Peter, PLEASE PLEASE STOP HARPING ON ABOUT THIS COUNTRYSIDE FANTASY, it’s just making me feel worse. You just don’t seem to appreciate how fast and how frighteningly and how MUCH things have changed. The housing market has COLLAPSED. Like just about everything eslse in this country IT IS KAPUT. Couldn’t you guess that? Wouldn’t that be obvious from all the things I’ve been telling you? Do you really think some nice young coiuple is goimng to be isnepcting our house with a chequebook in their hands? All those nice young couples all over the UK are frozen with TERROR. Everyonbe is just sitting tight, hoping agaimst hope that things will improve. I am sitting tighjt myself, hoping that at last some big truck will finally come and pick up the stinking piles of garbage in front of our home.
As for using the word godforsaken, I’m sure God can forgive me but the question is, can you?
The vehemence of the blow took him by surprise. In the minutes that followed, his brain swirled with hurt, indignation, shame and fear. She was wrong, he was misunderstood, she was wrong, he was misunderstood, she was in trouble, he couldn’t help, she was in trouble, he couldn’t help, she was deaf to his assurances of love and support, she spoke in a tone he couldn’t recognise. Was this what pregnancy had done to her mind? Or had she been harbouring these resentments and frustrations for years? Half-formed sentences suggested themselves, drafts of defences and analyses, ways to demonstrate to her that she was not helping anyone by behaving like this, ways to allude to the deranging effects of hormones and pregnancy without making her angrier still.
As he thought more, however, his urge to argue dwindled and all that was left was love. It didn’t matter, for the moment, that she misjudged him. She was overwhelmed, she was in distress, she needed help. Rightness or wrongness was not the point. Giving her strength was the point. He must let go of his grief at how alienated she was from him. The greater problem was that she seemed alienated from God. A barrage of suffering borne in unaccustomed loneliness had weakened her faith. Her mind and heart were closed like the fist of a child in pain. Rhetoric and arguments were useless and, in the circumstances, cruel. He must remember that when he’d been at his own lowest ebb, a single Bible verse had pulled him back from the abyss. God didn’t waste words.
Bea, I love you. Please pray. What is happening all around you is terrifying, I know. But please pray and God will help. Psalm 91: I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust.
There, it was sent. He clasped his hands and prayed she would pray. Everything would be all right if she only could.
III. AS IT IS
21. There is no God, she wrote
‘Sคฉ้นtฉ้ณ,’ he said.
‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ she corrected him.
‘Sคฉ้นtฉ้ณ,’ he tried again.
‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ she corrected him again.
‘สีคฉ้นรี่ฉ้ณ,’ he said.
All round him rose a noise like a flock of birds flapping their wings. It was not birds. It was the sound of applause from dozens of gloved hands. The Oasans — no longer Oasans to him but สีฐฉั — were letting him know he was making excellent progress in their language.
It was a perfect afternoon, just perfect. The air was less clammy than ever before, or perhaps he’d grown accustomed to the humidity at last. His body felt free and unencumbered, almost a part of the atmosphere, with no division between his skin and the surrounding sky. (Funny how he’d always been encouraged to conceive of the sky as something that started at some point far above him, whereas the สีฐฉั word for it — สี — recognised that it extended right down to the ground.)
He and the สีฐฉั were sitting outside the church, as was their custom when they were engaged in matters not strictly related to faith. The church was for singing, for sermons (although Peter didn’t refer to his Bible talks as such) and for contemplating the pictures his friends had dedicated to the glory of God. Outside, they could speak of other things. Outside, they could be his teachers.
Today, they numbered thirty. Not because the Jesus Lovers had dwindled in total, but because only certain members of the congregation felt confident to give their pastor instruction. Some of the people he was fondest of weren’t here, and he was forging a new intimacy with others who’d been a closed book to him before. For example, Jesus Lover Sixty-Three — so shy and awkward in most contexts — displayed a flair for linguistic problem-solving, keeping silent for long periods and then, when everyone was stuck, uttering the word they were searching for. By contrast, Lover One — the original convert to Christ and thus a person of some eminence among the believers — had declined Peter’s invitation to take part in the lessons. Declined? ‘Dismissed’ or ‘rejected’ was closer to the mark; Lover One was opposed to Peter attempting anything that might dilute the strangeness of the Book of Strange New Things.
‘Forget the Book for a moment… ’ Peter had said, but Lover One was so wound up that, for the first time, he interrupted.
‘Never forgeรี่ the Book. Never, never. The Book our rock, our hope, our redeemer.’
The words were Peter’s own, specially selected to be easy for these people to say, but the more often he heard the สีฐฉั uttering words like ‘redeemer’, the more he wondered what they really thought they meant.
‘I didn’t mean… I wasn’t saying… ’ Peter floundered. Then: ‘I just want to know you better.’
‘You know enough,’ Lover One said. ‘We are they who need more knowing, more word of Jeสีuสี. Word of Jeสีuสี good. Our word no good.’ And no amount of reassurance could convince him otherwise.
So here they were, a congregation within a congregation, engaged in an activity that had a slightly contentious status — which made it feel more important, of course. They sat on a patch of earth which had been shrouded in shade when they first settled in it, but not anymore. How many hours had they been sitting here? He didn’t know. Enough for the sun to move a significant distance across the sky. The sun’s name, he’d learned, was ڇ. Back at the USIC base, stowed in a drawer in Peter’s quarters, lay a printout prepared for him by some well-meaning boffin, charting the rising and setting of the sun within the 72-hour diurnal cycle. The heavens were reduced to a geometric grid with USIC at its centre; the times of day were represented as incomprehensible multi-digit numbers, and the sun was not dignified with a name. Typical.
Now, under that sun, he sat with his brethren on the mildest, most beautiful day yet. He imagined the scene from above — not very high above, but as if from a beach lifeguard’s observation tower. A tanned, lanky, blond-haired man in white, squatting on brown earth, encircled by small robed figures in all the colours of the rainbow. Everyone leaning slightly forward, attentive, occasionally passing a flask of water from hand to hand. Communion of the simplest kind.
He hadn’t felt like this since he was six and his parents took him to the dunes in Snowdonia. That summer had been the happiest time of his life, as he’d luxuriated not just in the balmy weather but also in his parents’ reconciliation, all coos and hugs and soft words. Even the name ‘Snowdonia’ seemed magical, like an enchanted kingdom rather than a national park in Wales. He’d sat for hour upon hour in the dunes, soaking up the warmth and his parents’ togetherness, listening to their beningnly meaningless chatter and the lapping of the waves, gazing out at the sea from under his oversized straw hat. Unhappiness was a test that you had to pass, and he’d passed it, and everything would be all right from now on. Or so he’d thought, until his parents’ divorce.