The Miracle Inspector (6 page)

Jesmond was standing on a low stage in an underground venue where he’d been invited to give a reading of his poetry. He was rocking from side to side, like a mother trying to comfort her baby. He was wearing black jeans and a black jumper. He had the thumb of one hand hooked into the pocket of his jeans. The other hand held a glass of red wine, which sloshed about a bit but didn’t spill, despite the gentle rocking, because his hand acted like a gimble, his elbow the hinge.

Jesmond unhooked his free hand and wiped it through his hair from the crown to the tip of his curls, then smiled, as if verifying the length and vigour of his wiry grey hair had reassured him in some way. He took a sip from the glass of wine, then put it down.

‘Friends,’ he said. ‘Friends.’

People stopped talking and looked around. Strictly speaking, most of them weren’t friends at all, but a collection of strangers who formed part of his audience. But as he was standing on stage, calling out to them, they had little choice but to look at him, and by doing so, it was as if they accepted that they
were
his friends. By such subtle little tricks, he managed to get his audience on side before he had even started.

He was there to read his poetry. But he didn’t read it in a monotone from a piece of paper held in his hand, as some poets did. He performed it, from memory. Whether or not that was for practical reasons – no paper meant no evidence to be seized in case of a raid – it nevertheless meant he could make eye contact, he could give the appearance of speaking from the heart, could even seem to be making it up especially for those listening, there and then, on the spot. Jesmond had discovered that the best way to appear sincere was to be sincere. When he performed, he really, really meant it. And that’s how he could cry, and make others cry, when he said the things he did.

So far as his poetry was concerned, it was a bit hit and miss. But that’s poetry for you. People were rarely disappointed as they hadn’t necessarily come to hear his poetry, they had come to participate in a minor act of rebellion. They had come to see a famous man give a fine performance of his work, just for them. He made no money from it. Some said he did it for idealistic reasons, some said he did it because he craved the attention. What people believed had little to do with Jesmond; it was a reflection of their general point of view.

Looking at him, hearing him call out at the beginning, ‘Friends, friends,’ you would think he would go on to command the room in an almost military style. He always refused to use a microphone. But he spoke very softly – another trick. His audience had to lean forward to listen. They had to keep very still and silent to be sure to make out all the words. Even the rustle of an anorak was enough to distort what he was saying. There were no pause or rewind buttons on a live performance, as his young audience came to appreciate as they strained to listen to him. They had to pay attention if they wanted to follow what was being said.

Jesmond was beautiful the way an antique is beautiful, just by being old. The young people looked at him and thought, ‘I wish he was my father.’ Not because he was a poet and that was cool, but because their own fathers had disappeared, died or were in prison and he was about the right age to step in as a substitute.

The young people stood about in their jeans and jumpers and looked up at Jesmond. They were men, mostly, although the androgynous look was very popular these days and so you could never be sure. Later, when they discussed his performance and his appearance, more than one would remark that his head seemed to be square in shape. Jesmond had overheard it said so often, he’d begun to think his head must resemble a novelty watermelon grown by the Japanese, which it did not. He was an old man with a large jaw, big fleshy ears and grey hair, that was all. But the young people weren’t used to seeing old men. Jesmond seemed as ancient and mysterious to them as the giant leatherback turtles Jesmond had seen on a beach in Malaysia in his youth. The turtles returned to the same beaches, year after year, to lay their eggs in the moonlight, remnants from the dinosaur age. Seeing those turtles’ eyes wet with tears, Jesmond had thought that the turtles were crying with emotion, just as the woman he’d loved said she had done when she gave birth. More practical observers attributed the tears to the practicalities of laying eggs on a beach, and the need to keep the sand out of the mother turtles’ eyes.

As he read his poetry, tears were sliding down Jesmond’s cheeks tonight. Many of the young people cried with him. If he had yawned a lot on stage, might they have yawned, also?

‘Rise up,’ Jesmond urged them as he reached the chorus of his most famous poem, published in a book entitled
This Faerie England
. ‘Rise up and be free.’ And when they heard him say it, in that dark basement that he had visited at some risk to his personal freedom, it seemed to most of the audience that it was the least they could do.

Unfortunately, there were some who interpreted the chorus as a ‘Simon Says’ moment of light entertainment. They tried to show their approval of the concept of rising up by actually rising up, getting to their feet or, if they were already standing, going up on the balls of their feet, lifting their hands and joining in with his words. The most defiant thing about it was the way they pointed their chins upwards. If Jesmond had asked them to shake their booty, they might have done that. There were some people, Jesmond was always left reflecting, who probably didn’t deserve to be set free.

