Excerpt
The Book of Strange New Things
1Forty minutes later he was up in the sky.“I was going to say something,” he said.
“So say it,” she said.
He was quiet, keeping his eyes on the road. In the darkness of the city’s outskirts, there was nothing to see except the tail-lights of other cars in the distance, the endless unfurling roll of tarmac, the giant utilitarian fixtures of the motorway.
“God may be disappointed in me for even thinking it,” he said.
“Well,” she sighed, “He knows already, so you may as well tell me.”
He glanced at her face, to judge what mood she was in as she said this, but the top half of her head, including her eyes, was veiled in a shadow cast by the edge of the windscreen. The bottom half of her face was lunar bright. The sight of her cheek, lips and chin--so intimately familiar to him, so much a part of life as he had known it--made him feel a sharp grief at the thought of losing her.
“The world looks nicer with man-made lights,” he said.
They drove on in silence. Neither of them could abide the chatter of radio or the intrusion of pre-recorded music. It was one of the many ways they were compatible.
“Is that it?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “What I mean is . . . Unspoiled nature is supposed to be the ultimate in perfection, isn’t it, and all the man-made stuff is supposed to be a shame, just cluttering it up. But we wouldn’t enjoy the world half as much if we--man . . . that is, human beings . . .”
(She gave him one of her get-on-with-it grunts.)
“ . . . if we hadn’t put electric lights all over it. Electric lights are actually attractive. They make a night drive like this bearable. Beautiful, even. I mean, just imagine if we had to do this drive in total darkness. Because that’s what the natural state of the world is, at night, isn’t it? Total darkness. Just imagine. You’d have the stress of not having a clue where you were going, not being able to see more than a few meters in front of you. And if you were heading for a city--well, in a non-technological world there wouldn’t be cities, I suppose--but if you were heading for a place where other people lived, living there naturally, maybe with a few campfires . . . You wouldn’t see them until you actually arrived. There wouldn’t be that magical vista when you’re a few miles away from a city, and all the lights are twinkling, like stars on the hillside.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And even inside this car, assuming you could have a car, or some sort of vehicle, in this natural world, pulled by horses I suppose . . . It would be pitch black. And very cold, too, on a winter’s night. But instead, look what we’ve got here.” He took one hand off the steering wheel (he always drove with both hands laid symmetrically on the wheel) and indicated the dashboard. The usual little lights glowed back at them. Temperature. Time. Water level. Oil. Speed. Fuel consumption.
“Peter . . .”
“Oh, look!” Several hundred meters up ahead, a tiny overburdened figure, standing in a puddle of lamplight. “A hitchhiker. I’ll stop, shall I?”
“No, don’t.”
The tone of her voice made him think better of challenging her, even though they seldom missed an opportunity to show kindness to strangers.
The hitchhiker raised his head in hope. As the headlights enveloped him, his body was--just for an instant--transformed from a vaguely humanoid shape into a recognizably individual person. He was holding a sign that said HETHROW.
“How strange,” said Peter, as they zoomed past. “You’d think he’d just take the Tube.”
“Last day in the UK,” said Beatrice. “Last chance to have a good time. He probably used up his British money in a pub, thinking he’d keep just enough for the train. Six drinks later he’s out in the fresh air, sobering up, and all he’s got left is his plane ticket and £1.70.”
It sounded plausible. But if it was true, then why leave this lost sheep in the lurch? It wasn’t like Bea to leave anybody stranded.
He turned toward her darkened face again, and was alarmed to see teardrops twinkling on her jaw and in the corners of her mouth.
“Peter . . .” she said.
He took one hand off the steering wheel again, this time to squeeze her shoulder. Suspended over the highway up ahead was a sign with a symbol of an aeroplane on it.
“Peter, this is our last chance.”
“Last chance?”
“To make love.”
The indicator lights flashed gently and went tick, tick, tick, as he eased the car into the airport lane. The words “make love” bumbled against his brain, trying to get in, even though there was no room in there. He almost said, “You’re joking.” But, even though she had a fine sense of humor and loved to laugh, she never joked about things that mattered.
As he drove on, the sense that they were not on the same page--that they needed different things at this crucial time--entered the car like a discomfiting presence. He’d thought--he’d felt--that yesterday morning had been their proper leavetaking, and that this trip to the airport was just . . . a postscript, almost. Yesterday morning had been so right. They’d finally worked their way to the bottom of their “To-Do” list. His bag was already packed. Bea had the day off work, they’d slept like logs, they’d woken up to brilliant sunshine warming the yellow duvet of their bed. Joshua the cat had been lying in a comical pose at their feet; they’d nudged him off and made love, without speaking, slowly and with great tenderness. Afterward, Joshua had jumped back on the bed and tentatively laid one forepaw on Peter’s naked shin, as if to say, Don’t go; I will hold you here. It was a poignant moment, expressing the situation better than language could have, or perhaps it was just that the exotic cuteness of the cat put a protective furry layer over the raw human pain, making it endurable. Whatever. It was perfection. They’d lain there listening to Joshua’s throaty purr, enfolded in each other’s arms, their sweat evaporating in the sun, their heart-rates gradually reverting to normal.
“One more time,” she said to him now, above the engine noise on a dark motorway on the way to the plane that would take him to America and beyond.
He consulted the digital clock on the dashboard. He was supposed to be at the check-in counter in two hours; they were about fifteen minutes from the airport.
“You’re wonderful,” he said. Perhaps if he pronounced the words in exactly the right way, she might get the message that they shouldn’t try to improve on yesterday, that they should just leave it at that.
“I don’t want to be wonderful,” she said. “I want you inside me.”
He drove for a few seconds in silence, adjusting quickly to the circumstances. Prompt adjustment to changed circumstances was another thing they had in common.
“There are lots of those horrible corporate hotels right near the airport,” he said. “We could rent a room just for an hour.” He regretted the “horrible” bit; it sounded as though he was trying to dissuade her while pretending not to. He only meant that the hotels were the sort they both avoided if they possibly could.
“Just find a quiet lay-by,” she said. “We can do it in the car.”
“Crisis!” he said, and they both laughed. Crisis was the word he’d trained himself to say instead of Christ, when he’d first become a Christian. The two words were close enough in sound for him to be able to defuse a blasphemy when it was already half out of his mouth.
“I mean it,” she said. “Anywhere will do. Just don’t park in a place where another car’s likely to run into the back of us.”
The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one’s attitude.
Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be. The challenge of getting people to see that the immutable facts of existence were not so immutable after all. The challenge of finding a simpler word for immutable than immutable.
“How about here?”
Beatrice didn’t answer, only put her hand on his thigh. He steered the car smoothly into a truckstop. They would have to trust that getting squashed flat by a 44-ton lorry was not in God’s plan.
“I’ve never done this before,” he said, when he’d switched the ignition off.
