rooney?) Peter couldn’t quite retrieve. Two females he’d never been introduced to waved at him as well. An animated murmur rippled through the crowd. It was like a queue for a funfair or a concert.

Peter drew abreast with the nearest person he knew by name, which happened to be Hayes, the literal-minded engineer who’d delivered the speech at the official opening of the Centrifuge & Power Facility. He’d made conversation with her several times since then, and had grown to enjoy how boring she was. Her boringness was so perfect that it had transcended itself to become a kind of eccentricity, and her own unawareness of it was funny and sort of touching. Other USIC personnel felt the same way about her, he’d noticed. There was a twinkle in their eye when she droned on.

‘What have we come out here for?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know why you’ve come,’ she replied. ‘I can only speak for why we’ve come.’ In anyone else, this would be testiness or sarcasm. In her, it was earnest determination to stay within the limits of the subject matter on which she could speak with authority.

‘OK,’ he said, falling into step beside her. ‘Why have you come out here?’

‘We got a call from the team at the Mother,’ she said.

‘Oh yes?’ It took him a couple of seconds to figure out she meant the Big Brassiere. Nobody but her called it the Mother, but still she would repeat the term at every opportunity, hoping it would catch on.

‘They told us there were animals headed this way. A horde. Or maybe they said a herd.’ Her brow wrinkled at the ambiguity. ‘A large number, anyway.’

‘Animals? What sort of animals?’

She took further cognisance of the parameters of her knowledge. ‘Native animals,’ she said.

‘I thought there weren’t any!’

Hayes mistook his excitement for scepticism. ‘I’m sure our colleagues at the Mother are reliable eye-witnesses,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe they would play a practical joke on us. We’ve discussed practical jokes in USIC briefings, and agreed that they’re counterproductive and potentially hazardous.’

Peter nodded, his attention wandering to the terrain ahead. Visibility was poor, not only because of the intense glare but because copious amounts of mist were swirling along the ground, spread wide over hundreds of metres like a swarm of spectral tumbleweeds. The eye played tricks: some obscure thing would appear to be moving forwards, emerging from the fog, only to be revealed a moment later as a clump of vegetation, demurely rooted in the soil.

The troop of humans reached the end of the tarmac, and the ground underfoot was soft. Peter surveyed the front ranks of the USIC personnel and noted who was walking foremost. It was Stanko, the guy from the mess hall. His gangly frame was graceful in motion; his long arms swung loosely and casually. It suddenly occurred to Peter how odd it was, in the circumstances, that Stanko wasn’t carrying a weapon. In fact… No one was. In fact… in fact, had he seen a gun at all since coming to Oasis? Could this really be a community without weapons? Could there be such a thing? How astonishing, if it were so… But on the other hand, wasn’t it foolhardy to be so indifferent to danger? Weren’t there times when it was crazy to set out without a rifle in hand? Who had authorised this communal foray, armed with nothing but curiosity? Were they all walking to their deaths, doomed to be crushed or torn to pieces by savage animals?

The answer wasn’t long in coming. A breeze pushed the mist backward and a large swathe of scrubland was swept clear, abruptly revealing the herd, or horde, of advancing creatures — perhaps eighty or a hundred of them. The USIC personnel gasped, whooped and muttered, each according to their nature. Then, inevitably, there was laughter. The animals were the size of chickens. Small chickens.

‘Well, will ya look at that,’ drawled Stanko, beaming.

The creatures seemed to be half-bird, half-mammal. Featherless, their hide was pink and leathery, mottled with grey. Duck-like heads bobbed with the rhythm of their waddling walk. Puny, vestigial wings hung against their flanks, gently jogged by the motion of the march but otherwise flaccid, like the rumpled lining of pulled-out trouser pockets. Their torsos were remarkably fat — rotund as teapots. Their gait was solemn and hilarious.

‘I cannot be-leeeeve this!’ BG’s voice. Peter looked for him in the crowd but there were a dozen people in the way and it would be impolite to cut across them.

By unspoken mutual assent, they stopped moving forward, so as not to spook the animals. The horde was waddling ever closer, apparently unperturbed by the alien onlookers. Their fat bodies kept up the pace, making slow but inexorable progress. At a distance, it had been unclear how many limbs each creature had under its belly, two or four. Closer up, it turned out to be four: squat little legs, unbirdlike in their muscular stockiness. Downy, paddle-like paws of a much darker grey than the rest of the body gave them the appearance of wearing shoes.

‘Cute to the power of ten,’ somebody said.

‘Cute to the power of a hundred,’ somebody else said.

Seen at close range, the animals’ heads were not quite so duck-like. Their bills were fleshier, drooping slightly like dog snouts. Their minuscule, expressionless eyes were very close together, conveying an impression of utter stupidity. They didn’t look up, around or at each other, only straight ahead. They were on course to pass right by the USIC base, on their way elsewhere. They made no sound apart from the faint, rhythmic thwuh-thwuh-thwuh-thwuh of their feet on the soil.

‘What are we gonna call these critters?’ somebody asked.

‘Chickadees.’

‘Duckaboos.’

‘How about fatsos?’

‘Woglets.’

‘Xenomammals.’

‘Flabbits.’

‘Lunch!’

There was a flurry of laughter but someone immediately hollered: ‘Forget it, Powell.’

