The Miracle Inspector (18 page)

Their rescuer shouted over the sound of the horse’s hooves to say her name was Ruth and the horse was called Celeste. Maureen sat at the front on an uncomfortably narrow seat covered in hessian, her knees squeezed tightly together because there was not much room; Ruth had her thighs splayed open very wide, like an anxious would-be father trying to cool his testicles.

Angela and Christina shuddered and juddered in the cart behind them, giggling like innocent heroines in a Thomas Hardy novel just before the bad things start to happen to them.

‘You might want to eat that cream slice or throw it away,’ said Maureen, turning round.

‘It’s custard,’ Angela said.

She handed it to Christina, who ate it, then licked her hand, then licked Angela’s hand. Maureen handed out the wet wipes. Angela smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Christina while they cleaned up.

Ruth brought them to her home, which was a commune. It was a place, she explained, where women could live together in harmony, ecologically, with respect for their surroundings (although the ‘cock-sucker’ villagers were presumably exempt from that respect) and a love for nature. The life, said Ruth, was tough but rewarding. She hoped Angela and Maureen would consider joining them.

‘It would be nice to rest for a while,’ said Maureen. ‘After that, we’ve got to press on.’

‘We’re just passing through,’ said Angela.

Ruth showed them round what was essentially an encampment of about two dozen sturdy-looking olive green army tents pitched in a ring, and a few tumbledown stone buildings. The place smelled of bonfires, as did the women living there. Their unfortunate existence seemed to involve sitting on the floor and stirring big iron pots of bean stew over an open fire.

Maureen looked in her handbag. ‘Thanks so much for helping us out,’ she said to Ruth. ‘I wish we had something to give you. A little token.’ She sifted through the treasures she kept in there – wet wipes, antiseptic hand wash, some satsumas, several packets of raisins. Angela remembered the loaf of bread in her bag and brought that out. But Ruth looked disdainful and glanced over to where women were baking gritty flat bread on hot stones.

‘Actually, there is something,’ said Ruth. ‘That money you had. We could do with some of it, to build a school here.’

Angela felt her heart beat faster, her system flooding with adrenaline. Maureen smiled a warm and appreciative smile. She held Ruth’s gaze for a few moments. She said nothing. They went and sat by one of the bonfires and had a cup of smoky tea. Maureen handed round the raisins. Angela saw a few of the women looking with longing at the bread in her bag but she wasn’t sure that Ruth would approve if she shared it out and she didn’t want to push it.

‘Well,’ said Maureen after a while. ‘Thanks for the tea. I suppose we’d better be heading off.’

‘Where you heading?’

‘Westerly.’

‘To Cornwall?’

‘We’ve got family there. Angela’s mother-in-law. My father.’

‘You’re not heading for Wales, are you? You’ll never make it.’

‘Are they dangerous, the Welsh?’ Angela asked.

‘Oh no. They’re lovely people. But you’ll never get across. They took the bridge down after partition.’

‘We’re heading for Cornwall,’ Maureen assured her. ‘Which way would you suggest?’

Ruth stood, put her hand on Maureen’s shoulder and pointed the way. ‘You take that road, it snakes a bit. Follow it as far as you can, ’til you reach the crossroads. Go straight over, keep on going. Be careful of the UN forces, the peacekeepers. You can’t trust them. Look out for the white vehicles, the meat-fed foreign men spending money on trashy women in the bars, and avoid them. Other than that, you can’t go wrong, really – you can navigate by the sun.’

‘Thanks,’ said Maureen, ‘Angela’s got a compass.’

‘Actually?’ said Angela, getting to her feet. Everyone ignored her.

‘Course,’ said Ruth. ‘You can’t go
now
.’

She looked stern. The women of the camp were standing around, blocking the way out of the camp. Perhaps it was unintentional. But there was a sense that it was not going to be easy to leave this place.

‘They’re expecting us,’ said Angela. ‘They’ll be worried.’

‘It’s nearly nightfall. The animals are on the prowl.’

The sheep? The donkeys? The cows? Angela failed to disguise a giggle.

 
‘It’s a full moon tonight,’ Ruth said. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

‘Won’t that help us?’ Angela asked. ‘There aren’t that many clouds. We should be able to see the way.’

‘No. You don’t understand. There are wild animals around here, lions and tigers and that. They can smell us. Most of the women are menstruating.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Maureen. Her face seemed to harden and thicken, like a speeded up demonstration of the effects of sun damage. Perhaps it was the exposure to the country air. Perhaps it was Ruth’s explanation about why they shouldn’t leave. Maureen seemed to age about five years.

‘I thought it was a myth,’ said Angela. ‘About the animals?’

‘After that fella up London let ’em all out from Regent’s Park Zoo, everyone had to have a turn, didn’t they? Most of the ones round here are from Bristol Zoo, though they say the elephants might be from Paignton.’

‘But I thought they’d perished. Or that even if they survived, they hid away from human contact.’

‘C’mere, Panther,’ Ruth called to an unfeline-looking woman standing across the way.

