The Miracle Inspector (16 page)

The man who was interviewing Lucas today had slack, grey skin and dark patches under his eyes. He looked as if he was made of moon dust. Not the bright and beautiful fairytale kind that might make him look as if he had been carved from a block of marble like a Rodin sculpture. It was more prosaic than that, closer to real life. The man looked as though he had been moulded from crumbly, volcanic rock that would dirty your hands when you touched him. Lucas felt he could have drawn a hand across the man’s face and used the grey ash he collected on his fingertips to write HELP! on the wall behind him. But who would come?

‘There’s only a few of us here,’ Lucas said. ‘Is this a prison for the elite?’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Is it?’

‘Perhaps it is.’

The interrogator had a small bag in front of him, somewhere in size between a pencil case and the sort of fancy wash bag Lucas might have taken on holiday to an expensive hotel, if he had ever been on holiday. The interrogator began to open it.

‘You and your wife were planning on going away somewhere?’ the interrogator enquired. It was a hairdresser’s question. Lucas half expected the man to produce a comb and one of those pairs of silver scissors with a specially-moulded thumb grip from the bag, and give him a quick trim to smarten him up before the trip.

But he didn’t.

Lucas tried to think of something that would take him away. The portal. The door. The door or the portal, which was it? Never mind, he had to think of Angela.

By the time dinner was over, Fenella seemed to have grown quite fond of them. ‘I’m sorry to have to turn you over to Natalia,’ she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sure you’ll like her – everybody does. She’s got that wonderful Cockney sense of humour.’

‘How much do we owe you?’ said Maureen, opening her handbag.

‘Your currency’s no good here. Worthless. It’s the trade restrictions. Don’t worry about it. Natalia’s going to help you to integrate and show you how you can make a living here. It’s all funded by the taxpayer. You can stay as long as you like.’

‘We’re not planning on staying,’ Angela said.

Maureen said, ‘It’s not that we don’t like Slough.’

‘Don’t tell me – you’re heading for Cornwall. What is it with Cornwall? Everyone thinks it’s beaches, ice cream, walks along the cliffs, fresh fish. You do realise the place has terrible social problems? There’s very low employment. What you gonna do? Get a job collecting seaweed? You’re much better off here. When your papers come through, you can get a job in Eye Tee.’

Angela would have loved a job in a tea shop, a little frilly pinny, a pad to write the orders on, cucumber sandwiches served with the crusts cut off and home-made cakes or jam and scones. She’d seen it in the films on TV. It was so old-fashioned, it was something Jesmond might have written a poem about.

‘No,’ said Fenella. ‘Not High Tea. Eye Tee. Computers. Mind, it’s very well-paid.’

Angela wanted to like Natalia but she found it tough going from the moment she opened her door to them and said, ‘Welcome to the Fugee Farm.’

She showed them their room upstairs and then took them into the sitting room where she handed Christina the most extraordinary toy Angela had ever seen; it was a small-scale slut. ‘A Bratz doll,’ explained Natalia. ‘They’re all the rage here.’

‘It looks just like you,’ said Angela. But she was keen to throw off the conditioning of her upbringing and if a close appreciation of their host’s bosoms, bottom and thighs jiggling under clingy, revealing clothes was going to help set Angela free, so be it.

Natalia did her best to make them comfortable. First, she poured wine for Angela and Maureen. Next, she painted their fingernails and toenails with expensive varnish which she said was the latest fashion and very difficult to get hold of.

‘The dark chocolate cherry colour will mark you out as ladies with attitude and style,’ she said firmly. ‘And it’s long-lasting.’

‘Ladies!’ said Angela.

‘Where we come from,’ said Maureen, ‘you’re a girl until you’re eighteen, and after that you’re a woman – unless you sell yourself for money, in which case you’re a lady.’

‘Don’t forget,’ said Natalia, warming the bottle of nail varnish by rubbing it briskly between the palms of her hands, ‘I came from there too.’ She grabbed hold of Angela’s right hand and pressed it flat on the table, then she opened the nail varnish by gripping the plastic top securely between her teeth while twisting the glass bottle anti-clockwise with her right hand.

