The Miracle Inspector (2 page)

‘I can’t stand another fucking minute of it. Is that clear enough for you? Is that unstoic enough? Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. How would we get to Cornwall?’

Was this a rhetorical question?

‘With your job, you must know. How could we get to Cornwall? If you really meant it, Lucas, I’d go with you tomorrow.’

That’s the thing. He didn’t really mean it. For some reason that was mysterious even to him, he had used what was effectively a seduction line after he’d already had sex with her twice and without any urgent wish to do it for a third time, since he had a headache and his cock was a bit sore. It was unstrategic of him. He hadn’t thought it through.

‘Or Wales. We could go to Wales.’ She wasn’t going to let it go.

‘I didn’t know you wanted to go to Wales.’

‘Anywhere but here. Imagine if we lived somewhere by the sea, with nice friends, no restrictions on where we went or what we did. Kids playing happily. Not wondering what I’d do if I gave birth to a girl because bringing a girl into this world is a curse.’

‘What would I do for work?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s the sort of thing you’ve got to worry about. How would I support us? Would they let us in to Cornwall?’

‘We’d find a way. As for being accepted – you’ve got money. If we didn’t ask for anything, only contributed…’

‘OK, look. Don’t get upset. Angela? Angela?’ She looked as if she would cry again. ‘Don’t get upset. I’ll look into it. I don’t know how these things work. We’ve got money but there are currency restrictions. What if it doesn’t have any value there?’

‘Find something that does.’

‘I’ll look into it.’

‘You’ve got friends in the Ministry.’

‘I have.’

‘You’ve got influence.’

‘Was that why you married me?’

‘What?’

‘Did you think I had something? Money, power? A way out? Because I don’t.’

‘I married you for your blue eyes.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wonder if you’re happy.’

‘Happy? No, I’m not happy. Jesus. Of course I’m not happy. But that’s hardly your fault. It’s just the way things are.’

‘You married me for my blue eyes?’

‘You’re sweet. I like the sex, the sex is great. Yeah, you’ve got money and the car and the house and all that. It’s not about that, though, is it.’

‘We could have a baby.’

No answer.

‘Are you bored?’

‘I’m not bored. I’m a prisoner. I want to leave here.’

‘With me?’

‘With you.’

‘I love you, Angela.’

‘I know.’

You can’t say to someone – to your own wife, after she has revealed that she is deeply unhappy – you can’t say ‘So, do you love me, then?’ It might sound needy. He had said ‘I love you’ to her. She should have said it back to him. It was accepted, to bat it back; a reflex. The table tennis of love. She didn’t actually have to mean it. It was comforting, that’s all.

‘What?’ Sometimes she looked at him as if she could hear his thoughts. Why couldn’t he hear hers?

‘Nothing. I love you, Angela.’

‘I know.’

He’d have to try harder if he wanted her to say she loved him and mean it. A good job at the Ministry, sex most nights when he came home, money in the bank, food on the table – it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to be happy.

‘Lucas?’

‘I was thinking about Cornwall. I was thinking about us driving to the beach – about you driving, if you wanted to – and lying there on the sand, looking up at the sky, without anyone asking us what we were doing.’

‘You really think it’s like that?’

‘A little house with a garden and a dog.’

‘You’re allowed dogs there?’

‘Why not? And a couple of kids. And friends. Having dinner with friends.’

‘I know the names I’d call my kids.’

‘Do you?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

‘We’ve never discussed it.’

‘You think I only think about the things that you discuss with me?’

‘I’m not… you make me sound like an ogre. I don’t make the rules. I don’t think it’s fair.’

‘Don’t you? Why don’t you try and change it, then?’

It had never occurred to him before now that he might be married to a woman who was a seditionist. He felt a sickening shock of fear. His mouth flooded with a bitter taste, his breathing quickened. He picked up a napkin and put it to his mouth and drooled saliva into it, discreetly, to get rid of the taste. He lived in a misogynistic, patriarchal society but still, a man wasn’t supposed to sit and drool on the floor in his own home. His hands felt damp and cold, and his fingers unresponsive, too weak to close in on themselves and make a fist around the napkin. A terrible thought had suddenly come into his head: what if she was a spy? What if she had been asked to say this by the Ministry? Where had he met her, anyway? What did he know about her, really? Maybe it was a test. Perhaps if he tried to have sex with her again? It might take her mind off it. Besides, she was probably feeling pretty horny with all this talk of Cornwall. He put his hands on her.

‘Lucas. Don’t do that. Are you listening to me? Are you saying we can go to Cornwall?’

‘Yes.’

