The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  ‘Where you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  The Oasan held up the photograph. ‘Where you?’

  ‘I’m not in this one,’ said Peter.

  The Oasan nodded, handed the picture to his neighbour.

  Peter extracted the next photo from the plastic wallet. Even if the Oasan air had not been so humid, he would have been sweating by now.

  ‘This is me as a child,’ he said. ‘It was taken by an auntie, I think. The sister of my mother.’

  Jesus Lover One examined the snapshot of Peter at age three. In it, Peter was dwarfed by his surroundings but still conspicuous in a bright yellow parka and orange mittens, waving at the camera. It was one of the few family photos found in Peter’s mother’s house when she died. Peter hoped the Oasans didn’t ask to see a photograph of his dad, because his mother had destroyed them all.

  ‘Very high building,’ commented Jesus Lover Fifty-Four. He meant the tower block in the background of the picture.

  ‘It was a horrible place,’ said Peter. ‘Depressing. And dangerous, too.’

  ‘Very high,’ confirmed Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, passing the square of card on to the next in line.

  ‘We moved to somewhere better not long after that,’ he said. ‘Somewhere safer, anyway.’

  The Oasans hummed approvingly. Moving to somewhere better and safer was a concept they could understand.

  The already handed-out photos, meanwhile, were making their way among the crowd. One of the Oasans had a question about the photo of Peter’s church. In the picture, a few members of the congregation were gathered outside the building, queuing to enter the blue door. One of them was Ian Dewar, the Afghanistan veteran who got around on crutches, having refused the MoD’s offer of an artificial leg because he valued any opportunity to talk about the war.

  ‘Man have no leg,’ observed the Oasan.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Peter. ‘There was a war. His leg was badly injured and the doctors had to cut it off.’

  ‘Man dead now?’

  ‘No, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine.’

  There was a communal murmur of wonder, and several utterances of ‘Praiสีe the Lord’.

  ‘And this,’ said Peter, ‘is my wedding day. Me and my wife Beatrice, on the day we got married. Do you have marriage?’

  ‘We have marriage,’ said Jesus Lover One. A mildly amused retort? Exasperated? Weary? Simply informative? Peter couldn’t tell from the tone. There was no tone, as far as he could hear. Only the straining of exotic flesh to imitate the action of vocal cords.

  ‘She introduced me to Christ,’ added Peter. ‘She brought me to God.’

  This provoked a more excited reaction than the photos.

  ‘Your wife find the Book,’ said Jesus Lover Seventy-something. ‘Read, read, read, read before you. Learn the รี่echnique of Jeสีuสี. Then your wife come for you and สีay, I have found the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี. Read now, you. We สีhall noรี่ periสีh, buรี่ have eรี่ernal life.’

  Summarised like that, it sounded more like the serpent’s overtures to Eve in the Garden of Eden than Bea’s matter-of-fact allusions to Christianity in the hospital ward where she first met him. But it was interesting that the Oasan went to such strenuous effort to quote from John 3:16 verbatim. Kurtzberg must have taught them that.

  ‘Did Kurtzberg teach you that?’

  The Jesus Lover who’d spoken did not reply.

  ‘Whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life,’ said Peter.

  ‘Amen,’ said Jesus Lover One, and the whole congregation murmured likewise. The word ‘amen’ seemed mercifully tailored to their mouths, or whatever part of their bodies they used to speak with. ‘Amen, amen, amen.’

  The wedding photo reached an Oasan in an olive-green robe. He – or she? – recoiled.

  ‘Knife,’ the Oasan said. ‘Knife.’

  It was true: in the picture, Peter and Bea were both clutching the hilt of an outsized knife, ready to cut the ceremonial slice from their wedding cake.

  ‘It’s a custom,’ said Peter. ‘A ritual. It was a very happy day.’

  ‘Happy day,’ echoed the Oasan, in a voice like wet bracken being crushed underfoot.

