The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  ‘So, do we just yell hello?’ said Peter.

  ‘They know we’re here,’ said Grainger. ‘That’s why they’re hiding.’ Her voice, muffled slightly by the scarf, sounded tense. She had her arms folded, and he could see a tongue of dark sweat in the armpit of her smock.

  ‘How many times have you been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Dozens. I bring them their drug supply.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m a pharmacist.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  She sighed. ‘Looks like I totally wasted my breath when we first met. You didn’t absorb a word I said, did you? My big speech of welcome, my detailed explanation of the procedure for getting stuff from the pharmacy if you need it.’

  ‘Sorry, my brains must have been scrambled.’

  ‘The Jump does that to some people.’

  ‘The wimpy ones, huh?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Grainger hugged herself tightly, squeezing her upper arms in stress. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’ This last was not addressed to him; she was staring at the building with the star painted on it.

  ‘Are we in any danger?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  Peter leaned against the crash-bar of the vehicle and made a more careful study of what he could see of the settlement. The buildings, although rectangular, had no hard edges: each brick was a well-buffed lozenge, a glassy loaf of amber. The mortar had no grit to it; it was like plastic sealant. There wasn’t a hard angle anywhere, nothing sharp or corrugated. It was as though the architect’s aesthetics had been formed in homage to children’s play centres. Not that these buildings were in any way infantile or crass: they had their own uniform dignity, and they were obviously rock-solid, and the warm colours were . . . well . . . warm. But Peter couldn’t say he found the overall effect attractive. If God blessed him with the opportunity to build a church here, it would have to strike a different note, stand out against the squatness all around. At the very least it would need to have . . . Yes, that’s it: he’d worked out what was so dispiriting about this place. There was no attempt to reach up into the heavens. No tower, no turret, no flagpole, not even a modest triangular roof. Oh, for a spire!

  Peter’s vision of a church steeple shone in his mind just long enough for him to be oblivious to a movement in the bead curtain of the nearest doorway. By the time he blinked and focused, the figure had already stepped out and was confronting Grainger. The event had occurred too suddenly, he felt; it lacked the drama appropriate to his first sighting of an Oasan native. It ought to have happened with ceremonial slowness, in an amphitheatre, or at the summit of a long staircase. Instead, the encounter was already under way, and Peter had missed its beginning.

  The creature – the person – stood upright, but not tall. Five foot three, maybe five foot four. (Funny how those imperial measurements – inches, miles – stubbornly refused to be left behind.) Anyway, he, or she, was delicate. Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, an unassuming presence – not at all the fearsome figure Peter had prepared himself to confront. As foretold, a hood and monkish robes – made of a pastel-blue fabric disconcertingly like bathtowel – covered almost all of the body, its hems brushing the toes of soft leather boots. There was no swell of bosom, so Peter – aware that this was flimsy evidence on which to base a judgement, but unwilling to clutter his brain with unwieldy repetitions of ‘he or she’ – decided to think of the creature as male.

  ‘Hi,’ said Grainger, extending her hand.

  The Oasan extended his hand in return, but did not grasp Grainger’s; rather he touched her gently on the wrist with his fingertips. He was gloved. The gloves had five digits.

  ‘You, here, now . . . ’ he said. ‘A สีurpriสีe.’ His voice was soft, reedy, asthmatic-sounding. Where the ‘s’s should have been, there was a noise like a ripe fruit being thumbed into two halves.

  ‘Not a bad surprise, I hope,’ said Grainger.

  ‘I hope รี่ogether with you.’

  The Oasan turned to look at Peter, tilted his head slightly so that the shadows from the hood slid back. Peter, having been lulled by the Oasan’s familiar shape and five-fingered hands into expecting a more-or-less human face, flinched.

  Here was a face that was nothing like a face. Instead, it was a massive whitish-pink walnut kernel. Or no: even more, it resembled a placenta with two foetuses – maybe three-month-old twins, hairless and blind – nestled head to head, knee to knee. Their swollen heads constituted the Oasan’s clefted forehead, so to speak; their puny ribbed backs formed his cheeks, their spindly arms and webbed feet merged in a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain – in some form unrecognisable to him – a mouth, nose, eyes.

