The Miracle Inspector (14 page)

The light was strange; blueish, damp. Someone with too much time on their hands had scraped the flesh from a bunch of black grapes and stitched the skins together to make a curtain for his eyes.

He felt cold and stiff and dirty, as if he’d spent the night camping in Hyde Park, and he was in pain. He would go to Maureen’s house. She’d give him a hot drink and let him have a shower. Angela would be there, looking worried and angry. Her mood would change when she saw what had happened to him. He wouldn’t want her to be too nice, in case he started to cry. He’d go and sit next to her and hug her and explain that they had to leave for Cornwall right away. She’d nod towards Maureen, lean in and whisper to him, ‘They’re coming with us.’

‘No,’ he’d say. ‘I’m sorry.’

Maureen would go to the kitchen and bang some pots fairly loudly, to show she wasn’t listening.

‘We’d never make it,’ he’d say to Angela. ‘They’d slow us down.’

Angela would give him that stubborn look, where her face closed in on itself and hardened. It was like watching a clay mask dry on her skin. He’d acquiesce to the demands that they all leave for Cornwall and Maureen would go and pack. And while she was doing that he’d have a shower and wash some of this pain away. When he stepped out of the veil of water in the shower and switched off the tap, it would be like completing the final part of a ceremony, like switching off his connection to this oppressive city. He’d dry himself with one of Maureen’s fluffy pink towels and put his fetid clothes back on, or perhaps Maureen would lend him one of her T-shirts. They’d put Maureen’s bags into the car, get in, close the doors, get Christina settled, put their seatbelts on. He’d switch the engine on and drive away. They’d leave London forever.

‘Mate?’ Someone touched his arm, gently. His arms hurt. Blue and bruised, maybe he was the grape, crushed under dozens of stamping toes. They’d make a very sour wine out of him.

‘Mate?’ Someone wiped a warm, wet flannel over his face, very gently. It was an exquisitely pleasant experience. It was done with maternal kindness. Was he with his mother? He had died and was in the process of being reborn, his poor little body battered by the journey through the birth canal, now delivered to the efficiencies of midwifery to be wiped down tenderly by some maternity nurse. He probably ought to cry out, to show that he was alive.

Someone held a cup of water to his lips. He wondered if he had the strength to go through another life from start to finish. It would be too painful, too full of sorrow and disappointment. He realised he was crying.

Someone began to tell him a story about a man whose shadow had learned to live separately from him. From birthday to story time, his early years seemed to be whizzing by. He didn’t remember things going so fast last time round. He didn’t want stories, he wanted a lullaby.

Someone knew this. He heard men’s voices, deep and low. They were humming. There was something reassuring in the masculinity of the sound. It was a rumble, the distant sound of tanks coming to the rescue through a forest. The sound of angels assembling to fight an evil foe. The tune was lovely, and familiar. When they stopped humming the introduction and started singing the words, he knew why. ‘
Imagine a land for you and me, without borders or checks on our ID. Imagine no CCTV
,’ they sang. ‘
Rise up.
’ That settled it. Jesmond’s protest songs would never be heard in heaven. Lucas hadn’t died, he hadn’t been reborn. He was still alive, left over from last time. It didn’t give him any comfort.

The next day, or maybe the day after that, Lucas had recovered sufficiently to understand where he was. He watched as a man called Rolf ran up and down the narrow space inside their prison cell, dodging and feinting as if trying to outwit a wasp. He might have been developing a physical training technique. Possibly he was planning to bring out a fitness DVD when he was released.
Rolf Runs with Wasps. Waspercise. Rolfercise
.

Rolf saw Lucas looking and came to sit next to him on the hard bed. Rolf was a very thin man with a bushy black beard. He could have been any age from twenty-five to forty-five and he looked like a desert island companion – not in the sense of being an ideal choice, like when people say for example that their ‘desert island’ ice cream would be chocolate and cherry, or mango sorbet. Rather, he looked as though he had been living on a desert island for some time. But there was no hushing sound of waves, no coconut trees, no hot sun or salty breeze, no warm sand to wriggle bare toes in, where they were being held.