‘Couldn’t we try just one?’ protested Powell.

‘They may be highly intelligent.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘They may be considered sacred. By the natives.’

‘Who says they’re edible?’ called a woman’s voice. ‘They could be poisonous as hell.’

‘They’re headed in the direction of Freaktown,’ Stanko pointed out. ‘If they’re edible and if it’s OK to eat them, we’ll probably get some eventually. Like, given to us. And it’ll be kosher.’

‘What do you mean, kosher?’

‘I didn’t mean… I meant, nothing sneaky about it. Just part of the regular deal.’

‘You’re all being disgusting,’ another woman’s voice remarked. ‘How could anyone even think of eating these? They’re so adorable.’

‘Adorable as a vegetable. Look at those eyes. Three brain cells, max.’

‘Maybe they bite.’

And so they stood there, bantering, happy as children, while the exotic procession shuffled past.

‘Hey, Peter! How’s tricks, bro?’ It was BG. He was in a jovial mood, if somewhat in need of a washcloth. This outing had evidently interrupted him in the middle of eating or drinking something white and frothy, judging from the creamy moustache haloing his upper lip.

‘I’m fine, BG,’ said Peter. ‘A bit tired. And you?’

‘On top of it, man, on top of it. Ain’t these guys great?’ He indicated the horde of animals, whose hundred hefty backsides swayed in formation as they shuffled by.

‘A real thrill to see,’ Peter agreed. ‘I’m glad I didn’t miss them. Nobody told me.’

‘It was on the PA system, bro. Loud and clear.’

‘Not in my room.’

‘Ah, they must’ve switched it off for you, man. Out of respect. You got your private spiritual stuff to concentrate on. You don’t want somebody naggin’ in your ear fifty times a day, “Could So-And-So come to Room 25, please”, “Could all available personnel report to the loading bay”, “Haircuts available in one hour in Room 9”, “Hey everybody, get your asses out of the East Wing entrance, ’cause there’s a huge posse of funny-lookin’ little motherfuckers headed this way!”’

Peter smiled, but the news of his exclusion from the public address system bothered him. He was disconnected enough from the lives of the USIC personnel as it was. ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘I would hate to have missed this.’

‘But you didn’t, bro,’ beamed BG. ‘You didn’t.’ He wiggled his eyebrows upwards at the heavens. ‘You must’ve got a tip-off, am I right?’

‘Maybe I did.’ Peter was exhausted all of a sudden, weighed down by his sweat-sodden clothing and his undischarged sense of inadequacy. God’s enigmatic instruction about the need for further study and making full proof of his ministry rematerialised in his mind.

BG got down to business: the reason he’d pushed through his colleagues to reach Peter. ‘So, what would you call ’em?’

‘Call them?’

‘Our cute little pals there,’ said BG, waving his hand at the retreating army.

Peter thought for a moment. ‘The Oasans must have a word for them.’

‘No use to us, bro.’ BG contorted his face and flapped his tongue idiotically in and out of his lips, emitting a blubbering sound. A second later, with the aplomb of a professional comedian, he composed his features into a mask of dignity. ‘With Tartaglione gone,’ he said, ‘there ain’t nobody here can understand the noises those guys make. You heard the old story of the kangaroo, Peter?’

‘No, BG: tell me the old story of the kangaroo.’

The animal horde was fully past now, making incremental headway towards their destination. Some of the USIC staff stood peering at the dwindling swarm of bodies, but most started ambling back towards the base. BG laid an arm around Peter’s shoulder, indicating that they should walk together. ‘There was this explorer guy,’ he said, ‘way back in the day, called Captain Cook. His specialty was landing on brand new pieces of real estate across the ocean, and swiping them off of the black folks that lived there. Anyway, he went all the way down to Australia. You know where that is?’

Peter nodded.

‘A lot of folks here get kinda hazy on geography,’ said BG. ‘Specially if they never been there. Anyway, Captain Cook landed in Australia and he saw these amaaazing animals jumpin’ around. Big furry motherfuckers with gigantic rabbit legs and a pouch on their stomach and standin’ upright and shit. And he asked the black folks, “What do you guys call this creature?”, and the black folks said “Kangaroo”.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter, sensing that some sort of punchline was coming.

‘Years later, some dude studied the black folks’ language, and guess what? “Kangaroo” meant “What you sayin’, bro?”’

BG bellowed with laughter, his massive body quaking with mirth as he escorted the pastor back to civilisation. Peter laughed too, but even as his mouth made the correct shape and his throat produced the appropriate sounds, he knew what God wanted him to do. He would learn the Oasans’ language. He would learn it if it killed him.

20. Everything would be all right if she only could

And so they began. Pressed close together, Peter and Beatrice could no longer see each other. Their mouths were joined, their eyes clasped shut, their bodies could have been anyone’s bodies since the world was created.

A few minutes later, he was wide awake. Bea was a billion miles removed from him, and he was shuffling to the washing machine, holding his soiled bedsheets bundled in his arms. Outside the window, it was the same sunny afternoon as it had been when he’d fallen asleep. The room was bathed in golden light just as before, as though time itself had been baked by the sun, while somewhere far away, his wife’s days and nights were flickering unseen.

