‘I would hope so,’ said Peter.
‘Well, hope is a fine thing,’ she sighed.
They walked further, and began to tire.
‘Maybe we should stop walking,’ said Peter.
‘And do what instead?’
‘Rest a while.’
They sat on the earth and rested a while. Two cotton-wrapped, pink mammals marooned on a dark ocean of soil. Here and there, a few small clumps of whiteflower grew, sweating in the sunshine. Peter reached out to one near his foot, plucked off a fragment and put it in his mouth. It tasted bad. How strange that a substance which, when ingeniously processed, cooked and seasoned, could be delicious in so many ways, should be so unpleasant in its pure form.
‘Enjoying that?’ said Grainger.
‘Not much,’ he said.
‘I’ll wait till we’re back at the base,’ she said, lightly. ‘Good menu today. Chicken curry and ice cream.’ She smiled, willing him to forgive her earlier lapse of morale.
Not much refreshed, they walked on. And on. Grainger had drunk half a water bottle by now, and Peter drank his fill direct from the sky when, just as he’d foretold, another rain-shower drenched them.
‘Hey!’ called Grainger as he swayed erect and awkward, his head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing, mouth wide open to the downpour. ‘You look like a turkey!’
Peter put on a grin, as Grainger’s comment was clearly meant in fun, but he felt his grin falter as he realised that he’d forgotten what turkeys looked like. All his life he’d known, starting from the first day his parents had shown him a picture of one in a book. Now, in his brain’s storehouse, where so many Bible passages lay spotlit ready for quoting, he searched for a picture to go with ‘turkey’, and there was none to be found.
Grainger noticed. Noticed and was not pleased.
‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she said, as they sat down together once more. ‘You’ve forgotten what a turkey looks like.’
He confessed with a nod, caught out like a naughty child. Until now, only Bea had ever been able to guess what he was thinking.
‘Mental blank,’ he said.
‘That’s what happens,’ said Grainger, solemn and intense. ‘That’s what this place is about, that’s how it works. It’s like one huge dose of Propanolol, erasing everything we ever knew. You mustn’t let them break you.’
Her sudden vehemence discomfited him. ‘I… I’m probably just… absent-minded.’
‘That’s what you’ve gotta watch,’ she said, hugging her knees, contemplating the empty tundra ahead of them. ‘Absence. The slow, insidious… disposal of everything. Listen: you wanna know what got discussed at the last USIC personnel meeting? Besides technical stuff and the bad smell in the loading bay behind H wing? I’ll tell you: whether we really need all those pictures hanging in the hallways. They’re just a dusting and cleaning problem, right? An old photo of a city on earth somewhere, way back when, with a bunch of guys eating lunch on a steel girder, it’s cute but we’ve seen it a million times walking past it, it gets old, and anyway those guys are all dead, it’s like being made to look at a bunch of dead people, so enough already. Blank walls: clean and simple: end of story.’
Grainger raked her fingers through her clammy hair: an irritable gesture. ‘So… Peter… Let me remind you what a turkey is. It’s a bird. It’s got a kind of dangle of flesh hanging off of its beak, looks like a big trail of snot or… uh… a condom. Its head is red with little bumps on it, like lizard skin, and its head and neck are in an S-shape, and they go like this… ’ With her own head and neck she acted out the ungainly motion of the bird. ‘And then this scrawny, snake-like head and neck are attached to this oversized, fat, fluffy grey body.’ She looked Peter in the eyes. ‘Ring any bells?’
‘Yes, you’ve… uh… brought it back to life for me.’
Satisfied, she allowed herself to relax. ‘That’s it. That’s what we’ve got to do. Keep the memories alive.’ She arranged her body more comfortably on the ground, stretching out as if sunbathing, using the tote bag as a pillow. A brilliant-green insect settled on her shoulder and began to flex its hindquarters. She seemed unaware of it. Peter considered brushing it away, but let it be.
A voice in his head said: You are going to die here, in this wilderness. You will never see Beatrice again. This flat terrain, these sparse clumps of whiteflower, this alien sky, these insects waiting to lay eggs in your flesh, this woman at your side: they are the contents of your life in its final days and hours. The voice spoke clearly, without accent or gender: he’d heard it many times before, and always been certain it was not his own. As a child, he’d thought it was the voice of conscience; as a Christian, he’d trusted it was the voice of God. Whatever it was, it had always told him exactly what he needed to be told.
‘What’s your earliest memory?’ Grainger asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, after giving it thought. ‘My mum strapping me into a special plastic child seat at a Turkish restaurant, maybe. It’s hard to know what’s a real memory and what’s something you construct afterwards from old photos and family stories.’
‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ she said, in the same tone she might have used if he’d declared that love was merely a meeting of sperm and ovum. ‘Tuska’s big on that idea. No such thing as childhood memories, he says. We’re just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. “Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe,” he’ll tell you, grinning that smug grin of his. Asshole.’
She held out her hand. Peter wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do. Then he handed her the water bottle. She drank some. There wasn’t much left.
‘My dad,’ she continued, ‘used to smell of gunpowder. We lived on a farm, in Illinois. He was always shooting rabbits. They were just bugs to him, big furry bugs. I’d ride around on my bicycle, and there’d be dead rabbits everywhere. Then later he’d sweep me up in his arms and I’d smell the gunpowder on his shirt.’
‘A very… uh… mixed-emotion sort of memory,’ said Peter carefully.
‘It’s a real memory, that’s the important thing. The farm was real, the dead rabbits were real, the smell on my father’s shirt was gunpowder and not tobacco or paint or aftershave. I know, I was there.’ She spoke defiantly, as if doubt had been cast on whether she was there, as if there was a conspiracy among the USIC personnel to reinvent her as a city kid from Los Angeles, the daughter of a Ukrainian dentist, a German Chinese. Two more insects had settled on her, one on her hair, the other on her bosom. She paid them no mind.
‘What happened to your farm?’ asked Peter, for politeness’ sake, when it became evident that the conversation had stalled.
‘Get the fuck out of my face!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands to her eyes.
He jerked back, prepared to apologise profusely for whatever he’d said to enrage her, but she wasn’t addressing him. She wasn’t even addressing the insects. With a cry of disgust, she cast a glittering shred first from one eye, then the other. Her contact lenses.
‘The damn air,’ she said. ‘It was trying to get under my contacts, lifting them up at the edges. Creeped me out.’ She blinked. One discarded hydrogel petal was stuck to her shoe, the other lay on the soil. ‘I shouldn’t have done that; my eyesight is not good. You might end up leading me along. Where were we?’