The Miracle Inspector

The Miracle Inspector

Helen Smith

This book is for Lauren

TYGER BOOKS

Lucas was dressed smartly, ready for work. He sat at the kitchen table and buttered his toast, and cracked at the top of the boiled egg his wife had made him for breakfast. Angela stood nearby, scrubbing at a small spot on the working surface. Layers of regret hung between them like unfashionable wallpaper. It made the place seem ugly.

‘You know what would be nice?’ Angela said.

Lucas didn’t answer. He was not being impolite, he was waiting for her to express her feelings.

She said, ‘If we could go somewhere…’

He didn’t speak. He licked his fingers. He couldn’t eat the egg but he ate his toast. He waited for her to continue.

‘…together. I wish there was something…’

He noticed that she had stopped rubbing the spot, as if speaking the words had been helping to power her hand. Or perhaps it was the other way around. He’d have liked to make a joke of it. Would the nub of it – the joke – be something about kinetic energy?

‘Will you be home for your tea?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He wiped his hands and brushed himself down, preparing to leave her. With his weary, cautious manner, his formal clothes, he could have been forty-five years old. He was not quite twenty-five.

‘Unless there’s a miracle?’

‘Well, then you definitely wouldn’t have to cook tea.’ He laughed, thinking they would share a moment.

She stared blankly back at him.

‘If I discovered a miracle, you’d come and see it,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

She set to work on that spot on the working surface again. She loved her husband; it had been a love match, not forced. There’d probably be only four or five years before one or other of them fell foul of the authorities, so she ought to treasure their time together. But most of their time ‘together’ was spent alone, and the dull routine of running a household was wearing her down. She was making a study of dinosaurs from the encyclopaedias she had salvaged when the local library closed down. Memorising the long names kept her mind occupied, with decisions about how to pronounce the multiple syllables providing a counterpoint to mundane tasks like shaking out the mat, folding linen, polishing taps. Recent attempts to use the recitation of dinosaur names and characteristics as a method of timing the preparation of the egg she boiled each morning for Lucas’s breakfast had thus far ended in failure.

Angela rubbed and rubbed at the spot on the working surface even though she could no longer see it. This was her life for the foreseeable future. She was not quite twenty-one years old.

That evening, when Lucas came home again, Angela didn’t even ask him how his day went. What made her so sure he hadn’t found anything, that it wasn’t worth asking about his day? What if he had the secret with him now, the beautiful, pure, shining truth of it? How would he put it? He was no good with words. ‘Darling, I’ve got some wonderful news. You must keep it to yourself for now.’ Would she think it was a good thing? He realised with a blush that she might not like him to use the word ‘darling’. It was silly and old-fashioned. He didn’t like it much himself – it reminded him of that old reprobate, Jesmond.

‘It’s a bit dry,’ Angela said to him. She was talking about the fish she had put on the plates for their evening meal. She could have been talking about their relationship. How could he put that in a lighthearted way, without seeming critical or prurient, inviting comparisons with wetness, which she wouldn’t approve of, and which he hadn’t actually meant to suggest? After some consideration, he said nothing.

‘You could have called me today.’

‘I couldn’t, not really.’

‘They didn’t have phones wherever you were?’

If I knew a secret, I would keep it for you.
That’s what he wanted to say. It seemed too craven. He tried to bring some sunshine in to the room. He thought about what it would be like to sit on some grass somewhere, looking at the light on her face. ‘Maybe we could have a holiday. Would you like that? Richmond or Highgate or somewhere nice. You choose.’

He watched her thinking about what he said, chewing it over in her mind, trying to break it down and make it digestible. She even moved her jaw a little, as if she had a mouth full of hi-fibre bread and was finding it difficult to despatch. But she didn’t reply.

The silences were not something he had expected from marriage. Sex, yes. Companionship. Someone to cook a meal and sit down and eat with, that kind of thing. The silences had evolved naturally, a way of being: ‘Our silences’, yet with no emptiness or vacancy in them. Instead, there were whole worlds contained in those silences; millions of gossamer strands of understanding going back and forth between them, like an invisible version of that fibreglass loft insulation that was illegal now. At school, his art teacher had explained to him that if he wanted to draw something, a chair, for example, he shouldn’t look only at what he could see – the structure of the thing – but also at the spaces. Sometimes it helped to draw the spaces. Similarly, in conversations with his wife, Lucas felt that to acknowledge only the words that were said would have been unhelpful. Their relationship was also about the silences.

He wanted a way to tell her out loud that he loved her and that her silences warmed him like invisible now-illegal loft insulation. But he couldn’t. It would only have come out sounding like a chorus from one of those Country and Western parody acts that were briefly popular on the radio a few years ago, before radio stations were banned and all the apparatus in London confiscated.

That was what he was thinking. What was she thinking?

How long had they been married? It seemed to him that he had never before wondered what she was thinking – although that was impossible, and he must have wondered and then forgotten about it. When she spoke, he listened and then reacted to the words he heard her say. Too often he was briefly wounded by the awfulness of what she said. Later, he would find a way of being reassured by it; it was just ‘her way’. Had he never before stopped to wonder if there was any subtext to what she said, to wonder whether she struggled with silly thoughts that she hid from him, the way he hid his thoughts from her? He didn’t remember ever doing so. He was too preoccupied with keeping his thoughts hidden to worry about hers.

