The Miracle Inspector (11 page)

He moisturised, looking at himself in the mirror while he smoothed the cream on in gentle, upward strokes, as directed by the manufacturer. Angela came and stood right next to him and looked into the eyes of the mirror version of him.

‘That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?’

‘You think talking about her’s a way of keeping her alive?’

‘I wondered what she was really like.’

‘I’ve got the newspaper clippings, I’ll show you.’

‘Yeah. Cool.’

‘She was one of those, she put her life into her art and she thought you should put art into your life. You know?’

Angela didn’t know. How could she? ‘I wish I’d seen some of her work. Was it all confiscated?’

‘I don’t know what happened to it. The last thing she worked on was something she called the Possibilities Project. You should read the articles, some of them would make you puke. She’s always “crisply attractive”. Or “sexily enigmatic”. They’ll mention her cheekbones, her hairstyle, the swish of her skirt. They pay too much attention to how she looked and not enough to what she thought.’

‘She was beautiful, though. Those photos of her downstairs with your dad. She really was lovely to look at. I bet when they came to interview her, she knocked them out.’

‘Trouble is, you get a woman who’s intelligent and interesting and beautiful, people get seduced by that. Then some others react against it and get jealous.’

‘You ever wish you were famous, Lucas?’

‘How would I know if I was? Where are the newspapers to print articles about it? There’s only the underground press. Nothing on TV except old films and nature documentaries.’

‘I suppose you’d know because you’d get recognised on the street. People would tell stories about you. Sing your songs if you wrote them.’

Jesmond! Why couldn’t she leave it?

‘Yeah. Well then, I definitely don’t wish I was famous.’

‘I wouldn’t mind being known for some sort of achievement.’

‘Better buy a printing press and start a newspaper if you want a mention.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Lucas hadn’t thought the day could get any worse but now all of a sudden Angela was interested in making something of her life.

Jason Prince would have liked to grow a goatee beard. He suspected it would have sharpened his chin and made him look more intelligent. But he couldn’t really do that, he had to be clean-shaven, out of solidarity with the girls. Still, he sometimes stroked the area on his chin where a goatee might have been. He believed it helped him think.

Jason was thinking about the people in the club the night Jesmond was killed, and which of them might have been spies. Unfortunately, it was like April Fool’s Day; as soon as he remembered it was April 1
^st
, everything everyone said or did on that day seemed absurd, and now the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that anyone in the club might have been a spy. But surely the audience that night had only been made up of poets, poetry-lovers, artists and eccentrics. That old bat with the funny hat, for example, had looked properly old school, a performance artist with nowhere left to perform. The organisers had been taking a risk letting in someone who was so obviously a woman after the curfew, although there would have been several of them in the audience incognito. You got to recognise them after a while; their studied cowboy way of walking from side to side with shoulders high, legs apart and arms held wide, their jeans and black T-shirts too perfectly male, their faces too soft, their eyes too big, their chins too smooth.

He didn’t blame himself for running when he came out of the club and saw what had happened to Jesmond. He had stepped over his hero’s body and run away. After all, a vicious gang who had beaten one poet to death might easily have had enough rage left over to beat other poets. He hadn’t wanted to hang around to find out, obviously. Others – either they were not poets or they were not cowards – had crouched around the body, checking for ID, a wallet or an item of jewellery to save and return to the family before the police arrived and dragged the body away. He doubted Jesmond had anything on him beyond his bus fare home. A life on the run made men cautious. It was, notoriously, one of the reasons why Jesmond had memorised his poems, so that there were no notebooks about his person with lyrics insisting that the reader should rise up, which would have given him away if he should ever have got stopped by the security forces or the police – although his face was so well-known, by now it must have been more a case of convention than prevention that made him travel so lightly.

Rise Up…
Jason choked up at the memory of them all singing that song together that night. He felt he ought to try to do something to compensate for what those thugs had done to Jesmond. There was no question of him going after them, to get revenge. It would have been purposeless.

It wasn’t even possible to determine who was responsible. It was probably nihilists. But because they claimed they didn’t believe in anything, they didn’t have symbols and insignia to identify themselves. This meant that when they carried out an atrocity, instead of spraying slogans or symbols around as calling cards, as other terrorists did, they left it to witnesses to work out who was responsible by a process of elimination. If no one else claimed it, it was probably nihilists. It was something of an insult, actually. If a person was going to be beaten to death, he would probably choose to be despatched by members of an organisation that stood for something, not by thugs who disdained even to choose a symbol to represent themselves.