Peter fed the bedsheets into the metallic drum. The CONSERVE WATER — COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED? placard teased at his conscience, but he couldn’t recall his semen ever smelling so pungent and he was worried that if he tried to hand-wash the sheets, the odour might permeate his quarters and be instantly noticeable if a visitor walked in. Grainger, for instance.

He scooped some soap flakes into the washing machine from the plastic tub provided. The flakes were waxy, as if shaved from a block of real old-fashioned soap. They certainly weren’t any kind of chemical detergent. Might they be whiteflower in one of its myriad forms? He lowered his nose to the tub and sniffed, but the smell of his own body was distracting. He shut the machine and set it going.

Funny, when he was among the Oasans, he never masturbated or had wet dreams. It was as though his sexual nature went into hibernation. He was male, and male equipment hung from his pelvis, but it was just there, irrelevant as an earlobe. Only when he returned to the USIC base did his sexuality revive. Likewise, it was only when he was in the USIC base that he felt the full weight of loneliness.

He stood naked next to the Shoot. Its screen was cold and dark, though he couldn’t recall switching it off. It must have switched itself off sometime during his sleep, to conserve energy. He hoped he’d managed, before exhaustion overtook him, to send whatever messages he’d been writing to Bea. It was all a bit of a blur. What he’d said; what she’d said. He vaguely remembered something about the carpets in the living room having to be removed and thrown away. Or maybe it was the curtains. And rats. Something about rats. Oh yes: Bea had walked to the kerbside to add a garbage bag to the already overflowing wheelie bin there (collections were irregular these days) and she’d got the shock of her life when a rat leapt out, narrowly missing her face.

The rat was probably as frightened as you, he’d reassured her. Or words to that effect.

Locked in the shower cubicle, he lathered himself clean, while his bedclothes churned nearby. Scalded seeds of his DNA gurgled gently into the drainage pipes.

Sitting at the Shoot, towelled and fresh, he was reaching forward to check for more messages from Bea when he noticed a droplet of blood trickling down his upper arm. He’d washed his hair and, while massaging his scalp, had dislodged a scab from the top of one of his ears. His burns were healing well but the flesh of his ears was rich in blood vessels and needed to be left undisturbed while the epidermal cells did their work. He looked around for toilet paper; remembered that USIC didn’t supply any. He had some Band-Aids somewhere, but a fresh droplet tickled his shoulder and he didn’t fancy searching through his bag. Instead he picked up a pair of underpants and fitted them on his head so that the fabric nestled against his bleeding ear.

Lord, please don’t let Grainger walk in unexpectedly now…

Once more he seated himself at the Shoot. A new message had loaded in. He opened it, already visualising the word ‘dear’ before it manifested on the screen.

Peter,

I am so, so angry wiuth you. You’re my husband and I love you but I’m hurt and furious.

In all the time we’ve been apart you have mnentioned NOT ONE WORD about our baby. Are you trying to teach me a lesson or do you just not care? I have dropped a few hints reminding you htat I’m pregnant but I haven’t pushed too hard because it’s really up to you to decide if you’ll engage with it or not.

In the past whenever we discussed having kids, you always found reasons why we shouldn’t — ‘not yet’. You always assured me you would LOVE to do it one day and that it was only a matter of timing. Well I’m sorry if I got the timing wrong but I was terrified you would never come back amd you are the only man I want to have childrenb with. Yes I know I sound confused but I don’t think I’m as confused as you are. I see now that you’ve been avoiuding avoiding avoiding fatherhood all these years. It’s a scary step, everyone knows that but people take that leap imto the dark and that’s how the human race goes on. But your missions were always more compelling weren’t they? So many challenges. Another day amnother challenge. Challenges which are really not too hard at all. Because we can try our best to help strangers, but utimately those strangers are responsible for their own fate, aren’t they? If we can’t help them, it’s sad but we just move on and help somepne else. But a child isn’t like that. Not when it’s your own child. Your own child’s fate matters more than anything. You can’t AFFORD to fail even thoiugh you probably will, and that’s what’s so scary. But you know what? — for millions of years people have been stupidf enough or brave enough to try anyway. I’m feeling that pressure right now carrying our baby inside me.

And you’re clearly not interested.

Peter I’m sorry if it looks like I’m not being sympthaetic to the difficulties that you’re no doubt facinfg in your mission. But you haven’t really told me anything about those difficylties. So I can only imagine. Or more to the point, NOT imagine. All I can see from the few morsels you’ve shared with me, is that you’re having a big adventure up there. You’ve been given the cushiest treatment any Christian missionary has ever had in the entire history of evangelism. Other missionaries have been thrown into prison, spat on, speared, pelted wiuth stones, threatened wiht knives and guns, hacked to death by machetes, crucified upside down. At the very least they’ve been given the cold shoukder and frustrated in every conceivable way. As far as I can tell, you arrived to a hero’s welcome. USIC drives you to the Oasans and picks you up again when you’re ready for a rest. Your congregation all love Jesus already and think you’re the bee’s knees and want nothing from you but Bible study. You supervise building works while getting a suntan, and every now and then, somebody brings you a painting to hang up on the ceiling. It sounds like you’re compiling your very own Sistine Chapel up there! And the latest news I get from you is that you just saw a parade of cute littlw animals.

Peter I know you don’t want to hear this but I’M IN TROUBLE. Things are falling apart at a terrifying rate. Some of it I’ve told you about and a lot of it I haven’t. Any other husband, once he got wind ofg what’s been going on here would have offered to come home by now. Or at least made noises about it.