She put her arms around him and kissed him, dryly and gratefully, the way he’d seen her kiss a bottle opener once, after she’d spent half the day looking for it.

And that was it. She wasn’t a spy, she was an unhappy girl and it was in his power to make her happy. He’d made a promise to her, the woman he loved more than anything in the world. All he needed now was a miracle, ha ha.

‘I meant to tell you,’ Angela said. ‘Jesmond was here.’

‘You meant to tell me?’

‘He turned up around lunchtime.’

‘You didn’t let him in?’

‘He was hungry, I had to give him a meal. He had a notebook full of old poems and stuff. Said you might want to look through it.’

‘I’m not interested.’

She attempted an impersonation of Jesmond’s slightly florid style of speaking: ‘“My dear, let me list all the things I wish I could have left with you: a small, shiny shell picked up on a beach on an outing with a woman I was in love with, a poem written for Matthew and Anna when Lucas was born, a photo of my mother, a postcard from my brother sent shortly before he was taken. I’ve lost them all along the way – all except this. Keep it safe for me. They’ll want it for the archive one day, when the situation improves.”’

‘Oh. The archive!’

‘You know he adores you.’

‘If “adores” means turning up unannounced twice a year, stinking and skint and trying to cadge food off you while I’m out at work.’

‘Don’t be an arse.’

But Lucas was uneasy; you never knew who was watching the house.

The next morning Lucas drove through near-empty streets in the sleek, air-conditioned car that had been allocated to him when he first took up his job at the Ministry. He did the same journey every morning, and he never gave a thought any more to the disused runways at Heathrow that were filled with rusting rows of confiscated vehicles, although a glimpse, through tinted windows, of some Ministry employee engaged in a menial task – sweeping leaves at the side of the road or counting daisies in the grass verges – occasionally prompted an appreciation of his privileged position. But that day he saw no one except a few women scurrying along the pavements in their billowing black garments, heads down. And he didn’t really notice them.

He parked the car right outside the Ministry building where he worked. It was difficult to imagine that the flaking yellow or red lines still visible along the edge of some of the streets he drove through, or the zebra stripes that spanned them, had once had some purpose other than purely decorative; that, like the coloured lights on poles at the junctions and the risibly childish symbols on the metal signs at the side of the road, they had once been used to control the flow of traffic and to advise drivers about how and where to park. He could no more imagine streets full of traffic than he could imagine skies full of planes.

He walked up the steps at the entrance to the Ministry building and into the marble lobby where he nodded to the security guard before walking to the lift which would take him to the fourth floor. His office was in the nicest of the half a dozen Ministry offices in central London which were now occupied by the many, many bureaucrats required to interpret London’s eccentric laws.

When things had started to go a bit crazy and security was at its height, people in London had grizzled and complained. There had been talk of rebellion and several unsuccessful uprisings. Everyone had been unhappy and so someone, some government advisor, had come up with the idea of devising a written constitution: by the people for the people. Brilliant. Except that the people who self-selected themselves for such tasks were not necessarily suited to them. The particular group of people who took on the role of writing the constitution turned out to be made up of idealists, imbeciles, anarchists and practical jokers. At least the nihilists hadn’t got involved – although that was only because they couldn’t be bothered. Each of the members of the committee tasked with writing the constitution had had an equal vote on what it should contain. Lucas didn’t like living in a dictatorship, as he did now, but he could see how democracy could be a bit of a burden when you were expected to obey the will of the people and the people turned out to be such a bunch of fools.

On the fourth floor, as Lucas walked down the long corridor towards his office, each brass plaque on each doorway he passed told something about the way London now functioned: Inspector of Cats, Inspector of Hedgerows & Grass Verges, Inspector of Inventions & Gadgets, Inspector of Women & Family Relationships. The departments ranged from the esoteric to the worthy to the downright silly and as he passed the fourth floor toilets, Lucas was amused to recall hearing that the reason there were two sets on every floor, one with urinals, one without, was because women had once been allocated toilets in every office in London; it seemed ludicrous. There was now a whole department tasked with agreeing what it meant to work outside the home – whether it was OK, for example, for women to work in other women’s homes or whether they were to be restricted to working in their own homes. There were all sorts of exceptions and loopholes which had to be debated, refined and then policed. It ought to have been easy to sort out but it wasn’t so straightforward once they got into the detail, especially as there were so many amateurs at senior level, appointed because of nepotism and favouritism, and because so many competent civil servants had been imprisoned as suspected terrorists or paedophiles or, occasionally, both. What about the homes of relatives? And what was a home, exactly? A family-owned restaurant, a nursing home, a children’s home? Was any one of these a home as set out in the constitution?

