The Miracle Inspector (7 page)

Now that Lucas had destroyed the letters, Angela wasn’t going to go crazy wondering what had happened. Jesmond was still here in London, after all; it seemed pretty obvious that he hadn’t made it to Adelaide with his girlfriend and her child. The
what
wasn’t important. Angela was interested in
why
. She was surrounded by millions of people in London and she never got a chance to enquire into why they did the things they did. They hid their true face from her. She could draw her own conclusions but she never really knew. She’d thought she might have a chance to know someone really well by reading Jesmond’s letters. She had been looking forward to going on the journey with him.

It was only a story, for her. For Jesmond, it was his life. She wondered whether he had ever found out why his girlfriend never turned up at Southampton to get on the boat with him. Perhaps she was detained. Perhaps she couldn’t bear to leave her husband. Perhaps she had underestimated the dangers facing them and the rest of the country and hadn’t taken his letter seriously. Perhaps she had turned up and Jesmond had got cold feet and he wasn’t there. Perhaps they were intercepted on their way to the docks and made to turn back, either by her husband or by police road blocks. Perhaps the boat never sailed and they had to go back to their own lives and pretend the chance had never been offered to them.

She found it perplexing that Lucas wasn’t more interested in Jesmond’s welfare. With older people in such short supply in London, parents and godparents, even the parents of friends were usually treated with reverence. Lucas seemed to have no sympathy for the man at all. Didn’t he wonder why things had turned out the way they had for him?

And then she thought, perhaps Lucas wasn’t curious because he
knew
why. There was some secret, some family secret about his mother and his father and his godfather that he hadn’t told her. Very well, she would get to the bottom of it.

When Jesmond finished his set, there was always a moment of intense loneliness. He bent and picked up his glass, drained it. A young chap stepped up at the end, diffident. Despite the apparent diffidence, Jesmond was nervous as he came near. You never knew who these people were and what dangers they might represent. Jesmond felt chilly, like a man induced by a nuisance caller to step out of the bath and stand at the front door in his dressing gown. He wished the lad would go away but almost as soon as he wished it, more of them came up, as if he had wished on a faulty talisman and triggered the opposite of what he wanted.

‘Fancy a drink, then?’ one of the lads asked him.

Jesmond always wanted a drink after a gig. Drinking provided a wonderfully immersive experience, drugs too, although they were harder to get hold of. Few other things took you over like that. Sex, yes. But certain factors needed to be in place to make that happen, namely, a more-than-passing interest in the now-fatiguing act of love on his part and the consensual involvement of other(s). Drinking, though sociable, was something that could be experienced alone. And it was democratising; the tipsy delights of the first drink available to anyone for the price of a glass of wine or a whisky. But tonight he would not drink alone.

Jesmond felt obliged to play up to the flamboyance that might be expected of a man of his status and colourful reputation. He stood on the edge of the stage and said, ‘Young man, I thoroughly approve of drinking because drinking leads to drunkenness, and that causes one to make mistakes. Mistakes bring wisdom, or learning from them does. So, let’s drink.’

The kids loved it. Jesmond didn’t necessarily believe any of it any more, although perhaps he once had. Loss made you wiser and sadder. And he had experienced so much of it. Perhaps he should say something about that? But they were grinning at him, happy enough with his pronouncements. He wanted to say something about how things weren’t quite so inherently funny once you got to his age. Drink made him repeat himself, so there was no need to say everything all at once, he could save some of it for later on in the evening, when the subject would inevitably come round again.

They took him to a room at the back and poured some rather cheap wine into a plastic cup and gave it to him. Too late, he remembered he had left his glass on the stage, from where it had no doubt been cleared by now and stacked into the dishwashing machine. Drinking wine from a plastic cup was as dissatisfying as kissing a woman wearing an orthodontic brace but there was nothing he could do about it now. At least it wasn’t Styrofoam. There were a few young men already in the back room, two with acoustic guitars. Candles flickered on the tables. It was like a bohemian fantasy. He felt intensely happy for a few moments.

‘Jesmond?’ someone said, a very eager look on his face.

‘Uh, gimme a moment,’ Jesmond said. ‘Takes a while to wind down after a gig. Imagine a jagged line on a graph in a recession.’