His eyes searched the audience. He craved the company of women at these things. It was difficult to tell who was who, of course. That skinny ‘indie band’ look was very popular, and Jesmond could understand why, but still he didn’t like it; at any moment, one expected them to pick up a guitar and sing some nasal lament that referenced brand names – or, at least, one would if this were thirty years earlier. The other thing that was interesting was the craze for thinness. Everyone had worried so much that a trend towards obesity that had began about thirty years ago would continue and continue until everyone could only waddle. But each generation rebels against the last, and this one was no different. Besides, lives were at stake. Adding weight to a body was like a litmus test for gender. Fat went on different areas for women than it did for men. Fat betrayed those who wanted to keep that kind of information hidden so they could go out at night. So the young stayed slim. Young men grew their hair. Young women kept theirs short. Jeans and loose tops were popular, as were scarves around the throat, to disguise the Adam’s apple. Not wearing a beard was an act of rebellion for the men, a way of showing solidarity with women.

Jesmond didn’t have a beard but then no one would mistake him for a woman. He was a grizzled, old, ugly man. His teeth were yellow, like the keys on a disused piano in a church hall, the kind that would have been played during amateur dramatic rehearsals and ballet classes in the old days. The yellowing of Jesmond’s teeth was attributable to his advancing age, his use of tobacco and red wine, not disuse. But perhaps the young people, with their shiny white teeth, connected the state of his teeth to cultural neglect. There were no more ballet classes, no little girls in pink leotards doing their jetés and pliés, and there were no more poets like Jesmond.

He was surprised to see someone he thought he recognised in the audience. An elderly lyricist who had once written for jazz musicians, a grande dame of the poetry scene. Or at least she had been, a quarter of a century ago. He hoped she wouldn’t recognise him. She herself was not instantly recognisable. She was folded in on herself like an envelope, she had a deeply lined face and she was wearing a turban in kingfisher colours. Perhaps there was some performance art aspect to her outfit: she had come as a living painting? ‘The Princess’ they used to call her, or sometimes ‘La Princesse’ because she was European and rather imposing. He hoped she wouldn’t stay to hear his set. She was the superior poet and she knew it. He couldn’t have said he actually wanted the police to burst in and arrest her for being out after the curfew – for one thing, they’d probably have taken half the audience with them if they did. But an incident like that would solve his problems.

He seemed to remember kissing her once. Did they have sex? He couldn’t remember. He only remembered a cherry liqueur taste to her mouth, while at the same time acknowledging it was absurd, an indulgence of old age to coat a memory with such a thing. He felt the saliva glands at the sides of his mouth prick at the memory – the false memory – of that cherry sweetness.

But she knew him. She could see him looking at her. She pushed her stick into the ground. A stick. Christ, how much time had passed since they’d seen each other? She stood up and walked over to him.

She had always treated him with condescension, as he remembered it. But now she was smiling graciously, tears in her eyes.

‘How you people have suffered. You were always a great man, Jesmond. But to do this…’

A poetry reading? He searched her crepy old face for a hint that she was mocking him. Or perhaps she was merely insincere, like one of those annoying people who have been brought up to be polite, the sort who used to come round to his house for a spaghetti Bolognese in student days and gush on and on and on about how delicious it was and ask for the recipe. But she was sincere, moved. The tears sparkling in her eyes proclaimed it, and the coppery crème eyeshadow glittering in the folds of her eyelids complimented the tears very nicely, in a slightly gaudy way. Her whole eye area was like a muted indoor firework display. He could have plucked her eyeballs from the sockets and strung them up and set them twirling with the tears still on them and they could have served as disco balls for fairies or other tiny creatures in some miniature dance hall.

Her fingers were splayed sideways by arthritis, so when she held them up, it looked as if she was about to make a kooky, self-deprecating joke. He took hold of her hands to pull her towards him, and he kissed her and – extraordinary miracle – he got a faint taste of cherry on her lips, something artificially sweet and fiery. It must be some lozenge she habitually ate, and had been sourcing and sucking on for more than twenty-five years. Extraordinary. He ran his tongue along his lips. Unless it was lip gloss? Did women of her age wear lip gloss or had that fallen out of fashion, linked to a time of pop stars and triviality? She noticed him smiling. She nodded once, very slowly. What was she acknowledging, exactly? She might have thought the kiss reminded him of their earlier tryst. She looked relieved, touched, grateful, as if she had remained young in one man’s heart. He couldn’t ask about the cherry taste, it would have been unchivalrous. She would go home tonight and look in the mirror before she rubbed the cream on her face to take off her make-up, and she would think, ‘You’ve still got it, girl.’ Whatever else he was, he was enough of a gentleman to let her have her dreams. After all, she had restored his to him with one kiss. It seemed that his other sugar-coated – cherry-coated, if you will – memories might not be the foolish reminiscences of an old man. Maybe she (not The Princess but
she
) had loved him as much as he remembered she had.

