27
Stay where you are
His name was Peter Leigh, son of James Leigh and Kate Leigh (née Woolfolk), grandson of George and June. He was born in Horns Mill, Hertford, Hertfordshire. The names of his cats, in the order that he’d owned them, were Mokkie, Silky, Cleo, Sam, Titus and Joshua. When he returned home, he would have another cat, from an animal refuge, if such places still existed when he got back. As for his own child, he would call him, or her, whatever name Bea wanted. Or maybe Kate. They would discuss it when the time came. Maybe they’d wait until the baby was born, and see what its personality was. People were individuals from Day One.
He stood as straight as he could in his soul-destroying room in the USIC base and appraised himself in the mirror. He was a thirty-three-year-old English male, deeply tanned as if he’d been on a long holiday to Alicante or some such Mediterranean resort. But he did not look fit. His chin and collarbones were worryingly sharp, sculpted by inadequate diet. He was too thin for the dishdasha, although he looked even worse in Western clothes. There were a few small scars on his face, some of them dating from his alcoholic years, some more recent and delineated with neat crusts. His eyes were bloodshot and there was fear and grief in them. ‘You know what would sort you out?’ a fellow dosser once said to him as they stood in the rain waiting for a homeless shelter to open. ‘A wife.’ When Peter asked him if he spoke from experience, the old wino only smiled and shook his grizzled head.
The USIC corridors that had once seemed like a maze were now familiar – too familiar. The familiarity of a prison. The framed posters hung in their appointed places, marking his progress through the base. As he walked towards the vehicle bay, the glazen images gazed sightlessly down at him: Rudolph Valentino, Rosie the Riveter, the dog in the basket with the ducks, the smiling picnickers by Renoir. Laurel and Hardy caught frozen, stoic, forever interrupted in their hopeless attempt to build a house. And those 1930s construction workers suspended high above New York . . . they would be suspended there eternally, never finishing their lunch, never falling off their girder, never growing old.
He pushed through the last door and was greeted by the smell of engine grease. For his farewell visit to the ?????, he wanted to travel to C-2 himself, alone, not as a passenger in someone else’s car. He cast his eyes over the vehicle bay in search of the person who was manning it today, hoping it might be someone he’d never met before, someone who knew nothing about him except that he was the VIP missionary man who should be given whatever he asked for, within reason. But the person bending into the engine of a jeep, canopied by the open hood, had a rump he recognised. It was Craig again.
‘Hi,’ he said, knowing even as he opened his mouth that oratory would get him nowhere.
‘Hi,’ she said, only half-acknowledging him as she continued to slather the engine innards with lubricant.
Their negotiation was short and sweet. He could hardly blame her for refusing to hand over a vehicle, given what happened last time. Maybe she’d been criticised by her fellow USIC personnel for allowing him – clearly off his head – to drive Kurtzberg’s hearse into the night, only to need emergency rescue later, while the vehicle had to be schlepped back to base in a separate trip. Craig was all smiles and casual body language, but the subtext was: You are a pain in the ass.
‘There’s a drug and food exchange scheduled just a few hours from now,’ she said, as she wiped her hands on a rag. ‘Why not go along for the ride?’
‘Because this is goodbye. I’m saying goodbye to the ?????.’
‘Goodbye to the what?’
‘The Oasans. The native people.’ The freaks in Freaktown, you fat idiot, he thought.
She chewed on this. ‘You need your own vehicle to say goodbye in?’
He hung his head in frustration. ‘If I’m shoulder to shoulder with USIC personnel, it might look like I was using you guys as . . . uh . . . bodyguards. Emotional bodyguards, if you see what I mean.’ Craig’s direct yet unfocused stare told him that no, she didn’t see. ‘It might look like I didn’t want to face them on my own.’
‘OK,’ said Craig, idly scratching her snake tattoo. Seconds passed, making it obvious that her ‘OK’ did not mean ‘In that case, I will give you a car’; it did not even mean ‘I understand why that might worry you’; it meant ‘So be it.’
‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that Grainger will want to be going out to the settlement today.’
‘Won’t be Grainger,’ said Craig breezily, and consulted a printed roster. ‘Grainger is off-duty for . . . ’ She flipped pages, scanning for the name. ‘The foreseeable,’ she summarised at last, and flipped back to today. ‘It’ll be . . . Tuska and Flores.’
Peter looked over her shoulder, at all the greased-up vehicles he could drive out of this place if only she wasn’t in the way.
‘Your choice,’ she grinned, and he understood that sometimes there is no choice at all.
‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake,’ Bea had said, the last time he’d held her in his arms. ‘It’s night and the sky is full of stars.’ And she had shared her vision of him preaching to a multitude of unseen creatures in fishing boats, bobbing on the sea. Perhaps they’d both known that it was a dream, that nothing like that would really happen. It was another sunny, torpid day on Oasis, and the natives were dozing in their cots, or making food for their foreign guests, or washing clothes, or spending time with their children, hoping that their flesh would survive unharmed until the sun set and they were cocooned in their cots again. Maybe they were praying.
Filling in time before the appointed hour for his ride, Peter considered what, if anything, to take with him to the settlement. A stack of half-finished booklets lay on the table, next to some balls of wool. He picked up the nearest, a paraphrase of Revelation, Chapter 21. He’d reduced the number of ‘s’ sounds to four, and gotten rid of all the ‘t’s: that was probably as much as he could achieve.
And there I found a new heaven and a new earth, for the heaven and the earth from before were gone. And I heard a loud voice from heaven declaring, Behold, God will dwell with you, and you will be His very own people, and God will be your very own God. And there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain. And God upon the throne said, Behold, I make everything new.