If he could prise open her head with a penknife and put a straw into her brain and siphon out the thoughts, suck them up and then drip them out on to a specially-prepared surface in front of him in a legible little puddle, so he could pick them over and examine them – well, he would have been surprised to uncover anything more profound than the expression of simple wants, needs and instructions to herself that would enable her to carry out her daily tasks around the house: ‘Bread, table. Knives, forks, spoons, salt. Toilet. Eat. Drink. Sex.’ That sort of thing. And yet she was an intelligent woman. It was extraordinary to him that he had never realised that she might have a secret life, something she kept away from him. Did she ever share these thoughts with anyone else? A friend? A ‘relative’? A journal?

‘What?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re just sitting there, staring. Finish your meal. Don’t you like it?’

‘What were you thinking about?’

‘You were the one sitting there not saying anything,’ she said. ‘I was only wondering what you were thinking about.’

‘I was wondering what sort of thing you think about.’ He felt slightly defeated by it all but to his surprise she laughed girlishly, as if he’d just made a rather wonderful joke. ‘I have these thoughts sometimes,’ he said. ‘Things I want to say to you that sound like poetry in my head. And I stop myself because they wouldn’t come out right.’

‘Like what?’ A little nostril flare of suspicion from her.

He pressed on: ‘I was going to say to you that I don’t mind it when we don’t say much to each other. It’s like being wrapped up in loft insulation. That’s all.’

He expected her to laugh again. But she stared at him for a few seconds as if he had just said something rather vulgar. Then she came over to him and kissed him once, very gently, on the mouth. Then she half sat on his leg, turned and pushed away the plate of half-eaten food, turned back to him and kissed him, putting her tongue in his mouth – did he taste of the food? – while grinding herself against him. He reached up under her shirt and pushed her bra up and felt her bare skin and then fumbled about – or they fumbled together – and got her knickers out of the way and his trousers undone and they had sex. It wasn’t ideal because of the still-warm food on the plate and not brushing his teeth and the sadness he had noticed in her. She was behaving as if they had just met in a nuclear shelter and the sirens were still going. He put his mouth on her skin, about an inch along from her nipple and bit her. He did it quite gently and she didn’t complain, as if she resisted letting him know anything about how she felt, even when she felt pain. Even when he caused it.

When they finished, she seemed giggly again. Happy, sad, happy. It was as if she was insane. ‘You’re not pregnant?’

‘You want a miracle here, at home?’ Now she was angry. Sometimes he felt he didn’t know her at all. What was there to be angry about? Did she want a child? Or was she simply making a joke? Perhaps she had been making a joke, pretending to be angry, and it had misfired. He felt tired. Desperately tired, as if it was the end of everything, as if he had just carried home something expensive and heavy to save a child’s life – an iron lung or some other breathing apparatus – only to find that the child had already died.

‘If I was certified as a miracle,’ she said, ‘you’d have to stay here and guard me. We could make love all day, then.’

Jesus. She seemed to want to have sex again. She took her top off. She took her skirt off. She took her knickers off. She looked sad again. Maybe it was because he was sitting there gawping, in an appalled kind of way.

She took off his shirt, tugged at his trousers, tried to pull him on top of her.

‘Not on the floor, you’ll get cold,’ he said.

She had one hand at the back of his neck, pulling his face down on hers so she could kiss him. She had her nose pressed right into his face.

‘You’re not crying?’

She didn’t answer. But her face was damp with tears.

He got her up off the floor and half carried her into the living room. It was unromantic. He was like a soldier escorting a wounded colleague. He got her on to the sofa. Perhaps they should talk about things. He’d probably said something wrong. Or not said the right thing. Was it the loft insulation or the miracles, or the food that had dried out in the oven? Perhaps she’d hoped he’d make it home earlier today?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. It seemed as good a start as any. But she just wanted to have sex again. She was lying on her back and she had her neck resting at an angle on the arm of the sofa. He was worried about snapping it. If he was too energetic and he accidentally snapped her neck and she died instantly but he carried on having sex with her… Actually, it wouldn’t matter what people thought or if he went to prison because nothing would matter any more because his wife would have died, and he honestly wouldn’t want to live any more if she was dead. He thought the world of her.

‘Angela,’ he said afterwards, ‘let’s go away to Cornwall together.’ It was the sort of thing people in London said to each other all the time these days, without having any idea of how they would get there or whether living in Cornwall would really be any better than living in London. But if you wanted to excite and flatter a woman you were supposed to mention Cornwall, as if there could be nothing finer than taking her to a place where she’d be expected to earn her living by serving behind the counter in a supermarket or whatever they made them do there.

But women were funny like that. They were just like other people – they always wanted what they hadn’t got.

‘Lucas,’ she said. ‘If I could really believe that…’

‘About Cornwall?’

‘Some days I think I can’t bear another minute of it.’

‘You sound like one of those women, in those war-time films, you know – with their marvellous accents “I simply can’t bear another minute of it”.’