It was the sort of comment that might have offended her before, but she seemed unconcerned. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Not for the foreseeable future. Our brief is to build a sustainable environment first. Clean water. Renewable power. A team that gets along. A native population that doesn’t hate our guts.’
‘Noble aims,’ he said, leaning back in his seat, hit by a wave of weariness. ‘Funny no one thought of them before.’
They drove into the rain. The windscreen was dry one second, inundated the next. Elaborate raindrop patterns criss-crossed the glass until swept aside by the wipers. He was inside a metal and glass shell, in an artificially maintained atmosphere of cool air, divided off from the rain that could wash him clean. He should be out there, standing naked under it, letting it flow across his scalp, letting it blur his vision, letting it pelt the bony surfaces of his feet.
‘Are you really OK?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ he said, with effort. ‘It just feels a bit . . . strange . . . being enclosed in such a small space.’
She nodded, unconvinced. He could tell she was worried about him. He regretted not having insisted that she wait a little longer back at the settlement, so that he could prepare a little better for this return to the base. He would have been in much better shape if he could have had even ten, fifteen minutes to himself before stepping into the vehicle.
‘We’re within Shoot range now,’ she said, after a long silence.
He looked at her uncomprehendingly, as if she’d just told him that they were liable to be killed by snipers.
‘The Shoot. The messaging system,’ she said. ‘You could check if there’s anything from your wife.’
Not yet, he thought. Not yet.
He considered saying, ‘Thanks, but I’d prefer to wait until I’ve had a shower, changed my clothes, unwound a bit . . . ’ It would be the truth. But this truth would make him appear, in Grainger’s eyes, less than eager to know how his wife was getting on. He didn’t want her to doubt his love for Bea. And besides, here was Grainger showing sensitivity to his needs, or what she guessed his needs might be. She should be rewarded for that.
‘Yes, please,’ he said. The windscreen wipers were squeaking against the glass: the sky was clear above them. Peter twisted in his seat to look at the vista receding behind the vehicle. The rains were on their way to C-2. Soon they would unleash their sweet sussurus on the roof of his church.
‘OK, we’re connected,’ said Grainger. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, she used the other to swivel the Shoot screen over his lap, ready for him to use.
He typed in his password, followed the instructions as usual. There were at least a dozen messages from Bea, maybe even twenty. They were electronically dated, but the dates made no sense to him. He opened the oldest. A large quantity of print swarmed onto the screen. His wife was telling him she loved him. Peter, I love you, she said. He re-read her greetings several times, not to savour them, but to wait until the words were something more than pixels configured on a plastic screen, until he could hear her voice.
Just found out why the supermarket was closed. It’s gone bust! Incredible. This is Tesco we’re talking about, one of the biggest corporations in the world! They had huge fortunes to play with – which was what brought them down, apparently. There was a full report on one of the news sites, a sort of post-mortem, which made me realise it was bound to happen – totally inevitable. It’s just that the inevitable can still come as a surprise, can’t it? A vast amount of Tesco’s money was tied up with ExxonMobil, who’ve been in trouble ever since the Chinese grabbed the oilfields in Iraq, Iran and Kazakstan (sp?). They also had big interests in shipping companies, which have been hammered by the upsurge in piracy, also a lot of their empire was based in Thailand until the military coup. Plus they were hit hard when Barclays went down the plughole a few years back and took Tesco Stakeholder and Tesco Swipe down with it. Those are the bits I remember from the programme, there was a lot more to it. The corporation had its fingers in a hundred pies, all sorts of businesses you wouldn’t think of when you’re walking down the pet food aisle looking for Joshua’s niblets, and suddenly a critical number of those businesses went pear-shaped and hey presto, no more Tesco. ‘The end of an era,’ as a news presenter put it – rather pompously, I thought.
Have you ever noticed the way news presenters always round off their reports with a resonant phrase? They even modulate their voices when they’re reading the last couple of lines of the script. It’s a special kind of vocal music that signals ‘The End’.
Sorry, I’m rambling. Usually I’m the one who teases you about ruminations like this, and here I am indulging in it myself. Maybe I’m trying to fill the silence with my own imitation of your voice! Or maybe it’s true what they say, that married people end up blurring their identities, finishing each other’s sentences.
