‘You’re a lucky guy, Peter. One of life’s charmed creatures.’
For some reason, this stung him. He wanted her to know he had suffered just as much as anyone.
‘I was homeless for a few years. I got beaten up.’ He hoped he was speaking with quiet dignity, rather than whining, but he suspected not.
‘All part of life’s adventure, right?’ said Grainger. There was no sarcasm in her voice, just a weary, tolerant sadness.
‘What do you mean?’
She sighed. ‘Some people go through heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They’re in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It’s one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn’t touch them, not really. They’re having an adventure. It’s like: What’s next? And then there’s other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they’re maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9.35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. For ever.’
He lay silent, absorbing what she’d said.
‘I felt that way,’ he said at last, ‘when Bea told me it was over.’
It began to rain again. Without shelter, they had no choice but to lie where they were and get soaked. Grainger just closed her eyes. Peter watched her bra materialising again under her tunic, watched the contours of her breasts take shape. She hitched the sleeves off her arms, let the old injuries breathe. Each time he’d spent time with Grainger he’d wondered if a natural opportunity would arise to ask her about her self-harm. There would never be a better time than now. He tried to frame the question, but none of the obvious words – the whys and whens – would move from his brain to his tongue. He realised that he no longer wanted to know what caused those scars. Grainger’s pain was in the past and there was no point revisiting it. Here, today, lying by his side, she was a woman with faint ridges on her arms: if he stroked her flesh gently, he would feel them. That was all.
When the shower had moved on and the sun was warming them again, Grainger said: ‘Did you get married in a church or an office?’
‘A church.’
‘Was it a big, fancy wedding?’
‘Not so much. No parents or family members on either side, for various reasons. A few people from Bea’s own church, which became my church in the end.’ In truth, he remembered nothing much about the event, but he remembered the light beaming through the windows, the way a grey November afternoon had been unexpectedly transformed by a sunburst. ‘It was nice. I think everyone had a good time. And there was loads of alcohol and I didn’t drink, I wasn’t even tempted. Which was quite an achievement for me because, you know . . . I’m an alcoholic.’
‘Me too,’ she said.
‘It never leaves you,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Like God, huh? More loyal than God.’
They lay quietly for a while. Two small insects of the same species found each other on Grainger’s abdomen and started mating.
‘I bet Ella Reinman is a secret lush,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘A lush. American word for alcoholic. I thought you’d know that one.’
‘Never too late for vocabulary building,’ he said.
‘She thinks she’s so damn smart,’ bitched Grainger. ‘Thinks she can look right inside you and tell if you’re ever gonna drink again. Well, she got it wrong with us, didn’t she?’
Peter was silent. Nothing would be gained by telling her that the booze she’d smelled on him when she dragged him out of Tartaglione’s den was all spillage. Let her think they’d fallen off the wagon together. Let her think he’d broken his sacred promise, let her think he’d lost his last shred of dignity. It was kinder that way.
‘I was a different person when I did that interview,’ she said. ‘It was a million years ago. People change.’
‘Yes, people change.’
The insects were finished, and flew off.
‘Tell me about your wife’s wedding dress,’ said Grainger.
‘It was white,’ he replied. ‘It was exactly what you imagine a wedding dress to be, conventional, nothing unusual about it. Except that it was a huge symbolic statement. The whiteness of it. Bea had a terrible past, sexually. She was . . . let’s just say she was used and abused. And she refused to be destroyed by it.’
Grainger scratched at her arms. The repeated drenchings had activated an allergy in the scars. ‘Not so much of the symbolism. Tell me more about the dress.’
He cast his mind back. He cast it across the galaxy, aiming for the bedroom of his home in England.
‘It . . . it didn’t have a huge flouncy train behind it,’ he said. ‘It was a proper dress, a dress to move around in. It had puff shoulders, not balloony, just elegant, and then it was tight on the arms, with a brocade kind of texture, right down to the wrists. There was brocade on the . . . uh . . . abdomen as well, and on the collar, but the bosom was smooth and silky. The skirt was ankle-length, it didn’t touch the floor.’
Grainger was nodding, humming. She was getting what she wanted.
‘One of the amazing things about Bea,’ said Peter, ‘is that she wore that dress many times afterwards. At home. Just for us.’
‘That’s so romantic.’ There were tears in Grainger’s eyes.
Peter felt suddenly disconsolate. The memory of Bea’s bitter disappointment with him was more recent than these fond memories he was sharing with Grainger. ‘I suppose it’s just a story I’m telling myself, like Tuska says,’ he said. ‘An old story. Life has moved on. Bea is a different person. You know, not long ago, I wrote to her about the dress, about how much I loved her in it, and she . . . she said I was just being sentimental, focusing on a memory of who she used to be, not who she is now.’
Grainger shook her head. ‘That’s bullshit,’ she said softly. Tenderly, even. ‘Take it from me, Peter, her heart swells up when you talk about that dress. She would be devastated if she thought you’d forgotten about that dress. Can’t you see that? Everybody’s sentimental, everybody. There’s only about fifty people in the whole damn world who aren’t sentimental. And they’re all working here.’
They both laughed. ‘We should try once more to get back,’ said Peter.
‘OK,’ she said, and hauled herself to her feet. Her movements were stiffer than before. His too. They were carbon-based life forms, running low on fuel. An hour or so later, with the USIC base still eluding them, they found a structure of a different kind. It had shimmered in their sights for the longest time, and while heading for it they discussed the possibility that it was a mirage. But it proved real enough: the skeletal remains of a large camping tent. The metal struts were intact, staking out the shape of a house, the kind of house a child would draw. The canvas hung in tatters.
Inside the tent, nothing. No provisions, no bedding, no implements. A square of ground, a blank panel for the imagination to fill.
Behind the tent, planted in the ground and only slightly tilted, a cross. A wooden one, of very modest scale, about knee-height. Where had the wood come from? Not from this world, that’s for sure. It must have been transported, stashed in a ship along with the medicines and the engineering magazines and the raisins and the humans, billions of miles from its point of origin. Just two pine slats, never intended to be nailed together in this manner, two sturdy slices of tree varnished to resemble antique oak. Two nails were driven through the crux: one to join the two pieces of wood together, and another, crudely hammered and bent, to secure two small circlets of metal. Gold. Kurtzberg’s wedding ring, and the wedding ring of the wife he’d lost in another galaxy long, long ago.
On the horizontal slat of the cross, the minister had carved a message, then painstakingly blackened each letter with the flame of a cigarette lighter or some similar tool. Peter expected a motto in Latin or an allusion to faith or Christ or the Afterlife.
FOR ALL THAT I’VE HAD AND SEEN, I AM TRULY THANKFUL, the inscription said.
They stood and looked at that cross for several minutes, while the ragged remains of the tent flapped in the breeze.
‘I’m going home,’ announced Grainger, in a voice shaky with tears, ‘to find my dad.’
Peter put his arm around her shoulders. This was the moment when he was called upon to say the right thing; nothing less than the right thing would do. As a man or as a minister of God, his challenge was the same: to reconcile them both to their fate. There would be no going home; there was no dad to be reunited with; they were lost and soon they would be dead. Lightning had struck them, and they had failed to understand its message.
‘Grainger . . . ’ he began, his mind blank, trusting that inspiration would lend words to his tongue.
But before he could continue, the dull thrum which they’d both imagined was the wind agitating the canvas shreds of the tent grew suddenly louder, and an olive-green military jeep drove past them, slowed to a stop, and reversed.
A brown head with white eyes and white teeth poked out of the window.
‘Are you guys finished here?’ hollered BG, revving the engine. ‘’Cause some of us have work to do.’