Determined to do something to make amends for Jesmond’s somewhat ignominious death, Jason went by bicycle to the address Jesmond had given him and watched the house, thinking that the occupants might lead him to Jesmond’s family. He wasn’t sure what he intended to do if he saw them. Apologise? Tell them what a great guy Jesmond had been, how wonderful that last night had been? No, because if he did so, it might almost seem that he was gloating at having been there.

Perhaps he was just being voyeuristic. Perhaps he secretly hoped that the family might come to the address he was watching to mourn, or that the occupants of this house would go somewhere and meet up with other famous writers to celebrate Jesmond’s death, and he might feel connected to them all somehow, by watching them. Was he really only hanging around in hope of seeing famous people? He had to believe he wasn’t. Actually, so far as he was aware, all the other famous writers had long since gone to live in exile, or had been detained. Jesmond had been the last one left.

Jason leaned the pedal of his bike against the kerb and sat with his buttocks resting on the saddle, one foot on the ground and one foot on the kerb, and he waited. And from time to time, he stroked his chin, approximately in the region where his goatee might have been, if he’d had one.

He liked the look of the house. It was a white-painted 1930s villa, semi-detached, with a tidy front garden and a little stone path leading from the gate up to the house. There were peonies growing in the borders. The place was modest, attractive, not like some of the houses in the street, with their gardens crammed full of ostentatious ornaments. People had so little to spend their money on – foreign holidays were out, for example. They didn’t have to pay to put their parents or grandparents in nursing homes as most died long before they became too frail to cope. Almost no one was a saver, when the future was so uncertain. Londoners were spenders and he could hardly criticise them for that, although he sometimes found it difficult to understand why they felt they had to spend their money on such gaudy tat.

After he had been watching the house for about an hour, he saw a woman come out of the house in her veil and covers. She looked young, the way she carried herself. Her frame was slight. Jason was ready to follow but she only went up to the door of the neighbouring house, knocked on the door and went inside.

About half an hour after that bit of excitement, Jason was surprised to see a Ministry car turn up at the house. Very surprised. Frightened, even. Maybe they had come to cart off the occupants? He watched as a smooth-looking man got out of the car holding a bunch of expensive-looking flowers. He was one of those confident types with movie-star looks, well-groomed, a year or two older than Jason. Perhaps the flowers were to break the news of Jesmond’s death. Perhaps the woman inside was Jesmond’s wife or daughter. But then why the Ministry car? A known link to Jesmond would be dangerous for a Ministry man. Maybe that’s why this was a safe house for Jesmond; it was a bluff. No one would ever think the respectable people inside actually passed messages along to Jesmond or helped him. Then again, maybe they hadn’t helped Jesmond. Maybe it was they who had dobbed him in.

Could Jesmond himself have been a spy, a tool of the establishment, used as a focus for discontent, so that those who were inclined towards revolution could be weeded out? Had Jesmond been the cheese in the mousetrap of the establishment? He thought it over and he thought not. Jesmond had been the real deal.

While he waited, Jason thought of writing a poem, provisionally entitled
The flowers that he brought you.
The good thing about being a poet was that you could spend your time sitting around, thinking, and every phrase that popped into your head was potentially useful. So even a long afternoon spent watching someone’s house with the pointed end of a saddle working its way into your arse crack could seem fairly productive.

Considering how many thoughts a man must have in a day, it was odd that he wasn’t more prolific. But poetry was about quality, not quantity. He thought, he sifted, he used or discarded. It would be nice to just lie down and think, his head on his arm, his eyes closed, and have someone else record his thoughts for him. Saying them aloud wouldn’t work. He had no use for a Dictaphone or any instrument like that. He was interested in the thoughts as they floated in his head before they became speech. The process of converting the words into speech was just one more method of sifting and selecting them. He liked to access the thoughts before they reached that stage, when they were all wandering around inside his head like sheep on a hillside.

Thus he spent a lovely afternoon thinking about how he thought, and marvelling at the process, as if no one else in the whole history of the world had ever had a head full of thoughts. He was well-intentioned enough, though. And if young men never sat about thinking how brilliant they were, then precious little would ever get written, so if he ever got old and he looked back on this day and other days like it, he wasn’t going to feel too angry with himself.

