Free The Miracle Inspector by Helen Smith Page A

glass, drained it. A young chap stepped up at the end, diffident. Despite the apparent diffidence, Jesmond was nervous as he came near. You never knew who these people were and what dangers they might represent. Jesmond felt chilly, like a man induced by a nuisance caller to step out of the bath and stand at the front door in his dressing gown. He wished the lad would go away but almost as soon as he wished it, more of them came up, as if he had wished on a faulty talisman and triggered the opposite of what he wanted.
    ‘Fancy a drink, then?’ one of the lads asked him.
    Jesmond always wanted a drink after a gig. Drinking provided a wonderfully immersive experience, drugs too, although they were harder to get hold of. Few other things took you over like that. Sex, yes. But certain factors needed to be in place to make that happen, namely, a more-than-passing interest in the now-fatiguing act of love on his part and the consensual involvement of other(s). Drinking, though sociable, was something that could be experienced alone. And it was democratising; the tipsy delights of the first drink available to anyone for the price of a glass of wine or a whisky. But tonight he would not drink alone.
    Jesmond felt obliged to play up to the flamboyance that might be expected of a man of his status and colourful reputation. He stood on the edge of the stage and said, ‘Young man, I thoroughly approve of drinking because drinking leads to drunkenness, and that causes one to make mistakes. Mistakes bring wisdom, or learning from them does. So, let’s drink.’
    The kids loved it. Jesmond didn’t necessarily believe any of it any more, although perhaps he once had. Loss made you wiser and sadder. And he had experienced so much of it. Perhaps he should say something about that? But they were grinning at him, happy enough with his pronouncements. He wanted to say something about how things weren’t quite so inherently funny once you got to his age. Drink made him repeat himself, so there was no need to say everything all at once, he could save some of it for later on in the evening, when the subject would inevitably come round again.
    They took him to a room at the back and poured some rather cheap wine into a plastic cup and gave it to him. Too late, he remembered he had left his glass on the stage, from where it had no doubt been cleared by now and stacked into the dishwashing machine. Drinking wine from a plastic cup was as dissatisfying as kissing a woman wearing an orthodontic brace but there was nothing he could do about it now. At least it wasn’t Styrofoam. There were a few young men already in the back room, two with acoustic guitars. Candles flickered on the tables. It was like a bohemian fantasy. He felt intensely happy for a few moments.
    ‘Jesmond?’ someone said, a very eager look on his face.
    ‘Uh, gimme a moment,’ Jesmond said. ‘Takes a while to wind down after a gig. Imagine a jagged line on a graph in a recession.’
    The kids stared at him. One of them handed him a joint. He smoked it. He drank from the plastic cup. He used his thumb and forefinger to wipe at the granular deposits that collected at the sides of his mouth. He felt the red wine flood the veins in his face, like those light-up street maps of London that had been popular with tourists, before the sight of a tourist in London had become an anomaly. The joints in his fingers ached, particularly the top knuckle of the little finger on his right hand, and the thumb knuckle on his left hand. Still, he felt happy. Was this happiness his reward? He couldn’t say why he did it, otherwise. Once he would have said he did it to inspire others.
    He looked up. He had recovered and was ready to engage with them.
    ‘What you writing, Jesmond?’ They wanted to admire him. But he hadn’t written anything in months. No – years. He smiled and looked bashful, batting at the air in front of his face, as if to dispel a thick layer of lies that hung about in