The Miracle Inspector (15 page)

‘Mate?’ There was an awful sour smell. Lucas couldn’t think what it was, where he was. Then he remembered and he waited a moment or two before opening his eyes. He had soiled himself, or Rolf had. He didn’t want to see it or engage with it or help clear it up.

‘Mate? Come on. Please.’ Rolf’s voice, wheedling. A hand on his arm. He opened his eyes, saw that the stink came from a bowl of brown liquid next to his bed, a modest-sized turd floating in it.

Lucas knew all about the symptoms of distress shown by caged animals in zoos – standing and rocking or nodding their heads repeatedly, and eating their own faeces. Jesmond used to go on and on about it before freeing as many of them as he could from London Zoo in Regent’s Park and going on the run. So when Rolf dipped a spoon into the bowl of filth and brought it to his lips, Lucas wasn’t as shocked as another man might have been. He took hold of Rolf’s arm very gently and said, ‘No.’

‘You got to have nourishment,’ said Rolf. ‘It’s all there is.’

Then Lucas saw that the brown liquid was a soup of some kind. The fibrous, fatty chunk floating in it was not a turd but had once been alive, though whether animal or vegetable he still wasn’t sure. Life in prison was almost comically unpleasant, a child’s version of what a prison should be, unbendingly awful and without comfort or humanity of any kind. It was an environment created by people without imagination or wit. The big question was, why?

‘Think you might have found a miracle and not known it?’ Rolf asked.

‘You’re joking. People called up, hoping it would lead to something, that I’d pull some strings, that I’d write them a note to see a doctor, or ask someone to pop by and sort out their garden, or their cooker or their drains. It never happened but they never stopped hoping. Got depressing, after a while, especially when you realise they’d be glad of a visit from just about any Ministry department inspecting just about anything: cats, rapists, miracles, whatever.’

‘Something happened that’s got you in here, bro.’

There had been a number of cats touted by their owners as having a special skill. His favourite among these had been the clairvoyant tabby cross. There had been wise, clever, talented children, many of whom had been able to play the piano to a high standard at an early age. He had sat through a lot of recitals. He had inspected spiders and dandelion heads mistaken for angels, feathers and gnats mistaken for fairies, and religious iconography that had spontaneously appeared in baked goods all over London. He had declared none of them a miracle.

‘Must have been nice to spend time with the kids? One of the few men allowed within five feet of a child without his wife having given birth to it. And even then…’

‘You’ve got to have precautions. You don’t want to end up like the French or the Spanish – strangers hugging and kissing babies, grandparents allowed to help care for the kids.’

‘That’s a myth,’ Rolf said.

Even if Rolf had relatives in one of those countries, it was near impossible that he’d been in touch with any of them at any time in the last twenty years to verify what life was like there. Still, Lucas was conciliatory. ‘They don’t touch kids, you mean?’

‘Playing with kids doesn’t make you a paedophile, is what I mean.’

A clue as to what Rolf was in there for? Perhaps it was as well to stick with an analysis of why Lucas might have been taken. Where were they?

Rolf said, ‘You were talking about miracles.’

Poltergeists and ghosts were popular, particularly in north London. Ethereal singing was heard more often in South London than in any other quarter. People made urgent, desperate phone calls to his office: a spirit had a message it wished to convey to ‘the cynics’; it could help, it could heal, it had foretold the end of the world or the beginning of a new era. It could lead the authorities to where the body of the last Queen of England lay. But Lucas never heard anything more remarkable than bird song when he visited these hauntings, leaving him no choice but to report, as ever, that a miracle had not been found.

He had also been asked to inspect several inventions. Ordinary people had very little access to information so they couldn’t readily discover whether the ‘miraculous’ labour-saving devices they came up with had already been invented. Some of the inventions were daft and some showed ingenuity. Many of the inventors had been motivated by an altruism that had given Lucas a quiet hope for the future. In every case, he had followed the correct procedure and passed details of the reported invention to the person at the Ministry who was responsible for inspecting them.

When he was first appointed to the role of miracle inspector, he had assumed that there would be weeks or months on end without news of a miracle. But he was called out almost daily. Some of the people who contacted him were in earnest, some mischievous, some pathetic. The worst of them were his ‘regulars’, who would contact him time and again, as if sooner or later he must give in and start handing out prizes for effort.

‘The last visit, mate? Might be something in that.’

The last visit he’d made had been to Christina; very thin and frail, she had looked about five years old. Perhaps she was older. It hardly mattered: in the reporting of miracles, appearances trumped facts, always.

