They stood and looked at that cross for several minutes, while the ragged remains of the tent flapped in the breeze.
‘I’m going home,’ announced Grainger, in a voice shaky with tears, ‘to find my dad.’
Peter put his arm around her shoulders. This was the moment when he was called upon to say the right thing; nothing less than the right thing would do. As a man or as a minister of God, his challenge was the same: to reconcile them both to their fate. There would be no going home; there was no dad to be reunited with; they were lost and soon they would be dead. Lightning had struck them, and they had failed to understand its message.
‘Grainger… ’ he began, his mind blank, trusting that inspiration would lend words to his tongue.
But before he could continue, the dull thrum which they’d both imagined was the wind agitating the canvas shreds of the tent grew suddenly louder, and an olive-green military jeep drove past them, slowed to a stop, and reversed.
A brown head with white eyes and white teeth poked out of the window.
‘Are you guys finished here?’ hollered BG, revving the engine. ‘’Cause some of us have work to do.’
26. He only knew that thanks were due
All the way back, Peter could hear — only hear, not see — the weeping and the laboured breathing and the outbursts of anxiety and anger, sometimes incoherent, sometimes lucid. He was in the front passenger seat next to BG, almost shoulder to shoulder with the big man, although his own shoulder looked emaciated in comparison with BG’s bulge of meat and muscle. Invisible in the space behind them, Alexandra Grainger was going through hell.
BG drove in silence. His normally benign face was a grim mask, frozen under the sheen of sweat, as he concentrated, or pretended to concentrate, on the road ahead — the road that was no road at all. Only his eyes betrayed any stress.
‘They’d better not try to stop me,’ Grainger was saying. ‘They can’t keep me here. I don’t care how much it costs. What are they gonna do? Sue me? Kill me? I’ve got to go home. They can keep my salary. Four years for free. That makes us even, right? They’ve got to let me go. My dad is still alive. I know he is. I feel it.’
BG glanced up at the rear-view mirror. Maybe from his angle he could see more than Peter. All Peter could see was a narrow rectangle of black upholstery which, through the distorted veil of the air currents trapped in the cabin, appeared to be pulsing and throbbing.
‘Four years as a pharmacist,’ Grainger ranted on, ‘handing out drugs to those creepy little freaks: what’s that worth, BG? Worth a ride on a ship?’
BG grimaced. Crises of confidence were not what he was accustomed to dealing with. ‘Chill out, Grainger, is my advice to you,’ he said pensively. ‘The cost ain’t an issue. I been back, Severin went back a couple times, a few other guys took a break too. Nobody slapped them with a bill. If you need to go, you need to go. No big deal.’
‘You really think so?’ Her voice was tremulous, the voice of a farm girl from Illinois who was deeply ashamed to waste millions of dollars of someone else’s money to indulge her own pain.
‘Money don’t mean shit,’ said BG. ‘We play this little game: ten bucks for a bar of chocolate, fifty bucks for a bottle of Pepsi, deducted from your salary, blah blah blah. It’s just a Friday-night card game, Grainger, it’s Monopoly, it’s Go Fish, it’s kids gambling for peanuts. The salary’s a game too. Where we gonna spend this cash? We ain’t goin’ nowhere.’
‘But you did go home,’ said Grainger. ‘Not that long ago. Why?’
BG’s mouth set hard. He clearly didn’t want to discuss it. ‘Unfinished business.’
‘Family?’
BG shook his head. ‘Call it… loose ends. A guy in my line of work needs his mind clear. So I did some stuff and cleared it. Came back to the job a new man.’
This silenced Grainger for a few seconds. Then she was anxious again. ‘But that’s it, that’s the whole point — you came back, you didn’t quit. I’ve got to quit, you understand? I’ve got to leave and never come back. No way, never.’
BG jutted out his chin. ‘Never say never, Grainger. Never say never. That’s in the Bible somewhere, ain’t that right, Peter?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Peter mumbled. He knew perfectly well that the Bible said nothing of the sort.
‘It’s gotta be right there in Chapter One,’ affirmed BG. ‘God’s advice to Moses and the whole crew: Seize the day! Get on top of it, people!’
Peter watched BG’s right hand rise up from the steering wheel and form a triumphal fist in the air. Long ago, in a previous life, BG had no doubt stood among other dark-skinned creatures in his Nation of Islam brotherhood, all raising their fists likewise. Now, their slogans had mingled in BG’s mind with a thousand windblown leaves from the Qur’an, the Bible, assorted self-help books, magazines and TV programmes, combining into a mulch. A mulch from which his self-esteem grew healthy and strong.
The Bible stored inside Peter was pure and unadulterated, not a word of it confused with anything else. And yet, for the first time, he was ashamed of it. The holy book he’d spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren’t religious. With God, nothing shall be impossible, proclaimed Luke, and that message, which Peter had always thought was the most joyously positive reassurance you could wish for, now turned itself over like a dying insect, and became Without God, everything shall be impossible. What use was that to Grainger? What use was that to Bea? The way things had turned out, they might need to manage without a saviour; they might need to forage and scrabble for whatever future they could get on their own. And the thing about the Bible was, once you asked for a future without faith, the Scriptures washed their hands of you. Vanity, all is vanity.
‘What was it like, BG?’ said Grainger. ‘Come on, tell me, what’s happening back home?’
‘This is my home now,’ BG cautioned her, tapping his chest with his fingers. Maybe, rather than referring to Oasis, the home he meant was his own body, wherever in space it might be located.
‘OK, fine, fine,’ said Grainger, barely controlling her annoyance, ‘but tell me anyway, damn it. It’s been so long since I left. There must have been big changes. Don’t spare me, BG, skip the pep talks, give it to me straight. What’s it like?’
BG hesitated, weighing up the wisdom of responding. ‘Same as always,’ he said.
‘That’s not true!’ yelled Grainger, instantly hysterical. ‘Don’t lie to me! Don’t patronise me! I know everything’s falling apart!’
Why not ask me? Peter thought. She was treating him as if he didn’t exist.
‘Everything’s always been falling apart,’ BG stated calmly. There was no defensiveness in his tone: the facts were too self-evident for dispute. ‘Planet Earth got fucked up a loooong time ago, excuse my French.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ whined Grainger. ‘I mean… What about your old neighbourhood, where you grew up, your relatives, your house… ’
BG squinted through the windscreen at the expanses of nothingness, then glanced down at the navigation gadget on his dashboard.
‘Grainger, I got another wise old saying for you. Listen up: You can’t go home again.’
Thomas Wolfe, circa 1940, thought Peter helplessly.
‘Yeah? Well, just watch me,’ said Grainger, belligerent in her fear. ‘Just fucking watch me.’
BG was silent, obviously judging that Grainger was on too delicate a hair-trigger for more discussion. But the silence provoked her just as much. ‘You know what you are?’ she wheezed, her voice ugly as if soaked in alcohol. ‘You’re just a little boy. Running away from home. Big tough guy, but you can’t face reality. All you can do is pretend it’s not happening.’