The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  He stood for a long while, getting drenched, drinking the rain. Water filled his ears, and the auditory world inside his head became muted. Rarely had he felt such mindless satisfaction.

  But rain, on the Oasan settlement, was not a selfish experience. It was communal and it prompted communal action. Just as the chants of the muezzin called Muslims to prayer, the rains called the Oasans to work. Hard work. Now that Peter knew just how hard, he insisted on labouring in the field alongside the Oasans, putting his muscle into helping them.

  Whiteflower was not the only crop the Oasans cultivated. There was also a cotton-like substance called สีค๙, which erupted from the soil in sticky white froth that quickly hardened into a fibrous weed. It was from this weed that the Oasans’ nets, shoes and clothing were derived. Then there was คڇสีค, a kind of moss which grew at an amazing rate, completing its metamorphosis from specks of mould to verdant fluff in a single afternoon. What was it for? He had no idea, but he learned how to harvest it.

  As for whiteflower, there was, he learned, a catch to its wondrous versatility: each plant had to be individually and frequently assessed to ascertain what stage of its growth cycle it had reached, because different things could be made with it depending on when it was pulled from the ground. On a given day, a plant’s roots might be good for ‘mushroom’ soup, its fibre good for ‘liquorice’, its flowers good for bread, its nectar good for ‘honey’, whereas on another day, its roots might be good for ‘chicken’, its fibre good for rope, its flowers good for ‘custard’, its dried sap good for ‘cinnamon’, and so on. Timing was most crucial straight after rainfall, because that’s when the oldest plants yielded their best. Morbidly porous, they swelled with water, lost what little stiffness they had left, slumped to the earth, and would swiftly begin to rot if they were not plucked out. Found in time, they were the most useful agricultural product of all, for they provided yeast.

  Aware that the Oasans would already be on their way to the field, Peter stopped guzzling the rain and walked back into the church. Water ran down his legs as he crossed the floor, and each step left a paddle-shaped puddle. He strapped on his sandals (the yellow boots were too precious for filthy labour), combed his hair flat against his scalp, took a few bites of a dark-brown pumpernickel-like substance the Jesus Lovers called Our-Daily-Bread, and set off.

  The rain dwindled as he walked. The watery swirls still made distinctive shapes in the air but some of the arcs softened into vapour, and there was less force, less impact on the skin. He knew the downpour would last only a few more minutes, and then the sky would clear for a good while – if ‘clear’ was the right word for a sky that was always saturated with moisture. After that, the rains would return once more, then lay off for twenty hours or so, then return twice more again. Yes, he was getting the hang of it now. He was almost a local.

  Three hours later, if he’d been counting hours, which he most definitely hadn’t, Peter returned from the whiteflower fields. His hands and forearms were stained whitish-grey with the powdery slough of the harvested plant. The front of his dishdasha, from chest to stomach, was so filthy from the armfuls of whiteflower he’d been loading onto the carry-hammocks that the inky crucifix could scarcely be seen. Further down, where his knees had made contact with the ground, the fabric was slimy with sap and soil. Specks of pollen fell from him as he walked.

  Emerging from the outskirts of the settlement, he began to cross the stretch of prairie between the town and the church. More conscious of his ridiculously grubby state with every step, he peered up into the sky, looking for signs of the next burst of rain, which was due very soon. The rain would rinse him clean. All he need do was stand naked under the deluge and rub his hands over his flesh, maybe with the aid of the bar of soap he’d brought from home. He would stand just outside his church and the rain would wash him and when he was clean he would hold up his clothes and the rain would wash them too. After that there would be a long sunny spell, excellent drying weather.

  As he strode across the wasteland his eyes were focused squarely on the silhouetted church building, and, in anticipation of reaching it, he yanked off his garment and flapped it a couple of times to shake off the excess dirt.

  ‘Whoah!’ called a voice.

  He swung round. About twenty metres to his left, parked alongside the wall whose welcoming graffiti had long vanished, stood the USIC van. And, leaning against the vehicle’s grey metal hull, with a large water-bottle clutched to her breast, stood Grainger.

  ‘Excuse me for interrupting you,’ she remarked. Her eyes were levelled at his face.

  He draped his clothing in front of his genitals. ‘I . . . I’ve been working,’ he said, moving towards her with slightly clumsy steps. ‘In the fields.’

  ‘That’s what it looks like,’ she said, and took another swig from her bottle. It was almost empty.

  ‘Uh . . . Bear with me,’ he said, gesturing, with his free hand, at the church. ‘I just need to have a wash; do a few things. I can be getting on with that while you’re busy handing over the medicines.’

  ‘The drugs handover is done,’ she said. ‘Two hours ago.’

  ‘And the food?’

  ‘Also done. Two hours ago.’

  She downed the last of the water, tipping the bottle almost vertical against her lips. Her white throat pulsed as she swallowed. Sweat twinkled on her eyelids.

  ‘Oh, my . . . gosh,’ he said, as the implications sank in. ‘I’m so sorry!’

  ‘My fault for not bringing a magazine, I guess,’ she said.

  ‘I just lost . . . ’ He would have spread his arms helplessly, had one of them not been covering his nakedness.

  ‘Track of time,’ she confirmed, as though it might still be worth saving a few precious seconds by finishing his sentence for him.

  On the drive back to USIC, Grainger was less peeved than Peter expected. Perhaps she had passed through all the stages – irritation, impatience, rage, worry, boredom, indifference – in the two hours she’d hung around waiting, and she was beyond it all now. Whatever the reason, she was in reasonable humour. Maybe the fact that she’d found him in such an unsavoury state, and had caught a glimpse of his shrunken penis clinging to his pubic hair like an albino garden slug, was contributing to her mood of benign condescension.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she remarked, as they sped across the flat, featureless terrain. ‘Has anybody been feeding you?’