I#m writing this at 5 AM after a sleepless night and I’m almost hallucinating wioth stress and I will probably regret sending you this when I#ve finally had some sleep. But you’ve alwayts been on my side in the past and now you’re hurting me and I don’t know where to turn. Have you given ANY THOUGHT AT ALL to how it might make me feel when you inform me that Grainger, the person who seems to be closest to you up there, is a female and that you’ve ‘just spent some time with her’ and that she’s very ‘vulnerable’ but you’re happy to report that she ‘opened up’ more today than she’s done for you before? I’m sure it will be a wonderful breakthriough for you both when she lets you call her by her first name and you finally ‘get to the bottom’ of why she’s hurting (maybe it will coincide with the happy day when this other woman you’ve been ministering to, Maneater or whatever she;s called, is ready to ‘take it further’) — but Peter has it occurred to you that I might be just a teensy bit ‘vulnerable’ too!

I know you lovbe me and I#m sure you are not doing anything bad withj Grainger but I wish you thought a bit more cvarefully about the language tyou use when talking about her and you. You devote so much time andf energy to pondering exactly the right words to choose in your Bible paraphrases for the Jesus Lovers but when it comes to communicating with me, your inbfinite attention to nuance deserts you.

It’s nice that you are having such vivid memoeries of our wedding but it would be a lot better for me if you had some vivid memories of the woman you left behibnd a few months ago and what she might need right now.

In tears,

Bea

There was another message, sent a mere two minutes later. He opened it, hoping it might be some sort of retraction or softening of the blow — not an apology exactly, but a step back, a second thought, maybe an admission that she was drunk. Instead, she didn’t even call him by name.

As for the rat, PLEASE let’s not pretend — it was NOT as frighjtened as me. I’m sure it was having a simply marvellous time being a rat and it’s overjoyed that our neighbouirhood is choking on its own waste. I just don’t know what to do. Lots of people are driving tyheir garbage to other parts of town and dumping it anywhere they think noeone will catch them doing it. I wou;ldn’t be surprised if a lot iof the filth that’s scattered over our street comes from drive-by dumpings. The police seem powerless to stop it. They seem powerless to stop anything. Tbey just drive arounfd in their squad cars, talking into their handsets. What use is that? What are we paying them for? They’re just watching us go under.

The washing machine gurgled loudly as it sluiced one load of water away to make room for another. Dense white suds clung to the inside of the glass-fronted door. Too much soap. His fault.

He got up from his chair and wandered aimlessly around the room. His heart was beating hard and his intestines felt heavy as clay in his midriff. A stack of Bible booklets lay ready next to the bed, their spines neatly sewn in colourful thread, a labour of many hours during which he had been blissfully unaware of any bad thing.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

I was devastated to get your letter and I’m sorry I’ve made you feel so hurt. I hope for your own sake — for both our sakes — that the extremity of your distress when you wrote to me was partly due to the state you were in at that moment. All those typos (very unlike you) made me wonder if you’d been drinking. Which is not to suggest that your grief isn’t valid, only that I hope you’re not feeling this much hurt and anger all the time.

But of course the fault is mine. I can’t explain or excuse the way I’ve been treating you. The closest I can come is to say that this journey — the first time we’ve been apart for more than a few days at a time — has revealed a frightening lack in me. I don’t mean a bad attitude (although that’s obviously how you see it) I mean a problem with the way my brain works. I find it almost impossible to keep a grip on things that aren’t in my immediate orbit. We’ve always faced life together and I suppose our togetherness masked this deficiency. When you first met me I was bombarding my system with every toxic substance I could throw at it, and once I cleaned up I blithely assumed that the alcohol and the drugs hadn’t inflicted any permanent damage, but I’m now forced to consider that maybe they have. Or maybe I’ve always been like this. Maybe it’s what sent me off the rails in the first place. I don’t know.

How can I reassure you about our baby? It’s true I’ve been worried in the past about whether I’m cut out for parenthood. It’s true that the responsibility is daunting. But it’s not true that I never intended or wanted to have children with you. I want to very much. By the time I get back home, I suppose you’ll be heavily pregnant and I hope you’ll consent to take time off work. You shouldn’t be doing heavy lifting and going through all the stress of the hospital when you’re growing a child. How about going on maternity leave as soon as I return? We could relax and prepare things properly.

One thing neither of us has mentioned for a while is money. It’s not the factor that we focused on when this mission came up — we were both excited about the project for its own sake. But on the other hand, I will be paid a great deal — more than either of us has ever earned for anything. In the past, once our living expenses were covered, we always ploughed any extra income into the Lord’s work. We’ve funded a lot of worthwhile things. But our child is a worthwhile thing too and I’m sure God will understand if we give the other projects a rest. What I’m suggesting is this: Let’s use the money from this mission to move house. Judging from what you’ve been telling me, it’s becoming very unpleasant, even dangerous, to stay in the city. So let’s move to the country. It would be a much better environment for our child to spend his/her formative years in. As for our church, by the time I get back they’ll have managed for six months without me and I’m sure Geoff will be delighted to carry on as pastor, and if he isn’t, someone else will step forward. Churches shouldn’t get too fixated on a particular shepherd.

