The Miracle Inspector (8 page)

‘What’s your name?’ The boy had told him but he couldn’t be expected to remember the name of every would-be poet who came up to him after a gig.

‘It’s Prince. Jason Prince.’

‘That’s apposite. A new ruler. A new star in town.’ Jesmond was a bit drunk. He had swigged and refilled that plastic cup several times. He had drunk from it steadily, grimly, as if it was his duty to get rid of the cheap wine so it couldn’t hurt any of them any more. The part of his brain that believed that he was ‘helping’ in some way, by drinking as much of the stuff as he could, never seemed to learn that there was always another bottle to be uncorked (or unscrewed).

‘How will I find you?’ Jason asked.

‘I move around a lot.’

‘I could leave a message for you at a safe house. Or a public place; a pub or a restaurant or something.’

Jesmond was amused. ‘I’ll give you an address. Have you got something to write on?’

The boy offered his page of poetry.

‘I can’t,’ said Jesmond, simply. The words were too beautiful. He wasn’t going to write over the top of them.

‘There’s a little space on the end. Write on that.’

Jesmond wrote an address, very small, at the end of the piece of paper, and handed it back. ‘You can ask here. They might know where I am.’

The boy stared at the address, put the paper back into the fabric pouch around his neck. He saw Jesmond looking at him with longing and intensity. He took the paper back out of the pouch, looked at the address on the bottom for a few moments, committing it to memory, then handed the page back to Jesmond. ‘You can keep it,’ he said. ‘If you like.’

The paper felt silky and warm. Jesmond would have liked to put it next to his heart but he was wearing a jumper without a pocket, no shirt underneath. The only method he could think of, therefore, that would keep the page close to his heart would be to tuck the paper under his armpit; impractical for so many reasons. He put it into his trouser pocket, the one where he liked to hook his thumb when his hand was idle when he was doing a reading. He didn’t know what the boy made of him plunging the paper penis-wards into his pocket and keeping it there, next to his groin. Perhaps he didn’t make anything of it, although poets tended to concern themselves with imagery more than most. Jesmond shrugged – even when carrying out conversations with himself inside his head, he tended to embellish them with physical gestures, which made him appear more eccentric than perhaps he was.

‘Can you help me get published, Jesmond?’

‘That’s what you want?’

‘Yeah. You know, I can’t believe this. It’s a miracle I found you.’

It was indeed. Perhaps he could get the boy registered with Lucas. Hadn’t the poets believed, in the old days, that the words of God were flowing through them? If he could get the boy acknowledged, he could get him protected. The arts would flourish. Theatre. Poetry. He would give readings, introduce the boy. They would print and distribute the books produced as a result of their creative partnership.

He stood, too quickly. He felt dizzy. He ran his hand from the crown of his head to the tip of his curls. He squeezed on the curls a few times, his fist gentle and rhythmic, like a milkmaid squeezing a teat. Perhaps he was testing for crispness. If so, he must have been disappointed. The curls were limp. He was drunk. He had to go home.

The young men in the club, seeing Jesmond on his feet, reverted to another chorus of ‘Rise up, Rise up.’ The words seemed almost mocking after what he had just read. Jesmond hiccupped and a small amount of peppery vomit rose up (ha ha) into his throat and went back down again. His view of the world had shrunk to a tiny letter-box shape directly in front of his eyes. He waved his hand and joined in with the song, while looking around for the door.

‘You will remember my name?’

‘I will.’

‘I hope I can find you.’

‘You found me tonight, lad.’

‘I’d been looking for you for more than a year. Waiting to meet you.’

‘That address I gave you should do it. Ask there, or leave a message.’

‘It’s not your home? Can’t you tell me where you live?’

‘I don’t have a home. I move around.’

‘How about, we choose a tree. I’ll carve a message on a tree trunk and you’ll find me.’

‘It’s actually quite hard work carving a message on a tree. Ever tried it?’

‘But that way we could leave messages for each other without arousing suspicion.’

‘Come with me.’

Now the boy was wondering.

‘We can travel together. If you’re with me, you’ll know where to find me. Won’t you?’

The boy didn’t answer. He was thinking it over but he didn’t look keen.

Jesmond put on his black leather jacket and turned to go. That baking soda fizzing in his veins again. That peppery magma. Limp curls. Letterbox vision. Why should the boy follow him? What was there to entice him? He’d said himself there was nothing he could teach him.

