The Miracle Inspector by Helen Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

the trigger. Perhaps he’d even do the kid the favour of taking her with him. Perhaps he’d lean down and put his head against her little head with its soft shiny hair and put this imaginary gun against his temple and blow them both away.
    ‘See, that’s what she does when she’s happy. See that? That little smile? It takes a tremendous amount of effort for Christina to do that. She only does that for people she knows, or if she likes you.’
    ‘Lovely.’ He ought to – but he thought of it quite often and he couldn’t do it for everybody and so in fact he had never done it – he ought to remember their address and send them some money anonymously. Do something to help them, make their lives better.
    ‘Oh, but that isn’t the miracle.’
    ‘Of course not. No.’
    ‘You see, if you had something – if you were unhappy…’
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘If you were unhappy about something. Or if you were sick. I mean – I know you’re not…of course. But if you were troubled or…’
    ‘Oh, I get it. Like a cat?’
    He meant it genuinely. Any warm-bodied, empathetic creature without the power of speech: the perfect confessor. Always listening, never giving advice. Poor old Maureen, he might as well have slapped her. He might as well have dragged her by the hair into the kitchen, filled the sink with water on top of – he hadn’t seen it, he was guessing here – its dirty dishes, and repeatedly dunked her face in it, pushing her head down towards the plates with (guessing again) their traces of baked bean juice, then held it under the water as a very few uneaten baked beans dislodged from the plate and floated slowly towards the surface, like lilies unfurling in the daylight.
    ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It’s altruistic, isn’t it? A miracle. They never try to heal themselves. It’s others they help.’
    ‘No, exactly. Standard question. Right answer.’
    ‘You’re not writing any of this down?’
    ‘I’ll make the report after, don’t worry. I like to take it all in. You’ve got your head bent over a piece of paper, you’re likely to miss something. The sly look between conspirators.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Or the moment when the miracle happens. You see what I mean?’
    ‘Oh. Yes. ’
    She was reappraising him, Maureen. His stock was rising. He was in charge, he knew what he was doing. She’d thought him a bit of an idiot; too young, with his blue eyes and his pretty face and his day-dreaming. Now she knew he was in charge. And she thought that because she could see that he was clever, it made her clever. But she could only see it because he let her see.
    He turned to the child. ‘Now then, Christina.’
    What on earth was he going to say to her? To be fair, he did think he could see a tiny little change in her expression, a glimmer.
    ‘She likes you.’
    ‘Yes.’
    They sat in silence for a while, all three of them, Maureen content now for him to be in charge. He wondered whether he ought to go through some farcical examination whereby he brought in the sick and the heartsick and paraded them in front of Christina to see whether they could be cured. But it didn’t seem fair on the kid, to raise her hopes only to say it hadn’t worked. Maureen might quite like the company but she didn’t have money to be spending on lemon drizzle cake for sundry visitors. Besides, she’d be bitterly disappointed when he declared there hadn’t been a miracle.
    ‘Does she like singing?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘My wife has a lovely voice.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Angela.’
    ‘Really? I’d love to hear her sing some time. I’m sure Christina…’
    ‘Ah, well. She rarely gets outside the house.’ That’s the way you expressed it these days, as if it was a minor, temporary inconvenience, particular to the person being discussed. You’d never say, ‘Isn’t it terrible, all the women in London being under house arrest?’
    ‘Did you ever work, Maureen, outside the home?’
    She looked a bit