As I write this, it’s all becoming clearer in my mind. I was thinking at first that you should go on maternity leave, but as I think about it more, it would make much better sense if you actually quit. A decision which is probably long overdue. The people who run that hospital have caused you so much heartache over the years and it never improves. You can fight them to the last of your energy and they’ll just carry on regardless. Well, let’s leave them to it. Let’s both devote ourselves to being parents, and start a fresh phase of our lives.

All my love,

Peter

‘Hi,’ said Maneely. ‘Your ear looks sore.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s crusted over now.’

She had joined him in the mess hall, where he was sipping tea and trying to persuade himself to order some food. He smiled in welcome, but knew that his nausea and distress must be evident on his face. She, by contrast, looked upbeat and relaxed. She’d had a haircut which suited her. Maybe she’d even had it dyed, because he remembered her as mousy and she was honey-blonde now. Then again, the light in the mess hall had a honeyish tinge. His tea glowed bright orange like a well-brewed beer.

‘I’ve been kind of avoiding you,’ Maneely said. ‘Sorry.’

‘I just assumed you were busy,’ he said diplomatically. Was this going to be the day when she accepted Jesus into her heart? He didn’t feel up to it.

She drank some strawberry soymilk through a straw before getting stuck into a large serving of imitation sausage and mashed potato.

‘Your hair suits you,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re not eating?’

‘I’m… taking things slowly today.’

She nodded understandingly, as though tolerating a man with a hangover. Several generous slices of sausage disappeared into her mouth and she chased them down with another slurp of soy. ‘I’ve been thinking about our conversation after Severin’s funeral.’

Here it comes, he thought. Lord, please give me grace. ‘Well, you know I’m here for you.’

She smirked. ‘Except when you’re in Freaktown getting your ears fried.’

‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘I just have to be more careful.’

She stared him straight in the eyes, serious again. ‘Look, I’m sorry about what I said.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I think I got you all excited.’

‘Excited?’

‘Severin was kind of a pal of mine. Not in a romantic way, but we… solved a lot of problems together. On various projects. When he died, it hit me hard. Put me into a real vulnerable state. At the funeral, you gave a great speech, and I kind of got half-convinced about… you know… all this God and Jesus stuff. But it’s not me. I’ve thought it over, and it’s just not me. I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no need to apologise. It’s like apologising to gravity or light. God is just there, whether we acknowledge him or not.’

She shook her head and ate some more. ‘For a second there I thought you were comparing yourself to the forces of gravity or light.’

He winced. ‘Sometimes I don’t express myself very well. I’m just… I’m going through… ’ The awareness of Bea’s anger coursed through his system like an infection. He thought he might faint from it. ‘I have problems like anyone else.’

‘I hope they get resolved,’ said Maneely. ‘You’re a good guy.’

‘I don’t feel so good right now.’

She blessed him with a sisterly smile. ‘Hey, you’ll feel better soon. It’s all perceptual. Chemical, even. Feeling down, feeling up, it’s a cycle. You wake up one morning and the whole thing looks different. Trust me.’

‘I appreciate your encouragement,’ said Peter. ‘But addressing problems that need to be addressed isn’t a matter of… you can’t be that passive. We have responsibilities. We’ve got to try to make things better.’

Maneely slurped the last of her soy and shoved the glass to one side. ‘This is about home, right?’

‘Home?’ Peter swallowed hard.

‘When I get stressed about stuff that’s out of my control,’ Maneely counselled him, ‘I often remember an ancient poem. It’s, like, thousands of years old. It goes: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’

‘Written by a guy called Reinhold Niebuhr,’ Peter said. ‘Except that he actually wrote “God grant”.’

‘Well, maybe, but it works just as well without.’ Her gaze was level, seeing right through his pedantry. ‘Don’t beat yourself up about home, Peter. This is home now.’

‘I’m going back soon,’ he protested.

She shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

He spent the next couple of hours walking outside, circling the compound. He considered walking all the way to the Oasan settlement. How long would that take him? Weeks, probably. It was a mad idea, mad. He needed to be here to receive Bea’s next message. She would be asleep now. She would be asleep for hours yet. They should be sleeping together. Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.

He returned to his quarters, worked on Bible paraphrases, and moped. Waves of hunger plagued him, interspersed with the urge to vomit. More hours passed. Finally, after having checked the Shoot in vain at least a hundred times, he was put out of his misery:

Dear Peter,

No time to write a long letter as I’m about to go to a funeral but I am still very distraught and exasperated with you. Am making a special effort however to check my spelling so that you don’t accuse me of being drunk. Actually I’d just about recovered from that one when hey presto, you suggest I become an unemployed rural housewife!

Sorry, I know sarcasm is unhelpful.

I’ll write again when I’m back from the funeral. Although I may have to spend some time with Sheila first. She’s going through hell.

I do love you, insane as you are,

Bea

At once he responded:

Dear Bea,

It lifted my spirits so much to hear (read) you say that you love me. I’ve barely been able to function all day for grief at the trouble between us. You are so much more important to me than my mission.

Although you don’t say so in so many words, it’s obvious from your message that Billy Frame committed suicide after all, despite the concern we all felt for him and your recent efforts to offer him support. I can still picture him the way he was when he was a little kid and he was beaming with pride at the wall hanging he and the other children made for us. How awful for Sheila. I can only imagine how stressed you must be by all of this. The fact that you used the word ‘Hell’ to denote something other than eternal separation from God speaks volumes.