As he left, as he opened the door and closed it again behind him, he realised that in actual fact, he had been expecting the boy to come running after him, like a carpet salesman provoked by a customer determined to drive a hard bargain by leaving the shop. He realised that he hadn’t really meant to leave. He had wanted the boy to come with him. And he realised that the boy wasn’t coming because Jesmond had got the bargaining positions of their roles wrong. He was the carpet salesman, the one who wanted something. And in that case, he shouldn’t have been the one to leave the shop. He wanted a happy ending, a fairytale, the boy – the Prince – running after him in the rain. Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.

‘You are a fuck-up and a failure,’ he said to himself, ashamed. He may have said the words in his head or he may have said them aloud. No matter, they were very nearly the last words he heard. A heavy instrument, a cricket bat or something like that, was brought down on the back of his head very hard. More blows on his arms and his shoulders. Thwack. Thwack, thwack. The sound of willow hitting leather (even if it was only Jesmond’s old leather jacket) was redolent of a quaint old England that had long since disappeared, so it was quite a fitting sound to be coming from the author of
This Faerie England
, as if Jesmond had finally found his perfect moment as a performer; a human instrument, which when played would summon up reminders of the lost England he lamented in his poetry. Leather boots connected with the yellowing piano keys of his teeth, but this was less successful, instrumentally speaking. There was no melodic tinkle, no thundering crescendo of keys and chords. But then it takes a very skilled artist to play the piano with his boots, and Jesmond’s attackers were thugs. Although it was impossible to say for sure, just by looking at them, whether or not any of the attackers could play an instrument, it was reasonable to assume that they could not, and furthermore, it was reasonable to assume that if they had attended more dutifully to music lessons as children, they might have had something more interesting to do to fill their time than beating up an old gentleman. But most of the schools in the state education system had closed down for fear of paedophiles. Music lessons likewise. These thugs were perhaps a product of their time.

Jesmond suddenly thought of something he would like to say. It seemed important. He was like a man who has been called to the stage at an awards ceremony and surprises himself by ripping up his speech and speaking from the heart. ‘Life is a journey. A man may climb a mountain but what will he do when he gets to the top, except talk about how he got there?’

Then he thought of another way of putting it: ‘Life is just a series of anecdotes.’ Was that what he believed? What about love? Ordinarily he would have gestured to himself; a little shrug, a tilt of the head. But he wasn’t in a position to do it as he was lying face down and someone – an unmusical thug – was standing on his right shoulder. Nor was he in any fit state to share his thoughts, unfortunately. His mouth was full of blood but anyway his brain was in such a mess, he probably couldn’t have got a message to his tongue, even if he’d tried.

The narrow letterbox of his vision contracted until it was a tiny dot of light, then it went out, like an old-fashioned cathode ray television taking its time to settle down after it has been switched off.

Someone said the words, ‘You fucking fascist.’ He didn’t hear them, which was probably a good thing. The last words he heard were his own, formulated inside his poor old, kicked-about, broken head but never spoken aloud: ‘What about love?’

The next day Lucas went into Jones’s office, wondering if there would be any repercussions after his visit to Joanna. Jenkins was in there and both were drinking Ribena. It was supposed to be a super-drink; scientists had discovered that blackcurrants could help you live longer and make you more virile. Since most men died or disappeared before they were fifty years old, presumably it was the prospect of enhanced virility rather than longevity that interested everyone who had started drinking it, unless they believed they could somehow stop the soldiers at their door by pouring a line of blackcurrant syrup across the threshold.

Jones didn’t behave like a man whose wife has been insulted. He offered Lucas a glass of the stuff and Lucas accepted. Well, why not? He liked the taste. He needed a little energy boost from all that sugar.

He couldn’t see Jones’s computer screen. Actually, to be fair, Jones didn’t quite broadcast pictures of his wife. That’s the way it had seemed, when Lucas had first got an eyeful of nipple. But, in fact, you had to go and stand at the other side of Jones’s desk, and accidentally knock the keyboard to activate the screen, and then you had to know where to look among the icons on the screen; it was the one labelled JJ.

Jenkins was complaining about his job. It was what you had to do. You couldn’t say you enjoyed what you did – that would have seemed like showing off – though you could mock other men’s jobs so that listeners would infer that yours was better. Today Jenkins was doing this by expressing relief that he wasn’t in charge of one of the vast and sprawling departments tasked with unravelling the familial ties claimed by London’s women.

