by Michel Faber
‘We’re going to crack them, Joe.’
‘Crack them?’ echoed Tuska.
‘Find out what makes them tick,’ she explained.
‘Yeah?’ said Tuska, clearly not much interested in the prospect.
‘Yes. And then, God willing, we’ll fix them.’
Peter was surprised to hear such words uttered by a USIC employee. But then Flores’s face appeared in the gap between the front seats, like a gargoyle head jutting out from a Gothic wall, seeking out the minister stashed in the back.
‘Just a figure of speech, you understand,’ she said. ‘I really meant, with luck.’ Her face vanished again, but she wasn’t done talking. ‘I guess you don’t believe there’s such a thing as luck, huh?’
Peter turned his face to stare out the window. At the speed Tuska was driving, the dark earth could be mistaken for tarmac, and the occasional outcrop of pale wildflower swept past in a blur like the painted white lines of a motorway. If he imagined hard enough, he might even see M25 road signs estimating the distance to London.
‘I hope there is,’ he answered Flores, a little too late. He was pretty sure the word ‘luck’ appeared nowhere in the Bible, but that didn’t mean there was no such thing. Grainger had called him a lucky guy. And, with Bea at his side, for the best part of his life, he truly had been.
When he got back to his quarters, there was, finally, a message from Bea.
It said,
Peter, I love you. But please, don’t come home. I beg you. Stay where you are.
28
Amen
‘What I like about this place,’ said Moro, making brisk progress on her treadmill, ‘is that every day there’s something a little bit different, but also it’s the same.’
She, BG and Peter were exercising in the gazebo. It was just another day on Oasis, another scheduled break in the task at hand, a few hours of R&R before work resumed on the great project. The canopy was shading them from the sun, but the light was so intense at this stage of the afternoon that it penetrated the canvas, casting a yellow tinge over their flesh.
Moro had worked up a big sweat already; the fabric of her shalwar was sculpted to her thighs as she paced, and her bare midriff glistened. She had announced three hundred steps as her goal and must be about halfway through by now, never letting the rhythm slacken. She swivelled her wrists on the treadmill’s handle-bars, as if revving the throttle grip of a motorcycle.
‘You should try it with just your legs, no holding on,’ advised BG, resting between bouts of press-ups. ‘Better for your quads, your tibs, everything.’
‘I see it as exercise for my hands, too,’ said Moro. ‘People who lose a finger often let the hand get sloppy. I made a decision: not me.’
Peter was lifting a sandbag on a pulley, or trying to. His arms had become quite strong and wiry from working in the whiteflower fields, but the muscles he’d toughened must be a different set from the ones he was straining now.
‘Don’t bust a gut on the lifting,’ advised BG. ‘The lowering’s just as good. Do it slow. Slow as you can.’
‘It’s still too heavy for me, I think,’ said Peter. ‘What’s the bag filled with? Not sand, surely?’ He couldn’t imagine USIC approving the shipment of a sack of sand when, for the same cost-weight ratio, they could transport a sack of sugar or a person.
‘Earth,’ said BG, gesturing at the bare acres around the exercise yard. He removed his singlet and wrung it out in his fists. An arc of puckered scars came to life near his left armpit, marring the smooth swell of his pectoral. He put his singlet back on.
‘I don’t suppose we could let some of the soil out?’ said Peter.
‘I don’t suppose so, bro,’ said BG. His facial expression was unsmilingly serious, but he was amused. Human beings could be read quite easily once you got to know them a bit. It was all in the tone, the cadences, the twinkle in the eyes, so many subtle factors that defied scientific description but which you could, if you wished, build a lifelong friendship on.
Peter tried to lift the sandbag again. This time, he barely raised it above knee-level before his biceps began to hurt.
‘Part of your problem there,’ said BG, coming over, ‘is you need more of a balanced approach.’ He unhooked the sandbag from the pulley, hoisted it without much effort to his chest, then cradled it in one arm. ‘Most important muscle is your brain. You gotta plan what you’re gonna do, warm up to it. Find an exercise that pushes you to the limit but not beyond it. With this sandbag, I suggest a straight carry.’