Today was the day that the Frame family moved house. Sheila dropped Billy off with me, as agreed. I took him to the cat show. It was a hoot and he seemed to enjoy it immensely despite whispering to me how stupid it all was and how ridiculous the handlers looked. But as I’d hoped, the charm of the animals won him over! And I must admit I was gawping happily at all those different moggies too. God must have had such terrific fun designing all those distinct varieties of furry mammal. (Although maybe I’m showing my own prejudices there. Maybe he had even more fun with the fish and the insects and so on.)
Anyway, Billy and I kept the conversation light most of the day, but just before his mum came to fetch him, he opened up. I asked him how he felt about his father going to another country. He said, ‘My dad says there aren’t any countries anymore. They don’t exist. England and Romania are just different parts of the same thing.’ For a moment I thought, how nice, Mark is reassuring his kid that we’re all one world-wide community. But no. Billy said Mark asked him to visualise the world map as a huge thick sheet of plastic floating on the sea, like a raft, with crowds of people balancing on it. And sometimes too many people stand together on one bit and it starts to sink. You just run to another bit where it’s better, he said. Then when THAT bit starts to sink, you move again. There’s always places where things aren’t so bad: cheaper accommodation, cheaper food, cheaper fuel. You go there and it’s OK for a while. Then it stops being OK and you get the hell out. It’s what animals do, he said. ‘Animals don’t live in countries, they just inhabit territory. What do animals care if a place has a name? Names don’t mean shit.’ That’s the word Billy used, so I presume that’s the word his father used. Quite a heavy lecture in geopolitics for a little boy to swallow! And of course the bit that Mark left out of his analysis was the bit about going off with a 27-year-old concert promoter called Nicole. Who happens to be Romanian. But enough of that.
I’ve got a blanket over my knees as I type this. You’re probably expiring from the heat but it’s cold here and I’ve been without gas for a week now. Not because of any accident or failure in the supply, just because of sheer bureaucratic insanity. The gas company we’re with – used to be with, I should say – was being paid by direct debit out of our Barclays bank account. But when Barclays went under and we changed over to Bank of Scotland, something went wrong with the debit arrangement. A computer glitch. And suddenly I got this final demand. I tried to pay it, but here’s where it gets insane – they wouldn’t talk to me, because I’m not the ‘account holder’. I kept offering to pay them, and they kept saying ‘Sorry madam, we need to speak to the account holder’, ie, you, Peter. I must have spent hours on the phone about this. I considered getting the next door neighbour to pop round and talk into the phone in a deep voice, which would have been morally wrong, of course, but they probably would have asked him your mother’s maiden name. In the end, I had to concede that it just wasn’t possible to fix. I’ll wait until they take us to court and hope it gets sorted out then. In the meantime, I’ve signed with a different gas supplier but it will be a few days before they can come and connect it. They say that the freak weather in various parts of England has been causing havoc with utilities and (to quote the engineer I spoke to) ‘there’s engineers dashing about all over the place like chickens with their heads cut off’. Give that man a job in PR!
Do you remember Archie Hartley? I bumped into him in the cafeteria of the hospital the other day and he
Again he rested his head back against the seat, breathed deeply. Despite the dry cool of the air conditioning, he was sweating. Droplets tickled his forehead and ran into his eyebrows.
‘Finished already?’ said Grainger.
‘Uh . . . just a minute . . . ’ He felt as though he might be in danger of passing out. ‘Bad news?’
‘No, I . . . I wouldn’t say that. It’s just . . . You know, there’s a lot to catch up on . . . ’
‘Peter, listen to me,’ said Grainger, enunciating each word with earnest emphasis. ‘This happens. This happens to all of us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re here. She’s there. It’s natural.’
‘Natural?’
‘The rift,’ she said. ‘It grows and grows, and finally . . . there’s too much of it to cross. It’s like . . . ’
Words failed her, and she resorted to a gesture instead. Releasing her grip on the steering wheel for a few seconds – a safe enough risk, given that the ground was flat and there was nothing visible in any direction to collide with – she held up her hands, palms parallel, separated by a few inches, as though about to press them together in medieval prayer. But instead, she parted them wider, letting the fingers splay limply, as though each hand was toppling off an axis, falling through space.