  Of course, there were no foetuses there, not really: the face was what it was, the face of an Oasan, nothing else. But try as he might, Peter couldn’t decode it on its own terms; he could only compare it to something he knew. He had to see it as a grotesque pair of foetuses perched on someone’s shoulders, half-shrouded in a cowl. Because if he didn’t allow it to resemble that, he would probably always have to stare at it dumbfounded, reliving the initial shock, dizzy with the vertigo of unsupported falling, in that gut-wrenching instant before a solid comparison is found to clasp onto.

  ‘You and I,’ said the Oasan. ‘Never before now.’ The vertical cleft in the middle of his face squirmed slightly as he formed the words. The foetuses rubbed knees, so to speak. Peter smiled but could not summon a response.

  ‘He means he hasn’t met you before,’ said Grainger. ‘In other words, he’s saying hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’

  The Oasan nodded. ‘You are Peรี่er. I will remember.’ He turned back to Grainger. ‘You bring mediสีine?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘How liรี่le?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Grainger, walking around to the back of the vehicle and lifting the hatch. She rummaged in the jumbled contents – bottles of water, toilet paper, canvas bags, tools, tarps – and extracted a plastic tub no bigger than a schoolchild’s lunch-box. The Oasan followed every movement, although Peter was still unable to work out which parts of the face were its eyes. His eyes, sorry.

  ‘This is all I could get from our pharmacy,’ said Grainger. ‘Today is not one of the official supply days, you understand? We’re here for a different reason. But I didn’t want to come with nothing. So this’ – she handed him the tub – ‘is extra. A gift.’

  ‘We are diสีappoinรี่ful,’ said the Oasan. ‘And in the สีame breath we are graรี่eful.’

  There was a pause. The Oasan stood holding his plastic tub; Grainger and Peter stood watching him hold it. A ray of sunlight found its way to the roof of the vehicle, making it glow.

  ‘So . . . uh . . . How are you?’ said Grainger. Sweat twinkled in her eyebrows and on her cheeks.

  ‘I alone?’ enquired the Oasan. ‘Or I and we รี่ogether?’ He gestured vaguely at the settlement behind him.

  ‘All of you.’

  The Oasan appeared to give this a great deal of thought. At last he said: ‘Good.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Is anyone else coming out today?’ asked Grainger. ‘To see us, I mean?’

  Again, the Oasan mulled over the question as though it were immensely complex.

  ‘No,’ he concluded. ‘I รี่oday am only one.’ He gestured solemnly at both Grainger and Peter, in acknowledgement, perhaps, of his regret for the 2:1 imbalance between number of visitors and welcoming party.

  ‘Peter here is a special guest of USIC,’ said Grainger. ‘He’s a . . . he’s a Christian missionary. He wants to . . . uh . . . live with you.’ She glanced at Peter for uneasy confirmation. ‘If I’ve got that right.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, brightly. There was a glistening, champignon-like thing roughly halfway down the central cleft of the Oasan’s face that he’d decided was the Oasan’s eye, an
d he looked straight at that, doing his best to radiate friendliness. ‘I have good news to tell you. The best news you’ve ever heard.’

  The Oasan cocked his head to one side. The two foetuses – no, not foetuses, his brow and cheeks, please! – blushed, revealing a spidery network of capillaries just beneath the skin. His voice, when it came, was even more asthmatic-sounding than before. ‘The Goสีpel?’

  The words hung in the whispering air for a second before Peter was able to take them in. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Then he noticed that the Oasan’s gloved hands had been pressed together in a steeple shape.

  ‘Yes!’ Peter cried, dizzy with elation. ‘Praise Jesus!’

  The Oasan turned to Grainger again. His gloved hands were trembling against the tub he held. ‘We have waiรี่ed long for the man Peรี่er,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Grainger.’ And without further explanation he hurried through the doorway, leaving the crystalline beads swinging in his wake.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Grainger, yanking her scarf loose and wiping her face with it. ‘He never called me by name before.’