After a while, the young woman in the veil and covers emerged from her neighbour’s house carrying a brown paper bag. Her eyes seemed to catch his for a moment but she looked down at the pavement and continued with the short journey back to her own home.

Jason wanted to say something in the poem about hope. Something about beauty and hope and making a connection with another person. He would have liked to mention the peonies, but there was something too much like
pee on me
about the sound of the word, although the flowers themselves were beautiful, like soft roses. Gauzy roses? Perhaps he could do something with gauzy.

You exhale slowly, sorrowfully

A puff of breath, the gauzy veil

lifts temporarily

Our eyes connect

No. That wouldn’t do. He’d try again when he got home. He often took his inspiration from mundane events but he didn’t consider it his duty to document them. It amused him the way some people thought that poets only talked about real events, meticulously setting down what had actually happened, as if poetry was written under caution. When he wrote poetry, he tried to be truthful. But not in the way that people imagined. Almost the best thing about being a poet was that, no matter what kind of day he’d had, how tiresome or tedious, he would have noticed something, or a few lines would have formed in his head that he could later use, and he’d be able to say to himself at the end of it, ‘At least I got a poem out of it.’

Presently, he saw a nondescript man walking hurriedly along the pavement, looking this way and that. He looked very shifty. Jason turned his face away but the man wasn’t interested, he was too busy worrying about who might be looking at
him
. He stopped at the little white gate leading to the house Jason was watching, trotted up to the door and posted a slip of paper through the letterbox. It might have been a flyer or something like that, which was nothing unusual, except that he didn’t deliver to any of the other houses in the street. Perhaps he was a gaudy tat merchant who’d noticed how poorly-served this house was for such material, and had seen an opportunity to make a buck. Or not.

The nondescript man had the androgynous look of a person who might enjoy going to underground poetry events. He might have been one of the men who’d searched Jesmond’s body for ID after the poetry event. But then again, maybe not. Everyone did their best to look the same as everyone else these days, not drawing attention to themselves or standing out in a crowd. Jason couldn’t very well shout over and ask if he was a poetry aficionado as it was against the law to congregate in clubs at night and listen to people speaking out against the authorities, even if they did it prettily, in verse. A question like that was tantamount to an accusation and could lead to trouble if put to the wrong person. As it was, the man turned and went back the way he had come, so Jason didn’t get a proper look at him and the man never got a look at Jason’s face, either. If he had, maybe he would have recognised him. Maybe not.

Jason waited a while longer but there was no sign of anyone else coming to the house, or anyone leaving. To be honest, he was slightly wary in case that ministry man came out of his house, saw Jason and thought he’d put that note through his letterbox, whatever it was. Better not risk a misunderstanding. It seemed that he would have to leave and return to his spy duties the following day.

He wondered how he should go about getting safe passage for someone if he wanted to help them leave London. He’d heard of people who’d planned to leave, who’d paid huge sums of money to traffickers. He’d subsequently heard that they had left. Unfortunately no one ever seemed to know whether those people had come out safely at the other end. Still, if the occupants of this pleasant suburban house should lead him to Jesmond’s family, he thought he would do all he could for them, including making enquiries about how they could find safe passage out of London. What did he have to lose? Even at his young age, he had more than enough money than he would ever be able to spend in his lifetime; he doubted he would live as long as Jesmond. There was something rather funny about minding so much about an old man dying, when so many much younger men did not survive. But perhaps it was his longevity that made it so sad. Jesmond was a venerable old geezer and he had survived this long, so it would have been much more fitting if he had simply died in his sleep after a heavy night on the vino.

Jason went home to see how much cash he could lay his hands on. He would ask around in dodgy places run by foreigners trapped in London after partition; the sort who went out of their way to maintain their separateness from other Londoners, as if it might count in their favour if ever the fences came down and the citizens of London were put on trial for their conduct towards each other. He went to the rooms above cafés run by Turkish people that he had heard you should visit for illegal transactions such as these, the sleazy men-only nightclubs in Soho run by Greeks, the men-only cinemas run by the Welsh, the transport companies run by Albanians and Scots. He would visit every mythically low-life venue he had ever heard of, and he would beg and bargain and plead, and somehow or other he would contrive to buy a family their freedom.