Write as soon as you can, I love you,
Peter
? was finally going down, turning the horizon golden caramel. There would be a drawn-out dusk of almost wearisome beauty and then it would be night for a long, long time. Peter stowed the putrefying Oasan food in his bag and left the compound.
He walked for a mile or so, in the hope that the USIC base would disappear from his view – or, more to the point, that he would disappear from the view of anyone at USIC who might have seen him leave. But the flat, featureless terrain meant that the buildings remained obstinately in sight, and a trick of perspective made them seem less far-off than they were. Rationally, he knew it was highly improbable he was being watched, but instinctively he felt under constant surveillance. He walked on.
The direction he’d chosen was westward into the wilderness – that is, not towards the Oasan settlement and not towards the Big Brassiere. He’d fantasised that if he walked far enough he would eventually reach mountains, streams, or at least some rocky knoll or marshy bog that would let him know he was elsewhere. But the tundra went on for ever. Level brown earth, occasionally enlivened by a clump of whiteflower luminescing in the sunset, and, whenever he turned to look back, the eerie concrete mirage of the USIC base. Tired, he sat down and waited for ? to sink below the land.
How long he waited, he couldn’t tell. Maybe two hours. Maybe six hours. His consciousness detached itself from his body, hovered above it, somewhere in the ??. He forgot the purpose of his coming out here. Had he decided he couldn’t spend the night in his quarters, and opted to sleep in the open air? His knapsack could serve as a pillow.
When it was almost dark, he sensed he was no longer alone. He squinted into the gloom and spotted a small, pale creature about five metres away. It was one of the bird-like vermin that had consumed the whiteflower harvest and bitten him. Just one, separated from the rest of its kind. It waddled cautiously in a wide circle around Peter, nodding its head. After a while, Peter realised it was not nodding but sniffing: its snout smelled food.
Peter recalled the moment when the flesh of his arm sprayed blood, recalled the nauseating pain of the bite to his leg. A convulsion of anger disturbed the numbness of his grief. He considered killing this vicious creature, stamping on its body, grinding its sharp-fanged little skull under his heel – not in revenge but self-defence, or so he could pretend. But no. The thing was pathetic and comical, hesitant in the dark, vulnerable in its aloneness. And the food it smelled was not Peter’s flesh.
Slowly and smoothly, Peter extracted the prize from his knapsack. The creature stopped in its tracks. Peter laid the plastic bag on the ground and shuffled backwards. The creature moved in and punctured the bag with its teeth, releasing a sweetish stench. Then it gobbled up the entire pile, plastic shreds and all. Peter wondered if, as a result, the creature would end up dying a more horrible death than if he’d stomped on its head. Maybe this was what the Hindus meant by karma.
After the satisfied animal had left him, Peter sat and stared at the distant lights of the base, his ‘home away from home’, as Grainger had called it. He stared until the lights turned abstract in his brain, until he could imagine the sun rising in England, and Bea hurrying through the car park of her hospital towards the bus stop. Then he imagined Bea getting into that bus and taking a seat amongst a heterogeneous variety of humans, some chocolate brown, some yellowish, some beige or pasty pink. He imagined the bus travelling along a road crowded with vehicles, until it pulled up in front of a store that sold household knick-knacks, cheap toys and other bargains for 99 pence, round the corner from a street with a launderette on the corner, a hundred and fifty metres from a semi-detached house with no curtains in the front windows, and an internal staircase carpeted in threadbare maroon, leading up to a room in which stood a machine on which Bea could, when she was ready, type the words ‘Dear Peter’. He raised himself to his feet and started walking back.
Dear Peter,
No I have not had a miscarriage and please don’t lecture me about compassion. You just don’t understand how impossible everything has become. It’s all about the scale of a problem and the available energy to deal with it. When someone gets their leg blown off by a bomb, you rush them into surgery, mend the stump, fit them with a prosthetic, give them physiotherapy, counselling, whatever it takes, and a year later, they may be running a marathon. If a bomb blows off their arms, legs, genitals, intestines, bladder, liver and kidneys, IT IS DIFFERENT. We need a certain proportion of things to be OK in order to be able to cope with other things going wrong. Whether it’s a human body or Christian endeavour or life in general, we can’t keep it going if too much of what we need is taken away from us.
I won’t tell you about the other things that were freaking me out in the last week or two. It’s current affairs stories that will only bore you. New wars in Africa, systematic slaughter of women and children, mass starvation in rural China, crackdown on protesters in Germany, the ECB scandal, my pension being wiped out, stuff like that. None of it will seem real to you up there. You are spooning Bible verses into the hungry mouths of Oasans, I appreciate that.
Anyway, what you need to know is that last week, for various reasons, I was stressed out and, as usual when I’m stressed out, Joshua picks up on my vibes. He was cowering under the furniture, dashing from room to room, crying, circling round and round my shins but not letting me pick him up or stroke him. It was the last thing I needed and it was driving me crazy. I just tried to ignore him, get on with some chores. I ironed my uniform. The ironing board was at an awkward angle and the cord didn’t have enough slack and I was too tired and hassled to set it up any other way so I just coped. At one point, I set the iron down and it fell off the edge of the board. Instinctively I jumped backwards. My heel came down hard on something, there was a sickening cracking snapping noise and Joshua screamed, I swear he screamed. Then he was gone.