I’m sorry you interpreted my suggestions about moving to the country as a plot to turn you into an unemployed rural housewife. I’m sure there will be jobs out there — probably even nursing jobs, less horrible ones (probably) than what you have now. Nor am I suggesting that I’ll spend all day chopping wood or growing vegetables (even though I’ve become quite a happy fieldworker out here). There may be a church that needs a pastor. But whatever work opportunities there are (or aren’t), we should leave it in the hands of the Lord.

I’m deeply sorry about the thoughtless way I have spoken about Grainger and Maneely. Yes, they are females but my role in their lives is strictly pastoral — or would be if they were open to the Lord’s grace, which they don’t seem to be. Maneely has just told me in no uncertain terms that she is not interested.

Words are my profession but I don’t always use them wisely, nor are they always the best way of getting things across. I wish I could just hold you and reassure you. I’ve let you down in the past, in worse ways than I’m doing now, and we got through it together because we love each other. That love is based on communication but it’s also based on something that’s almost impossible to describe, a sense of rightness when we’re in each other’s company, a sense we only connect with when we’re with other people who aren’t right for us. I am missing you so much, darling.

All my love,

Peter

‘What you want won’t be easy to arrange,’ Grainger told him shortly afterwards.

‘But possible?’

The simplemindedness of the question irked her. ‘Everything’s possible if you throw enough labour and resources at it.’

‘I don’t want to cause havoc for USIC,’ he said, ‘but this is very important to me.’

‘Why not just come back to base at shorter intervals? You might be in better shape if you did.’

‘It wouldn’t work. The Oasans live at their own pace. I need to be among them, share in their routines. I can’t just drop in and then get whisked away all the time. But if I had a Shoot out there… ’

‘… we might never see you again.’

‘Please. My wife needs my support. I’m missing her. And maybe whatever you’d have to build to make the Shoot work would come in useful for some other purpose. Once it was there.’

She narrowed her eyes. He realised belatedly that he hadn’t asked her how she was or made any pleasantries before hitting her with this demand.

‘I’ll see what we can do,’ she said.

Dear Peter, he read as soon as he got back.

I wish you had offered to come home instead of reminding me how much money we stand to make if you stay. Yes, I know that it was tremendously laborious and expensive for USIC to invite you. If you’d offered to leave now I probably would have argued you out of it. But it would have been nice to think that you felt enough concern to consider it as a possibility, which you plainly didn’t. It’s clear you are 100 % determined to serve out your time. I understand: it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Your urgings for us to move to the countryside have stirred up my emotions because it’s only natural for someone in my position to wish desperately that we could just escape all the fiascos and start afresh in idyllic surroundings. But then my common sense kicks in and I’m exasperated with you. Do you have any idea what the countryside is really like? Do you ever read newspapers? (Rhetorical question — I know I’m the one with that sordid habit.) The countryside is a wasteland of decaying factories, bankrupt farms, long-term unemployed, ugly supermarkets and charity shops. (Hey, I wonder if the supermarkets have unsold reserves of chocolate desserts? Now there’s an incentive…) The money you’ll be paid for your USIC appointment is substantial but it’s not a fortune and a fortune is what we’d need to set ourselves up. There are still picturesque, safe, middle-class bits of rural Britain where I’m sure our child would have a nicer start than here in the city but they come at a very steep price. If our child was dumped in some godforsaken town where half the population is alcoholic or on drugs, and the schools are full of low achievers and social work cases, we’ll be no better off. You say, leave it in the hands of the Lord, but whose decision would it be to move in the first place? Yours.

In any case, grieved as I am about the way things are done at my hospital, I still have an ongoing commitment to the place and I feel there’s still things I can do to help. I’m also scared that if I quit this job I won’t be able to get another one, because unemployment levels are soaring as the economy implodes.

Speaking of which: It’s only a few days before I’m due to go back to work and hey presto, I got a letter from Goodman. Once again, I must say that nobody in the history of the world ever had a less appropriate name and it’s criminal that a person like this is in charge of deciding how our hospital allocates its resources. Anyway, the letter is basically a threat. He alludes to some of my more conspicuous episodes of patient advocacy and hints that in the ‘current circumstances’, our hospital cannot afford to devote ‘disproportionate’ staff energies & funds to ‘clients who are least likely to respond optimally to our care’. Which is Goodmanspeak for: we shouldn’t waste our time on anyone who’s mentally ill, bolshie, ancient or too badly injured/cancer-ridden to ever shake the doctor’s hand and say Ta Ta & Thanks For Everything. What Goodman wants is more cleft palate repairs, more robust blokes with fractures, kids with 2^nd degree burns, youngish women getting lumps excised, etc. And he wants my promise that I won’t cause trouble. And he hints that if I don’t guarantee better behaviour, he may ‘re-evaluate’ whether I’m allowed back at all!