Angela didn’t really want to have her nails painted. But now that she was emancipated, everyone she met seemed to insist that she do something she didn’t want to do.

‘C’mere, darling,’ Natalia said to Christina after she had finished with Maureen and Angela, drawing the child towards her. ‘Come and have some varnish on yer fingers and toes.’

‘No,’ said Maureen. ‘Not for Christina.’

‘It’s alright,’ said Natalia. ‘I don’t mind.’ She held the child’s wrists in turn, loosely, and drew the brush from cuticle to tip ten times.

‘Tell you what,’ Natalia said once the varnish had dried, while they were having another glass of wine and Christina was playing with her unsuitable toy, ‘come and have a look at this.’

She took them to a computer screen that had been set up on a side table and switched on the machine. They’d had a lesson in how to integrate, and now Angela assumed they were about to get a demonstration of how to earn a living in Slough, possibly by getting a job in Eye Tee. But when the screen came to life, Natalia showed them page after page of photos of men and women touting themselves in an online brothel.

Natalia brought up a photo of herself on screen. She said, ‘Come and see what I’ve said about me. It’s s’posed to be what yer mates would say if they had to describe you to a fella. You read it fer us, Ange.’

‘
She
likes
long walks in the rain.’

‘
You got to have one sporty element,’ said Natalia.

‘She loves red wine, oranges, sunshine and elephants. Her favourite food is lasagne. She’s got a great sense of humour. She’s thoughtful and kind. She enjoys shopping for handbags and shoes – but watch out, fellas! When it comes to fashion, she can be bit anal.’
Angela shuddered at this. ‘
She’s an independant lady–’

‘I think you need an e for independent,’ Maureen said.

‘Maureen used to be a journalist,’ said Angela. But Natalia looked wary and slightly upset.

‘Actually I noticed a few men on there who said they were looking for an independant woman,’ said Maureen. ‘Perhaps a is better.’

Angela continued reading:
‘She’s an independant lady who
needs a cuddle sometimes – and she likes to give cuddles, too. Will you take a chance and let her be your cuddle dispenser?’

‘Well,’ Natalia asked. ‘What d’yer think?’

Angela lay next to Maureen in bed. Christina was on a blow-up mattress on the floor beside them. It was about 2 o’clock in the morning and, after a few hours of deep, drunken sleep, Angela was awake and feeling troubled. She was dehydrated, cold and shivery. Her heart was beating slightly faster than normal, a hurried, shallow flutter in her chest. Her head ached. She was piecing things together in her mind.

‘I’m sorry to have to turn you over to Natalia,’ Fenella had said, tears in her eyes. ‘She’ll show you how to make a living here.’ Natalia had called this place a Fugee Farm. What was she farming, exactly?

Angela examined the evidence; the sexual doll and what Natalia called a ‘dating site’, which she had at first assumed to be an online brothel. What if her first impression had been the correct one? Angela knew what was going on, she’d heard about it often enough in London, although she’d always thought the reports were silly scare stories, promulgated to keep women afraid and locked inside their homes: they were being groomed.

She got up, woke Maureen and tried to wake Christina as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb their host. Maureen lay there, perplexed, taking a bit too long to come to.

‘We have to leave,’ said Angela, hurriedly packing their things into their bags. She didn’t even stop to use the loo.

It wasn’t until they had walked for at least half a mile that Angela explained her fears that they were being groomed as sex workers, their services to be advertised online on the site Natalia had shown them that evening. Maureen didn’t scold her or try to reassure her. She nodded a few times and they kept walking. They had burnt their bridges, after all.

They travelled west across the city. When they got to the ‘Welcome to Slough’ sign (there was no ‘goodbye’ sign, perhaps its inhabitants thought no one would ever want to leave), Angela squatted and peed. Even if the sign makers of Slough didn’t think that anyone would ever leave, the fence makers knew better. They had constructed a seven-foot-tall metal turnstile out of horizontal, spiked bars spaced about six inches apart, which turned one way only, allowing users to egress. Maureen, Angela and Christina egressed.

Lucas was thinking about his mother. He was probably not the only man in prison thinking about his mother, although the other men were presumably thinking about their own mothers, not about Anna Gray.

