‘Just close your eyes and relax, bro,’ advised Stanko, already halfway to the door. ‘Sleep it off.’
Sleep it off. These were words he’d heard many times before in his life. He had even heard them spoken by men who’d scooped him off a floor and carried him away – although usually to a dumping-place much less pleasant than a bed. On occasion, the guys who’d lugged him out of the nightclubs and other drinking-holes where he’d disgraced himself had given him a few kicks in the ribs before hoisting him up. Once, they’d tossed him into a back street and a delivery van had passed right over him, its tyres miraculously missing his head and limbs, just tearing off a hunk of his hair. That was in the days before he was ready to admit there was a higher power keeping him alive.
Uncanny how similar the after-effects of the Jump were to extremes of alcohol abuse. But worse. Like the mother of all hangovers combined with a dose of magic mushrooms. Neither BG nor Severin had mentioned hallucinations, but maybe these guys were simply more robust than him. Or maybe they were both fast asleep right now, quietly recuperating instead of making fools of themselves.
He waited for the room to become a geometric space of fixed angles anchored in gravity, and then he got up. He checked the Shoot for messages. Still no word from Bea. Perhaps he should have asked Grainger to come to his room to check his machine, make sure he was using it correctly. But it was night and she was a woman and he barely knew her. Nor would their relationship have got off to an auspicious start if he’d hallucinated that she was sprouting multiple eyes and mouths and then collapsed at her feet.
Besides, the Shoot was so simple to operate that he couldn’t imagine how anyone – even a technophobe like himself – might misunderstand it. The thing sent and received messages: that was all. It didn’t play movies, make noises, offer to sell him products, inform him about the plight of mistreated donkeys or the Brazilian rainforest. It didn’t offer him the opportunity to check the weather in southern England or the current number of Christians in China or the names and dates of dynasties. It just confirmed that his messages had been sent, and that there was no reply.
Abruptly he glimpsed – not on the matt grey screen of the Shoot, but in his own mind – a picture of tangled wreckage on an English motorway, at night, garishly lit by the headlights of emergency vehicles. Bea, dead, somewhere on the road between Heathrow and home. Loose pearls scattered across the asphalt, black slicks of blood. A month ago already. History. Such things could happen. One person embarks on an outrageously hazardous journey and arrives unscathed; another goes for a short, routine drive and gets killed. ‘God’s sick sense of humour,’ as one grieving parent (soon to leave the church) had once put it. For a few seconds, the nightmarish vision of Beatrice lying dead on the road was real to Peter, and a nauseous thrill of terror passed through his guts.
But no. He mustn’t let himself be deluded by imaginary horrors. God was never cruel. Life could be cruel, but not God. In a universe made dangerous by the gift of free will, God could be relied upon for support no matter what happened, and He appreciated the potentials and limitations of each of His children. Peter knew that if anything awful happened to Bea, there was no way he’d be able to function here. The mission would be over before it began. And if there was one thing that had become clear in all the months of thought and prayer leading up to his journey to Oasis, it was that God really wanted him here. He was safe in God’s hands, and so was Bea. She must be.
As for the Shoot, there was one easy way of checking whether he was using it correctly. He located the USIC icon – a stylised green scarab – on the screen, and clicked open the menu behind it. It wasn’t much of a menu, just three items: Maintenance (repairs), Admin and Graigner, obviously set up in haste by Grainger herself. If he wanted a more substantial list of correspondents, it was up to him to organise it.
He opened a fresh message page, and wrote:
Dear Grainger. Then deleted ‘Dear’ and substituted ‘Hi’, then deleted that and just had ‘Grainger’, then reinstated ‘Dear’, then deleted it again. Unwarranted intimacy versus unfriendly brusqueness . . . a flurry of confused gestures before communication could begin. Letter-writing must have been so much easier in the olden days when everyone, even the bank manager or the tax department, was Dear.
Hi Grainger.
You were right. I am tired. I should sleep some more. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Best wishes,
Peter
Laboriously, he undressed. Every item of his clothing was swollen with damp, like he’d been caught in a downpour. His socks peeled away from his wrinkled feet like muddy clumps of foliage. His trousers and jacket clung obstinately to him, resisting his attempts to tug free. Everything he removed weighed heavy and fell to the floor with a dull whump. At first, he thought that fragments of his clothing had actually crumbled off and rolled across the floor, but on closer inspection, the loose bits were dead insects. He picked up one of the bodies and held it between his fingers. The wings had lost their silvery translucence, and were stained red with dye. Legs had been lost. It was an effort, actually, to perceive this mangled husk as an insect at all: it looked and felt like the pulverised remains of a hand-rolled cigarette. Why had these creatures hitched a ride in his clothes? He’d probably killed them just by the friction of walking.
Remembering the camera, he fished it out of his jacket pocket. It was slippery with moisture. He switched it on, intending to review the pictures he’d taken of the USIC perimeter and to snap a few more here, to show Bea his quarters, his sodden clothes, maybe one of the insects. A spark leapt from the mechanism, stinging him, and the light died. He held the camera in his hand, staring down at it as though it were a bird whose tiny heart had burst from fright. He knew the thing was unfixable and yet he half-hoped that if he waited a while, it would hiccup back into life. Just a moment ago, it had been a clever little storehouse of memories for Bea, a trove of images which would come to his aid in a near future he’d already inhabited in his imagination. Him and Bea on the bed, the gadget glowing between them, her pointing, him following the line of her finger, him saying ‘That? Oh, that was . . . ’ ‘And that was . . . ’ ‘And that was . . . ’ Now suddenly none of it was. In his palm lay a small metal shape with no purpose.
As the minutes passed, he became aware that his naked flesh smelled strange. It was that same faint honeydew melon scent he detected in the drinking water. The atmosphere swirling around out there had not been content merely to lick and stroke his skin, it had made him fragrant, as well as provoking copious sweat.
He was too tired to wash, and a slight quaver in the straight line of the skirting board warned him that the whole room might soon start moving again if he didn’t shut his eyes and rest. He collapsed on the bed and slept for an eternity which, when he awoke, turned out to have been forty-odd minutes.
He checked the Shoot for messages. Nothing. Not even from Grainger. Maybe he didn’t know how to use this machine after all. The message he’d sent Grainger was not a foolproof test, because he’d worded it in such a way that it hadn’t strictly required a response. He thought for a minute, then wrote:
Hello again Grainger,
Sorry to bother you, but I haven’t noticed any phones or any other method of getting hold of somebody directly. Are there none?
Best wishes,
Peter
He showered, towelled himself half-dry and lay on the bed again, still naked. If his messages to Grainger had failed to get through and she turned up a few minutes from now, he would wrap himself in a sheet and talk to her through the door. Unless she walked right in without knocking. She wouldn’t do that, would she? Surely the social conventions of the USIC base weren’t that different from the norm? He looked around the room for a suitable object to wedge against the door, but there was nothing.
Once, years ago, while going through the complicated procedure of locking up the church (deadbolts, padlocks, mortice locks, even a chain), he’d suggested to Beatrice that they should have an open-door policy.
‘But we do,’ she’d said, puzzled.