Peter, I’m glad I lifted your spirits by saying I love you, but you’re acting like a little boy who feels the whole universe has collapsed when his mother is angry with him but who then feels everything is all right again when she says she loves him. Of course I love you — we’ve both poured years of commitment and intimacy into our relationship and that’s totally integral to our minds and hearts. Our love can’t be erased by a bit of unhappiness. But that doesn’t mean our love can cure unhappiness, either. It comes down to this — there are frightening, dispiriting things going on in my life right now which I am dealing with on my own, partly because you’re not physically here with me but partly also because you are unable or unwilling to offer me emotional support. I hear what you’re saying about drug abuse, brain damage, etc, and maybe you’re right — in which case it has implications for our relationship that don’t exactly cheer me up — but another possibility is that it’s a convenient excuse for you, isn’t it? You’d like to show an interest in what’s going on in my life — or in the world at large, for that matter — but you can’t because your brain is damaged. So that’s all right then.

I’m sorry if I sound bitter. I’m just very, very overwhelmed. How about we both blame physical factors — you claim brain damage and I claim hormone overload? Ever since I’ve been pregnant, I’ve felt more vulnerable. But of course there are plenty of shocking things happening that have nothing to do with my hormones.

Which brings me to the funeral I just went to. The conclusion you jumped to as ‘obvious’ — that Billy committed suicide — was wrong, but understandable. I concluded the same thing when Sheila phoned me. But the truth is worse. It was Rachel. The child who was supposedly OK. There was no clear warning sign, or if there was, Sheila missed it. Maybe she was too preoccupied with Billy’s depression to notice. Of course, now, she’s tearing herself inside-out about it, trying to remember every tiny thing Rachel did and said. But as far as I can tell, Rachel was behaving pretty much as normal for a teenage girl — going to school, bickering with her brother, listening to bad pop music, fussing over her hair, going on fad diets, declaring she’s vegan one day and scoffing roast chicken the next. Of course Sheila now regards all of these things as distress signals but given how difficult 12-year-old girls can be, I think she’s being too hard on herself. What was really going through Rachel’s head, we’ll never know. All we know is that one morning she just took herself to a car scrap yard near her home, crawled through a gap in the wire mesh (the place was abandoned) and hid inside a big stack of car tyres. She took a lot of pills — her mum’s sleeping pills, painkillers, just household stuff but dozens of them. And she washed them down with flavoured milk and huddled inside those tyres and died and wasn’t found for three days. She left no note.

Billy’s coping well, I think. Taking care of Sheila, sort of.

I could write about what’s been happening in Pakistan but it’s a huge topic and I very much doubt you’d want to hear about it anyway.

Joshua’s cowering under the table as if he thinks I’m going to kick him. I wish he would just curl up in his basket and go to sleep. I mean, let’s be honest, life really isn’t so bad for a cat. Instead he just skulks around. And he doesn’t sleep with me anymore, so I don’t even have the comfort of his physical presence.

I must have a rest. Big day today. Will write again tomorrow. Will you?

Love,

Bea

Peter vomited, then prayed. His head cleared, his guts were soothed with a fuzzy numbness, his fever — which only now he recognised as a fever — ebbed away. God was with him. What Bea was facing now, they had faced together many times in the past. Not the precise circumstances, but the feeling that life had become unbearably complicated, a tangled network of insoluble problems, each requiring all the others to be solved before any progress could be made. It was in the nature of a troubled soul to regard this as objective reality, a hard look at the grim facts that were revealed once the rose-coloured glasses were off. But this was a distortion, a tragic misconception. It was the frenzy of the moth butting against the lightbulb when there was an open window nearby. God was that open window.

The things that were worrying Bea were genuine and awful, but they were not beyond the power of God. In their lives together, Peter and Bea had been confronted with police harassment, financial ruin, eviction, a hate campaign by Bea’s father, the concerted opposition of local councils, malicious lawsuits, escalating vandalism, threats from knife-wielding gangsters, the theft of their car (twice) and a burglary so bad they were left with little more than their books and a stripped bed. In each case, they had appealed to the mercy of God. In each case, He had untangled the barbed wire of trouble with a firm, invisible hand. The police had suddenly apologised, an anonymous donor saved them from bankruptcy, the landlord had a change of heart, Bea’s father died, a Christian lawyer took on the council on their behalf and won, the threatened lawsuits melted away, the vandals were caught red-handed by Peter and ended up joining the church, the gangsters got jailed for rape, one stolen car was found undamaged and the other was replaced by a parishioner, and, when the burglars cleaned them out, the congregation showed such kindness and generosity that Peter and Bea’s faith in human goodness was boosted to ecstatic heights.

Dear Bea, he wrote.

Please don’t use the word ‘Godforsaken’. I know you’re upset and rightly so but we must honour with our mouths the fact that no one is truly forsaken by God. In all your distress, I get the feeling you’re not leaning on Him as trustingly as you might. Remember all the hundreds of times we’ve been at our wits’ end and He’s come through. Turn to Him now. He will provide. Philippians 4:6 reassures us: ‘Be careful for nothing (ie, don’t be anxious about anything), but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.’

I’m sorry I didn’t offer to come home early. I did think of it and was very strongly tempted by the idea but instead of airing it with you I struggled with it inside my own mind before I wrote. Apart from anything else I didn’t want to raise false hopes in case USIC told me it wasn’t possible. There is already a ship on the way, I gather, containing (no doubt among other things) another doctor to replace one that died.

