The Miracle Inspector (20 page)

‘A few people have been to visit me here,’ said Lucas to his mother. ‘Why didn’t my father come?’

‘He did,’ said Anna. ‘You’ve been in a pretty bad way: feverish, hallucinating. Perhaps you didn’t know him when he was here.’

‘Angela’s the one person I don’t want to see. I hope she’s safe somewhere. I don’t want her to show up here.’

‘I know.’

‘You think we should never have talked about going to Cornwall?’

‘Dreams create possibilities,’ Anna said. ‘When you dream, you launch something that goes out into the world, and if you don’t go with it, it’ll go without you.’

‘So if you don’t dream, everything stays the same?’

‘You can’t ever have that. It isn’t just your dreams, there’s other people’s.’

‘I did something silly. There was this woman, Joanna Jones…’

‘We’ve all done something silly at some point, Lucas. Don’t worry about it. You like the picture?’

He was worried about Angela. Where was she now?

Honeysuckle Cottage was a lovely-looking place. There was a little gate that clinked as Angela opened it, and a path that led up to the cottage through a slightly overgrown garden. There was something that registered as not quite right about it as she walked towards it but she was so tired and achey, all she could think about was getting inside and introducing herself to Mandy, and having a bath and falling in to bed and sleeping all night.

She rang the doorbell. No answer. Then she realised what was wrong about it. There were no lights on in the cottage. The place didn’t look derelict but it did look deserted. She walked up to a window and stared in at the empty interior. She tried the gate that led to the back garden and might have given her access to the back door but it was locked.

She went to the front door again, she rang the doorbell and knocked the dolphin-shaped brass knocker and she banged with her fists on the door. If Mandy had only popped to the shops, she would wait. But there was dust on the front door. Leaves had blown in piles against the doorstep. It looked as if, wherever Mandy had popped to, she would not be coming back until the bed and breakfast season started again and custom picked up a bit – which might take years, not months. At any rate, however long it took, it would be too long to wait.

She went round and tried all the windows at the front, in case one of them was not secured properly and she could get in – or squeeze Christina in, and get her to come round and open the front door – and they could make themselves at home. She didn’t want to break a window; that was no way to repay a friend of Dave’s, after he had been so helpful. Mandy would have helped them, if she’d been here. Angela was sure of it because Dave had been so sure. She wished she had asked him more about himself – asked him anything, in fact – so that she could reflect on it on the long journey ahead and take comfort in the things that he was sure of and be sure about them herself.

It was cold. There seemed little point in lying down to sleep in the front garden of the cottage. It was probably better to keep walking. It would keep them warm and take them nearer to their destination.

They walked, hand in hand. Sometimes she lifted Christina on to her back and carried her, sometimes she had to put her down and get her to walk by herself. The child was almost delirious with tiredness. It amounted to mistreatment. She couldn’t think why they had ever thought it would be a good idea to bring the child along. And yet, without Christina, she would not have been nearly so well-treated herself, and she would not now be motivated to keep going on this terrible journey. So, although it sounded slightly dramatic to say it, she felt that Christina had saved her life.

Being on the moor was like wandering in a lost land where dinosaurs roamed. It was like going back to the beginning of time. Her legs were chafing, she had blisters on her feet, she was thirsty. She was staying alive for the child, otherwise she’d have been tempted to lie down and stay lying down. She walked slowly, singing, counting aloud, the child bumping on her back. They had very little sleep. It was important to keep marching on. Sometimes she saw a landmark and she was sure she had seen it before. Sometimes she was part of the scenery; she was a tree, walking. Still she kept going forward.

Sometimes she talked aloud. Sometimes she carried on a conversation with Lucas in her head. If there were dangerous animals at large, she never saw one. She saw red deer, sheep, a few ponies. Once, while she knelt to collect water from a stream, she had a glimpse of a giraffe in the distance, nibbling at leaves in the tree tops, that was all. Poor thing, you’re a long way from home, she thought. Whether she was communicating with the giraffe or it was communicating with her, she couldn’t tell.

She thought about Jesmond and the woman he had loved. She thought about her parents and Maureen. She thought about Lucas, of course. Sometimes she talked to them, sometimes she turned ideas about them over in her head, almost like a meditation. It made no difference – even to Christina, apparently – whether she spoke aloud or not, and it began to make no difference to her. She kept expecting to see Maureen. It seemed entirely possible that Maureen had not been shot or taken by immigration and deported but was wandering on the moor, not too far away. Angela imagined running into her: ‘What a lovely surprise!’ She would give Maureen the one remaining satsuma (or had Christina eaten it, she couldn’t remember, she was too tired to check), they would put their arms around each other, they would put their heads together to make a plan. They would draw strength from each other.

The effect of walking on the moor, lost and half out of her mind with tiredness, was like putting a kaleidoscope to her memories. Several people fractured into dozens, then the mechanism changed again and all the people she had ever met and cared about merged into one companion walking beside her, urging her and Christina on. The little child was such a light weight to carry, and so quiet, Angela wondered sometimes if she might be dead.

She walked through a field of purple lupins. She couldn’t tell whether she was seeing the lupins or imagining them, or remembering them. She liked blue flowers: delphiniums, cornflowers, hyacinths, hydrangeas, bluebells, irises, violets, lupins. The sort of blue flowers whose colours are shown up most vividly next to yellow or gold. Then, as if she’d made it happen by thinking about it, she saw something, some patches of gold moving about among the blue flowers.

