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, ???ogether, we are ?????rong.’ 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 stuff 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 Jani?, 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).