Wonders of a Godless World

Wonders of a Godless World

Andrew McGahan

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

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Praise for Wonders of a Godless World

Also by Andrew McGahan

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

The orphan knew something was up that night, even before the foreigner arrived at the hospital. It was a warm evening, early in the storm season, and she had been feeling strangely restless all day. More notably, the old doctor had stayed on much later than his usual quitting time, sitting quietly in his office, sipping now and then from a bottle, and listening to the radio. He waited in there all through dinner and past sunset, and even until lights-out in the back wards, by which time the orphan and the night nurse were normally the only ones left awake in the place.

The night nurse was annoyed, because most evenings he sat in the office with the radio and the bottle, but now he had to pretend to be working. The orphan wasn’t happy either, because the night nurse, to look busy, was interfering with chores she knew perfectly well how to perform alone. And the inmates in their turn, sensing the irregularity, were making all kinds of trouble for her—climbing out of bed, taking off their pyjamas, wandering the halls and piss-ing in the corners.

Dutifully, the orphan retrieved clothes and dressed bodies and mopped floors, and said no more than she ever said, which was nothing at all. The inmates had plenty to say, of course, but the orphan couldn’t understand them in any case. Between the late hour, the heat and the unusual goings-on, the madness in each of them was bubbling up in their throats, jumbling their words.

Her own madness was alive too. She could feel it beneath her feet, trembling and quivering. It was as if, far below in the earth, a giant machine hummed. The vibrations buzzed against her heels, running right up between her legs, and she couldn’t decide if it felt bad or if she was half on the edge of an orgasm where she stood. But something was about to happen, she was sure. And by chance she was out the front—emptying her mop bucket in the drainage ditch—when the arrival took place.

First, the town’s police car came bumping up the track and parked in the dim pool of light outside the hospital’s front porch. The orphan had to step out of the way, and into the ditch, to let it by. The police captain was behind the wheel; a short, sweaty man, frowning over the dashboard. His presence in itself wasn’t so unusual. The captain was a frequent visitor, if not always so late. But then an old white van drove up and parked behind him, and that wasn’t usual at all. And yet the orphan had seen the van before. She strained her memory. Then she had it. Yes! It was the ambulance. It came from the big hospital, down in the big town. It was used to deliver patients.

A patient! Someone new! Letting the bucket drop, the orphan hurried over to the van’s rear doors and tried to peer in.

Nothing. Darkness through the windows. Then the driver was there, shooing her away angrily. The orphan caught a glimpse of herself through the man’s eyes. He thought she was one of the inmates—a short, stumpy girl with a shaved head and a hairy upper lip and a hospital dress stretched tight over big floppy breasts.

Ha! She was ugly and a madwoman and he was scared of her. She barked out loud, baring her uneven teeth, but then the old doctor appeared, and the police captain, and the night nurse too, and the doctor was explaining to the driver that the orphan wasn’t a patient. As proof, she retrieved her bucket and held it out. But everyone had forgotten her already. The night nurse and the driver opened the rear doors of the van and from the dark interior they heaved forth a stretcher.

A man lay on it, apparently sleeping, covered to the neck by a sheet. His skin was pale, and his face had a raw, scraped look, but there was no other sign as to what might be wrong with him. The night nurse and the driver carried him away inside, but the orphan didn’t follow. She lingered instead by the police car, hoping for clues. The old doctor and the police captain were leaning over the hood, talking, and studying a sheaf of papers the captain had spread there. It was not an easy conversation for the orphan to decipher, full of long words and quick allusions she could never hope to catch. But she had known the doctor most of her life, and the captain too. She was familiar with their voices and their mannerisms and their moods, and that was some help.

She gathered, for instance, that the captain was displeased. It was too hot and he was working late because he had been called down to the big town to collect the new patient. He didn’t like the heat or working late, and he didn’t like the people in the big town. The word he used for them was devils, and they had made him sign a lot of papers and take responsibility for the sleeping man. The captain thought he had enough responsibility as it was. He held out a grimy pen. He wanted the old doctor to sign the papers and then the sleeping man would be the hospital’s problem.

But the old doctor, who was the cleverest person the orphan knew, didn’t take the pen. Instead, he rubbed his chin and asked a very odd question. He wanted to know if the sleeping man had a name yet. At which the captain, odder still, gave him a disappointed look, and then sighed, lowering the pen. No, no one knew the man’s name yet. It was a mystery. The authorities had put his picture in the newspaper down in the big town, and even on television, but no one had claimed him, and it’d been weeks now. The only sure thing was that he wasn’t local to the island.

