Grainger sat rigid, jaw clenched and eyes unblinking. Tears welled up, glimmered, and fell. For a few seconds it looked as if she might start sobbing outright, then she pulled herself together – and got annoyed. Annoyance, Peter realised, was her defence mechanism, a prickliness that protected her soft underbelly like porcupine spines.
‘If prayer is just a way of voicing concern,’ she said, ‘what’s the point of it? It’s like politicians expressing their “concern” about wars and human rights abuses and all that other bad stuff they’re gonna sit back and let happen anyway. It’s just empty words, it doesn’t change a damn thing.’
Peter shook his head. It felt like years since he’d been challenged like this. In his ministry back home, it was an almost daily encounter.
‘I understand how you feel,’ he said. ‘But God isn’t a politician. Or a policeman. He’s the creator of the universe. He’s an unimaginably huge force, a trillion times bigger than the solar system. And of course, when things go wrong in our lives, it’s natural to be angry, and to want to hold someone responsible. Someone who isn’t us. But blaming God . . . It’s like blaming the laws of physics for allowing suffering, or blaming the principle of gravity for a war.’
‘I never used the word “blame”,’ she said. ‘And you’re distorting the issue. I wouldn’t get down on my knees and pray to the laws of physics, ’cause the laws of physics can’t hear me. God is supposed to be on the case.’
‘You make Him sound – ‘
‘I just wish,’ she said, ‘that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.’ And, with a strangled gasp of pain, she broke down and started weeping aloud. Peter leaned forward, still kneeling, and put his arm round her back as she convulsed. They were awkwardly matched, but she leaned forward in the chair and pressed her small head into his shoulder. Her hair tickled his cheek, arousing and confusing him with its intimate softness and alien smell. He missed Bea with a rush of distress.
‘I didn’t say He didn’t care,’ he murmured. ‘He cares about us very much. So much that He became one of us. He took human form. Can you imagine that? The creator of everything, the shaper of galaxies, got Himself born as a human baby, and grew up in a lower-class family in a small village in the Middle East.’
Still sobbing, she laughed into his pullover, possibly snotting it. ‘You don’t really believe that.’
‘Believe me, I do.’
She laughed again. ‘You are such a nutcase.’
‘No more than anyone else here, surely.’
They kept still for a minute, not speaking. Grainger had relaxed now that her anger was purged. Peter drew comfort from her warm body – more comfort than he’d expected when he reached out to her. No one, since BG and Severin had hauled him out of his crib on the flight, had made contact with his flesh other than to shake his hand in greeting. The Oasans were not touchy-feely people, not even with each other. They occasionally stroked each other on the shoulder with gloved hands, but that was about it, and they possessed no lips to kiss with. It had been a long time – too long – since he’d had this contact with a fellow creature.
But his back was getting sore from the unfamiliar position; muscles he seldom used were under strain. If he didn’t break the embrace soon, he would lose his balance. The arm which was now laid supportively around her midriff would suddenly bear down on her with his body’s weight.
‘Tell me a bit about your dad,’ he said.
She shifted back in the chair, allowing him to move away without appearing to have done so deliberately, just as he’d hoped. A glance confirmed that the weeping hadn’t done her any good – her face was blotched, puffy and unfeminine, and she knew it. He looked gallantly askance while she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve, pecked at her hair with her fingers, and generally tried to compose herself.
‘I don’t know much about my dad,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him since my mom died. That was twenty-five years ago. I was fifteen.’
Peter did the maths. It wasn’t the right time for a compliment, but Grainger looked much younger than forty. Even after a bout of crying.
‘But you know he’s sick?’ he prompted. ‘You told me he was going to die soon.’
‘I guess. He’s an old man now. I shouldn’t care. He’s had his time.’ She fidgeted with a phantom pack of cigarettes again. ‘But he’s my dad.’
‘If you haven’t had contact for so long, isn’t it possible he’s passed away already? Or maybe he’s living in retirement somewhere, enjoying a healthy, happy old age.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’ She shot him a mistrustful look, then softened, as though willing to give him another chance. ‘Do you ever get intuitions?’
‘Intuitions?’
‘When you get a feeling about something, something you’re sure is happening right at that instant, and there’s no way you can technically know it, but you just know it. And then a little while later, you find out . . . you get absolute proof, from somebody else maybe, some eyewitness, that what you thought was happening really did happen, exactly when you thought of it, in exactly the way you pictured it. Like it was being beamed straight into your brain.’
He held her gaze, resisting the reflex urge to nod. There seemed no acceptable response to her question except to agree and start swapping anecdotes about uncanny hunches that had been proved true. The thing was, he’d never had much interest in psychic phenomena, and he and Bea had often noted that the sort of people who were most deeply enthralled by the science of the supernatural were also least able to spot the glaringly obvious reasons why their own lives were in chaos. He couldn’t say that to Grainger, of course. He was just about to say something diplomatic about how faith was a bit like an intuition that didn’t depend on rare coincidences, when she pressed on:
‘Anyway, a few months ago I got this intuition about my dad. I saw him in my mind. He was being wheeled down the corridor of a hospital, on a trolley, real fast, by a bunch of medics who were like, “Gangway!” It was so clear, it was like I was running along behind. He was conscious but confused, his arm was attached to an IV drip but he was fumbling around for the pocket of his pants, looking for his wallet. “I can pay, I can pay!” He knew he was in deep shit and he was terrified he’d be refused treatment. His face . . . it wasn’t like I remembered, it was unrecognisable, he looked like an old bum that they just scooped off the street. But I knew he was my dad.’
‘And have you had any other . . . intuitions about him since then?’
She closed her eyes, tired out by revisiting her clairvoyance, or by her intimacy with him. ‘I think he’s hanging in there.’ She didn’t sound at all sure.
‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘I’m praying for him.’
‘Even though it makes no difference to the shaper of galaxies, huh?’