‘Sorry?’
BG stood close to Peter, transferred the sack from his own arms into Peter’s, carefully as if it was a sleeping baby.
‘Just hug it to your chest,’ he said. ‘Wrap your arms around it and walk. From one end of the gazebo to the other, and again, and again, as many times as you can until you can’t do it no more. Then lower it to the ground nice and easy.’
Peter did as he was told. BG watched. So did Moro, who had finished her three hundred steps and was drinking from a bottle of pale green liquid, possibly rainwater, possibly a small fortune’s-worth of carbonated soft drink from a faraway multinational corporation. Peter hurried past them with the sack in his arms, back and forth, back and forth. He performed reasonably well with the carrying part, but when he reached his limit, the lowering part was clumsy.
‘I need more practice,’ he said, panting.
‘Well,’ sighed BG, ‘you ain’t gonna get it, are you?’ It was the first time he’d alluded to Peter’s imminent departure.
‘I might,’ said Peter, sitting down on a low wooden pedestal whose purpose he couldn’t guess. ‘Nothing to stop me carrying a sandbag when I’m back home. Actually, I might have to, if there’s a flood. There’s been a lot of flooding lately.’
‘They need to put more thought into their sorry-ass water management systems,’ BG remarked.
Moro stood up and smoothed her clothing. Her exercise break was over and duty called. ‘Maybe you should do what you have to and then come straight back,’ she said.
‘Not without my wife,’ said Peter.
‘Well, maybe she can come too.’
‘USIC decided she couldn’t, apparently.’
Moro shrugged, and a flash of defiance animated her normally passionless face. ‘USIC schmusic. What’s USIC anyway? We’re USIC. Us, here. Maybe it’s time the eligibility tests got loosened up a little.’
‘Yeah, they’re tough,’ agreed BG, in a wistful tone, half-proud of himself for having made the grade, half-rueful for all the potential brothers and sisters who hadn’t made it. ‘Eye of a goddamn needle. That’s in the Bible, ain’t it?’
Almost as a reflex, Peter girded himself to craft a diplomatic answer, then realised he didn’t have to. ‘Yes, BG, it is. Matthew, chapter 19, verse 24.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ said BG, then grinned broadly, to signal that he knew very well he wouldn’t.
‘Husband and wife team,’ said Moro, stowing the bottle in her tote bag. ‘I think that would be kind of romantic.’ She spoke in a wistful tone, as though romance was something exotic and strange that might be observed in a tribe of monkeys or snow geese, not in anyone she’d ever known.
Peter closed his eyes. Bea’s final message, and his reply, were imprinted there, as clear as any verse of Scripture:
Peter, I love you, she’d written. But please, don’t come home. I beg you. Stay where you are. It’s safer and I want you safe.
This is the last message I’ll be able to send you, I’m not going to be able to stay in this house. I will be living with other people, strangers. I don’t know where exactly. We’ll be moving around. I can’t explain, just take it from me that it’s best. Nothing here is as it was when you left. Things can change so fast. It’s irresponsible for me to bring a baby into this rotten world but the alternative is killing it and I just don’t have the courage to do that. I expect things will end badly anyway, and it will be much kinder on you not to be here to see it. If
you love me, don’t make me watch you suffer.
It’s funny, all those years ago when we first met, people warned me what a hardened, devious exploiter you were, always manipulating people to fall for you, but I know you’re just an innocent little kid at heart. This planet’s too cruel for you now. I’ll take comfort from thinking of you in a safe place, with some chance of a happy life.
Beatrice
To which he had replied, without pause for doubt or deliberation, just this:
Safe or unsafe, happy or unhappy, my place is by your side. Don’t give up. I will find you.
‘You take care of yourself, OK?’ said BG. ‘You’re goin’ to a baaaaad place. Stay strong. Keep focused. You promise me that?’