  Peter shifted in his hammock, turned away from the rising sun. The molten orange light was getting a little intense. He lay on his back, staring up into the sky, and watched the purple retinal afterimages dancing in the cloudless expanse. Soon the after-images vanished and the sky was a uniform gold. Were the sunrises back home ever gold like this? He couldn’t recall. He could remember golden light on the bed, lighting up Joshua’s fur and the exposed curves of Bea’s legs if it was a warm morning and she’d kicked the sheets off. But that wasn’t the same as the whole sky being gold; the sky outside their bedroom would be blue, surely? He was annoyed with himself for forgetting.

  There was so much to tell Bea, and he’d written too little of it down. When the next opportunity came for him to transmit a letter, he would no doubt manage, with the help of the notes he’d scribbled in his notebooks, to list the most significant things that had happened in the last three hundred and sixty hours. But he would miss the nuances. He would forget the quiet, unspoken moments of intimacy between him and his new friends, the unexpected glimmers of understanding in areas of communication that he’d assumed would be hopelessly dark. He might even forget to mention the gold sky.

  His notebooks were in his rucksack, somewhere below. Perhaps he should’ve kept them up here in the hammock, so that he could jot down his thoughts and reflections whenever they came to him. But then he might stab himself in his sleep with the pencil, or the pencil might fall through the net onto the hard floor below. A pencil could land in such a way that the internal sliver of graphite got shattered in a dozen places, rendering it unsharpenable. Peter’s pencils were precious to him. Properly taken care of, they would continue to be of service when all the ballpoint pens had leaked and all the felt-tips had dried up and all the machines had malfunctioned.

  Besides, he enjoyed the hours he spent in his hammock, free of anything to do. While he was on the ground, working with his flock, his brain was buzzing constantly, alive to challenges and opportunities. Every encounter might prove crucial in his ministry. Nothing could be taken for granted. The Oasans believed themselves to be Christians, but their grasp of Christ’s teachings was remarkably weak. Their hearts were full of amorphous faith, but their minds lacked understanding – and they knew it. Their pastor needed to concentrate hard every minute, listening to them, watching their reactions, searching for a glimpse of a light going on.

  And, more mundanely, he also needed to concentrate on the physical jobs at hand: the carrying of stones, the spreading of mortar, the digging of holes. When the day’s work was over, and the Oasans had gone home, it was bliss to climb into his hammock, and know that he could do nothing more. As though the net had scooped him out of the stream of responsibility and suspended him in limbo. Not the Catholic idea of Limbo, of course. A benign limbo between today’s work and tomorrow’s. A chance to be a lazy animal, owning nothing but its skin, stretched out in the dark, or dozing in the sun.

  The net from which his hammock had been fashioned was just one of several on the site. Nets were what the Oasans used for carrying bricks. They carried the bricks from . . . from where? From wherever the bricks came from. Then across the scrubland to the church. Four Oasans, each with a corner of the net knotted around his (or her?) shoulder, would march solemnly, like pallbearers, carrying a pile of bricks slung in between them. Even though the church site was not far from the main cluster of buildings – just far enough away to give it the necessary status of a place outside the common run of things – it was still quite a long walk, Peter imagined, if you were carrying bricks. There seemed to be no wheeled transport available.

  Peter found this a little hard to believe. The wheel was a self-evidently nifty invention, wasn’t it? You’d thin
k that the Oasans, even if they’d never conceived of it before, would have adopted the wheel as soon as they’d seen it being used by the USIC work-force. Pre-technological lifestyle was all very dignified, he wasn’t putting it down, but surely nobody, if they had a choice, would lug bricks around in a fishing net.

  Fishing net? He called it that because that’s what it looked like, but it must have been designed for some other purpose – maybe even specifically for carrying bricks. There was nothing else to use nets for, here. There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish.

  No fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy . . . The bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of Heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind . . . Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?