I’m not as attached to staying here as you think. While it’s true that this mission is an extraordinary opportunity, the spread of God’s word has its own momentum and its own timescale, and I’m sure the Oasans could do marvellous things on their own, with the input I’ve had so far. The reality is that I will have to leave them in a few months anyway, and there’ll still be a lot to do. The Christian life is a journey, not a self-contained project. I am giving these people my all, but when I have to go, I’ll go, and my sights will then be set on our life back home.

Please try to reconnect with the love and protection that God has shown us in the past and which is waiting there to shield you now. Pray to Him. You won’t have to wait long for evidence of His hand. And if, in a few days, you still feel distraught, I will do my best to arrange to come home to you, even if it means forfeiting some of my payment. Whatever happens, I’m confident that I’ll be treated fairly. These are benign, well-intentioned people. My instincts about them are good.

As for the countryside, yes, I admit ignorance. But as Christians — and, again, with God’s help — we have the power to affect what sort of ethos a place has. I’m not saying there won’t be problems but we’ve had big problems in the city too and you’re currently having a horrendous time so could it really be worse? I’ve been spending most of my time outdoors here and there is something so calming about it. I would love to go walking with you in the sunshine and fresh air. And think how Joshua would adore it!

It will be your morning by the time you read this. I hope you slept well.

Love,

Peter

Having sent this message, Peter was clammy with sweat. And ravenous. He showered and dressed in clean trousers and T-shirt. Then he went to the mess hall and ordered himself the sausages and mash.

When he returned, he resumed work on the Bible booklets. Several of the Jesus Lovers had asked him about the parable of the Good Shepherd, the Hireling and the Sheep. He’d gently urged them to tackle a different episode, because this one involved sheep and wolves, two creatures they’d never seen, and besides, it was full of sibilant letters. But they insisted, as if worried that their natural limitations might prevent them from comprehending something utterly crucial. So, he was tinkering with it. For sheep, he could substitute whiteflower. God could be the Good Farmer, making sure that the crops were tended properly and picked at the correct times; the Hireling could be… what could the Hireling be? The Oasans knew nothing about money and recognised no difference between vocation and employment. And what about the conclusion of the story, where the Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep? A farmer couldn’t lay down his life for his crops. The whole parable was untranslatable. Yet the Jesus Lovers would not be fobbed off. He would have to teach them about sheep, wolves, shepherds, hirelings. It was an absurd challenge, although it might be worthwhile if it allowed the Oasans access to the concept of the Lamb of God.

On a sheet of paper, he experimented with drawing a sheep. Art was not one of his strong points. The animal he scrawled had a credibly sheep-like body but its head looked more like a cat’s. He struggled to recall ever having seen a sheep in the flesh, or even in photographs. Beyond a vague impression of woolly rotundity, he couldn’t summon forth any details about ears, snout, eyes and so on. Was the lower jaw visible? Perhaps there would be something in the USIC library. Granted, many of the books had pages torn out, but he imagined that if there were any pictures of sheep, they’d be intact.

Absent-mindedly, out of habit, he checked for new messages on the Shoot. Immediately, one from Bea loaded in. She hadn’t gone to bed after all.

Peter, PLEASE PLEASE STOP HARPING ON ABOUT THIS COUNTRYSIDE FANTASY, it’s just making me feel worse. You just don’t seem to appreciate how fast and how frighteningly and how MUCH things have changed. The housing market has COLLAPSED. Like just about everything eslse in this country IT IS KAPUT. Couldn’t you guess that? Wouldn’t that be obvious from all the things I’ve been telling you? Do you really think some nice young coiuple is goimng to be isnepcting our house with a chequebook in their hands? All those nice young couples all over the UK are frozen with TERROR. Everyonbe is just sitting tight, hoping agaimst hope that things will improve. I am sitting tighjt myself, hoping that at last some big truck will finally come and pick up the stinking piles of garbage in front of our home.

As for using the word godforsaken, I’m sure God can forgive me but the question is, can you?

The vehemence of the blow took him by surprise. In the minutes that followed, his brain swirled with hurt, indignation, shame and fear. She was wrong, he was misunderstood, she was wrong, he was misunderstood, she was in trouble, he couldn’t help, she was in trouble, he couldn’t help, she was deaf to his assurances of love and support, she spoke in a tone he couldn’t recognise. Was this what pregnancy had done to her mind? Or had she been harbouring these resentments and frustrations for years? Half-formed sentences suggested themselves, drafts of defences and analyses, ways to demonstrate to her that she was not helping anyone by behaving like this, ways to allude to the deranging effects of hormones and pregnancy without making her angrier still.

As he thought more, however, his urge to argue dwindled and all that was left was love. It didn’t matter, for the moment, that she misjudged him. She was overwhelmed, she was in distress, she needed help. Rightness or wrongness was not the point. Giving her strength was the point. He must let go of his grief at how alienated she was from him. The greater problem was that she seemed alienated from God. A barrage of suffering borne in unaccustomed loneliness had weakened her faith. Her mind and heart were closed like the fist of a child in pain. Rhetoric and arguments were useless and, in the circumstances, cruel. He must remember that when he’d been at his own lowest ebb, a single Bible verse had pulled him back from the abyss. God didn’t waste words.

Bea, I love you. Please pray. What is happening all around you is terrifying, I know. But please pray and God will help. Psalm 91: I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust.

There, it was sent. He clasped his hands and prayed she would pray. Everything would be all right if she only could.