As she got closer, she saw that it was a wounded giraffe lying on the ground, one foreleg blasted off just under the knee. There was a smoky, gunpowder smell near where the giraffe lay and a sweet smell of blood, as if someone had let off a firework in a butcher’s shop. There was no sign of hunters, so perhaps it had triggered a primitive trap, or stepped on unexploded ordinance from ranges used nearby for practice by the British army before partition. Angela got close to the poor, wounded creature, saw its ears, shaped like the velvet flower spikes on a lupin, saw its eyes, big and frightened, like a cow’s. It shuddered and twitched. She felt she ought to put it out of its misery. But how? Take a rock and club it to death? She wasn’t sure that Christina would understand if she saw her do that. Poison it? Smother it? She had no poison with her. She had no pillow, either. Should she pinch its nostrils together, clamp its jaw? She had no weapons, conventional or otherwise. Wasn’t it customary to slay a dragon by piercing its eye with a sword? At fifteen feet tall, surely the giraffe was almost the same size as a dragon. Angela had camping cutlery with her somewhere in Maureen’s rucksack, a knife and a spork, but couldn’t imagine doing the giraffe to death with those implements, she and Christina working together to stab it through a big heart that was roughly the same size as a man’s head and just as heavy. And how long would it take to dig a grave for a giraffe using only a spork? She couldn’t say. Couldn’t even estimate it.

The giraffe smelled like horses, it was mooing, it was covered in sweat. Angela was worried about getting too close in case it should kick at them with its hooves, thrash about or rear up and fall again and crush them. She didn’t want to look at it suffering but she forced herself to do it. She put her arms around its long, dinosaur neck and lay down next to it, Christina beside her. Without the benefit of a formal education she had no idea whether anyone else had ever hypothesised that the long-necked plesiosaurs on display in museums might be giraffe skeletons that had been put back together wrongly, and assigned drab green skins and small, mean eyes instead of the beautiful reticulated gold patterned hide and the big, kind eyes they had been born with.

How long could she lie there holding the creature’s neck? If only Christina’s tears could heal the creature’s wounds. She willed it to haul itself to its feet again and lope three-legged across the moor, like a fashionably upholstered milking stool. But it would no more do that than grow wings and fly them all to Cornwall, wisps of clouds clinging round its head like a silly bonnet. The giraffe had died.

Angela stood up, picked Christina up, kept walking. She didn’t look back, whether because she was frightened of seeing crows pecking at the giraffe’s wounds, or whether because she might have seen that there were no lupins, there was no giraffe, just the moor, bleak and boring and endless, stretching out behind her as it stretched out in front of her.

In her mind, she had given up. But her body kept on going. She knew it because she heard the swish as her feet walked through the long, damp grass, the pretty little wild yellow and purple flowers: yellow pimpernel, cowslip, lesser celandine, wild parsnip, archangel, birdsfoot trefoil, the mallow, the yarrow, the speedwell, sorrel and clover, the bracken, the heather, the grasses, the butterflies. She had never seen so many butterflies.

Anna Gray was putting the finishing touches to the project in Lucas’s prison cell. She had painted the doorway, the lovely view through it into the countryside. Now she was drawing in the details, the pretty little yellow and purple wild flowers, the bracken, the heather, the butterflies. In the distance, she had painted a woman and a child. And a sign, ‘Welcome to Cornwall’.

‘Are you ready, Lucas?’ Anna said. ‘You know what day it is?’

‘My birthday?’

‘It’s such a strange thing, giving birth. I’m sorry you’ll never experience it. It’s the end of something, the start of something. Hurts like hell, mind you.’

They had burst Lucas’s left eardrum. It was bleeding. It hurt like hell.

Lucas looked through the doorway and saw the woman in the painting. ‘Is it Angela?’ When he spoke, the woman seemed to turn towards him. The child too.

He was frightened that they would run towards him. He shouted, ‘No! Keep going. You’re not safe until you get there.’ He was very weak. ‘Is it Angela?’ he asked again.

‘Why don’t you step through the doorway,’ Anna said. ‘You can go and meet her, if you like.’

So he did.

Jason stood on the stage in the crowded underground venue. He blinked several times. It was an affectation, a way of suggesting that he had just woken up, that he existed only in the presence of his audience and the rest of the time, he slept. He had a handsome goatee beard, much admired but never imitated. He stroked the beard once or twice, as if his chin functioned like a soap dispenser in a public toilet, and that by plucking at it with his fingers, the words required to recite his poem would be deposited in the palm of his hand. He hooked his thumb into the pocket of his jeans and spoke softly without notes:

The Disappeared

Our fathers who artlessly

protested the erosion of their freedom;

sitting around, singing songs, writing

poems, and sometimes even visiting

the theatre. While behind the scenes,

grey government mice nibbled

at the rights in the constitution, disconnecting

the cables and burning the place down.

Like children making snowflakes to decorate

a classroom, the mice men took a million snips at the paperwork,

then held up the results to show the holes. Proudly.

There are no more classrooms. The curtains came down on

the theatre, and stayed down. Songs suppressed,

freedom curtailed, poetry driven underground.

If you arrest everyone as a terrorist or a paedophile,

eventually there’s no one left. And while the considerable burden of keeping

elderly people in care homes has gone away, enriching the welfare state,

there’s no one left to educate the children. Where are the wise men? Where

are the women? Who is there to ensure the welfare of the state?

Our fathers taken away. Our mothers fading away.

Some families fleeing to the promised lands, to Cornwall, Liverpool,

Scotland, Australia and the rest. No one returns.

Not so much as a postcard to help us gauge

whether the escape has been a success. We just have to guess.

After partition, parting. What can we do to protest?

The protester’s life is invariably cut short by a misplaced

full stop. I wish. I wish I could. But what?