I found him under the bed, trembling and hyperventilating. Eyes wide in pain and terror. I’d broken his back leg. I could see that. There was not one iota of trust in his eyes, he flinched when I spoke. I was the enemy. I fetched the gardening gloves so that he wouldn’t scratch or bite me and I took hold of his tail and pulled him out. It was the only way. I got him into the kitchen, put him on the table and attached the lead to his collar. He was calmer. I thought he was in shock, maybe in too much pain to do anything except sit there panting. I picked up the phone to call the vet. The kitchen window was open as usual. Joshua shot out as if someone fired him from a cannon.
I looked for him for hours. I covered the same ground over and over until I just couldn’t walk anymore and it was pitch dark. Then I had to go to work (night shift). It was hell. Don’t say anything, it was hell. At 4 am I was wearing two hospital gowns because my uniform was covered in faeces. An obese insane guy had been tossing it out of his bed, smearing it on the bedrails, bellowing the place down. The orderlies were off-duty, it was just me, little Oyama and a new girl who was sweet but kept disappearing. The faeces-tossing guy’s mother was camping out in the visitors’ room through the night – nobody had been able to throw her out. She’s in there with a six-pack of Pepsi and some half-eaten takeaway (this is supposed to be a hospital!) and every so often she pops her head in and checks that we’re taking good care of her boy. ‘You a bitch!’ she yells at me. ‘You cruel! I call police! You not a real nurse! Where the real nurses?’ On and on and on and on.
In the morning, I go home, still wearing the two gowns with a cardigan over them. Must have looked like an escapee from a loony bin. I get out of the bus two stops early so I can cut through the park in case I find Joshua there. It’s a long shot and I don’t really have any hope that I’ll see him. But I do.
He’s strung up by the tail from a tree. Alive. Two kids of maybe twelve are hoisting him up and down on a rope, making him spin, jerking him so he twitches. A red haze falls over my eyes. I don’t know what happened next, what I did to these kids, my memory is a blank. I only know I didn’t kill them because they weren’t there anymore when I came to. There’s blood on my fists, under my nails. I wish I’d killed them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – underprivileged kids, rotten upbringing, in dire need of love and forbearance, why not come to our Outreach programme blah blah blah – THESE EVIL SCUMBAGS WERE TORTURING JOSHUA!
I pick him up. He’s still breathing, but shallowly. The base of his tail is shredded and one eye looks gouged out but he’s alive and I think he recognises me. Ten minutes later I’m at the vet’s. It’s before opening hours but I must have kicked and screamed because they open up for me. He lifts Joshua from my arms and gives him an injection.
‘OK, it’s done,’ he says. ‘Do you want to take him home or leave him here?’
‘What do you mean, take him home?’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for him?’
‘I just did,’ he says.
Afterwards, he tells me he had no way of guessing I was willing to pay any amount of money for surgery. ‘Nobody’s bothering with that sort of thing nowadays,’ he says. ‘I can go for five, six hours without anyone coming in, and then when someone finally walks through the door with a sick pet, all they want is for it to be put to sleep.’ He puts Joshua into a plastic bag for me. ‘I won’t charge you,’ he tells me.
Peter, I’m only going to say this once. This experience is not educational. It is not instructive. It is not God moving in mysterious ways, it is not God figuring out exactly what sublime ultimate purpose can be served by me stepping on Joshua’s leg and everything after. The Saviour I believed in took an interest in what I did and how I behaved. The Saviour I believed in made things happen and stopped things happening. I was deluding myself. I am alone and frightened and married to a missionary who’s going to tell me that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and if you don’t say it it will just be because you’re being diplomatic, because in your heart you’re convinced I made this happen through my faltering of faith, and that makes me feel even more alone. Because you’re not coming back to me, are you? You like it up there. Because you’re on Planet God. So even if you did come back to me, we still wouldn’t be together. Because in your heart you’d still be on Planet God, and I’d be a trillion miles away from you, alone with you by my side.
IV
IN HEAVEN
23
A drink with you
The bites were poisonous after all. He was sure of it. Underneath the bandages, the wounds looked clean, but the damage was done. The network of veins and arteries inside his flesh was industriously polluting all his organs with infected blood, feeding his brain with venom. It was only a matter of time. First he would become delirious – he felt that coming on already – and then his system would shut down, kidneys, liver, heart, guts, lungs, all those mysteriously interdependent globs of meat which needed poison-free fuel to keep functioning. His body would evict his soul.
Still seated at the Shoot, he lifted his face to the ceiling. He’d been staring at Bea’s words so long that they’d burned into his retinas and now re-appeared above him, illegible as mildew. The lightbulb hanging above his head was one of those energy-saving ones, more a coil than a bulb, like a segment of radioactive intestine suspended from a wire. Above that, a thin lid of ceiling and roof, and above that . . . what? Where in the universe was Bea? Was she above him, below him, to his right or to his left? If he could fly, if he could launch himself through space faster than the speed of light, what good would it do him? He had no idea where to go.