Lucas wondered why Rolf was wearing someone else’s clothes. His shabby trousers were much too big for him and he looked like a scarecrow. Who was he trying to scare? Not Lucas. Lucas didn’t care about anything any more. How long had he been there? If someone had said ‘forty years’ he might have believed them but he supposed it was not that long. He had been there for however long it took for hope to die. How long was that?

‘About twenty-four hours,’ Rolf said.

‘So what’s the deal here?’ Lucas asked him. He was expecting that Rolf would point out the old-timers, say something about the food.

Instead he said, ‘They’ll be along in a couple of hours, to take you away for questioning.’

‘I’ll have a chance to put my case?’

‘Naw, you won’t get a trial. This is a rubbish tip. They sift through it, trying to harvest anything useful.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh,’ Rolf laughed. His face showed that he didn’t think it was funny. ‘Your kidneys are safe, bro. Your gold teeth. They want information.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘You’d be surprised. Listen. You got to find a way of leaving yourself behind in there. Yeah? Coercive questioning. It’s not very nice. You got to go elsewhere, remember happy times. A day in the park with your mother, when you were small. The smell of your wife’s perfume. Or think of a song you like.’

Lucas could think of a song he didn’t like.
Rise up, rise up…

‘You got something? Imagine dancing to it. Memorise the steps; the more intricate the better. I imagine this dance, me and my shadow. But while he’s dancing, tap tap, tap tap, tap tap, taking it very serious, I leave him here. I’m off. You get me?’

‘That’s what you were doing just now? Dancing?’

‘Practising. We run along, and we’re together. I lift my foot, he lifts his. I kick, he kicks. Then, boom, I turn real sharp, wrench my foot away, so I’m out of step with him. And I’m off. I’m outta there.’

‘Sounds a bit energetic.’

‘It ain’t physical, it’s philosophical. You gotta get the mental energy right. I’m serious, bro. You need a strategy for when you’re in there.’

‘I could think about my wife.’

‘Alright. So you got yourself something to fix on: her face, her name, the smell of her perfume.’

‘You said.’

‘That’s your portal. Fix on it, orient yourself, then go through. Yeah? Whatever you do, don’t just sit in that room staring at the doorway. You gotta get up and go through.’

The interrogator was a young man. He had a likeable face and spiky ‘woo, I’m a little bit crazy’ hair, like an enthusiastic art master at one of those progressive schools that probably still existed outside London. He gave the impression that he and Lucas were in this thing together, and that while he might know more than Lucas about the situation they found themselves in – had, in fact, been here many times before – he wasn’t going to patronise Lucas by making it obvious. He was actually going to pretend that they were setting off on a journey of discovery together and that they’d both find it equally instructional and equally entertaining.

The interrogator couldn’t sit still. He got up, paced about. He was so animated, so eager, Lucas felt he would have been more suited to the role of children’s entertainer and had surely only fallen into the interrogation business because so few opportunities came up in children’s entertainment these days. In fact, if they were on the outside – where, as a government employee, Lucas had had a little influence – he might have tried to make a few enquiries, see if he could do something for the poor bloke. He wasn’t sure if he had caught his name, was it Terry? Terry Gator would be an excellent stage name. But they weren’t on the outside. They were on the inside, where their situations were reversed and the bloke had all the influence and Lucas had none at all.

‘Your wife,’ said the interrogator. ‘Had she been planning a trip somewhere?’

Lucas remembered what Rolf had said. That was the portal. He tried to think about Angela and what she was doing now. He imagined her sitting at home, grief-stricken, her face red and blotchy from crying, which always made her look as if she had been stung all over by nettles. She was sitting in the kitchen. She looked listless, more depressed than he had ever seen her. Someone was with her. Who was it? Delilah? Joanna Jones? Maureen, standing about, looking embarrassed? Perhaps they were all there, trying to cheer her up while silently disapproving of him.