His father had given him a locket decorated with pearls and chips of rubies, which had once belonged to her. It had a photo of Lucas aged about three or four years old in it, and the design was very feminine, so he’d had no use for it – who wears a photo of himself around his neck? He had given it to Angela when they married.

His mother had been big on choices. You follow a certain path, the choice you make dictates what happens to you. She didn’t like the notion that everything is preordained and it doesn’t matter much what you do because you’ll reach the same goal in the end. She had accepted, of course, that we all die in the end – all except the disappeared. He was one of them now.

He wondered if his mother could have got to Cornwall. Hadn’t his father told him she had run away?

‘She was painting portals into other worlds? That’s so cool,’ said Rolf when Lucas told him about Anna.

‘It was an art project, that’s all. She had a good imagination.’

‘You thought of using it, in there?’

‘I don’t know if I can remember any of the pictures clearly enough.’

‘Concentrate, it’ll come back to you. Gather all the things you remember about her in one place in your mind, like making a shrine. It’ll help.’

‘Is that what you do?’

‘No. I told you. I go in with my shadow. Then when they start in, I get up, quick as I can, whoosh, and leave him behind.’

‘Where do you go? Outside?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You fly?’

‘Yeah. But not the whooshing, swooping kind you get when you dream about flying. Not even the leg-kicking, splashing, swimming kind. I feel the outside air on my skin and I mingle with it, like smoke drifting up above a chimney towards the clouds. It’s not mechanical. It’s transcendental, I’m hardly aware of it. I’m like… I’m aware I’ve done it, after.’

‘What if you travel too far away and leave him behind? That’s got to be risky.’

‘Risk, risk, risk, risk, risk, risk, risk.’ Rolf was so het up he was making a sound like a flustered hostess at a dinner party, grating a nearly-overlooked nutmeg just in time to garnish the spinach mousse. ‘You’re so concerned with risk. How did you ever get put in here?’

Lucas stared at his friend. Rolf was thinner than ever. The skin that stretched over his skull was dry and delicate, as if he was dead already and his shadow had climbed inside the cadaver and was wearing him like a monkey suit.

Lucas said, ‘Doesn’t he get resentful, being left behind?’

‘They don’t feel pain like we do.’

‘Have you ever come face to face with each other? Would you even recognise him?’

Rolf rallied a bit. ‘Imagine a sepia photo of a man printed on baking paper, crunched up and put in a pocket. Yeah? Maybe the picture shows him walking towards you, or it’s a face, or a shoulder and the back of the head as he runs away. Anyways, it’s a figure in motion, an image taken at random. Most likely it’s blurred. Take the piece of paper from your pocket, smooth out the creases, look at it. Close up it’s a page of faded dots of a similar colour: disparate, yeah? Meaningless. But hold it further away, it starts to look like a man. I know him, bro, even when he’s separate from me.’

‘Sounds like one of the miracles I used to investigate.’

‘Nah. We’ve all got a shadow. Though who’s to say if you’re born with one or if they’re little dark demons that attach to you when you come out into the world, and they grow with you. You know? It’s a way for them to live, yeah? They go where you go.’

‘In which case ours won’t be very happy, being in here.’

‘You’re not kidding.’

‘Ever worry yours might try and escape? Leave you in here. If you can separate, it must work both ways.’

‘I’m working on a strategy to address that. I been perfecting a technique of sharing energy. He grows more substantial, I become slighter. He gets a better chance of surviving without me, I get a better chance to escape.’

‘Well, look at you. It seems to be working.’

‘You wanna try?’

‘I don’t think it’ll work if I don’t believe in it. Sorry.’

‘Nah, that’s OK.’

‘You discussed it with anyone else in here?’

‘Not many. They don’t stay long.’

‘Where do they go, after here?’

Rolf took a while to respond. It seemed he was trying to work out whether Lucas already knew the answer. ‘Maybe they go somewhere better,’ he said eventually.

Lucas would never know whether his friend had managed to drain away just enough of himself to separate permanently from his shadow, slip out through the bars and fly away free. After that night, he never saw Rolf – or his shadow – again.