‘Oh dear,’ sighed Peter. ‘I’m… uh… out of my depth here.’
There was a pause, during which Frank Sinatra launched into a ditty about a little old ant and a rubber tree plant. ‘It’s OK,’ said the woman, indulgently. ‘It’s OK. Not everyone likes the same things. It’s allowed.’
He remembered her name now: Iris. Iris Berns. She came from a Pentecostal family and was an atheist. She liked to play card games, she once had a sister who drowned in a back-yard swimming pool, she had a running joke with BG about centrifugal force, and she was heterosexual despite her butch appearance. None of these bits of information quite fitted into any sensible remark Peter could think of making at this point. Even calling her Iris might come across as an attempt to show off something he’d recalled too late, and anyway, she might want him to call her Berns like everybody else.
Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn’t people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?
‘Give him a break,’ said Tuska. ‘He’s just come back from a long spell in Freaktown.’
‘Yeah?’ said Berns, plonking down her dessert and taking a seat at the table. ‘You should take some suntan lotion next time.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said Peter. He was aware that he was more red-faced than he needed to be, because he’d foolishly worn a sweater over his T-shirt. It had seemed a good idea at the time: a signal that he was a regular urban guy, not some freaky desert-dweller.
‘I’m surprised you got so much sun,’ said Berns, stirring a dollop of dark red syrup through the yoghurt-like substance in her bowl until the white turned pink. ‘They’re not exactly outdoors types, are they?’
Peter pulled the neck of his sweater down, to let air in. ‘They work outside almost every day,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Growing and harvesting food for us.’
Berns ate a few spoonfuls of dessert. ‘You know, I’ve driven all the way round that settlement, and I never saw a plantation, greenhouses, nothing.’
‘That’s because they’re right in the centre.’
‘The centre?’
‘Of the settlement.’ Peter took a deep breath. His forehead stung with perspiration. ‘Haven’t we been through this already?’
‘Must’ve been with a different woman, honey.’
‘Don’t call him honey,’ said Tuska. ‘He’s a preacher.’
‘The fields are inside the settlement,’ Peter explained. ‘The buildings are built in a circle around them.’
‘It figures,’ said Berns.
‘Figures? Why?’
‘They’re real secretive.’
Peter wiped his brow with his sleeve. ‘It’s not because… ’ His voice was too soft. A flotilla of children had come along to assist Sinatra on the chorus of ‘High Hopes’. Peter’s motivation to explain the Oasans’ relationship with agriculture faltered under their assault.
Berns stood up and called across the room: ‘Hey, Stanko! Can we have something instrumental? Our pastor here is having difficulty!’
‘No, really,’ protested Peter, as the eyes of everyone in the mess hall turned on him. ‘You shouldn’t… ’ But he was relieved when the voices of Frank and the school choir disappeared in mid-syllable and were replaced by the tinkling of a piano and some languorously shaken maracas.
Berns sat back down and polished off her dessert. Tuska ate the rest of his Bolognese. Peter had consumed only a few mouthfuls of his pancake but felt stuffed. He leaned back in his chair, and the amiable conversation of several dozen people rustled past his ears, a gentle hubbub of engineering jargon, small talk about food, polite disagreements about solving practical challenges, and the Jabberwocky mishmash of half-heard words and phrases, all interwoven with a Brazilian samba.
‘What music do you like, Peter?’ said Berns.
‘Uh… ’ His mind went blank. The names he might usually have rattled off were gone. ‘To be honest,’ he said, after taking a deep breath, ‘I’m not that keen on recorded music. I like music best when it’s performed live and I’m actually there when it’s happening. That way, it’s less like being expected to admire a thing, and more a celebration of the moment, of people doing something together in public. Something that could go horribly wrong, but through a combination of talent and trust and enthusiasm, it comes out sublime.’
‘Well, you should join our Glee Club,’ said Berns.
‘Glee club?’
‘Our singing group. A bunch of us meet up every hundred and eighty hours and sing together. It’s real informal. You’d love it. You a tenor?’
‘I… I think so.’
‘BG is the bassiest bass you ever heard. You gotta hear him in action.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘We don’t do any Sinatra.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
‘Well, I hope it is.’ Her tone was sincere. He realised all of a sudden that she was trying to prevent him drifting away from the bosom of their community, to stop him going native.
‘How big is the group?’ he asked.
‘Depends on our workload. Never less than six. Sometimes up to ten. Anyone’s welcome, Peter. It’s good for the soul. If you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Does Tuska sing with you?’
Tuska guffawed. ‘No chance. Voice like an extractor fan. A malfunctioning extractor fan.’
‘Every person can sing,’ insisted Berns. ‘It just takes practice. And confidence.’
‘Oh, I got loads of confidence,’ said Tuska. ‘And a voice like an extractor fan.’
Berns looked at him pityingly. ‘You got sauce on your beard, honey.’
‘Holy shit — pardon my French.’ Tuska patted at his facial growth with his fingers. ‘That does it: this beard has got to go.’
‘Clean-shaven suits you, Tuska,’ said Berns, wiping her lips with a table napkin. (A linen napkin: USIC didn’t go in for disposable paper.) Then, to Peter: ‘Your beard looked OK, though. I saw you when Grainger brought you back in. Kinda stylish.’
‘Thank you, but… I just didn’t have an opportunity to shave while I was away. I use an electric razor, you see, and there wasn’t… uh… ’ What garbage I’m talking, he thought. Is this the best we can come up with?
‘So, ‘said Berns, ‘conditions in C-2 really are as primitive as they say?’
‘Who says they’re primitive?’
‘Everybody who’s been there.’
‘Who’s been there?’
‘Grainger… ’
‘Grainger doesn’t venture further in than the perimeter.’ Even as he spoke the words, he was alarmed at his inability to keep the judgemental overtone out of his voice. ‘I don’t think she’s ever set foot inside an Oasan’s house.’
Berns raised an eyebrow at the word ‘Oasan’, but she caught on instantly. ‘So what is it like? How do they live?’
‘Well, their living spaces are kind of… minimalist. I wouldn’t use the word primitive. I think that’s how they prefer it.’
‘So no electricity.’
‘They don’t need it.’
‘What do they do all day?’
It took all his focus to hide from Berns how exasperated this question made him. ‘Work. Sleep. Eat. Talk to each other. Same as us.’
‘What do they talk to each other about?’
He opened his mouth to reply, but found that the part of his brain where he went to fetch the answers was filled with incomprehensible babble, abstract whispers in a foreign language. How strange! When he was with the Oasans and overheard them conversing, he was so used to the sound of their voices, and so familiar with their body language, that he almost thought he understood what they were saying.