‘See, my wife,’ said Jenkins, ‘she’s Chinese.’

‘Is she?’ said Lucas.

Jenkins was one of those boorish people who believed that he was cleverer than everyone else just because he was too stupid to know how thick he was, so there was probably some trick involved here. Still, why not play along? Lucas was more than a match for him.

‘Well, she spends all her time round the house of a Chinese woman she says is her sister. Ethnically, that makes her Chinese. See? She’s Irish-looking as a bloody peat bog but she swears blind they’re related. I wouldn’t like to be in charge of it. Your wife, now…’

‘She’s black.’

Jenkins laughed uproariously, thinking they were sharing a riff on this joke about spurious ethnicity. Then he tailed off, unsure. He gave Lucas a funny look and then looked away. It was the reason some people didn’t like Lucas and why they were also afraid of him, because they looked in his face and they could see he didn’t give a shit about them. And then there was the job he did. The Miracle Inspector. No one was quite sure what that meant. Was it very important or one of those nonsensical jobs? Jenkins, for example, was in charge of something to do with cats that was enshrined in the constitution. People had the right to keep cats and Jenkins’s job was to keep on top of it and make sure there were enough to go round and not too many, and so on. Rumour had it Jenkins spent most of his time rounding up spare cats and taking them off somewhere to be killed. He’d jump at the chance to be in a job that involved visiting women in their homes to discuss their prodigiously talented daughters and their ‘special’ sons, or to look at faces in their flans, of course he would.

‘You seen the news?’ asked Jones. The news was so heavily censored that almost no one saw it except Jones, which was why he liked to mention it. ‘That poet’s been killed. Anti-fascists, they think. Nihilists.’

Lucas paused for only a moment before pressing on: ‘About the wives.’

‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ said Jones to Lucas.

‘Who?’

‘Jesmond.’

‘Jesmond’s been killed?’ Jenkins was incredulous. ‘Shit. Man. You know what, I didn’t even know he was still alive.’

‘Yeah, exactly,’ said Lucas. He was furiously angry. He hated everyone. Right there, right then, all he wanted to do was sit down in a chair and think quietly about Jesmond, his dad, his mum. What the man had meant to his family and what it meant that he was dead. But you had to keep up appearances. He stared back at Jones, evenly.

‘Killed, though? Not detained?’ This was Jenkins still bleating on about it, innocent as a little lamb.

‘Kicked to death. Or beaten with a baseball bat. Or a bit of both,’ Jones explained.

‘They’re sure it was him?’ Lucas asked.

‘Yeah. He was still recognisable.’

‘Will there be a funeral?’ asked Jenkins.

‘I doubt it,’ said Jones. ‘They won’t want a focus for insurgency. Clashes between the unionists and the nihilists. Load a singing in the streets. Crap like that.’

‘No. Course not,’ Jenkins agreed. ‘Sad day, though? Man of his stature going like that. Say what you like about him. He had a rare talent.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucas bitterly. ‘A talent for making alcohol disappear.’ He felt angry, reckless. ‘The wives,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about their safety. It was something you said, Jones.’

Just because he was upset, there was no need to provoke Jones. He needed to calm down and be very careful about what he said.

‘Are they in danger?’ Jenkins was worried. Obviously no one had been round to his house recently to check out his salt of the earth Irish wife. Jenkins probably tried to make her feel like a princess by letting her keep two cats. Hopefully that was compensation for the fact that apparently no one wanted to see her naked.

‘Got to keep an eye on them,’ said Jones.

‘You got surveillance equipment installed, Jenkins?’ said Lucas.

‘No. Have you?’

‘No. Jones could help with that, though, couldn’t you?’

‘I could set something up for you.’

I bet you could, thought Lucas.

‘If you let me know where to get the equipment,’ said Jenkins, ‘I’ll sort it out.’

‘He’s got cameras,’ Lucas said, of Jones.

Jenkins wasn’t following this. He obviously hadn’t seen Joanna’s nipples. He was frowning and looking at Jones. ‘You wouldn’t put cameras on your wife, though?’

‘See, I come from a security background,’ Jones said. ‘Say you go to a wedding in a hotel and the man sitting next to you, he’s a fireman. Ask him where’s the fire exits and he’ll know. He’ll come in your house and he’ll be looking round – smoke alarm, exits.’

Jenkins didn’t get it.