He suddenly felt flustered, wished he had not entrusted the letters to Lucas’s wife. What had he been thinking? He always used to swear that he would not part with them until he died. It was only recently that he had come to see it as absurd that he was hoarding letters from
himself
. But he had come to a decision – he shivered, felt almost a superstition about it – he would return to Lucas’s the following day and ask to have the journal back. Lucas wouldn’t have read them, anyway (at any rate, he hoped not, because if so, he might have guessed the identity of the woman Jesmond had been writing to) so he might as well keep them with him. The memories would die with him, when the time came.

Angela looked so lovely when Lucas got home. She’d been baking something. She had flour on her nose. The wife in his imagination and the woman he was married to were never quite the same person. Maybe it was OK to fantasise about other women because even when you fantasised about your own wife, you weren’t really fantasising about her, you were fantasising about a fantasy.

She seemed cheerful today, not so beaten down as she’d seemed in recent weeks. He was cheerful, too. She noticed it.

‘Your miracle people not so annoying as usual?’

‘I met this woman; she used to read the news on TV.’

‘You’re kidding? How old is she?’

‘She’s not so old. I reckon she’d have been quite young back then. She was just starting out, she said.’

‘What’s she do now, then?’

‘She takes care of her kid. This disabled kid.’

Angela looked sad at that. Shit. So now he couldn’t ask her about getting pregnant because she’d be thinking of the kid.

Look, nobody was saying they didn’t want a disabled kid. Nobody was saying that. It’s just you didn’t want your kid to have anything less than another person’s kid, and that included speech and mobility and all the rest of it. The thing was, with antenatal care the way it was in London – i.e. non-existent – infant mortality and death in childbirth and previously avoidable complications leading to disability in the child, they were all a very real possibility. People started to question whether it was a good idea to bring a child into the world. First, because it might be a short journey with a sad ending. Second, because if the kid did make it past their first year, they might not have a very happy life, especially if they were a girl.

‘Did you mean it, what you said?’ he asked her. ‘About doing something about it if you were pregnant and you had a girl?’ Some people smothered the kid at birth if it was a girl. It was frowned on but people did it.

‘I never said that.’ She was shocked.

‘No, but you said something about having a girl – not wanting one.’

‘Did I? You must have misunderstood.’

He was having the conversation he hadn’t wanted to have. ‘Let’s not talk about it. What’s for tea? I’m hungry.’

‘I’m making a pie.’

‘Ooh, lovely.’

She wasn’t an idiot, though. She wouldn’t leave it. ‘I didn’t say I’d kill our child if it was a girl.’

‘No.’

‘What made you say it, then?’

‘There was this girl today, she was disabled.’

‘You think I’d kill a child because it was disabled?’ She screeched the words. She was incredulous.

‘No, I’m not saying that.’

‘What then?’

‘No, there was this girl – this lovely disabled girl – and I thought “I wish we could have a child,” and I wondered why we haven’t.’ It took him by surprise. He was nearly crying. He had to turn away so she wouldn’t see. He pretended to do the washing up. He put some water in the sink. He wished he hadn’t thought all those horrible things about dunking Maureen’s head in a sink full of washing up, and the baked beans. He had no reason to think she even fed baked beans to her family. It was snobbish of him. It’s because he’d thought she was poor and ignorant, before he realised she used to read the news on TV. He wondered if people thought that Angela was stupid because she didn’t have a job to give her any status. They wouldn’t think it if they’d ever heard her sing.

‘And you don’t ever sing any more.’ He actually was crying. She came and put her arms around him, put her head against his back between his shoulder blades. There was no use pretending he wasn’t upset. He had his hands in the soapy water in the sink but there was no use pretending. At least now she knew he was crying, he wouldn’t have to do the washing up.

He dried his hands on a tea towel. They went and sat down at the kitchen table. He could smell the pie in the oven. A fish pie with a mashed potato topping. She had made it just for him. He was a lucky man and yet he was crying over this disabled child or because he couldn’t have one of his own, disabled or not. Or because it had been such a long time since he had heard Angela sing.