‘Any chance she was the real deal?’

‘No. Sweet kid but she couldn’t talk. She just lay there. I couldn’t see her saving a life or… You know. My wife liked her.’

‘You let your wife out of the house?’

‘No one knew. She wanted to go and sing to the child. We couldn’t… We didn’t have one of our own. It was only once. No one saw us.’

Rolf shook his head, weary and wise. But thinking about his job had been restorative for Lucas. It had connected him to his old self, the inspector, the man from the Ministry. It was the next best thing to clothing him in a suit and sending him back out into the world.

He felt he had got a hold of himself. Then he was called in for interrogation again.

‘Lucas?’ Someone was whispering, shaking him. ‘Lucas, Lucas?’ A man’s voice, hissing. He was surprised that he had never noticed the sibilant snake sound that could be made by drawing out the s at the end of his name. It was the wheedling, hissy sound the serpent must have made in paradise.

He was not in paradise. He opened his eyes and looked. He was astonished to see Jesmond standing there, looking very dishevelled. As he looked, he thought he had found an explanation for the hissing sound because it seemed that a dozen snakes had wound themselves around Jesmond and were crawling about his midriff, so many of them that they were having trouble clinging to him and were spilling out of his shirt. Then he saw that the snakes were not snakes but Jesmond’s guts. He had been partially disembowelled, the tubes of his innards falling out of his shirt.

As if embarrassed at presenting himself so poorly, Jesmond tried to tuck himself in. He put his shoulders back, stood a little straighter, wiped a hand over his hair and down the length of his curls, to his collar. He shouldn’t have done that. Now he had blood on his hair. It might have some nutritional value (didn’t people put beer on their hair, blood and bones on their gardens?) but it would dry stiffly, and Jesmond would be sorry about that.

Lucas would have liked to say something, to tip him off about the blood on his hair, but washing facilities were limited so Jesmond couldn’t very well rectify it if he wanted to. And anyway, he had closed his eyes and started to croon. He swayed slightly on his feet. The moonlight fell from the window of Lucas’s cell onto the white shirt Jesmond was wearing. With the help of the romantic lighting conditions, Lucas now saw how the curls of Jesmond’s intestines complemented the curls of his grey hair, as if it had been his intention all along to co-ordinate his appearance by slitting open his belly and teasing out the tubes and arranging them there, fluffing and fussing until he had transformed his appearance, avoiding a potentially unmodish ‘unspooled cassette tape’ style by going for the much smarter ‘gift-wrapped’ look. Lucas had seen women (well, Angela) draw the sharp blade of a pair of scissors along the length of a piece of gift-wrapping ribbon to make it curl. The effect that Jesmond had achieved with his intestines was not dissimilar, but it was certainly more masculine. A man might look butch and brave in a skirt, if he calls it a kilt and knows how to wear it. And that was what Jesmond had done with the potentially frivolous gift-wrap effect of his intestines. He’d made it look butch. He was to be commended.

For a moment, Lucas felt intensely happy. Then he felt desolate. Then it didn’t matter what he felt because Jesmond tried to take over his mood and steer it somewhere else by singing to him.

‘You know I’ve loved you all your life?’
sang Jesmond.
‘Hmmm, yeah.’

‘Yeah, I know,’
sang Lucas (somewhat to his own surprise
). ‘You’re my godfather, right? I guess I knew you’d show up here one night.’

‘The disembowelment doesn’t bother you? I didn’t give you a fright?’

‘It’s not too bad – it looks quite nice, the way your intestines glisten in the moonlight, mmm.’

‘Mmmmm, right. There’s something else you need to know, hmmm.’

‘Is it Angela? Is she alright? Hmmm. Can you tell me, can you tell me, can you tell me, yeah?’

‘Lucas, I don’t know, woah, oh. I guess she’s on her way to Cornwall but I didn’t see her go. No. Mmmm. Yeah.’

‘Oh? O-oh. Hmmm. What did you come to tell me then, is it something bad?’

‘No, Lucas, no. Oh-o. I’ve come to let you know… that I’m your Dad.’

‘Chri-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-st. Woah-oh. Wooo-oo-ooh.’

‘I thought you might have guessed?’

‘That you’d slept with my mum? No. I never knew-ooh-oh. I never knew, hmm.’

‘Son, you know I always loved you? I loved your mum, too.’

‘Jesmond, I don’t care. Get out of here. And, Jesmond?