  They stood waiting for twenty minutes or so. The sun continued to rise, a sliver of brilliant burning orange, like a great bubble of lava on the horizon. The walls of the buildings glowed as if each brick had a light inside.

  At last, the Oasan returned, still clutching the plastic tub, which was now empty. He handed it back to Grainger, very slowly and carefully, only letting it go when her grip on it was secure.

  ‘Mediสีine have all gone,’ he said. ‘Gone inสีide the graรี่eful.’

  ‘I’m sorry there wasn’t more,’ said Grainger. ‘There’ll be more next time.’

  The Oasan nodded. ‘We abide.’

  Grainger, stiff with unease, walked to the rear of the vehicle to stow the tub back in the trunk. As soon as her back was turned, the Oasan sidled up to Peter, bringing them face to face.

  ‘Have you the book?’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘The Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี.’

  Peter blinked and tried to breathe normally. Up close, the Oasan’s flesh smelled sweet: not the sweet of rot, but sweet like fresh fruit.

  ‘You mean the Bible,’ he said.

  ‘We สีpeak never the name. Power of the book forbid. Flame give warmth . . . ’ With outstretched hands, he mimed the action of warming oneself on a fire, getting too close, and being burned.

  ‘But you mean the Word of God,’ said Peter. ‘The Gospel.’

  ‘The Goสีpel. The รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี.’

  Peter nodded, but it took him a few seconds to decode the last word from its impeded passage through the Oasan’s head cleft.

  ‘Jesus,’ he echoed in wonder.

  The Oasan reached out one hand, and, with an unmistakably tender motion, stroked Peter’s cheek with the tip of a glove. ‘We pray Jeสีuสี for your coming,’ he said.

  Grainger’s failure to rejoin them was, by now, obvious. Peter glanced round and saw her leaning on the back of the vehicle, pretending to study the gadget with which she’d unlocked the trunk. In that fraction of a second before he turned back to the Oasan, he felt the full intensity of her embarrassment.

  ‘The book? You have the book?’ the Oasan repeated.

  ‘Uh . . . not on me right now,’ said Peter, chastising himself for leaving his Bible back at the base. ‘But yes, of course. Of course!’

  The Oasan clapped his hands in a gesture of delight, or prayer, or both. ‘Comforรี่ and joy. Glad day. Come back สีoon, Peรี่er, oh very สีoon, สีooner than you can. Read for uสี the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี, read and read and read unรี่il we underสีรี่and. In reward we give you . . . give you . . . ’ The Oasan trembled with the effort of finding adequate words, then threw his hands wide, as if to indicate everything under the sun.

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, laying a reassuring hand on the Oasan’s shoulder. ‘Soon.’

  The Oasan’s brow – the heads of the foetuses, so to speak – swelled slightly. Peter decided that this, in these miraculous new people, was a smile.

  Dear Peter, wrote Beatrice.

  I love you and hope you are well but I must start this letter with some very bad news.

  It was like running towards an open doorway in a state of high enthusiasm and colliding with a pane of glass. He had spent the entire journey back to the base almost levitating with excitement; it was a wonder he hadn’t floated straight through the roof of Grainger’s vehicle. Dear Bea . . . God be praised . . . We ask for a small break and God gives us a miracle . . . these were some of the ways he’d thought of beginning his message to Beatrice upon returning to his room. His fingers were poised to type at delirious speed, to shoot his delight through space, mistakes and all.

  There has been a terrible tragedy in the Maldives. A tidal wave. It was the height of the tourist season. The place was teeming with visitors and it’s got a population of about a third of a million. Had. You know how when disasters happen, usually the media talks about how many people are estimated to have died? In this one, they’re talking about how many people may be LEFT ALIVE. It’s one vast swamp of bodies. You see it on the news footage but you can’t take it in. All those people with individual quirks and family secrets and special ways of wearing their hair, etc, reduced to what looks like a huge bog of meat that goes on for miles.