A stranger, the orphan noted, her brow furrowed with the effort it cost her to take all this in. A foreigner.

The conversation continued. The old doctor suggested that the man might perhaps be a tourist. After all, more and more tourists came to the island every year. And hadn’t he been found asleep on the beach? But the captain shook his head. None of the hotels down in the big town knew anything about the man. Neither did anyone at the airport. And besides, he had been in some kind of fire. His clothes were just ashes when they found him. Burnt to rags. The police in the big town thought that maybe there had been an explosion on a boat out at sea. Perhaps he was a sailor.

The old doctor had another question. Why hadn’t the man woken up, or spoken, in all the time since? Was there a head injury? The captain only shrugged. He didn’t know. The doctors at the big hospital hadn’t told him anything. All they had said was that they couldn’t keep the man any longer. Perhaps if he had turned out to be rich, or someone important, then they would have let him stay. But it looked like he had no friends or family at all. And no money. So here he was.

The old doctor finally nodded, resigned. It wasn’t for him to argue with the big hospital. The captain offered the grimy pen again, but the old doctor, unthinking, took out his own, and scribbled on the papers.

The orphan let out a puff of air and saw spots floating before her eyes. That was that. And yet, did she understand right? The new patient had lost his name? Why, that was almost the same as her! Well, she hadn’t lost her name exactly. But she could never quite remember it either. Or anyone else’s. She knew that everyone had a name, of course—and that other things did too—but try as she might, she could never recall them. They simply refused to lodge in her mind. It was a symptom of her madness, she supposed. Most probably, the foreigner was mad too.

The old doctor was walking back inside, holding the papers, his back bent painfully. He was too thin, the orphan had heard others say. He worked too hard, and was too old. Besides that, she knew, he was ill. The captain, meanwhile, who would never be thin, went to the door of his car. Noticing the orphan there, he winked and asked her a question. She understood him easily this time, because it was the same question people always asked her. He wanted to know if it would rain soon.

The orphan looked up. She didn’t need to look, but people expected it, and were even a little unsettled if she didn’t. The sky was clear, but the stars were muddied by the humid air, and it certainly felt as if water-laden clouds would form soon, and cooling winds begin to blow, and lightning to flicker. It was the storm season, after all. But the orphan knew better. She could tell that the great eddies in the atmosphere were moving too slowly for now. It wouldn’t rain tonight, or the next night.

She shook her head.

The captain sighed once more, and wiped sweat from his face. Then he climbed into his car and drove off—heading, the orphan sensed, not for his little police station in the town square, and not for his home, where his wife and children waited, but instead for the jungle hut where his mistress lived. (The orphan had met both the wife and the mistress, and thought the mistress was nicer.) Shortly afterwards, the ambulance driver emerged and set off on his much longer trip back down to the coast.

Alone, the orphan idled a moment, her bare feet twisting in the sand. She could hear distant noises from the back wards. The inmates would not be settling down any time soon. She stared into the night, restless still, and expectant. Was there something out there in the dark? Not a storm massing, but a subtler thing?

Away below the hospital she could see the scattered lights of the town. They were surrounded by the wide darkness of the plantations. And much further off, in the sky beyond the rim of the plateau, was the glow thrown up by the big town, down upon the sea, where the rich people lived and no one ever slept.

The orphan turned and gazed up, behind the hospital, to the mountain. The jungle on its lower slopes was thick and black and impenetrable, but high above, the peak was a lighter shadow against the stars.

No, there was nothing out of place.

But even as she stared, she felt again the tremble in the dust, felt the thrill run up her bones, making her belly squirm. Oh yes, something was on its way. The orphan smiled her mad smile, then skipped back inside to her chores.

2

Of course, she had not always been an orphan. In fact, she was most likely not an orphan even now. Her mother was dead, but her father was probably still alive, somewhere in the world.

Not that she would ever know. When the orphan was much younger she had overheard a conversation between two pregnant women in the front wards. She had been cleaning nearby, and they had noticed her there and begun to talk about her as if she couldn’t hear them. In particular, they were shaking their heads about all the men the orphan’s mother had been with, and how she had gone down to the big town, where no decent girl would go, and involved herself with criminals. It was no wonder, the pregnant women agreed, that the orphan’s mother had caught a disease. And it was even less wonder that when she gave birth to an ugly little retarded daughter, no man would step forward and claim the child as his own. Why, the father could be anyone.

Young as she had been, the orphan had understood a simple truth—anyone, when it came to fathers, meant the same as no one at all.