‘We have to get out of here,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t know. Something happened.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A man came here today. He said he knew you.’

‘Who?’

‘He said his name was Jones. Lucas, are you alright? Do you know him?’

‘What did he say?’

‘He had a knobbly face. An ugly man, quite friendly. Lucas?’

‘What did he say?’

‘Just that he knew you. Well, it was quite strange, really.’

‘What did he want? Did you let him in the house?’

‘No, of course I didn’t.’

He was up on his feet now, preparing himself for what she might say. He was so angry and frightened and murderous – that fiend, Jones, here with his wife – that his head was buzzing. A million wasps with chainsaws, inside his head. His fists were clenched. His face was red, that rosy flush on the skin that he had so wished to see on Jones’s wife. Spit had collected at the corners of his mouth. His breathing was altered.

‘Lucas, what is it?’

‘What did he do to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Lucas, sit down. You’re going mad. What’s the matter? He just came by, he said he knew you. Said they were looking in on all the wives, just checking to see if they were OK.’

‘And did he… did he make any lewd suggestions to you?’

She stifled a giggle. She could see that he was angry. But what he was saying was funny to her.

‘Did he try to touch you? Angela? It’s important.’

‘I’m not a child, Lucas.’

‘Would you tell me?’

‘Lucas, what’s the matter with you? He came to see if I was OK. He said they were worried about the security of the wives. He told me to call him if I couldn’t get hold of you while you were away.’

‘He gave you his phone number?’

‘He gave me his business card.’

‘Let me see.’

She went to the kitchen drawer, the one with the napkins and the tea towels. They kept a few take-away menus, flyers from people offering their services as gardeners, decorators, handymen. You needed them these days as it was so difficult for women to go out and shop, even for food. There was no question of a woman going to a hardware store; she might as well hang a red light over the door for all the opprobrium she’d be likely to suffer in the community.

Angela looked in the drawer for a few moments, moved the things around in there. Was she just pretending it wasn’t readily to hand? She took out the business card. She handed it over.

Jonathan Jones, it said. Head of Security.

‘Did he talk about his wife?’

‘Well, no. He said he was worried about her. That’s all.’

‘Did he tell you her name?’

‘He said, “We’re worried about the wives. I’m a married man myself.” That kind of thing.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why are you so angry? What’s he done?’

‘No, you don’t understand.’

‘Well tell me, then.’

‘He films his wife and broadcasts it in the office.’

‘Oh God.’

‘I’ve seen her soaping her tits in the shower, Angela. I’ve seen the hairs on her–’

‘Don’t be… Honestly, Lucas. Don’t.’

‘What, don’t say cunt?’

‘No. There’s no need.’

‘He’s a cunt. I’ve seen his wife’s cunt. I don’t want him looking at yours.’

He stormed upstairs. So that she wouldn’t see him in such a state, as much as anything else.

‘Lucas?’ she called up after him, the flour on her nose, the pie in the oven – the perfect wife.

He shouted down the stairs at her: ‘Cunt.’

So that was that, then – no singing from Angela that night.

He went to bed without bathing, getting under the covers and switching off the light even though it was far too early to sleep. There was something else that was annoying him, something just outside his normal perception, that he only ever thought about just as he was about to fall off to sleep… That was it! He turned on the light and reached under the bed. A fat leather-bound journal full of dangerous, seditious ideas that would get them both put away forever if someone like Jones ever got in here and saw them. He pulled all the pages out of the binding. He took them and the letters and stormed downstairs.

Angela was surprised to see him in his pyjamas with the papers Jesmond had left for him. She knew what they were as soon as she looked at him, although she misunderstood his motivation for destroying them. ‘Lucas,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Lucas went to the bookcase and took his only copy of Jesmond’s famous book,
This Faerie England –
inscribed to him by the great man himself
–
from its hiding place behind the copies of the Children’s Encyclopaedia vols five to seven that Angela set so much store by.

He got a torch from a drawer in the kitchen, and some fire lighters from where they lay on top of the coal in the copper bucket next to the fireplace in the front room. He went into the back garden and lit a bonfire in the brazier. He put some twigs and leaves on the flames and then tossed Jesmond’s notes, letters and book into it. Random words caught his eye as the pages fell: faerie, spoiled, darling, Matthew.

When most of the pages had burned, he went inside, wiped his slippers on the mat, double-locked the door to the garden. One danger, at least, had been averted.