He cleared his throat, willing himself to call out names in an alien language he imagined he’d learned quite well, but which he now realised he had only the feeblest grip on. Instead, he remembered the 23rd Psalm, his own paraphrase of it, carefully devised to remove consonants. He’d sweated blood over it and now, for some reason, it came to him.
‘The Lord be he who care for me,’ he recited as he shuffled through the darkness. ‘I will need no more.’ This voice was the same one he used for preaching: not strident, but quite loud and with each word articulated clearly. The moisture in the atmosphere swallowed the sounds before they had a chance to carry very far. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my soul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all this, for he be God. Yea, though I walk through the long dark corridor of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your care wand make me feel no harm can come. You feed me even while unfriendly men look on in envy. You rub healing oil on my head. My cup runneth over. Good unfolding and comfort will keep me company, every day of my life. I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’
‘Hey, that’s good!’ cried an unfamiliar voice. ‘That’s good!’
Peter whirled around in the dark, almost losing his balance. In spite of the fact that the words were friendly, he was adrenalised with instinctive, fight-or-flight fear. The presence of another male (for the voice was definitely male), a male of his own species, somewhere very nearby but invisible, felt as life-threatening as a gun-barrel to the temple or a knife in the side.
‘I take my hat off to you! If I had a goddamn hat!’ the stranger added. ‘You’re a pro, what can I say, sheer class! The Lord is my shepherd without a fucking shepherd in sight. Only a couple of “t”s and “s”s in the whole damn thing!’ Curses aside, the sincerity of the admiration was clear. ‘You wrote that for the สีฐฉั, right? Like, Open up for Jesus, this won’t hurt. A banquet with all the bones taken out, a meal in a milkshake, thesaurus semolina. Bravo!’
Peter hesitated. A living shape had materialised from the gloom behind him. As far as he could make out, it was human, hairy and naked. ‘Tartaglione?’
‘Got it in one! Put it there, palomino! Come va?’ A bony hand grasped Peter’s. A very bony hand. The fingers, though strong, were skeletal, pressing spoke-like phalanges into Peter’s softer flesh.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Peter.
‘Oh, you know,’ was the drawled reply. ‘Just hanging out, shootin’ the breeze. Watching the grass not grow. Happy campering. What are you doing here?’
‘I… I’m the minister,’ said Peter, divesting his hand from the stranger’s. ‘The pastor for the สีฐฉั… We built a church… It was right here… ’
Tartaglione laughed, then coughed emphysemically. ‘Beg to disagree, amigo. Nobody here but us cockroaches. No gas, food, floozies or floorshows. Nada.’
The word was released like a bat into the humid night, and disappeared. All of a sudden, a lightbulb went on in Peter’s brain. He wasn’t in C-2 at alclass="underline" he was in the settlement that the สีฐฉั had abandoned. There was nothing here but air and brick walls. And a naked madman who’d slipped through the net of human civilisation.
‘I got lost,’ Peter explained, feebly. ‘I’m sick. I think I’ve been poisoned. I… I think I may be dying.’
‘No shit?’ said Tartaglione. ‘Then let’s get drunk.’
The linguist led him through the dark into still more dark, then through a doorway into a house where he was made to kneel and told to get comfy. There were cushions on the floor, large plump cushions that might have been cannibalised from a couch or armchair. They felt mildewy to the touch, like the decaying peel of orange or lemon. When Peter sat on them, they sighed.
‘My humble abode,’ said Tartaglione. ‘Après the exodus, moi.’
Peter offered a grunt of gratitude, and tried to breathe through his mouth rather than his nose. Oasan interiors usually smelled of nothing much except food and the honeydew air currents that continually flowed through the windows and lapped around the walls, but this room managed to reek of human uncleanness and alcoholic ferment. In its centre stood a large object which he’d thought at first was a sleeping crib, but which he now identified as the source of the liquor stink. Maybe it was a sleeping crib, serving as an alcohol storage tub.
‘Is there any light?’ asked Peter.
‘You bring a torch, padre?’
‘No.’
‘Then there isn’t any light.’
Peter’s eyes simply couldn’t adjust to the darkness. He could see the whites — or rather yellows — of the other man’s eyes, a bristle of facial hair, an impression of emaciated flesh and flaccid genitals. He wondered if Tartaglione had developed, over the months and years he’d lived in these ruins, a kind of night vision, like a cat.
‘What’s wrong? You choking on something?’ asked Tartaglione.
Peter hugged himself to stop the noise coming from his own chest. ‘My… my cat died,’ he said.
‘You brought a cat here?’ the other man marvelled. ‘USIC’s allowing pets now?’
‘No, it was… it happened at home.’
Tartaglione patted Peter’s knee. ‘Now, now. Be a good little camper, don’t lose Brownie points. Don’t use the H-word. The H-word is verboten! È finito! Distrutto! Non esiste!’
The linguist was making theatrical motions with his palms, shoving the word home back into its gopher-hole each time it popped up. Peter suddenly hated him, this poor crazy bastard, yes, he hated him. He closed his eyes tight and opened them again, and was bitterly disappointed that Tartaglione was still there, that the darkness and the alcohol stink were still there, when what should be there when he opened his eyes was the place he should never have left, his own space, his own stuff, Bea. He moaned in grief. ‘I miss my wife.’
‘None of that! None of that!’ Tartaglione sprang up, waving his arms about. His bare feet thumped a mad rhythm on the floor, and he emitted a bizarre ‘sh! — sh!-sh! — sh!’ as he danced. The effort of it triggered an extended burst of coughing. Peter imagined loose fragments of lung swirling in the air like nuptial confetti.
‘Of course you miss your wife,’ muttered Tartaglione when he’d calmed down slightly. ‘You miss every damn thing. You could fill a book with all the things you miss. You miss dandelions, you miss bananas, you miss mountains and dragonflies and trains and roses and… and… fucking junk mail for Christ’s sake, you miss the rust on the fire hydrants, the dogshit on the pavement, the sunsets, your dumbass uncle with the lousy taste in shirts and the yellow teeth. You want to throw your arms around the old sleazeball and say, “Uncle, what a great shirt, love your aftershave, show me your porcelain frog collection, and then let’s promenade down the old neighbourhood, just you and me, whaddaya say?” You miss snow. You miss the sea, non importa if it’s polluted, bring it on, oil spills, acid, condoms, broken bottles, who cares, it’s still the sea, it’s still the ocean. You dream… you dream of newly mown lawns, the way the grass smelled, you swear you’d give ten thousand bucks or one of your kidneys if you could have just one last whiff of that grass.’