He opened a fresh message page, and wrote:
Dear Grainger. Then deleted ‘Dear’ and substituted ‘Hi’, then deleted that and just had ‘Grainger’, then reinstated ‘Dear’, then deleted it again. Unwarranted intimacy versus unfriendly brusqueness… a flurry of confused gestures before communication could begin. Letter-writing must have been so much easier in the olden days when everyone, even the bank manager or the tax department, was Dear.
Hi Grainger.
You were right. I am tired. I should sleep some more. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Best wishes,
Peter
Laboriously, he undressed. Every item of his clothing was swollen with damp, like he’d been caught in a downpour. His socks peeled away from his wrinkled feet like muddy clumps of foliage. His trousers and jacket clung obstinately to him, resisting his attempts to tug free. Everything he removed weighed heavy and fell to the floor with a dull whump. At first, he thought that fragments of his clothing had actually crumbled off and rolled across the floor, but on closer inspection, the loose bits were dead insects. He picked up one of the bodies and held it between his fingers. The wings had lost their silvery translucence, and were stained red with dye. Legs had been lost. It was an effort, actually, to perceive this mangled husk as an insect at alclass="underline" it looked and felt like the pulverised remains of a hand-rolled cigarette. Why had these creatures hitched a ride in his clothes? He’d probably killed them just by the friction of walking.
Remembering the camera, he fished it out of his jacket pocket. It was slippery with moisture. He switched it on, intending to review the pictures he’d taken of the USIC perimeter and to snap a few more here, to show Bea his quarters, his sodden clothes, maybe one of the insects. A spark leapt from the mechanism, stinging him, and the light died. He held the camera in his hand, staring down at it as though it were a bird whose tiny heart had burst from fright. He knew the thing was unfixable and yet he half-hoped that if he waited a while, it would hiccup back into life. Just a moment ago, it had been a clever little storehouse of memories for Bea, a trove of images which would come to his aid in a near future he’d already inhabited in his imagination. Him and Bea on the bed, the gadget glowing between them, her pointing, him following the line of her finger, him saying ‘That? Oh, that was… ’ ‘And that was… ’ ‘And that was… ’ Now suddenly none of it was. In his palm lay a small metal shape with no purpose.
As the minutes passed, he became aware that his naked flesh smelled strange. It was that same faint honeydew melon scent he detected in the drinking water. The atmosphere swirling around out there had not been content merely to lick and stroke his skin, it had made him fragrant, as well as provoking copious sweat.
He was too tired to wash, and a slight quaver in the straight line of the skirting board warned him that the whole room might soon start moving again if he didn’t shut his eyes and rest. He collapsed on the bed and slept for an eternity which, when he awoke, turned out to have been forty-odd minutes.
He checked the Shoot for messages. Nothing. Not even from Grainger. Maybe he didn’t know how to use this machine after all. The message he’d sent Grainger was not a foolproof test, because he’d worded it in such a way that it hadn’t strictly required a response. He thought for a minute, then wrote:
Hello again Grainger,
Sorry to bother you, but I haven’t noticed any phones or any other method of getting hold of somebody directly. Are there none?
Best wishes,
Peter
He showered, towelled himself half-dry and lay on the bed again, still naked. If his messages to Grainger had failed to get through and she turned up a few minutes from now, he would wrap himself in a sheet and talk to her through the door. Unless she walked right in without knocking. She wouldn’t do that, would she? Surely the social conventions of the USIC base weren’t that different from the norm? He looked around the room for a suitable object to wedge against the door, but there was nothing.
Once, years ago, while going through the complicated procedure of locking up the church (deadbolts, padlocks, mortice locks, even a chain), he’d suggested to Beatrice that they should have an open-door policy.
‘But we do,’ she’d said, puzzled.
‘No, I mean no locks at all. The doors open to anyone, any time. “Entertaining angels unawares”, as the Scripture puts it.’
She’d stroked his head as if he were a child. ‘You’re sweet.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘So are the drug addicts.’
‘We don’t have any drugs here. And nothing that could be sold for drugs.’ He gestured at the walls decorated with children’s drawings, the pews with their comfy old cushions, the wobbly lectern, the stacks of well-worn Bibles, the general absence of silver candelabras, antique sculptures and precious ornaments.
Bea sighed. ‘Anything can be sold for drugs. Or at least the person can try. If he’s desperate enough.’ And she gave him a You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? look.
Indeed, he knew all about that. He just had a tendency to forget.
Despite his resolution to stay awake until the time Grainger might show up if she hadn’t received his message, Peter fell asleep. Two hours passed and, when he woke, the room was stable and the view through the window was unchanged: lonesome expanses of darkness, speckled with eerie lamplight. He shambled out of bed and his foot kicked something flimsy across the floor: one of his socks, dried out and stiff, transformed from cotton into cardboard. He sat at the Shoot and read a fresh response from Grainger that had his own ‘sorry to bother you’ lure hanging off it.
A telephone call would have bothered me a lot more, she wrote, especialy if Id been asleep. No, there are no phones. USIC tried setting them up in the early days but reception ranged from lousy to nonexistant. The atmosphere is wrong, too thick or something. So weve done without. And its been OK. Lets face it, most of what phones get used for is a total waste of time anyway. Weve got red buttons all over the place for emergencies (and never need them!). Our work schedules are on printed rosters so we know where to turn up and what to do. As far as chat goes we talk face to face if were not too busy — and if were too busy we shouldnt be trying to chat. When special announcements need to be made, we pipe them over the PA. We can use the Shoot also but most people wait until they can discuss things face to face. Everybodys an expert here and discussions can get quite technical and then theres the give+take of problem solving in situ. Writing stuff down so as the other person can understand it and then waiting for an answer is a nightmare. Hope this helps, Grainger.
He smiled. In one sentence, she’d flushed thousands of years of written communication briskly down the toilet, having already discarded a century and a half of telephone use in the previous dump. The ‘hope this helps’ chaser was a cute touch, too. Chutzpah of a kind.
Still smiling, and picturing the boyish face of Grainger in his head, he checked for messages from Beatrice, not really expecting any. A long scroll of text manifested on the screen and, because it appeared instantaneously, without fuss or fanfare, he was slow to recognise it for what it was. The screen was full to overflowing. He looked into the nest of words, and spotted the name Joshua. A cluster of six letters, meaningless to most other people, but it sprang into his soul and made it come alive with vivid images: Joshua’s paws, with their comical white tufts between the pink pads; Joshua covered in plaster dust from next door’s renovations; Joshua performing his death-defying circus leap from the top of the fridge to the ironing board; Joshua scratching at the kitchen window, his soft cry inaudible over the peak-hour traffic; Joshua asleep in the basket of dried washing; Joshua on the kitchen table, stroking his furry jaw against the earthenware teapot that never got used for any other purpose than this; Joshua in bed with him and Bea. And then he saw Bea: Bea only half-covered by the yellow duvet, reluctant to move because the cat was asleep against her thigh. Bea’s ribcage and bosom, poking through the threadbare cotton of her favourite T-shirt which was too old to be worn in public anymore but which was just right for bed. Bea’s neck, long and smooth except for two pale creases like seams. Bea’s mouth, her lips.