‘Jones is a security man,’ Lucas explained. ‘An expert. He thinks about surveillance the way a fireman thinks about fire exits. You probably know an awful lot about cats.’

Jones was enjoying the idea of himself as an expert in something, and he chuckled at Lucas’s put-down of Jenkins about the cats. He went to the drawer in his office. He got out a box of equipment and handed over two tiny cameras to Lucas, together with an equally tiny recording and transmitting device. ‘Instructions in the box,’ he said.

A thought occurred to Lucas as he took them. What if these cameras somehow transmitted to Jones as well as himself? ‘They’re secure? I mean, someone else couldn’t hack in?’

‘Best on the market. Totally secure.’

‘Thanks, I’ll… How much do I owe you?’

‘No, no. Take it. Have it.’

So now he was in Jones’s debt for camera equipment he had no intention of using. None whatsoever. Absolutely none. He looked at Jenkins. Perhaps Jenkins would try to keep up with the largesse by offering him a cat? But Jenkins was looking disappointed at not being offered free equipment to spy on his wife.

Jones’s phone rang. Jones put on a ‘top secret’ face, so Lucas and Jenkins left the office together.

‘Tell you what, Jenkins. Do you want it?’

‘Really?’

‘You have it, if you want. Didn’t want to turn down old Jones in there. You know? But I don’t need it.’

‘You got something already?’

‘Yeah, exactly. You have it. Don’t want – sorry, what’s her name, your missus?’

‘Delilah.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘After that song. You know.’

‘Well, you don’t want her at home, worrying.’

‘She can take care of herself, to be honest. Clap an intruder round the head with a frying pan.’

‘It’s not just the intruders. Some of the guys… some of them like to put the cameras in the bedroom.’

Jenkins bridled. He seemed to feel that Delilah’s honour was at stake. ‘Now hold on,’ he said. ‘Home porno?’

‘Not just for the home, either. Some of the guys show it around.’

Jenkins goggled. Lucas watched the thoughts go round in Jenkins head like little fishes: The other ‘guys’, whoever that meant, were making home porno films of themselves with their wives and showing it round, though not to him? There he was, drinking Ribena in Jones’s office and thinking he was in with the in crowd, and all the time there was some dirty little sex show going on that he wasn’t invited to.

Would Jenkins now go home and record himself tupping his practical, sensible wife, and then try to show it to Jones as a way of getting further inside the inner circle in the Ministry? Lucas hoped so. He hoped he might get to see a bit of footage of Jenkins’s wife naked, perhaps reclining on the bed, knickers off, legs open, frying pan in hand.

‘They get quite competitive.’

‘Do they? What is it, the wife in a nice pair of knickers, touching herself?’

‘I think they, you know. They let the wives go round to each other’s houses.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Does Delilah know Joanna?’

‘Joanna? Is that your…?’

‘Jones’s wife. Lovely tits. Very lonely. Maybe your wife could…?’

‘Oh, I see. Joanna. Where’s she live, though?’

Oh God. What if this was a trap? Much as he would like Jenkins to send his wife round to Jones’s to make saucy videos, maybe he shouldn’t confess that he knew where Joanna lived.

‘Arrange it through Jones.’

‘How do you go about that, then?’

‘Say your missus is lonely, can she go round to his wife. Don’t say why. You see – and make sure Delilah knows this – they don’t like it if it seems a set up. They’re a load of Peeping Toms, they don’t like to think it’s a show. They can go to Piccadilly Circus for that. It’s the innocence they like. The women, pure and innocent, soaping each other down in the shower.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘And then it makes them feel kindlier to the parties involved. Like, if you ever wanted to get away from cats. I’m not saying. But if you did. You see? They’d remember you.’

‘But your missus? Wouldn’t it be easier if Delilah came round to yours, if she knows the ropes?’

He didn’t want Jenkins’s donkey wife – who might after all be a very nice person, but still – ordered round to his house and reluctantly trying to feel up Angela so that Jenkins could get a promotion.

‘It’s gotta go through Jones. He’s the one hands out the cameras.’

‘But you gave yours away.’

‘I got something, some hush-hush project on. Can’t say what. But I got no time for all this.’

‘You haven’t found a miracle?’

‘Can’t say.’

‘Have you? You have!’

Jenkins was such an idiot. ‘No, listen. It’s not that. Jenkins, don’t go gossiping. I’ve got a secret, unrelated project I’m working on. It means I haven’t got time for Jones and his cameras. But don’t go saying anything. OK?’