When, at last, the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother had yielded all the bounty it was going to yield, she lay exhausted on the ground, in the shade of a couple of gently swaying garments that hung on the washing line nearby. Since she was the only Oasan Peter had seen completely naked, he had no way of telling how much of the grotesquery he saw before him was due to decay and how much of it was what he would have found under the clothing of any healthy, living Oasan. Her flesh, which smelled fermented but not foul, had turned grey as clay, and was pitted with pocks and cavities. She had no breasts or anything else suggesting human femaleness – or maleness. The paradigm he had in his head, based on photographs of human corpses in famines and concentration camps, was of flesh shrunk down to a thin parchment of skin to hold the bones together. That wasn’t what confronted him here. Lover One’s mother apparently had no ribs, no skeleton, just solid flesh that was liquefying. The holes eaten into her arms and legs exposed a ribbed black substance like liquorice.
Monster, was the word that came to his mind as he suppressed a shudder. But then Creatura: created thing, he reminded himself.
‘Now we pu??? her in the ground,’ said Lover One on the third day. There was no urgency or ceremonial portent in his voice, nor was it clear what he meant by ‘now’. As far as Peter was aware, no grave had been dug and there was no evidence of the community preparing for a solemn ritual.
‘Would you like me to . . . say something?’ suggested Peter. ‘At the funeral?’
‘Funeral?’
‘It’s the custom of our . . . ’ he began. Then, ‘When Christians . . . ’ he began again. Then, ‘Where I come from, when a person dies and is being buried, someone usually makes a speech before the body is put into the ground. They talk about the person who’s died, and they try to remind his friends and family about what made that person special.’
Lover One bowed his head in courtesy. ‘You never know my mother,’ he pointed out, with stonkingly obvious good sense.
‘That’s true,’ Peter conceded. ‘But you could tell me some things about her, and I could turn those things into a . . . speech.’ Even as he made the offer, it seemed absurd.
‘Word can make no ?ange in my mother now,’ said Lover One.
‘Words can comfort the friends and family left behind,’ said Peter. ‘Would you like me to read from the Book?’
Jesus Lover One smoothed his hands over an invisible molehill in the air, signalling that this would not be necessary. ‘Kur?????berg give u?? word from the Book, long before.’ And he recited them for Peter’s approval.
A trickle of lisping nonsense entered Peter’s ears. It took him a few seconds to re-play the meaningless syllables and translate them into a Bible verse, a verse which in fact was not from the Bible but from the Book of Common Prayer:
‘A??he?? ???o a??he??, du????? ???o du?????.’
For several dozen hours after this incident, Peter lived in fear that some generous soul would bring him, as a special treat, a dish made from maggots. The Oasans were always bringing him snacks and – who knows? – they might think he was getting fed up with whiteflower. Surprise dessert for Father Peter!
He knew his revulsion was irrational, as the food would no doubt be delicious and probably very good for him too. Moreover he was aware that every country had its culinary challenges which provoked disgust in squeamish foreigners – the Japanese with their giant fish eyeballs and cod semen and still-squirming octopus, the Africans with their goat heads, the Chinese with their bird’s nest soup that was really saliva, and so on. If he’d been ministering in any of these places, chances were he’d be honoured with one of these specialties. Wasn’t there even an Italian cheese that was rotten and maggot-infested? Casu marzu, it was called. (Amazing how he could retrieve that term, which he probably read just once in a magazine years ago, when only yesterday he’d blanked on the name of the street where he lived.)
Of course, he’d never had to eat any of these outlandish substances. All of his ministries, until now, had been in England. The most exotic thing he’d ever been served, at an outreach convention in Bradford, had been caviar, and his problem hadn’t been the fish eggs themselves, but the money that the organisers had channelled into the catering when they were supposed to be raising funds for the city’s homeless.
Anyway: this wasn’t about maggots per se. It was about the vivid memory of Jesus Lover One’s mother, and the unerasable, emotionally charged connection between her and the maggots that had fed on her. His mind boggled at how her own son could bear to eat a foodstuff that had been produced in this way.
To this question, as with so many others, God organised a very specific and enlightening answer. Jesus Lover One showed up at the church one evening, carrying a hamper of food. Wordlessly he unpacked it in front of Peter as they sat down together on the bed behind the pulpit. The food smelled wholesome and was still warm. It was whiteflower soup in its mushroom guise, and several hunks of whiteflower bread with brown crusts and pale insides, fresh from the oven.
‘I’m glad it’s whiteflower,’ Peter said, deciding to be totally frank. ‘I was worried you would bring me something made from . . . the creatures you harvested from your mother’s body. I don’t think I could eat that.’
Lover One nodded. ‘I al??o. Other can. No??? I.’
Peter absorbed the words, but couldn’t interpret their meaning. Maybe Lover One was informing him of the etiquette governing this particular ritual. Or was it an openhearted disclosure? Tell me more, he thought, but he knew from experience that keeping silent in the hope that an Oasan would fill the silence didn’t work.
‘It’s a very good and . . . admirable idea,’ he said, ‘to . . . do what you people do. With someone who’s just died.’ He wasn’t sure how to go on. The bottom line was that no amount of admiration could prevent him being disgusted. If he put that into words, he’d be lecturing Lover One on the irreconcilable differences between their species.
Again Lover One nodded. ‘We do all thing ???o make food. Make food for many.’ A bowl of soup sat balanced in the lap of his tunic. He had eaten none of it yet.
‘I’ve been dreaming of your mother,’ Peter confessed. ‘I didn’t know her as a person, I’m not saying . . . ’ He took a deep breath. ‘The sight of her covered in insects, and then in maggots, and everyone just . . . ’ He looked down at Lover One’s boots, even though there was no possibility of eye-to-eye confrontation anyway. ‘I’m not used to it. It upset me.’
Lover One sat unmoving. One gloved hand rested on his abdomen, the other held a piece of bread. ‘I al??o,’ he said.
‘I thought . . . I got the impression you . . . all of you . . . were afraid of death,’ continued Peter. ‘And yet . . . ’
‘We fear death,’ Lover One affirmed. ‘However. Fear canno??? hold life in a body when life i?? over. Nothing can hold life in a body. Only the Lord God.’
Peter stared straight into the unreadable face of his friend. ‘There can be moments in a person’s life,’ he suggested, ‘when grief over the loss of a loved one is stronger than faith.’