The kids stared at him. One of them handed him a joint. He smoked it. He drank from the plastic cup. He used his thumb and forefinger to wipe at the granular deposits that collected at the sides of his mouth. He felt the red wine flood the veins in his face, like those light-up street maps of London that had been popular with tourists, before the sight of a tourist in London had become an anomaly. The joints in his fingers ached, particularly the top knuckle of the little finger on his right hand, and the thumb knuckle on his left hand. Still, he felt happy. Was this happiness his reward? He couldn’t say why he did it, otherwise. Once he would have said he did it to inspire others.

He looked up. He had recovered and was ready to engage with them.

‘What you writing, Jesmond?’ They wanted to admire him. But he hadn’t written anything in months. No – years. He smiled and looked bashful, batting at the air in front of his face, as if to dispel a thick layer of lies that hung about in front of him, to prevent himself spreading them around as he breathed, spoiling a potentially pleasant evening.

The two boys with guitars began to sing. Jesmond was on safer ground, here. People only ever wanted to hear the old protest songs that he’d written with Matthew, all those years ago. They never asked if he was working on another one of those. Like fans at a music gig, they didn’t want new songs; they wanted the old stuff, the familiar stuff they could join in with.

Like the poetry, the protest songs enjoined listeners to rise up. Pretty much the only difference between the poetry and the protest songs was that the songs had a melody attached. Well, otherwise they wouldn’t have been songs, would they?

Everyone in the back room drank too much wine. Most sang. At events like these, people sometimes made the mistake of telling Jesmond how much they loved the tunes of the protest songs, thinking that they would endear themselves to him. People were so silly sometimes. He had written the lyrics, Matthew had set them to music. Admiring the music in Jesmond’s songs was like going to a barbecue at a man’s house and admiring the design of the garden next door. It was not pertinent and it was most definitely not a way to win favour.

But these kids were OK. They didn’t praise the music specifically. They let him know how much they loved the songs by the way they sang them. They belted out the stirring bits. They closed their eyes when they sang the moving bits. They punched the air or held hands, as appropriate. When they got to the chorus of the most famous one,
Rise Up
, the musicians showed their reverence for the words by stopping their strumming and beating out the rhythm with the palms of their open hands on their guitars as they sang a capella. They sang with conviction. Jesmond had noticed that when men spent the evening singing rousing songs with other men, it tended to make them feel that victory was possible. In the early days he’d believed it was a good sign and that it meant these men would join the cause. But it hadn’t happened. They’d just gone home again, as if singing was an end in itself. Maybe they remembered a time when you could still go to football matches, and the crowd would sing to urge their teams to victory, and take some of the credit for it when they did, and boo them when they lost. But singing was no way to seal victory in a revolution and it was certainly no substitute for action.

Imagine a land for you and meee,
sang the assembled group.

Without borders or checks on our ID

Imagine no CCTeeVeee.

Jesmond felt dirty and sweaty and tired. He was neither wealthy nor healthy. He was an old man, on the run. What was it all for? Was it really for these moments when – if not actually happy – at least everyone seemed to believe in the possibility of happiness?

The possibility of happiness. The phrase made him think of the woman he had once loved very much. Jesmond felt choked. It would almost be easier if someone were to come in and kill him now, or arrest him and take him away. He wouldn’t have to carry on. He wouldn’t have to bother with the burden of it. But then he thought, maybe he really had been wishing on a faulty talisman all these years because there never was any intervention to force him to give up his life, and so he endured. Still, he didn’t want to die. Not really, not while there was a chance that the woman he had loved was still alive. Deep in his heart, he still hoped for a reconciliation. Was that why he called for reunification of this country? Because he thought it might lead to a more personal kind of ‘reunification’?

Sometimes he thought he was a fraud. Hiding it from other people was tiring but it seemed better than announcing it and making those who admired him miserable as well. He wasn’t lying, he was trying not to disappoint.

There was a lull in the music while a lad changed a string on his guitar. Someone came up to him.

‘Jason Prince,’ the lad said, putting out his hand. Presumably that was the lad’s name – it wasn’t Jesmond’s.

‘Hi, Jason,’ he said.

‘Good crowd tonight. Packed, wasn’t it? I’m sorry the place is so small. Security, y’know?’

‘I know.’

‘What’s more important, would you say, reaching a wide audience or reaching an audience who really gets what you’re saying?’