No, that wouldn’t do at all. He didn’t want to think of Angela sitting at home waiting for him. He wanted to imagine her on her way to Cornwall. When he didn’t come to collect her from Maureen’s, Angela would know he must be in trouble. An hour would go by, then another. She’d begin to make plans to flee.

Angela went to the bathroom and vomited in the toilet, the shameful smell creeping out through the house and giving her away. Maureen said nothing. If they were going to go on the road together, there would be many more instances when they would be aware of each others’ bodies and their weaknesses.

‘Perhaps they’re holding him for questioning and they’ll release him?’ Angela said to Maureen.

‘Yes. I hope so.’

Presumably Lucas’s car was at the Ministry. But even if he had conveniently left it parked outside Maureen’s house and decided to walk into work or cycle there for some reason, it would have been no use to the women. Neither of them could drive. Their best hope for a way out of London was the message that had come through Maureen’s door from ‘a well-wisher’.

It turned out that ‘Go down to Down Street’ was not an especially cryptic message. Maureen looked in her encyclopaedia. Down Street was an underground station with its entrance on Down Street, just off Piccadilly. It had briefly served as a bunker for the Cabinet Office in the last war, in 1939, but it had been abandoned as a railway station in 1932, long, long before the whole underground system had fallen into disuse, the stations boarded up, the lifts disconnected and the stairs smashed to prevent people living down there.

‘Perhaps we should wait twenty-four hours?’ Angela said. ‘In case he comes back. He might have been held up at work. He might have found a miracle.’ She picked up the phone in Maureen’s house to check there was a dialling tone. It was working OK. She phoned her home but there was no answer. Lucas hadn’t gone back there. She phoned his office but she got a recorded message. ‘
If you are calling to report a miracle, press 1 now. If you are calling to check on the status of a report you have already made, press 2.
’ She put the phone down.

‘There’s only one reason a man doesn’t come home from work at night,’ Maureen said. ‘Well, two reasons. But you’d have heard from him by now if it was the second.’

‘Maybe I should go to the Ministry?’

‘You could,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s up to you. Is there anyone you trust who you can call?’

But there wasn’t.

After two hours, Maureen packed a bag with clothes and provisions. After three, she turned the gas off at the wall. She turned off the water. She unplugged all the appliances, closed the curtains.

‘Perhaps we ought to wait?’ Angela said.

‘Could do. How long have you been waiting for your dad to come back?’

‘Nine years.’

They left the house with Christina and two small bags. Angela would have to wear Maureen’s clothes until they got to Cornwall. She couldn’t risk a return home in case the house was being watched. It would not have been wise to have been seen leaving home with a suitcase so soon after her husband’s disappearance.

They got to Piccadilly before the curfew, walking part of the way behind a shepherd herding his sheep from Green Park to graze them in Hyde Park. London was quiet and peaceful – it almost seemed a shame to leave. In Down Street they found the lovely red-tiled facade of the abandoned Tube station just to the side of a newsagent’s shop. There was no padlock on the door. They opened it and saw the spiral staircase that would take them down into the system of tunnels beneath them; it was still intact. They started to walk down it into the darkness, Maureen in front, Angela behind, Christina in between them.

‘This seems quite straightforward,’ said Angela, apparently heedless of how much she was likely to antagonise the gods with such a remark. There was a sharp, damp smell in the air, cobwebs hung on the stair rail, and the paint was peeling off the walls. As they descended, the air grew warmer. Below them she heard eerie shrieks and caught a whiff of the distinctive odour of urine.

‘There’s something down here,’ Angela said. ‘Something moving, reaching out from the walls.’

‘An enchanted forest? You’re not used to the dark, that’s all. It’s what comes of respecting the curfew.’