She had long since worked out what retarded meant too. Retarded was the same as slow, the same as stupid. Retarded was another term for idiot girl, or for poor dumb child, or for any of the similar things she had heard herself called. Retarded was why she was incapable of speech, and why she had so much trouble understanding the speech of others. It was why she couldn’t read, or write, or do anything they had tried to teach her back in the horrible few years that she had gone to school.

Indeed, throughout her early childhood, as she had no other name to use for herself, words like retarded and slow were the closest she came to an identity. But not long after her seventh birthday (she could remember numbers better than names) her mother had become even sicker than usual, and had been confined to the hospital. The orphan had nowhere else to go and so had stayed at the hospital too, looked after by the nurses. And eventually, after long suffering, her mother had died.

The next day the old doctor had called her into his office. He had explained that she was now a homeless little girl, but that she shouldn’t worry, because everyone was very fond of her, and it had been agreed she could stay on at the hospital. He had said that this was the best she could hope for, because otherwise she was motherless and fatherless and completely alone in the world. She was now, he had announced, an orphan.

An orphan. The gravity of the word had impressed her deeply, and she had accepted it as her true identity, above all others.

Of course, she was only a child at the time. She had grown up since then. The day the foreigner arrived was barely a month after her last birthday; the staff had thrown an especially large party, and declared that she was not a girl anymore, but a woman.

She was, they said, twenty-one years old.

The new patient, meanwhile, was an enigma.

He was admitted to the front wards at first, so that he could be examined in detail. And although the orphan had initially thought of him as the sleeping man, it turned out that often his eyes were open. They were beautiful eyes—wide, the irises a deep brown, the whites unclouded—and yet they were unsettling. There was nothing behind them. No awareness. He might have been a dead thing, lying there.

But he wasn’t dead. His body was warm and alive. His heart beat. His blood flowed. And, to a certain point, he functioned. It did not appear that he could stand, or walk, but if he was propped up in a sitting position, he would not slump over. If liquid was put into his mouth, or soup, or mashed food, he would swallow it. And if, once a day, he was placed in a wheelchair, pushed to the shower block and arranged on a toilet, he would piss and shit on command. Which was a miracle, from the orphan’s perspective. She could only wish that the other patients were all so talented and compliant.

But it was only sleepwalking. There was no consciousness in him. No will. The foreigner never spoke, never looked at anything, never moved of his own volition. Left to himself he would lie motionless on his bed, and seemingly he would do so forever, uncomplaining, until starvation claimed him.

The mystery was, why was he in such a state? The old doctor prodded and probed his new charge, and studied the papers from the hospital in the big town, but found nothing. The man had no infirmities, no diseases, and his only apparent injuries were the burns on his skin. Actually, it was just the one burn, only superficial, and already mostly healed—but it covered his entire body, every crevice, from head to toe. And every single hair had been singed away. He was as naked as a newborn.

What did it mean? How had it happened? The orphan waited, but the old doctor, for all his patience, was unable to solve the riddle, or bring the sleeping man awake. Day after day went by, and he could only shake his head, at first in bafflement, then in frustration, and finally in failure. Of course—the orphan listened to the nurses discussing the situation—if the big hospital with all its experts and machines had failed, what was the old doctor supposed to do, with no money, and no equipment, and so many other patients to care for? Who could expect him to cure the man?

No one. The foreigner hadn’t been sent there to be cured anyway. At length, as was inevitable, he was transferred to the back wards.

The orphan’s home was not in fact the one hospital, but rather two quite separate hospitals in the one compound. There were the front wards, and there were the back wards, and they were very different places.

The front wards, and the hospital offices, were in the forward section of the grounds, housed in a concrete-brick building. This was where the townspeople came if they had everyday medical problems—if, perhaps, they had cut themselves so badly they needed stitches, or if they had broken a bone, or had a cough that wouldn’t go away. It was a free clinic, but it was a long walk from town, uphill along a rutted track through the jungle, so only the common folk made much use of it. Anyone who was well off or important saw their own doctor in town.

The front wards were also where women could come when they were pregnant, to have examinations and, if there were difficulties, to give birth. But it was considered ill-omened by the townspeople to bring a child into the world so close to the demented souls of the back wards, so only the poorest women ever chose to do so. The orphan herself had been born there. A nurse had once told her that it had been a terrible labour, long and bloody and damaging, and the orphan often wondered if perhaps that explained why she was the way she was. Certainly, the pregnant mothers regarded her with suspicion. Sometimes they would hiss curses at her and make signs to drive her away, as if she might spell a similar doom for their own children.

The back wards, on the other hand, weren’t for everyday patients. The back wards were where the dying were kept. And the insane.