  The Maldives has (HAD . . .) lots of islands, most of them at risk of flooding, so the government had been pushing for years to get the population to relocate to the biggest, best-fortified atoll. By coincidence, there was a TV documentary crew making a film about a few islanders on one of the smaller atolls who were protesting at being rehoused. The cameras were rolling when the tsunami hit. I’ve seen clips on my phone. You cannot believe what you are seeing. One second, an American anchorperson voice is saying something about papaya groves, and the next second, a zillion tons of seawater smashes across the screen. Rescue crews saved some of the Americans, a few tourists, a few of the locals. And the cameras, of course. That sounds cynical. I think they did what they could.

  Our church is considering what we can do to help. Sending people over there isn’t an option. There’s nothing we can achieve. Most of the islands are wiped off, there is nothing left except humps in the ocean. Even the biggest islands are probably never going to recover. All the fresh water has been fouled. There is not one fully intact, usable building. There is nowhere safe to land, nowhere to set up a hospital, no way of burying the dead. Helicopters are buzzing around like seagulls over an oilspill full of dead fish. At this stage, all we can do is pray for the relatives of Maldivans everywhere. And maybe, in time, there’ll be refugees.

  I’m sorry to start this way. You can imagine my head and heart are full of it. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you.

  Peter leaned back in his chair, lifted his face to the ceiling. The electric light was still on, superfluous now that the sunshine was beaming in, almost too bright to bear. He shivered, feeling the dampness in his clothes turning chilly in the air conditioning. He felt grief for the people of the Maldives, but, to his shame, the grief was mingled with a purely selfish pang: the sense that he and Beatrice, for the first time since the beginning of their relationship, were not going through the same things together. In the past, whatever happened would happen to them both, like a power blackout or a late-night visit from a distressed friend or a rattling window-frame while they were trying to sleep. Or like sex.

  I miss you, wrote Beatrice. This Maldives thing wouldn’t have upset me so much if you’d been here. Tell me more about your mission. Is it horrendously difficult? Remember that unexpected breakthroughs often come directly after everything has seemed impossible. The ones who insist they don’t want or need God are the ones who want and need Him most.

  Joshua is still playing his tricks. I’m seriously considering slipping him a Mickey Finn in his
evening milk. Or hitting him on the head with a mallet when he wakes me up yet again at 4 AM. Alternatively, maybe I should make a life-size dummy of you to lie next to me in the bed. That might fool him. Sadly, it wouldn’t fool me.

  The Mirah situation is under control now. I got together with a Muslim social worker, Khadija, who liaises with the imam at Mirah’s local mosque. Basically we’re trying to sell it to the imam as a human decency issue (the husband’s violence/lack of respect) rather than a religion vs religion issue. It’s hardcore diplomacy, as you can imagine, like brokering a peace deal between Syria and the USA. But Khadija is brilliant.

  I got a message from USIC saying you’re fine. How would they know? I suppose they mean they can verify you didn’t get vaporised. The message was sent by Alex Grainger. Have you met him? Tell him he can’t spell ‘liaise’. Or maybe there’s a simplified American way of spelling it now? Bitch, bitch, bitch. But I’ve been tolerant all day, honest! (Very difficult new patient on the ward. Supposedly transferred down from Psych for medical reasons but I think they were just desperate to get rid of her.) Anyway, I feel like being outrageously unfair to someone for just three minutes, to let it rip. I won’t, of course. I’ll be very nice, even to Joshua when he wakes me up AGAIN in the small hours.

  Seriously, I’m missing you terribly. Wish I could spend just a few minutes in your arms. (OK, maybe an hour.) Weather is better, lovely sunshine today, but it’s not cheering me up. Went to the supermarket for some comfort food (chocolate mousse, tiramisu, you know the sort of thing). Turns out lots of other people had the same idea. Everything I wanted was out of stock, a blank space on the shelf. Settled for one of those rollette things with the fake cream inside.

  Head full of Maldives tragedy, stomach full of dessert. What fortunate people we are in our Western playground . . . We watch the footage of foreign dead on video clips and then mosey out to the supermarket in search of our favourite treats. Of course when I say ‘we’, I can’t speak for you right now. You are far from all of this. Far from me.