As they reached the bottom of the stairway, Angela could feel the empty flapping of Maureen’s hand as she felt for Christina’s hand. But the child slipped past her mother and kept walking. How had they ever thought this would work?

‘Christina!’ called Maureen, her voice so rich with feeling, it was like hearing a whole opera in one word. Christina turned back and put her hand in her mother’s hand.

Angela found a torch in her rucksack and shone it the length of the corridor. There was only a door behind a metal grille and a strange, other-worldly blue glow coming from behind the door. As they got near, the door opened to reveal a large, bright, cheery room decorated with funky patterned wallpaper, 1970s plastic bucket chairs on stalks, beaded standard lamps and an aquarium. The place smelled of coffee. Plinky bossa nova cocktail music was playing. It was empty except for a young woman in an aquamarine cat suit.

‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Tawny. Did you bring the toll?’

‘What do you need?’ Maureen asked. ‘If we’ve got it, we’ll be happy to share it with you.’

‘Aloe vera,’ said Tawny. ‘Plants, sunshine, fish, parsley, paperback books, fuses.’

They had neither fish nor fuses, nor any of the other things Tawny had asked for, as Maureen very well knew. Still, she searched through the contents of her rucksack with great solemnity, as if she really thought she might find some sunshine in there. Eventually she came up with a jar of multi-vitamins, some soluble Vitamin C tablets and some gingerbread, which she handed over.

The eerie wails started up again. ‘Sensors,’ said Tawny. ‘It’s on a loop. You get used to it.’

‘How did you get the screaming noises?’ Angela asked her.

‘Foxes. And what about the hands coming out of the walls? Neat idea, isn’t it? We take it in turns.’

‘I thought I felt something!’

‘Jezza’s down there now. Squeeze your tits, did he? Cheeky bugger. We want some automata – there’s some at the Clink Museum or the London Dungeon we could filch, if the other trolls haven’t had them already. Getting them across London’s too hazardous – underground, OK, no trouble. But we’d have to bring them some of the way over ground.’

‘Automata?’ said Angela.

There was a clanking sound as three or four sure-footed men came down the spiral staircase.

‘Sound as if they know their way here,’ said Tawny. ‘Smugglers, probably. Let’s hope they’ve brought my parsley. Best get you hid. They’re dangerous.’

‘Parsley smugglers?’

‘People smugglers. Cash up front, don’t take kindly to rivals on their turf. Know what I mean?’

Tawny took them towards the source of the blue light. She saw the puzzled look on Angela’s face and said, ‘Guess what it is.’

A giant electric fly killer? A tub of radium? A time machine? A device which might summon Jesmond here to tell Angela what was in the rest of the letters he’d written twenty years before? A device which might allow her to go back just two or three weeks to warn Lucas not to do whatever it was that had got him taken away. If only she knew. If only he knew.

‘It’s a solarium,’ said Tawny. ‘I’m gonna do you a favour, for the sake of the kid. Wait in there till those blokes have gone by then head west down the tunnels towards Heathrow. Get out at Terminal Five.’

‘Do the planes still fly?’ asked Angela. ‘We were thinking of going to Australia.’

Tawny turned to Maureen. ‘There’s a break in the perimeter fence by Terminal Five. Squeeze through, it brings you up outside the London borders. Don’t hang about because when they find it, they’ll repair it.’

‘Thanks,’ said Maureen.

‘Don’t you ever think of going?’ asked Angela.

‘This is me. This is what I do. There’s absolutely no guarantee there’s anything better out there. You go if you want, I’m not stopping you. The fences won’t stay up forever. I’ll see what I want to do then.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ said Maureen. ‘But we can’t wait.’

‘Make sure you claim asylum as soon as you get to Slough or you’ll find yourselves back here.’ Tawny said. She gave Angela a compass. ‘I got it off a dead man. Hope it does you more good than it did him.’