The building was hidden behind the front wards, an elongated structure of several wings, with stone walls and high ceilings and narrow windows. It was very old, dating from other times entirely, before the hospital was even a hospital. It had been a grand house once, and grand folk had dwelt there. Or so the orphan was informed. But that was long ago, and she couldn’t imagine it. Now the plaster was flaking away from the walls and the stone was crumbling and the tin roof was red with rust. Inside, it was a grim maze of long wards and metal doors and echoing hallways.

Many people were frightened of the building alone, never mind the inmates. But the orphan wasn’t frightened, no matter how gloomy the wards might be, and no matter how the inmates might scream or yell, no matter even how tangled their hair or bad their breath or shitty their sheets. It was only smell and noise, after all. The building was just a building, and most of the patients were harmless. (The ones who weren’t were kept in the locked ward, where she wasn’t allowed to go.)

She was even happy to work in the back wards at night. The night nurse—coward that he was—was almost too scared to enter there after dark, but the orphan actually preferred it. It was cooler and quieter then, and she was less in people’s way. Most evenings—seeing that the night nurse, apart from being cowardly, was also purely lazy—the orphan was the only soul the inmates might see after lights-out. They liked her for that, and she liked them.

She was less comfortable in the front wards. It wasn’t just the unfriendly looks she received from the townspeople—worse than that, the front wards were the territory of the surgeon, and she didn’t like the surgeon. He was the hospital’s only other doctor, much younger than the old doctor, and all the nurses thought he was very good-looking. But the orphan knew that he cut people open with knives, and whenever he glanced at her, his eyes unsmiling, she felt a little afraid.

To begin with, they put the foreigner in the catatonic ward.

The orphan did not quite understand the word, but to her, these patients were the empty people, the ones with nobody inside them. And of all the back wards inmates, they certainly resembled the foreigner most closely. One, for instance, was a woman who did nothing but sit and brush her hair for hours at a time, staring, even though she had long since brushed herself bald. Another was a boy who rocked back and forth ceaselessly on his bed, his arms clasped around his knees. Others simply slept all day, or gazed blindly at the ceiling, almost exactly as the foreigner himself did. None of them, beyond the occasional incoherent mutter or cry, ever spoke.

But things changed after the foreigner moved in.

Over the following days, the woman with the brush began to rake her skull so severely that blood was drawn. The boy’s rocking gradually became so violent he repeatedly threw himself to the floor. And the others started to moan and shout hoarsely from the depths of their sleep. The nurses were alarmed. What was happening? It was only when they noticed that things quietened down abruptly if the foreigner was removed—when he was taken to the shower, say—that they came to wonder if he might be the cause. True, he hadn’t moved or spoken in all that time, or done anything blameworthy. But there was something strange about him, they all agreed. Those beautiful eyes…

The old doctor scoffed at the idea. He told the nurses that most likely the other catatonics didn’t even know the foreigner was there. But if they really wanted to move him somewhere else, then he wouldn’t stop them.

This time they put him in with the geriatrics.

It was another ward that was usually sleepy and subdued, for only the very old ended up there. Many of the inmates weren’t even all that mad, they were just too infirm to survive on their own, and had no one else to look after them. Others, however, had retreated into deep senility. They drooled, they leered, they smiled and laughed, and sometimes they yelled and cried, but mostly—thanks to the pills they were given morning and night—they dozed in silence. The foreigner, admittedly, was too young to belong there. Although exactly how old he was, no one knew. With his smooth, burnt skin, he didn’t look any particular age. Not young. But not old either.

In any event, he had a peculiar effect on the geriatrics. One old man complained that he was not getting any sleep because the foreigner was climbing out of bed and dancing all night. Other patients concurred. But the orphan knew it wasn’t so. She checked the ward regularly on her evening rounds, and the foreigner never moved. His bedclothes were never even ruffled. Then one morning an old woman, a vague, timid creature who had never made any sort of fuss, was discovered completely naked upon the foreigner’s bed, legs astride his hips, shuddering back and forth in delight. When she was dragged away, she insisted that he had lured her there and possessed her with his eyes and that she would love him till she died. But even while she was on top of him, the man had remained as limp and unconscious as ever.

That was enough for the nurses. Clearly the foreigner was a devil (that word again) of some kind. They wanted him shifted once more. The old doctor was doubtful. It didn’t matter what the old people claimed, he said. They were mad, they imagined things. But the nurses insisted. Of course, they weren’t educated people like the old doctor. They were just working women from the town, full of strange stories and superstitions. But the hospital couldn’t run without them, and so somewhere had to be found to keep the foreigner quietly out of their way.