Peter smiled. ‘I promise.’
He and the big man shook hands, formally and decorously, like diplomats. No bear hugs, no high fives. BG knew how to tailor the gesture to the occasion. He turned and walked away, with Moro at his side.
Peter watched their bodies dwindle and disappear into the ugly exterior of the USIC base. Then he took a seat on a swing, holding the chains loosely, and wept a while. Not big sobs, not even aloud, nothing that Lover Five might have called a very long song. Just tears on his cheeks, which got licked up by the atmosphere before they could fall to the earth.
Eventually he walked back to the sandbag and kneeled down next to it. Without much difficulty, he dragged it up his thighs onto his lap. Next, wrapping his arms around it, he hauled it to his chest. It was heavier than Bea, he supposed, although it was hard to be sure. Lifting a person was easier somehow. It shouldn’t be, because both of you were subject to gravity; there was no escaping that. Yet he’d tried lifting an unconscious body and he’d lifted Bea and there was a difference. And a baby . . . a baby would be lighter still, much lighter.
He sat holding the sandbag until his knees were hurting and arms were sore. When he finally let it slip to the ground, he couldn’t guess how long Grainger had been standing near him, watching.
‘I thought you were angry with me,’ he said.
‘So you ran away?’ she said.
‘I just wanted to give you space,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘I have all the space I can handle.’
He checked her appearance, unobtrusively he hoped. She looked sober, dressed as normal, ready for work.
‘You’re going home too, right?’
‘Right,’ she said.
‘We’ll be together,’ he said.
The reassurance cut no ice with her. ‘We’ll be in the same ship but we won’t be aware of it.’
‘We’ll wake up together at the other end,’ he said.
She looked away. They were heading for different destinations, and both knew it.
‘Is there . . . ’ he began, then got stuck for a few seconds. ‘Is there a part of you that’s sorry to leave?’
She shrugged. ‘They’ll get another pharmacist; they’ll get another minister. Everyone’s replaceable.’
‘Yes. And irreplaceable, too.’
The sound of an engine revving distracted them. Not far off, a vehicle had pulled away from the base and was now driving in the general direction of the Big Brassiere. It was the black station wagon, the one Kurtzberg had always used. Mechanics had fixed it, proving that if you were a car, you could be struck by lightning, pronounced dead and yet be brought back to life. Not exactly good as new, but saved from the scrapheap by the grace of experts. The rear of the wagon was crammed with pipes of some sort, which stuck out some distance from the hatch and were secured with rope. The bed must have been ditched. Evidently, now that the USIC personnel knew for certain that the pastor was dead, they no longer felt constrained to keep his car as he liked it, permanently in a bay earmarked ‘Pastor’, but to put it to general use instead. Waste not, want not. And hey, Kurtzberg had even handled his own funeral, instead of causing headaches by dying at the base. What a guy.
‘Are you still praying for my dad?’ said Grainger.
‘I’m having trouble praying for anyone right now,’ he said, gently removing a bright-green insect from his sleeve and launching it into the air. ‘But tell me . . . How are you going to find him?’
‘I’ll figure it out,’ she said. ‘I just need to be back. Then I’ll know what to do.’
‘Are there relatives who could help?’
‘Maybe,’ she said, in tone that suggested that maybe, in equal likelihood, a Tibetan football team, a herd of talking buffalo or a host of angels might pitch in to assist.
‘You never married,’ he confirmed.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Still called “Grainger”.’
‘A lot of women don’t change their name when they get married,’ Grainger said. The opportunity to spar with him seemed to cheer her up.
‘My wife changed hers,’ he said. ‘Beatrice Leigh. Bea Leigh.’ He smirked, embarrassed. ‘Sounds ridiculous, I know. But she hated her father.’
Grainger shook her head. ‘Nobody hates their father. Not deep down. You can’t. He made you.’
‘Let’s not go there,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll end up talking about religion.’
Kurtzberg’s hearse was a dot on the horizon now. A sparkling constellation of rain hung right above it.