  But no, he mustn’t get too downhearted about this. His problems were far from unique; they were par for the course. Missionaries in Papua New Guinea in the twentieth century had been forced to find a way around the fact that the native people didn’t know what sheep were, and that the local equivalent – pigs – didn’t work so well in the context of the Christian parables, because Papuans regarded their pigs as prey to be slaughtered. Here on Oasis, he would be faced with similar challenges and he would simply have to find the best compromises he could.

  All things considered, he and the Oasans were communicating very well so far.

  He rolled onto his belly and looked though the netting at the ground below. His sandals were positioned neatly, side by side, directly underneath him, on the smooth cement floor. Oasan cement barely needed trowelling; it spread out almost by itself and dried with a satiny finish, feeling less like concrete to the touch than unvarnished wood. It had just enough traction for the soft leather boots of the Oasans not to slip on it.

  Next to his sandals lay one of the few tools on the site: a large spoon, the size of a . . . how would he describe it to Bea? The size of a small spade? Bicycle pump? Police baton? Anyway, it wasn’t made of wood or metal, but of a kind of glass, as strong as steel. Its function was to stir the mortar in the mortar vat, preventing it from drying too quickly. Last night – that is to say, five or six hours ago – before he’d climbed into his hammock to sleep, he’d spent a good twenty minutes cleaning mortar off this spoon, scraping at it with his fingers. The debris lay scattered all around. He had done a thorough job, despite his tiredness. The spoon was ready for another day’s stirring. Father Peter was the one who did that job, since he was the strongest.

  He smiled at the thought of it. He had never been a particularly strong man before. In a past life, he’d been beaten up by other alcoholics, and tossed casually into the lock-up by police. Once, he had done his back in attempting to carry Bea to bed. (‘I’m too fat! I’m too fat!’ she’d cried, thus compounding the embarrassment all round when he was forced to let her fall.) Here, among the Oasans, he was a mighty creature. Here, he stood at the mortar vat and churned its contents with a giant spoon, admired by the weaker beings around him. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but there was something very morale-boosting about it, nonetheless.

  The whole process of constructing a house was absurdly simple here, yet effective. The mortar-vat, primitive as a cauldron and stirred by hand, was typical of the level of sophistication. In the church walls as they took shape, there was no skeletal infrastructure: no metal stanchions, no wooden framework. The lozenge-shaped bricks were simply glued to the foundations and then fastened one to the other, layer upon layer. It seemed a dangerously simpleminded way to construct a building.

  ‘What if there’s a storm?’ he’d asked Jesus Lover One.

  ‘สีรี่orm?’ The upper parts of the cleft in Lover One’s face – the foreheads of the babies, so to speak – contorted gently.

  ‘What if a very great wind comes? Will it blow the church to the ground?’ Peter puffed hard and loud through his lips, waved his hands, and mimed the collapse of a building.

  Lover One’s grotesque face contorted a little further, into a shape that might signal amusement, or bemusement, or perhaps meant nothing. ‘Bond break never,’ he said. ‘Bond สีรี่rong, oh very สีรี่rong. Wind like . . . ’ He reached out and stroked Peter’s hair, barely ruffling it, to show how ineffectual the wind was.

  The reassurance was no less childlike than the construction method, but Peter decided to trust that the Oasans knew what they were doing. Their settlement, while not exactly impressive architecturally, seemed stable enough. And he had to admit that the mortar which bound the bricks was amazingly strong. When freshly spread, it looked like maple syrup, but within an hour it was hard as amber, and the join was unbreakable.

  There was no scaffolding employed in the construction of this church, no ladders, nothing made of wood or metal. Instead, access to the higher reaches of the walls was provided by a method that was at once grossly cumbersome and beautifully practical. Large carved blocks of hardened moss – the same material as was used for the Oasans’ beds – were assembled into staircases, stacked against the outside of the building. Each staircase was about two metres wide and as high as it needed to be; additional steps could be affixed as the level of the bricklaying moved higher off the ground. Over the last few days, the staircases had grown in scale until they were twice Peter’s height, but despite their bulk they were obviously temporary, a building tool that was no more a part of the final conception than a ladder would have been. They were even portable – just. They could be shifted sideways if everyone pitched in. Peter had helped to shift a staircase several times, and although he couldn’t confidently estimate how much it weighed because of the communal musclepower pushing against it, he didn’t think it was heavier than, say, a refrigerator.

