The Book of Strange New Things



22


Alone with you by my side


‘Carpenter,’ said a voice floating above him.

‘Mm?’ he responded.

‘When I was a kid, people assumed I’d be a carpenter. I had a talent for it. But then . . . this is all a con, you know.’

‘A con?’

‘This air of sophistication medicine gets wrapped in. The doctor magician, the great master surgeon. Baloney. Fixing the human body doesn’t require that much finesse. The skills you need . . . I tell ya, it’s just carpentry, plumbing, sewing.’

Dr Adkins was proving his point by pushing a sewing-needle through Peter’s flesh to add another loop of fine black thread to the row. He was almost done. The stitches formed an elegant design, like a tattoo of a swallow in flight. Peter felt nothing. He was generously dosed with analgesics on top of having been injected with two whacks of local anaesthetic, and this, combined with his exhaustion, put him beyond the reach of pain.

‘Do you think I’ve been poisoned?’ he asked. The operating theatre seemed to be expanding and contracting slightly, in rhythm with his pulse.

‘Nothing in your blood to suggest you have,’ said Adkins, tying the final knot.

‘And what about . . . uh . . . I forgot his name. The doctor you came here to . . . uh . . . the one who died . . . ’

‘Everett.’

‘Everett. Have you established what killed him?’

‘Yup.’ Adkins tossed the needle onto the suture tray, which was immediately removed by Nurse Flores. ‘Death.’

Peter laid his embroidered arm across the white linen napkin covering his chest. He wanted to sleep now.

‘But the cause?’

Dr Adkins pursed his lips. ‘A cardio-vascular accident – with the emphasis on “accident”. His grandfather died the same way, apparently. These things happen. You can eat healthy foods, keep fit, take vitamins . . . But sometimes, you just die. It’s your time.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘I guess you’d call it an appointment with God.’

Peter flexed his fingers, appraised his tattoo of stitches again.

‘I thought it was my time for a while there.’

Adkins chuckled. ‘You’ll live to preach another day. And when you go back, just in case you cross paths with those nasties again, here’s my advice.’ He clamped his hands together, mimed a violent swing. ‘Take a golf club.’

Peter was too drugged to walk, so someone trundled him out of the surgery in a wheelchair. Two pale hands appeared from behind him and spread a cotton blanket over his knees, tucked it around his hips, deposited a transparent plastic bag containing his sandals in his lap.

‘Thank you, whoever you are,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome, I’m sure,’ said Grainger.

‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t see you in the surgery.’

She wheeled him, straight and steady, along the sunlit corridor towards the big double doors. ‘I was in the waiting room. I don’t like the gory stuff.’

Peter lifted his arm, displayed the pure white bandage. ‘All fixed up,’ he said.

Even before she replied, he could sense she was not impressed. Her wrists, gripping the handles of the wheelchair, were tense – tenser than they needed to be.

‘You don’t take care of yourself when you’re out there,’ she said. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’re skin and bone. And yeah, I know I’m blaspheming. But look at you.’

He stared down at his wrists, which had always been bony, he thought. Well, maybe not that bony. The thick bandage made his arm look more emaciated somehow. How angry was Grainger? Just a bit exasperated? Furious? The distance between the medical centre and his quarters would take several minutes to cover, which was a long time when you were in the hands of someone who was upset with you. Weakened by the analgesics and the shock of Bea’s message – which returned to his mind over and over like a wave of nausea – he was suddenly overcome by a belief that other men had often described to him when he’d given them pastoral counselling – a deep, despondent conviction that no matter what they did, no matter how good their intentions, they were doomed to bitterly disappoint women.

‘Hey, I made an effort not to let my ears get so burnt this time,’ he said. ‘Give me some points for trying.’

‘Don’t patronise me.’

Grainger pushed him through the double doors, veered him sharply to the right.

‘Kurtzberg was the same,’ she remarked. ‘And Tartaglione. They looked like skeletons in the end.’

He sighed. ‘We all look like skeletons in the end.’

