WEL COME
‘Wow,’ said Grainger. ‘Didn’t know they had it in them.’
She stopped the car and flipped open the hatch. Peter got out and fetched his rucksack from the boot, strapping it onto his shoulders so that his arms were free. He wondered what the correct way of taking his leave of Grainger might be: a handshake, a courteous nod, a casual wave, or what.
The crystalline curtain that veiled the nearest doorway sparkled as its trails of beads were brushed aside to allow someone through — a hooded figure, small and solemn. Peter couldn’t tell if it was the same person he’d met before. He remembered the Oasan’s robe as being blue, whereas this one’s was pastel yellow. No sooner had the person stepped out into the light than another person followed him, parting the beads with his delicate gloves. This one’s robe was pale green.
One by one, the Oasans emerged from the building. They were all hooded and gloved, all daintily built, all wearing the same soft leather boots. Their robes were all the same design, but there was scarcely a colour repeated. Pink, mauve, orange, yellow, chestnut, faun, lilac, terracotta, salmon, watermelon, olive, copper, moss, lavender, peach, powder blue…
On and on they came, making room for each new arrival, but standing as close together as a family. Within a few minutes, a crowd of seventy or eighty souls had gathered, including smaller creatures who were evidently children. Their faces were mostly obscured, but here and there a whitish-pink swell of flesh peeped out.
Peter gaped back at them, light-headed with exhilaration.
The frontmost of the Oasans turned to face his people, raised his arms high and gave a signal.
‘Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa… ’ they sang, sweet and high and pure. The vowel floated for five, ten seconds without pause, a grand communal exhalation, sustained so long that Peter interpreted it as an abstract sound, unrelated to language or melody. But then it incorporated a consonant — albeit an unidentifiable one — and shifted in pitch: ‘…สีiiiiiiing graaaaaaaaสีe! Howสีweeeeeeeรี่ a สีouuuuuund thaรี่ สีaaaaaaaaaaaaved a wreeeeฐ liiiiike meeeeeeeeeee!’
In synchronised obedience to an energetic hand-gesture from the frontmost Oasan, they all stopped at once. There was a huge intake of breath, a seventy-strong sigh. Peter fell to his knees, having only just recognised the hymn: the anthem of fuddy-duddy evangelism, the archetype of Salvation Army naffness, the epitome of everything he had despised when he’d been a young punk snorting lines of speed off piss-stained toilet lids, of everything he dismissed as stupid when he was liable to wake in a pool of congealed vomit, of everything he considered contemptible when he was stealing money from prostitutes’ handbags, of everything he laughed off as worthless when he himself was a toxic waste of space. I once was lost, and now I’m found.
The conductor gestured again. The choir resumed.
II. ON EARTH
10. The happiest day of my life
Peter hung suspended between ground and sky, in a net, his body covered with dark blue insects. They weren’t feeding on him, they were just using him as a place to be. Every time he stretched or coughed, the bugs would hover up from his skin or hop elsewhere, then settle back. He didn’t mind. Their legs didn’t tickle. They were quiet.
He’d been awake for hours, resting his cheek on his upflung arm so that his eyes were in line with the horizon. The sun was rising. It was the end of the long night, his fifth night spent among the Oasans.
Not that he was among the Oasans now, strictly speaking. He was alone on his improvised hammock, strung aloft between two pillars of his church. His church-in-progress. Four walls, four internal pillars, no roof. No contents except for a few tools and coils of rope and vats of mortar and braziers of oil. The braziers of oil were cold now, glimmering in the dawn light. Far from serving any religious purpose¸ they had a purely practical function — throughout the long dark spell, for the duration of each working ‘day’, they were ignited to throw light on the proceedings, and extinguished again when the last of the Oasans had gone home and ‘Father Peรี่er’ was ready to retire.
His congregation were labouring as fast as they could to build this place, but they weren’t here with him today; not yet. They were still asleep, he supposed, in their own houses. Oasans slept a lot; they got tired easily. They’d work for an hour or two, and then, whether the task had been arduous or not, they would go home and rest in bed for a while.
Peter stretched in his hammock, recalling what those beds looked like, glad he wasn’t in one now. They resembled old-fashioned bathtubs, sculpted out of a sort of tough, dense moss, as lightweight as balsa wood. The tubs were lined with many layers of a cotton-like material, swaddling the sleeper in a loose, fluffy cocoon.
Three hundred hours ago, when he first succumbed to tiredness after the great exhilarations of his first day, Peter had been offered such a bed. He’d accepted it, in deference to his hosts’ hospitality, and there had been much ceremonial well-wishing for a good long rest. But he hadn’t been able to sleep.
For one thing, it was daytime, and the Oasans felt no need to darken their bedchambers, positioning their cots right under the brightest sunbeams. He’d climbed in anyway, squinting against the glare, hoping he might lose consciousness through sheer exhaustion. Unfortunately, the bed itself was an obstacle to sleep; the bed, in fact, was insufferable. The fluffy blankets were soon drenched with sweat and vapour, they exuded a sickly coconutty smell, and the tub was slightly too small, even though it was larger than the standard model. He suspected it had been carved specially for him, which made him all the more determined to adjust to it if he could.
But it was no good. As well as the absurd bed and the excessive light, there was also a noise problem. On that first day, there were four Oasans sleeping near him — the four who called themselves Jeสีuสี Lover One, Jeสีuสี Lover Fifรี่y-Four, Jeสีuสี Lover สีevenรี่y-Eighรี่ and Jeสีuสี Lover สีevenรี่y-Nine — and all four of them breathed very loudly, creating an obnoxious symphony of sucking and gurgling. Their cots were in another room, but Oasan houses had no closeable doors, and he could hear the sleepers’ every breath, every snuffle, every glutinous swallow. In his bed back home, he was used to the barely audible breathing of Bea and an occasional sigh from Joshua the cat, not this kind of racket. Lying in the house of the Oasans, he reconnected with a long-forgotten episode from his past life: the memory of being lured off the street by a charity worker and put in a hostel for rough sleepers, most of them alcoholics and addicts like himself. The memory, too, of sneaking out of there in the middle of the night, back onto the bitter streets, to look for his own quiet space to doss down in.
So: here he was in a hammock, suspended in his half-built church, in the open air, in the absolute desert stillness of the Oasan dawn.
He had slept well and deeply. He’d always been able to sleep outdoors: a legacy of his homeless years, perhaps, when he’d lain comatose in public parks and doorways, lain so still that people would mistake him for a dead body. Without alcohol, it was a bit more difficult to drift off, but not much. The intrusiveness of the vaporous Oasan atmosphere was easier to deal with, he felt, if he surrendered himself to it. Being indoors and yet not truly enclosed was the worst of both worlds. The Oasans’ houses weren’t sealed and air-conditioned like the USIC base; they were ventilated by open windows through which the insidious atmosphere swirled freely. There was something disconcerting about lying tucked up in a bed, and imagining every minute that the surrounding air was lifting the blankets with invisible fingers and slipping in beside you. Much better to lie exposed, wearing nothing but a single cotton garment. After a while, if you were sleepy enough, you felt as though you were reclining in a shallow stream, with the water flowing gently over you.