‘Now, again, you สีleep?’ The Oasan pointed back the way they’d come: back towards the sweat-drenched coconut-stinky tub in the house of snorers.
Peter smiled non-committally. ‘First, take me to where our church will be. I want to see it again.’
And so the two of them had walked out of the settlement, across the scrubland, to the chosen site. Nothing had been built yet. The site was marked with four gouges in the soil, to demarcate the four corners of the future structure. And, inside those demarcations, Peter had scratched the basic design of the interior, explaining to the seventy-seven souls gathered around him what the lines represented. Now that he saw his drawing again, on the deserted patch of earth, after a gap of many hours and through eyes bleary with exhaustion, he saw it as the Oasans might have seen it: crude, mysterious gouges in the dirt. He felt unequal to the task ahead of him: grossly so. Bea would no doubt counsel him that this meant he was confusing objective reality with the amount of sleep he’d had, and of course she’d be right.
The site contained a few other traces of the Jesus Lovers’ assembly. The small posset of vomit that one of the infant Oasans had disgorged during Peter’s opening speech. A pair of boots, specially made as a gift for Peter, but several inches too small for him (a mistake which appeared to cause neither embarrassment nor amusement: just mute acceptance). A semi-transparent amber water jug, almost empty. A metallic blister foil (medicine courtesy of USIC) from which the last tablet had been expressed. Two scattered cushions, on which a couple of the younger children had snoozed when the grown-ups’ discussion strayed too far into invisible realms.
Peter hesitated for a few seconds, then fetched the cushions and arranged them one near the other. Then he lowered himself to the ground, pillowing his head and his hip. His weariness immediately began to drain out of his flesh, as if seeping into the soil. He wished he was alone.
‘You were unสีaรี่iสีfied in our bed,’ Jesus Lover One remarked.
The sibilant cluster in the third word rendered it unintelligible to Peter. ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you just…?’
‘You were… unglad,’ said Lover One, clenching his gloves with the effort of finding a pronounceable word. ‘In our bed. สีleep came never.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ conceded Peter, with a grin. ‘Sleep came never.’ Honesty was the best policy, he felt. There would be misunderstandings enough without creating more with diplomacy.
‘Here, สีleep will come for you,’ Lover One observed, indicating, with a wave of his gloved hand, the open space around them.
‘Yes, here sleep will come for me.’
‘Good,’ concluded the Oasan. ‘Then all will be well.’
Would all be well? There seemed reason to hope that it would. Peter had a good feeling about his ministry here. Already, inexplicably felicitous things had happened — small things, true, not strictly miraculous, but enough to indicate that God was taking a special interest in the way things were panning out. For example, when he’d told the story of Noah and the Flood (at the Oasans’ request) and, at the precise instant that the heavens opened in the Scripture, it started raining for real. And then there was that amazing occasion, after they’d all stopped work for the night and the braziers had been extinguished and they’d been sitting there in the dark, when he’d recited the opening verses of Genesis (again at their request) and, at the exact instant that God said ‘Let there be light’, one of the braziers had sputtered back into life, bathing them all in a golden glow. Coincidences, no doubt. Peter was not a superstitious person. Much closer to genuine miracles, in his opinion, were the sincere declarations of faith and fellowship from these people so incredibly different from himself.
Then again, there had been a few disappointments. Or not exactly disappointments, just failures to communicate. And he couldn’t even figure out why these encounters had fallen flat; he didn’t understand what it was he hadn’t understood.
For example, the photographs. If he’d learned one thing over the years, it was that the best — and quickest — way of forging intimacy with strangers was to show them photos of your wife, your home, yourself when younger and decked out in the fashions and haircuts of a bygone decade, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your pets, your children. (Well, he didn’t have children, but that in itself was a talking point. ‘Children?’ people would always say, as if they hoped he was saving the best photos for last.)
Perhaps what had gone wrong with his show-and-tell with the Oasans was that the group was too large. Seventy-odd people examining his photos and handing them on, almost all of those people contemplating an image that was unrelated to the commentary he was giving at that point. Although, to be honest, the responses of the Jesus Lovers who’d been sitting right nearby, who had the opportunity to make the connection between the image and his explanation of it, were just as hard to fathom.
‘This is my wife,’ he’d said, extracting the topmost of the photographs from the plastic wallet and handing it to Jesus Lover One. ‘Beatrice.’
‘Beaรี่riสี,’ repeated Jesus Lover One, his shoulders contorting with effort.
‘Bea for short,’ said Peter.
‘Beaรี่riสี,’ said Jesus Lover One. He held the photograph gently in his gloved fingers, at a strict horizontal angle, as if the miniature Beatrice posing in her mulberry-coloured jeans and imitation cashmere sweater was in danger of sliding off the paper. Peter wondered if these people could even see in the conventional sense, since there was nothing on their faces he could identify as an eye. They weren’t blind, that was obvious, but… maybe they couldn’t decode two-dimensional images?
‘Your wife,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Hair very long.’
‘It was, then,’ said Peter. ‘It’s shorter now.’ He wondered if long hair was attractive or repulsive to those who had none at all.
‘Your wife love Jeสีuสี?’
‘She certainly does.’
‘Good,’ said Jesus Lover One, handing the photograph to the person next to him, who accepted it as though it were a sacrament.
‘This next one,’ said Peter, ‘is the house where we live. It’s in a satellite… uh… a town not far from London, in England. As you can see, our house is much the same as the houses all around it. But inside, it’s different. Just like a person can look the same as those all around him, but inside, because of his faith in the Lord, he’s very different.’ Peter looked up to assess how this simile was going over. Dozens of Oasans were kneeling in concentric circles around him, waiting solemnly for a rectangle of card to be conveyed towards them. Apart from the colours of their robes and some slight variations in height, they all looked the same. There were no fat ones, no musclebound ones, no lanky lunks, no bent-backed crones. No women, no men. Only rows of compact, standardised beings squatting in the same pose, dressed in garments of identical design. And, inside each of their hoods, a coagulated stew of meat that he could not, could not, simply could not translate into a face.
‘Needle,’ said the creature called Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, shuddering. ‘Row of needle. Row of… knife.’
Peter had no idea what he was talking about. The photograph, which showed nothing more than a drab ex-council house and a flimsy metal fence, was handed on.
‘And this one,’ he said, ‘is our cat, Joshua.’
Jesus Lover One contemplated the photo for fifteen or twenty seconds.