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 Gospel?’
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 waited long for the man Peter,’ 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.
‘Medisine have all gone,’ he said. ‘Gone inside the grateful.’
‘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 strange New Things.’
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 speak 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 Gospel. The technique of Jesus.’
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 Jesus 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. ‘Comfort and joy. Glad day. Come back soon, Peter, oh very soon, sooner than you can. Read for us the Book of strange New Things, read and read and read until we understand. 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