  The utter simplicity of the technology charmed him. Granted, it wouldn’t be adequate to the task of building a skyscraper or a cathedral, unless the surrounding area could accommodate a staircase the size of a football stadium. But for building a modest little church, it was blindingly sensible. The Oasans would simply walk up the steps, each carrying a single brick. They would pause at the summit of their makeshift staircase and cast their eyes (or eye, or viewing cleft, or whatever) over the wall’s top layer, surveying it as a concert pianist might contemplate his keyboard. Then they would glue the next brick in its correct spot, and walk down the steps again.

  By any standards, the work method was labour-intensive. There were perhaps forty Oasans on site at the busiest time of day, and Peter had the impression that there would have been even more were it not for the risk of getting in each other’s way. The work was conducted in an orderly fashion, unhurriedly, but without pause – until each Oasan reached what was evidently his (or her?) limit, and went home for a while. They worked in silence mostly, conferring only when there was some new challenge to master, some risk of getting something wrong. He could not tell if they were happy. It was his fervent intention to get to know them well enough to know if they were happy.

  Were they happy when they sang? You would think that if singing was torture for them, they wouldn’t do it. As their pastor, he certainly hadn’t expected them to greet him with a massed chorus of ‘Amazing Grace’, and they could easily have arranged some other gesture of welcome. Maybe they needed a channel for their joy.

  Happiness was such an elusive thing to spot: it was like a camouflaged moth that might or might not be hidden in the forest in front of you, or might have flown away. A young woman, newly in Christ, had said to him once, ‘If you could’ve seen me a year ago, going out on the piss with my mates, we was so happy, we was laughing our heads off, we never stopped laughing, people was turning their heads to see what’s so funny, wishing th
ey could be having as good a time as us, we was flying, I was on top of the world, and all the time underneath I was thinking, God help me, I am so fucking lonely, I am so fucking sad, I wish I was dead, I cannot stand this life one minute longer, you know what I mean?’ And then there was Ian Dewar, ranting about his time in the military, complaining about the cheapskates and the beancounters who’d robbed the troops of essential supplies, ‘buy your own binoculars, mate, here’s one flak jacket for every two guys, and if you get your foot blown off take two of these wee tablets ’cause we’ve not got any morphine for you.’ Fifteen minutes into one of these rants, mindful that there were other people patiently waiting to speak to him, Peter had interrupted: ‘Ian, forgive me, but you don’t need to keep revisiting this stuff. God was there. He was there with you. He saw it happen. He saw everything.’ And Ian had broken down and sobbed and said he knew that, he knew that, and that’s why underneath it all, underneath the complaining and the anger, he was happy, truly happy.

  And then there was Beatrice, on the day when he proposed to her, a day on which every conceivable thing had gone wrong. He’d proposed at 10.30 in the morning, in sweltering heat, as they stood at an automatic teller machine in the high street, preparing to do some grocery shopping at the supermarket. Maybe he should have gone down on one knee, because her ‘Yes, let’s’ had sounded hesitant and unromantic, as though she regarded his proposal as nothing more than a pragmatic solution to the inconvenience of high rents. Then the teller machine had swallowed her debit card and she’d had to go into the bank to sort it out, which involved a meeting with the manager and a lamentable episode in which she was grilled for half an hour as if she was an imposter trying to defraud another Beatrice whose card she had stolen. This humiliation ended with Bea cancelling her relationship with the bank in a righteous fury. They’d gone shopping then, but were able to afford barely half the things on their list, and, when they emerged into the car park, they found that a vandal had scratched a crude swastika into the paintwork of their car. If it had been anything other than a swastika – a cartoon penis, a swear word, anything – they would probably have just lived with it, but this they had no choice but to get fixed, and it would cost them a fortune.