‘Yes?’

‘I lied about your intestines; they look a mess.’

And then as he watched, Jesmond seemed to fade away, ‘mmmming’ and ‘oh yeah-ing’ as he went. Finally, there was no trace of him except a low rumbling sound.

Lucas tried to think of something else, something nicer. He thought about Angela, on her way to Cornwall; to safety.

As soon as they slipped through the fence into Slough, they were picked up by border guards who gave them two choices – claim asylum or face deportation back to London. There was no ‘just passing through’ option. They claimed asylum and were handed over to a woman named Fenella at the Refugee Centre.

‘You must be hungry,’ said Fenella. ‘Let’s get something to eat. Is Tina hungry?’

‘Christina.’

‘Are you hungry, dear? What does she like to eat, Maureen? We’ve no jellied eels, I’m afraid, though there’s a lovely little Cockney Shop across the other side of town. I must take you to it one day. The pie and mash is lovely. That green stuff, what’s it called?’

In Slough, Maureen and Angela looked out of place. Maureen was wearing a shirt-waisted dress and Angela was wearing a pair of trousers and a shirt that belonged to Maureen. Their clothes were not awful but when the women of Slough swished by, insouciant and stylish in flattering clothes, the patterns and fabrics they wore referenced each other as if they were part of some fabulous exhibition that had been curated by a
professor
of fashion. Any half a dozen Slough women, taken at random from the streets and arranged on white boxes in a white room, would have looked as if they belonged together, some part of a greater whole. Maureen and Angela did not. They did not fit in. They stood there, Christina between them, their luggage in their outer hands, Christina’s hands in the hands that hung between them, and they worried about what was going to happen next.

‘Fugees,’ two teenagers said, sneering as they went past.

Angela didn’t know how they knew. She and Maureen weren’t wearing their covers. They were trying to blend in.

‘Take no notice. Come on, we’ll go to my house.’

Maureen said, ‘You’re sure it’s no trouble, Fenella? We weren’t expecting anything like this.’

‘It’s no trouble at all. It’s good for my kids to see how the other half lives.’

Angela thought about Jesmond. She wondered how he would write about such a place in one of his letters. Then she wondered how she would describe the place to Lucas, if she ever got the chance. He’d always known more about everything than she had, travelled further and met more people. Now she was the explorer. It was a renegotiation of the terms of their relationship.

Over dinner, Fenella introduced them to Tom, her husband.

‘He’s a playwright,’ she said. She left a pause after she’d said it, as if she was expecting them to applaud.

‘Verbatim theatre,’ Tom said, with a self-deprecating smile, as if they might know what that conjunction of words meant, and therefore would understand that it was something so important and clever that he was embarrassed to mention it because it seemed boastful. But neither Angela nor Maureen had ever been to the theatre. Theatre was banned in London because it was thought to be inflammatory.

‘Your husband?’ Tom said to Angela. ‘He spoke out against the regime, did he?’

‘There’s not usually a reason why. They just get taken.’

‘But he was an artist of some sort? A poet?’

‘He was a miracle inspector,’ Angela said.

‘Oh,’ said Fenella.

‘He believed in miracles?’ asked Tom.

‘Tom,’ said Fenella. He was too far away to be kicked under the table so she tried to do it with her smile, which was very bright and as curved and stiff as the hook on a coat hanger. If she’d been able to peel it off her face, she could have poked him with it.

Angela saw what Tom wanted. ‘Actually, he did speak out. It was heroic, what he did.’

Tom raised his glass to Angela and nodded. ‘I’m working on something called
Testimony of a Widow,
’
he said
. ‘
Perhaps we could talk about your situation, later.’

‘I’m hoping Lucas is still alive,’ Angela said.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Fenella. ‘Tom, you could do a piece called
The Miracle Inspector
– that’s a nice title.’

‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘It is.’

‘Won’t you eat your meal?’ asked Fenella.

‘Sorry,’ said Angela. ‘We’re not used to meat.’

‘There are people in Slough who’d be glad of what you’ve left on your plates,’ said Fenella.

‘Leave them alone,’ said Tom. ‘It’s only the wealthy who can afford the bribes to get out of London. I don’t expect they’re used to our gristly fare.’

Maureen smiled politely, making no effort to finish the food. But Angela felt guilty. She tried to feed herself and Christina. Christina began to choke on a piece of food. Maureen jumped up and banged Christina on the back. Angela couldn’t help it. She began to cry.