  He opened his mouth to reassure her he’d been eating like a king, but realised it wouldn’t be true. ‘I haven’t been eating a lot, I admit,’ he said, laying one palm on his stomach just under the ribs. ‘Just . . . snacks, I suppose you’d call them.’

  ‘Very good for your cheekbones,’ she said.

  As a reflex, he appraised Grainger’s facial features. Her cheekbones weren’t particularly good. She had the sort of face that was beautiful only if she watched her diet and didn’t get much older than she was now. As soon as age or over-indulgence filled out her cheeks and thickened her neck, even a little, she would cross a line from elfin allure into mannish homeliness. He felt sad for her, sad about the ease with which her physical destiny could be read by anyone who cared to cast a glance over her, sad about the matter-of-factness with which her genes stated the limits of what they were willing to do for her in the years to come, sad in the knowledge that she was at her peak now and still not fulfilled. He thought of Beatrice, whose cheekbones were worthy of a French chanteuse. At least, that’s what he’d told her sometimes; he couldn’t actually picture Bea’s cheekbones now. A vaguer, more impressionistic vision of his wife’s face flickered in his brain, half-obliterated by the sunlight beaming through the vehicle’s windscreen and the swirl of recent memories of various Jesus Lovers. Troubled, he strained to envisage her in sharper focus. A string of pearls in the dimness of another time and place, a white bra with familiar flesh inside. Jesus Lover Nine asking to be baptised. The stranger in the fields who’d handed him a scrap of fabric inscribed
with the word คคڇ๙ฉ้, patted her (her?) chest and said: ‘My name’. ‘Say it for me again,’ he’d replied, and, when she did so, he’d contorted his mouth, his tongue, his jaw, every muscle in his face and said ‘คฐڇ๙ฉ้’, or something sufficiently similar for her to clap her gloved hands in approval. คฐڇ๙ฉ้. คฐڇ๙ฉ้. She would assume that he’d forget as soon as she was out of his sight. He must prove her wrong. คฐڇ๙ฉ้.

  ‘Hello? Are you with us?’ Grainger’s voice.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. A delicious smell was wafting up his nostrils. Raisin bread. Grainger had unsealed a packet of it and was eating a slice.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  He took some, self-conscious about his soil-grimed fingernails touching the food. The bread was sliced thick – three times as thick as any Oasan would have it – and felt luxuriously spongy, as though it had come out of the oven fifteen minutes ago. He stuffed it into his mouth, suddenly ravenous.

  She chuckled. ‘Couldn’t you have put in a request for some loaves and fishes?’

  ‘The Oasans took good care of me,’ he protested, swallowing hard. ‘But they’re not big eaters themselves and I just sort of . . . fell in with their routine.’ He extracted another slice of raisin bread. ‘And I’ve been busy.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Up ahead, two bodies of rain were coming into view. By chance, the sun was perfectly positioned in the clear space between. The peripheries of each body of rain shimmered with subtle rainbow colours, like an inexhaustible launch of noiseless fireworks.

  ‘Are you aware,’ asked Grainger, ‘that the tops of your ears are burnt to a crisp?’

  ‘My ears?’ He felt them with his fingertips. The texture of the outer lobes was rough. Like fried bacon, toughened on a forgotten plate overnight.

  ‘There’s gonna be scars,’ prophesied Grainger. ‘I can’t believe that didn’t hurt like hell when it was happening.’

  ‘Maybe it did,’ he said.

  The two bodies of rain had moved much nearer now, their approach given the illusion of greater acceleration by the car’s speedy progress towards them. A slight turn of the steering wheel, dictated by the navigation computer, meant that the sun had slipped behind a watery veil.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. He wished she wouldn’t interrupt the wonder of nature so often; it buzzed his nerves. Then, in an effort to communicate with her sincerely, he mused: ‘I don’t actually think about whether I’m OK or not. I just . . . am.’

  ‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ she said. ‘But I recommend you take some sunscreen next time. And look in the mirror occasionally. You know, just to check that all your bits are still intact.’

  ‘Maybe I should leave that up to you.’ Neither of them meant this exchange as a bawdy pun, but once it was spoken it hung in the air, and they both smiled.

  ‘I didn’t think they’d have you doing heavy labour,’ said Grainger. ‘I thought they wanted you for, like, Bible study and stuff like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t their idea for me to work in the fields. It was mine.’

  ‘Well, I guess you’ll get a tan. Once the sunburn settles down.’

  ‘The thing was,’ he persisted, ‘I realised that the food that gets loaded onto this truck each week doesn’t come out of nowhere – even though it might seem that way to USIC.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I grew up on a farm,’ said Grainger. ‘So if you’ve got me tagged as one of those people who think corn is made in the nachos factory, you’ve got it wrong. But tell me: these fields you were working in: where are they? I’ve never seen them.’

  ‘They’re right in the centre.’

  ‘The centre?’

  ‘Of the settlement. That’s why you haven’t seen them. They’re hidden by the buildings.’

  She shook her head. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  ‘The town is built in a circle around the arable land,’ he explained. ‘Which means that whenever there’s work to be done, the people come from all directions and converge in the middle, and they’ve all got a more or less equal distance to walk. It’s a beautifully logical idea, don’t you think? I can’t imagine why it never occurred to all the generations of humanity.’

  She shot him a come-off-it glance. ‘You really can’t imagine? It’s because farming is tough, boring work and most people would rather somebody else did it for them. Preferably someplace far away. Because in the city, they need the space for a shopping mall.’

  ‘Is that what USIC has planned here?’

  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 inevitab
le 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.)