‘What are you gonna call your kid?’ asked Grainger.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s all . . . It’s hard for me to conceive of yet. It’s a bit scary. They say it changes you for ever. I mean, not that I don’t want to be changed, but . . . You can see what’s happening to the world, you can see where things are heading. The decision to put a child in danger like that, to expose an innocent child to God knows – goodness knows . . . ’ He faltered and fell silent.
Grainger appeared not to have been listening. She hopped onto the treadmill and swayed her hips like a dancer, keeping her feet still, to see if the thing would move. She jerked her pelvis. The treadmill advanced maybe a couple of centimetres. ‘Your kid will be brand new to the planet,’ she said. ‘Your kid won’t be thinking about all the things we’ve lost, the places that went to hell, the people who died. All that stuff will be prehistoric like the dinosaurs. Stuff that happened before time began. Only tomorrow will matter. Only today.’ She smiled. ‘Like, what’s for breakfast?’
He laughed.
‘Are you packed?’ he said.
‘Sure. I didn’t come with much. Leaving the same way.’
‘I’m packed too.’ It had been a three-minute job; there was scarcely anything in his luggage now. Passport. Keys to a house which might, by the time he got there, have a different lock. Some pencil stubs. The bright yellow boots sewn by Lover Five, each stitch of which had been executed with infinite care so as not to risk injuring her hands. A pair of trousers that fell off his hips, a few T-shirts that would hang so loose on him that he’d look like a refugee decked out in charity hand-me-downs. Anything else? He didn’t think so. The other clothes he’d brought with him were ruined by mildew or sacrificed as rags during the construction of his church. He knew that when he got home it would be cold, and he’d not be able to ponce about in a dishdasha with nothing underneath, but that was a problem for another day.
The weirdest absence from his rucksack was his Bible. He’d owned that Bible since his conversion, it had counselled, inspired and comforted him for so many years, he must have thumbed its pages thousands of times. The weave of the linen-enriched paper probably contained so many cells from his fingertips that a new Peter could be grown from the DNA. ‘Before you came,’ Jesus Lover Seventeen once said, ‘we were all alone and weak. Now, รี่ogether, we are สีรี่rong.’ He hoped that she and her fellow Jesus Lovers would derive some strength from his cherished King James, their very own Book of Strange New Things.
It was all committed to memory, anyway. The parts that were important, the parts he might need. Even now, he was pretty sure he could recite the gospel of Matthew, all twenty-eight chapters of it, except for the Ezekias-begat-Joatham s
tuff at the very start. He thought of Bea, reading to him from Chapter 6 in the bedroom of her tiny flat when they were first together, her voice soft and fervent as she spoke of the heavenly sanctuary where precious things were safe from harm: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ He thought of Matthew’s last words, and the meaning they could have for two people who loved each other:
I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A far-flung coterie of people read portions of this book during its composition and offered valuable feedback. I would like to thank Francis Bickmore, Jamie Byng, Jo Dingley, Viktor Janiš, Mary Ellen Kappler, David Kappler-Burch, Lorraine McCann, Paul Owens, Ann Patty, Angela Richardson, Anya Serota, Iris Tupholme and Zachary Wagman. My wife Eva was, as always, my closest and most insightful advisor and collaborator.
The final drafts were finished under difficult circumstances in Lucinda’s attic and in the basement of the Primrose Hill Book Shop, made available for me day & night by Jessica and Marek. My thanks to them.
I would like also to express my appreciation for the team of writers, pencillers and inkers who worked at Marvel Comics during the 1960s and 1970s, giving me such enjoyment as a child and ever since. All the surnames in The Book of Strange New Things are based on theirs, sometimes slightly altered or disguised, sometimes not. My choice of which names to use was governed by narrative concerns and does not reflect my esteem of the comics creators homaged & not homaged. No similarity is intended between the attributes of the Marvel Bullpen and the attributes of the characters in this novel, except for some obvious allusions to that pioneer of new universes, Jakob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby).