‘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.

  Chapter Two ~ The Ministry

  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.’

  Chapter Three ~ Joanna Jones

  He couldn’t have said why he went to the house to see Joanna Jones. It was on a whim. There was no specific train of thought in which he’d said to himself, ‘I won’t go out inspecting miracles today, I won’t pop home and surprise Angela, my wife and the woman I love; instead, I’ll go and see Joanna Jones and risk ruining the rest of my life.’ If Jones found out, he would have him arrested. He would visit him in an underground prison and stare down at him through the bars in the cage and piss on him. For what? Whatever he was going to do now – and actually he still had no idea what it was – it had better be good. He told himself he just wanted to understand Angela by getting to know Joanna, by comparing the two women.

  He sat in his car, parked a little way down the street from where Jones lived. He watched a man sweeping the street. He watched men delivering food and other provisions to the houses along the streets, the housewives coming to the door, chatting a little longer than necessary to the delivery men, glad of the company.

  He watched a woman come out of Jones’s house – not Joanna, a heavier-set woman, probably older. She crossed the road, head down, face covered by her veil, arms at her sides, a coal scuttle with legs, her comedy walk necessitated by the long, restrictive outer garment covering her clothes. As she passed by his car, he wound the window down.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  She looked terrified.

  ‘I want to talk to you, ma’am. Stay where you are.’

  She peered at him but said nothing. He took his Ministry badge from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, flipped it open and dangled it out of the window so she could see it. There was really no need, she’d have deduced that he was somewhere near the top of the hierarchy because of the car. ‘How do you know Mrs Jones?’

  ‘She’s a relative of mine.’ No kidding. But he wasn’t interested in calling her on that. If he pricked the finger of every dissembling woman with the blood test kit he and every other high-ranking Ministry employee had been issued with and sent the sample off to the records office for analysis, he wouldn’t have a moment to spare for any other work. He didn’t care about the database, he didn’t care about their DNA. They all had an X chromosome, that was enough for him. Let them have their visits. Poor cows.

  ‘What’s in the basket?’

  ‘Nothing. Just…I brought her a jar of my home-made jam.’

  ‘Looks kind of uneven-shaped. What else you got?’

  ‘I keep my knitting in there, too. Making a little cloche hat for my granddaughter. Would you like a jar of jam, sir? I’ve some to spare.’

  ‘I need to speak to her. It’s important. Go back in and tell her to come out here.’

  The woman stared at him.

  ‘It’s important. We haven’t got much time. Go on. Oh, and listen to me, old woman, breathe a word of this to anyone and you’re in just as much trouble as she is.’

  The woman wasn’t even that old, maybe forty-five. What could she do? She went to fetch Joanna and presently she appeared, covered up. Joanna crossed the street to his car. Her friend stayed on the other side of the road, watching. Lucas waved her off and she had no choice but to comply. He watched her in the rear-view mirror until she disappeared from view. Joanna came up to the driver’s side of the car and peered in at him.

  ‘Get in,’ he said, and she did. He wound up the window and locked the car doors. They were safe from any intrusion; a little oasis of officialdom in her suburban street. Even a soldier would no more come up and knock on the window than take out his automatic rifle and shoot himself in the foot. Lucas was protected because of who he was. It was only then that he realised why he had come here. She had a little freckle on her left nipple. She had a plump bottom and tiny stretch-marks on her thighs, like shirring elastic. He had seen her lick toast crumbs from a breakfast plate in the privacy of her own home, when she thought no one was watching her.

  ‘Do you know why I’m here?’

  ‘No.’ She looked uncomfortable. She looked guilty about something. Maybe she’d been having secret meetings about how to overthrow the government under the guise of talking about jam and knitting. One thing that had always worked in Lucas’s favour was his long silences. He was daydreaming, usually, but it always seemed to other people as if he was holding his nerve. They caved and tried to fill the silence. Joanna was no different. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Do you trust your husband?’

  ‘What?’

  He could rummage around under the ugly black material that covered her, push her skirt off, get her knickers off. He could kiss her. Would she close her eyes and lie back, like Angela did? Would she feel inside his trousers? Would she turn around and shuffle her plump bottom back towards him? The car was a luxury model but still a bit cramped for that sort of thing. If she wanted to avoid banging her head on the roof, she’d have to keep her head tilted forward in a ‘yes’, signalling agreement with something or other for a protracted length of time. Would he have to talk dirty to her? Maybe he’d say something about covering her with jam and licking it off.

  The black material she was wearing was voluminous and it would be difficult getting his hands inside it. If he ruched it up, as if he was an assistant on the haberdashery counter at a large department store, she might start laughing. Or she might fight him off. He was sure she’d enjoy it, if he had sex with her. He just wasn’t sure how to get to that point from where they were just now, sitting in his car with her staring at him through the peephole in her veil in frank astonishment.

  ‘Would you do something for me, if you thought it might help your husband?’

  Her eyes widened. When that’s all you had to look at, it meant that a woman couldn’t hide what she was feeling. If she was wearing ordinary clothes, you’d be looking at her tits. But here it was, an honest, if enforced, communication.

  ‘It’s not a test,’ he said.

  As soon as he said it, she thought it was a test. ‘Did he send you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She didn’t know. She didn’t know what to think. She couldn’t follow the logic of what he was doing. No surprise as there was no logic.

  He unbuttoned the veil across her face. He looked at her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to put his tongue in her mouth – that funny tumbling of something warm and soft and alive, like interrupting a clothes dryer mid-cycle and reaching into it to rescue a kitten. The next step might have been to touch her.

  He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her. He said, ‘I didn’t come here to spy on you for him.’

  ‘I can’t do anything dangerous. I’m not brave. You know? I’m sorry, if you’re trying to help me. Don’t ask me to do anything.’

  ‘When you leave the house, where do you go?’

  ‘I go to the women’s groups.’

  ‘If I leave a message for you, will you meet me one day?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.’

 

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