Panther ambled over. She knew what Ruth was going to tell her to do. She didn’t wait to be asked, she hitched up her dress. She wasn’t wearing knickers, (perhaps underwear was unecological?) but the fact barely registered with Angela because of what she saw. The poor woman had been hideously scarred, with slashes and claw marks on her belly and chunks of her flesh missing. She had been attacked by a ferocious creature. A big cat, perhaps – maybe even a… Angela looked at the evidence and understood the significance of the woman’s name, although not the wisdom of it. She herself might otherwise have ended up being called Chicken Pox.

It was settled that Maureen, Angela and Christina would stay in the camp that night, for their own safety and to help with guard duty. The bonfires had practical applications that extended beyond cooking. Potential predators were frightened of fire, so Ruth said.

‘How awful, poor Panther,’ Angela said to Ruth. ‘She’ll never recover from those scars.’

‘That’s how we felt, at first. Now we embrace it. Come along to the ceremony tonight. You’ll see what I mean.’

They were assigned a tent to stay in and given a bowl of warm water so they could wash before dinner.

‘I think we’re in trouble,’ said Maureen.

‘It’s not the worst we’ve faced.’

‘I don’t want to be melodramatic about it. But this place gives me the creeps.’

‘It’s your mind playing tricks. You’re worrying because we’re getting closer to Cornwall and there’s so many things can still go wrong.’

‘Angela, I love you very much. You’re like family to me. You’ll take care of Christina, won’t you, if anything does happen. Having her has been the greatest, the best thing in my life. And it’s nothing unusual, to have a child. Something doesn’t have to be unusual to be special, remember that. Anyone who gets up in time can watch the sun rise and that can be the most magnificent and moving sight in the world, and yet it’s freely available to anyone.’

‘Except blind people. And people in underground prisons.’

‘Yes, OK.’

They linked arms with Christina between them, and they stepped out of the tent like a six-legged creature; separation unthinkable, if not impossible.

‘Do you eat pigs?’ Ruth asked them when they got to the food tent.

Most people in London were not flesh eaters. They were upset by it. As a general rule, they didn’t eat pigs, people, cats, dogs, peacocks, rats, squirrels, chickens. They had fish from their city’s waterways and fresh vegetables grown in the acres of park lands across the city. They consumed nothing with legs.

Maureen and Angela drank a lot of wine with their meal, unused to the farmyard stench of the cooked flesh, the women tearing at it like animals. This place was full of stinks. There was the droopy flesh of the women, smelling as if they had just got out of bed and hadn’t had a shower yet; not disgusting but rather too intimate. The women didn’t believe in chemicals for deodorant. They didn’t even use protective sun tan lotion, so their skin was striped; suntanned then pale, suntanned then pale, according to the positioning of their clothing during previous exposure to the sun.

‘You’re outsiders, like us,’ Ruth said after the meal. ‘I think you’ll like the ceremony. This way please.’

She walked them through the camp towards one of the tilted, inhospitable-looking stone buildings. With the smoke, the tilting, the dazed feeling caused by the consumption of the wine, the awful oinking conversations of pigs in nearby pens who must have been able to smell the roast flesh of their late companion, it was like walking around in the immediate aftermath of something terrible – more terrible than dinner had been, even.

‘Whatever they’re going to do, I think we have to try and protect Christina from seeing it,’ said Maureen.

‘It’s so smoky, she won’t be able to help closing her eyes,’ Angela said.

They were led inside what must have been the smokiest place in the camp. Ruth motioned for them to follow the example of other women who queued up to dip a bowl into a stone tank filled with water, then removed or pulled aside or pulled up or down whatever they were wearing on their top halves, and splashed the water over themselves to wash their hands, arms and upper torsos, then readjusted their clothing and went into the next room.

Angela had been trying not to stare, to preserve the other women’s modesty, but Maureen nudged her. Angela looked. She saw that some of the women’s bodies had been scarified. Flowers, fish, trees, butterflies had been carved into the skin on their arms and backs.

It should have prepared her for what was to come but she had to struggle to keep from vomiting. In the centre of the room she saw a woman, with all the artistry of a ten-year-old trying her hand at lino cutting, begin to mark the flesh of a younger woman, about eighteen years old.

‘Stay still now, Connie. You’re doing a grand job,’ the woman soothed as she worked on her client’s flesh. ‘That’s it. That’s a girl.’

Connie lay on a cloth on some hay bales, face down, arms bare. Angela could not recall witnessing a scene before that cried out so blatantly for the distribution of Maureen’s wet wipes. Though the alcohol in the little tissues would probably smart if they came in contact with the skin so perhaps the filthy-looking sponge employed to wipe away the blood would do just as well in the circumstances – these people were the experts, after all.

What the cutter lacked in artistic execution she more than made up for in speed and deftness, slicing through the skin, stripping out gobbets of flesh, halting the process occasionally to press on the bleeding wound with the sponge, then slicing again, stripping away the unwanted bits of the young woman and throwing them into a dish.

‘We throw the contents of the dish to the wild animals,’ Ruth confided. She was whispering, as if feeding human flesh to lions and tigers and pumas was such a good idea that she didn’t want everyone to hear in case they should try to copy it.

‘Surely it attracts them?’

‘You have to embrace the thing you fear. Run towards it. We spend our whole time in this crazy consumerist society trying to protect ourselves from what frightens us. We build walls around us. We put up barriers between ourselves and nature. We put layers of meaning between each other; social constructs, manners, class systems, gender definitions.’