‘Son, I want as many people as possible to hear what I have to say. It’s not relationships I’m after, it’s an audience. You piss about worrying who’s here and whether they’re worthy of hearing it, you’re gonna lose it.’

‘You get a buzz, doing this?’

‘Not really. It gets to be more like a duty. Like being a preacher, not a pop star. You know?’

The boy looked disappointed.

‘Maybe it’s a buzz at the beginning,’ Jesmond conceded.

‘I write poetry.’

Oh great. Jesmond looked around for a means to escape the inevitable.

‘I can’t deliver it like you can. I can’t do it justice. I know it’s an imposition but could you spare an hour or two, to teach me? I mean, I’m not saying it only takes a couple of hours. But if you could give up the time.’

‘Uh, probably not. Practice is all. Get up there and do it. You’ll find your way.’

Jason offered his poem for Jesmond to read. He took it from an embroidered pouch that hung from a leather thong around his neck, under his T-shirt, and when he passed it to Jesmond, it was warm to the touch.

Jason Prince said, ‘I wish I could learn from you.’

‘I travel alone,’ said Jesmond, somewhat pompously, even to his own ears. ‘If you want to learn from me, you have to be able to find me. If you can find me, so can they.’ But a man gets to be a certain age, he wants to have a son. If he can’t have a son, he’ll have a substitute, and acquiring an acolyte was likely to be a much more expeditious method than any other. He would be the boy’s mentor. His master. He felt a fizzy, excited feeling just thinking about it, like a dose of baking soda going through his veins.

Jesmond read the poem. It wasn’t what he was expecting at all.

The paper it was written on had a scent of the boy’s body, animal but not repugnant, like a much-loved pet moments after it has got up from sleep to rub itself against your leg. Jesmond touched that paper and then he read the poem and he felt it was the start of something. He had been called to witness a momentous event whose humble signifier was these handwritten words on a warm page.

Jesmond’s verse was rousing, like rugby songs, except with a social message. But when he read the words Jason Prince had written, he felt the breath and blood being slowly squeezed out of him, as if a giant rubber sheath was being rolled over him, over his head, over arms clamped tightly to his sides.

‘You OK, man?’ asked Jason, anxious.

Jesmond looked up at him, mouth downturned, eyes shimmering with tears. He put one fat finger up to the lower lid of his left eye and a tear rolled out of it and down his face, followed by others, dampening his finger and the cheek his finger rested on. The thing about Jesmond was that he should have been an actor, rather than a poet. Perhaps he only wrote so that he’d have a chance to perform his work.

‘Young man,’ said Jesmond, ‘there’s nothing I can teach you. Reading your poem is like picking up a snow globe only to see that there’s a real city encased in that delicate structure, behind the glass. This is beautiful. You have an extraordinary talent. You have nothing left to learn.’

Jason’s face transformed, unexpectedly and swiftly, like a Japanese paper flower that blossoms and ‘grows’ when dropped into water. He leant forward and gripped Jesmond’s arm above the bicep. He nuzzled his face into the shoulder seam of Jesmond’s jumper. He seemed to be totally overcome. He gripped too hard and nuzzled too long. Fame had a strange effect on people, and he was famous, after all. Perhaps Jason hadn’t written those lines but had copied them out of a book to impress him. It might have been Keats or Yeats or Shelley, one of those. An obscure poem from a master. If only you could still get access to the internet, you used to be able to check things like that in an instant.

Jason lifted his head at last, so he could speak. The side of his face was a bit crumpled and red, as if his cheek had been patched with corduroy. His ear was also red. ‘When I wrote it, I was thinking of you,’ said Jason, as if he could hear Jesmond’s thoughts and wanted to reassure him. ‘I was inspired by you.’

If he was going to claim the verse as his, that was all right. That made it his responsibility; it wasn’t up to Jesmond to check whether it was actually true. Jesmond rather looked forward to being the innocent in all this, if it turned out Jason wasn’t the author of the verse. He was sick and tired of feeling the fraud, of being older and more cynical than everyone else. He almost hoped that Jason was duping him. It would restore him to innocence, if so. And if not, then those beautiful, beautiful words would uplift him. He’d make the boy his friend, his apprentice. They’d travel the length and breadth of London, break into the parks and sit by the lakes. The boy would read him his poetry. He would die a happy man.