Last stop before Lucas’s office was the Inspector of Women’s Travel. It seemed as if every woman in London claimed somehow to be related to every other woman. It was the job of poor old Fielding next door to Lucas to keep track of which family relationships between women had been confirmed so that their visits to each other could be officially sanctioned. There was such a backlog that women criss-crossed all over London unofficially anyway, pending review of their cases. Men made the laws. Women set out to exploit the loopholes in them.

Finally Lucas reached the door to his office with its polished plaque proclaiming him Inspector of Miracles. He was still rather proud of the job, though a lot of it boiled down to sifting information. None of the other countries, principalities, nation states and sundry territories around the world had an Inspector of Miracles, so far as he knew. It might have been a way of incentivising him but he had been told that they watched his progress abroad with interest. If he should ever turn up evidence of a bona fide miracle, they’d surely want to renegotiate trade treaties and open a political dialogue with London.

Did anyone really expect him to uncover a miracle? He didn’t expect it himself. But the right to believe in miracles was enshrined in the constitution. And if a miracle is to be believed in collectively, then first it has to be found, next it has to be validated and finally it has to be presented to the people of London – and then the world – so that they can believe in it. All of this fell under his remit. It was a lot of work and potentially rather interesting despite the sifting, and it was why others were sometimes jealous of him.

‘What you up to, mate?’

He looked up to see Jones in the doorway and recoiled slightly. Jones was Head of Security and known to spy on his wife. You could go into his office to borrow a paperclip and get an eyeful of Joanna Jones in the shower, one of her pink nipples displayed in close-up on Jones’s computer screen like a small, sightless creature quenching its thirst in the rain.

‘Another face of the Virgin Mary in a flan. I’ve got to go to Earl’s Court this afternoon.’

‘Will you declare a miracle if it looks like the Virgin Mary?’

‘You know what, Jones? It would be a miracle if it didn’t, the trouble they go to, arranging the bits of leek and onion and all the rest of it into the shape of a face.’

Jones laughed at that one. Men found him funny. Jones laughed for just one second too long, in a slightly fawning way – though he might have been mocking him.

‘Why do they do it, if they know you’ll catch them out?’

‘They’re lonely, the women. I think they’re glad of the attention, some of them.’

‘You ever get reports from men that they’ve found a miracle?’

‘Yeah, course. I hear from all sorts, right across the board: every race, every class, every religion. But it’s predominantly women.’

‘And they ever, er, they ever come on to you? You know? They ever answer the door in their nightie and…’

‘No.’

‘No. I didn’t think so. You never know.’

‘Well, your wife wouldn’t and nor would mine.’

‘Honestly, mate. I don’t know about Joanna.’

Lucas shuffled some papers, to let Jones know that he was busy. But Jones didn’t want to leave. He said, ‘Have you heard? There’s something going on.’

‘With Joanna?’

‘No. Troops on the move, prisoners coming in. I think we’re in for a bit of trouble.’

‘The only ones who’d want to do anything about it are the women – wives, sisters, mothers, daughters of the men who get taken away, and they’ve never succeeded in getting a man released from prison. They can’t even protest legally since the Richmond gathering was quashed. That wasn’t anything to do with you, Jones? It was pretty brutal.’

‘Let’s be realistic – it’s the clamp-down on miscreants that ensures the continuing prosperity of this fair city.’

‘Because they’re terrorists?’

‘Because their assets are confiscated and never returned.’

‘If they bring in more prisoners, where will they put them? The camps?’

‘Camps? What have you heard about camps?’

‘Secret long-term prison camps where they stay so long that half the inmates become feminised. And they run on treadmills all day to keep London’s electricity going.’

‘Hahaha. Hahaha. That’s a new one. Very energy efficient. Might suggest it at the next council meeting. What else have you heard?’

‘Torture. Executions underground; the cremated remains of the prisoners thrown into the rivers that flow under the city and carried out to the sea so they can never be identified.’

‘Just keep your nose clean. You don’t ever want to find out what they do.’

‘Yeah, OK.’

‘You need to think about Angela.’ Jones seemed anxious. That was odd. ‘They’re talking about rounding them up for their own good.’

‘The wives?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where would they put them?’

‘Let’s hope it’s just talk.’

‘They’d put them in a detention centre somewhere and we’d have to queue up outside just to fuck them? You wonder what it would take to get this place back on track.’

‘I know damn well what it would take,’ said Jones.

Lucas didn’t. He looked at Jones and saw his eyes were glittering.

‘Mate, it would take a bloody miracle.’