8

      Take a deep breath and count to a million

      Everything looked different in daylight. The USIC mess hall, which had seemed so lonesome and eerie during the long hours of darkness, was a hive of cheerful activity now. A happy congregation. The glass wall on the eastern side of the building, although tinted, let in so much light and warmth that Peter had to shield his face from it. A glow was cast over the entire room, transforming coffee machines into jewelled sculptures, aluminium chairs into precious metal, magazine racks into ziggurats, bald heads into lamps. Thirty or forty people were gathered together, eating, chatting, fetching refills from the coffee bar, lolling around in the armchairs, gesticulating over the tables, raising their voices to compete with the raised voices of the others. Most were dressed in white, just like Peter, although sans the big inky crucifix on the chest. There were quite a few black faces, including BG’s. BG didn’t look up when Peter arrived; he was involved in an animated discussion with a rather butch-looking white woman. There was no sign of Grainger.

      Peter stepped into the throng. Piped music was still issuing from the PA system but it was barely audible above the clamour of conversation; Peter couldn’t tell whether it was the same Patsy Cline documentary or an electronic disco song or a piece of classical music. Just another voice in the hubbub.

      ‘Hey, preacher!’

      It was the black man who’d tossed him the blueberry muffin. He was seated at the same table as last night, but with a different pal, a fat white guy. In fact, both of them were fat: exactly the same weight, and with similar features. Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.

      ‘Hi there,’ said Peter, pulling up a seat and joining them. They each glanced at his chest to check out the ink-stained design there, but, having satisfied themselves that it was a crucifix rather than something they might wish to comment on, pulled their heads back again.

      ‘How’s things, man?’ The black guy extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.

      ‘Very good,’ said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

      ‘You got yourself fed yet?’ The black man had just polished off a plate of something brown and saucy. He nursed a jumbo plastic mug of coffee. His friend nodded a greeting to Peter, and unwrapped a soggy napkin from around a large sandwich.

      ‘No, I’m still functioning on half a muffin,’ said Peter, blinking dazedly in the light. ‘Actually, that’s not quite true: I’ve had some raisin bread since then.’

      ‘Lay off that raisin bread, man. It’s NRC.’

      ‘NRC?’ Peter consulted his mental database of acronyms. ‘Not recommended for children?’

      ‘Not Real Coke.’

      ‘I don’t follow you.’

      ‘It’s our cute way of saying that it was made here, not back home. Probably contains monocycloparaffins or cyclohexyldodecanoic acid or some shit like that.’ The black man was half-smiling, but his eyes were serious. The polysyllabic chemical terms had rolled off his tongue with the ease of obscenities. Again, Peter was reminded that each and every member of this personnel must possess skills that amply justified the cost of his or her passage to Oasis. Every member except him.

      The black man took a loud slurp of coffee.

      Peter asked: ‘Do you never eat anything that’s been made here?’

      ‘My body is my temple, preacher, and you gotta keep it holy. The Bible says that.’

      ‘The Bible says a lot of things, Mooney,’ his pal remarked, and took a big bite out of his sandwich, which dripped grey sauce. Peter glanced across the room at BG. The butch-looking white woman was laughing, almost doubled up. She had one hand on BG’s knee, for balance. The piped music poked through a gap in the noise, revealing the chorus of a Broadway song from the mid-twentieth century, the sort of stuff Peter had always associated with provincial charity shops or the record collections of lonely old men.

      ‘How’s your sandwich?’ he enquired. ‘Looks pretty good.’

      ‘Mmf,’ nodded the fat white guy. ‘It is good.’

      ‘What’s in it?’

      ‘Whiteflower.’

      ‘Apart from the bread . . . ’

      ‘Whiteflower, preacher. Not white flour. Whiteflower. Roast whiteflower.’

      Mooney came to the rescue. ‘My friend Roussos is talking about a flower.’ He made an elegant hand-gesture, unfurling his plump fingers in imitation of an opening blossom. ‘A flower that grows here. Just about the only thing that grows here . . . ’

      ‘Tastes like the best pastrami you ever had in your life,’ said Roussos.

      ‘It’s very adaptable,’ Mooney conceded. ‘Depending on the flavours you put in, it can be made to taste like just about any damn thing. Chicken. Fudge. Beefsteak. Banana. Sweetcorn. Mushroom. Add water and it’s soup. Boil it down and it’s jelly. Grind and bake it and it’s bread. The universal food.’

      ‘You’re doing a very good job of selling it,’ said Peter, ‘for someone who refuses to eat it.’

      ‘Sure he eats it,’ said Roussos. ‘He loves the banana fritters!’

      ‘They’re OK,’ sniffed Mooney. ‘I don’t make a habit of it. Mainly I insist on the real deal.’

      ‘But isn’t it expensive,’ asked Peter, ‘if you only eat and drink . . . uh . . . imported stuff?’

      ‘You bet, preacher. At the rate I’m drinking real Coke, I estimate I owe USIC maybe in the region of . . . fifty thousand bucks.’

      ‘Easy,’ confirmed Roussos. ‘That, and the Twinkies.’

      ‘Hell yeah! The prices these sharks charge for a Twinkie! Or a Hershey bar. I tell ya, if I wasn’t the easy-going type . . . ’

      Mooney slid his empty plate towards Peter.

      ‘If I hadn’t eaten it all, I could show ya something else,’ he said. ‘Vanilla ice-cream and chocolate sauce. The vanilla essence and the chocolate is imported, the sauce has maybe some whiteflower in it, but the ice cream . . . the ice cream is pure entomophagy, know