Peter smiled. ‘I promise.’
He and the big man shook hands, formally and decorously, like diplomats. No bear hugs, no high fives. BG knew how to tailor the gesture to the occasion. He turned and walked away, with Moro at his side.
Peter watched their bodies dwindle and disappear into the ugly exterior of the USIC base. Then he took a seat on a swing, holding the chains loosely, and wept a while. Not big sobs, not even aloud, nothing that Lover Five might have called a very long song. Just tears on his cheeks, which got licked up by the atmosphere before they could fall to the earth.
Eventually he walked back to the sandbag and kneeled down next to it. Without much difficulty, he dragged it up his thighs onto his lap. Next, wrapping his arms around it, he hauled it to his chest. It was heavier than Bea, he supposed, although it was hard to be sure. Lifting a person was easier somehow. It shouldn’t be, because both of you were subject to gravity; there was no escaping that. Yet he’d tried lifting an unconscious body and he’d lifted Bea and there was a difference. And a baby… a baby would be lighter still, much lighter.
He sat holding the sandbag until his knees were hurting and arms were sore. When he finally let it slip to the ground, he couldn’t guess how long Grainger had been standing near him, watching.
‘I thought you were angry with me,’ he said.
‘So you ran away?’ she said.
‘I just wanted to give you space,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘I have all the space I can handle.’
He checked her appearance, unobtrusively he hoped. She looked sober, dressed as normal, ready for work.
‘You’re going home too, right?’
‘Right,’ she said.
‘We’ll be together,’ he said.
The reassurance cut no ice with her. ‘We’ll be in the same ship but we won’t be aware of it.’
‘We’ll wake up together at the other end,’ he said.
She looked away. They were heading for different destinations, and both knew it.
‘Is there… ’ he began, then got stuck for a few seconds. ‘Is there a part of you that’s sorry to leave?’
She shrugged. ‘They’ll get another pharmacist; they’ll get another minister. Everyone’s replaceable.’
‘Yes. And irreplaceable, too.’
The sound of an engine revving distracted them. Not far off, a vehicle had pulled away from the base and was now driving in the general direction of the Big Brassiere. It was the black station wagon, the one Kurtzberg had always used. Mechanics had fixed it, proving that if you were a car, you could be struck by lightning, pronounced dead and yet be brought back to life. Not exactly good as new, but saved from the scrapheap by the grace of experts. The rear of the wagon was crammed with pipes of some sort, which stuck out some distance from the hatch and were secured with rope. The bed must have been ditched. Evidently, now that the USIC personnel knew for certain that the pastor was dead, they no longer felt constrained to keep his car as he liked it, permanently in a bay earmarked ‘Pastor’, but to put it to general use instead. Waste not, want not. And hey, Kurtzberg had even handled his own funeral, instead of causing headaches by dying at the base. What a guy.
‘Are you still praying for my dad?’ said Grainger.
‘I’m having trouble praying for anyone right now,’ he said, gently removing a bright-green insect from his sleeve and launching it into the air. ‘But tell me… How are you going to find him?’
‘I’ll figure it out,’ she said. ‘I just need to be back. Then I’ll know what to do.’
‘Are there relatives who could help?’
‘Maybe,’ she said, in tone that suggested that maybe, in equal likelihood, a Tibetan football team, a herd of talking buffalo or a host of angels might pitch in to assist.
‘You never married,’ he confirmed.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Still called “Grainger”.’
‘A lot of women don’t change their name when they get married,’ Grainger said. The opportunity to spar with him seemed to cheer her up.
‘My wife changed hers,’ he said. ‘Beatrice Leigh. Bea Leigh.’ He smirked, embarrassed. ‘Sounds ridiculous, I know. But she hated her father.’
Grainger shook her head. ‘Nobody hates their father. Not deep down. You can’t. He made you.’
‘Let’s not go there,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll end up talking about religion.’
Kurtzberg’s hearse was a dot on the horizon now. A sparkling constellation of rain hung right above it.
‘What are you gonna call your kid?’ asked Grainger.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s all… It’s hard for me to conceive of yet. It’s a bit scary. They say it changes you for ever. I mean, not that I don’t want to be changed, but… You can see what’s happening to the world, you can see where things are heading. The decision to put a child in danger like that, to expose an innocent child to God knows — goodness knows… ’ He faltered and fell silent.
Grainger appeared not to have been listening. She hopped onto the treadmill and swayed her hips like a dancer, keeping her feet still, to see if the thing would move. She jerked her pelvis. The treadmill advanced maybe a couple of centimetres. ‘Your kid will be brand new to the planet,’ she said. ‘Your kid won’t be thinking about all the things we’ve lost, the places that went to hell, the people who died. All that stuff will be prehistoric like the dinosaurs. Stuff that happened before time began. Only tomorrow will matter. Only today.’ She smiled. ‘Like, what’s for breakfast?’
He laughed.
‘Are you packed?’ he said.
‘Sure. I didn’t come with much. Leaving the same way.’
‘I’m packed too.’ It had been a three-minute job; there was scarcely anything in his luggage now. Passport. Keys to a house which might, by the time he got there, have a different lock. Some pencil stubs. The bright yellow boots sewn by Lover Five, each stitch of which had been executed with infinite care so as not to risk injuring her hands. A pair of trousers that fell off his hips, a few T-shirts that would hang so loose on him that he’d look like a refugee decked out in charity hand-me-downs. Anything else? He didn’t think so. The other clothes he’d brought with him were ruined by mildew or sacrificed as rags during the construction of his church. He knew that when he got home it would be cold, and he’d not be able to ponce about in a dishdasha with nothing underneath, but that was a problem for another day.
The weirdest absence from his rucksack was his Bible. He’d owned that Bible since his conversion, it had counselled, inspired and comforted him for so many years, he must have thumbed its pages thousands of times. The weave of the linen-enriched paper probably contained so many cells from his fingertips that a new Peter could be grown from the DNA. ‘Before you came,’ Jesus Lover Seventeen once said, ‘we were all alone and weak. Now, รี่ogether, we are สีรี่rong.’ He hoped that she and her fellow Jesus Lovers would derive some strength from his cherished King James, their very own Book of Strange New Things.
It was all committed to memory, anyway. The parts that were important, the parts he might need. Even now, he was pretty sure he could recite the gospel of Matthew, all twenty-eight chapters of it, except for the Ezekias-begat-Joatham stuff at the very start. He thought of Bea, reading to him from Chapter 6 in the bedroom of her tiny flat when they were first together, her voice soft and fervent as she spoke of the heavenly sanctuary where precious things were safe from harm: ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ He thought of Matthew’s last words, and the meaning they could have for two people who loved each other:
I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.