Grainger grunted irritably. She wasn’t finished chastising him yet. ‘What goes wrong out there in Freaktown? Is it you or them? They don’t feed you, is that it? Or they just don’t eat, period?’

‘They’re very generous,’ Peter protested. ‘They’ve never . . . I’ve never felt that I’m being starved. It’s just that they don’t eat a lot themselves. I think most of what they grow and . . . uh . . . process . . . gets put aside to feed the USIC personnel.’

‘Oh, great! So we’re exploiting them now?’ Grainger veered him round another corner. ‘I tell you, we’ve bent over backwards to do the right thing here. Bent over backwards. There’s too much riding on this to fuck it up with an imperialist fiasco.’

Peter wished they’d had this conversation a lot earlier, or that they could have saved it for later – any time but now. ‘Uh . . . what’s riding on this?’ he said, struggling to stay upright in the chair.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t it obvious? Are you that much of a babe in the woods?’

I just do God’s work; my wife asks the penetrating questions, he was about to say. It was true. Bea was always the one who needed to know why, who scratched under the veneer of what she was told, who refused to fall into step with the game everyone else was playing. She was the one who read the fine print in contracts, she was the one who would explain to him why an apparently wonderful opportunity was full of pitfalls, she was the one who could see through a scam even if it came disguised in Christian wrapping. Grainger was right: he was a babe in the woods.

He hadn’t been born one, that’s for sure. He’d turned himself into one, by force of will. There were many ways of becoming a Christian but the way that had worked for him was to switch off his capacity for cynicism, switch it off like a light. No, that was the wrong comparison . . . he’d . . . he’d switched on the light of trust. After so many years of playing games, exploiting everyone he met, stealing and lying and worse, he’d re-made himself into an innocent. God had wiped the slate clean. The man who’d once littered his conversation with casual expletives like ‘Jesus fucking Christ’ became the man who said ‘gosh’. There was no other way. You were either a raging alcoholic or you didn’t touch drink. Same with cynicism. Bea could handle it – in moderation. He couldn’t.

But then: There is no God. From Bea. Please, Lord, no. Not from Bea.

Bea, too, had trundled him in a wheelchair once, in the hospital where they first met. Exactly like Grainger was wheeling him now. He’d broken both his ankles jumping out of a warehouse window and had spent several days in Bea’s ward with his legs strung up in the air. Then one afternoon she unshackled him, got him into a wheelchair and pushed him to the x-ray department for a post-op assessment.

‘Can you just whizz me through one of these side exits for a minute so I can have a cigarette?’ he’d said.

‘You don’t need nicotine, handsome,’ she’d replied, from a sweet-smelling spot behind and above him. ‘You need your life to change.’

‘Well, here you are,’ said Grainger. ‘Your home away from home.’ They’d reached the door that was labelled P. LEIGH, PASTOR.

As Grainger was helping him to his feet, one of the USIC electricians, Springer, happened to be passing by.

‘Welcome back, preach!’ he called. ‘You want any more wool, you know where to find me!’ And he sauntered on down the hall.

Grainger’s lips were close to Peter’s ear as she said softly, ‘God, I hate this place. And everybody who works here.’

But please don’t hate me, thought Peter as he pushed open the door and they walked in together. The atmosphere that greeted them was stale and slightly sour from two weeks’ lack of air conditioning. Motes of dust, disturbed by the intrusion, swirled in a beam of light. The door fell shut.

Grainger, who’d had one arm on his back in case he lost his balance, threw the other one around him too. In his confusion, he was slow to realise she was embracing him. And not only that: it was a different embrace from the one they’d had before. There was passion and female need in it.

‘I care about you,’ she said, digging her forehead into his shoulder. ‘Don’t die.’

He stroked her awkwardly. ‘I don’t intend to.’

‘You’ll die, you’ll die, I’ll lose you. You’ll go weird and distant and then one day you’ll just disappear.’ She was weeping now.

‘I won’t. I promise.’

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