Angie winced slightly. ‘Hugh,’ she murmured.
‘Sorry,’ he said, subsiding.
When David had been a kid there had been a craze for those ‘Magic Eye’ pictures – those visual puzzles designed by computer, something to do with fractals, in which an image was hidden amongst the noise of a set of repeating patterns or shapes. He’d been terrible at them. ‘Couldn’t see the wood for the trees,’ his father had said, and it was true. David was very good at honing in on specific details but found it hard to widen his focus to see the big picture. It was what made him good at spotting flaws in a print run but atrocious at spelling. There was something about the big picture in front of him around the dining table that was subtly, ever so slightly wrong, and it lay in a detail that he’d missed, just like in a magic eye picture…
‘Hugh,’ he said, frowning, ‘is there something wrong with your eye?’
‘My eye?’ Hugh asked. ‘What, this one?’ He brought out of his pocket something that looked a bit like a marble and rolled it along the table towards him, and winked again, with the eye that used to be glass and moved sluggishly, if at all, but which now rolled in its socket as nimbly as its partner. An eye which, impossible as it was, had grown back. His old glass eye rolled to a stop against a cork, and peered blindly up at the ceiling.
‘Hugh, what the fuck?’ He turned on Ardwyn. ‘What’s going on here?’
She spread her hands. ‘You tell me.’
‘His eye! It…’ He was not going to say It grew back, because that was impossible. He must be mistaken, obviously more fatigued than he’d thought. Prosthetic eyes could be very convincing, with veins and everything. The thing on the table must be a spare; this was obviously just one of Hugh’s tasteless jokes.
Hugh got up from his chair and approached David. ‘Come on, David lad,’ he said gently. ‘Come and have a look. It’s real, I swear. Don’t be afraid. It’s not going to leap out of its socket and choke you.’
Cautiously, David peered closer. He might have been able to dismiss it as a particularly realistic prosthesis, complete with hair-like blood vessels in the sclera, and the fact that it moved could have been put down to it fitting particularly snugly with the muscles in Hugh’s eye socket. But no prosthetic eye, however realistic, had an iris that expanded and shrank like this as Hugh turned his head to and fro. It was impossible, and yet it was literally staring him in the face.
‘I know, lad, it’s a bit of a shock, but you get used to it.’ Hugh patted him on the shoulder and resumed his seat.
He turned to Everett. ‘How…?’ he whispered.
‘Wrong question, chum. The question is who. Angie?’
‘I’ve had Type 1 diabetes all my life up until six weeks ago,’ she said. ‘Then it just disappeared overnight. Poof!’ She snapped her fingers.
‘Edihan?’
‘In 1997 I was in a car accident,’ said the Turkish barber. ‘They had to pin my spine back together.’ He tossed onto the table a handful of metal pins and screws that clinked and glinted.
‘Peanut allergy,’ said Shane Harding. ‘Put me in a coma when I was ten.’
‘Which is no excuse for polishing off the pecan pie!’ said Everett, and the others laughed.
‘Me?’ said Jason. ‘Oh, I’m just here because Shane’s here. But I did spit out all my fillings and found my teeth fixed. Nothing very dramatic, sorry.’
‘Miracles,’ said Ardwyn, ‘don’t have to be big and flashy and dramatic. They can be as small as a smile or a tooth filling, or they can be as huge as the ocean. Or your daughter’s leukaemia.’
‘Shut up!’ David shouted. ‘No! Just shut up! That’s not… that’s not…’
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is very treatable and the survival rates are high, they’d been told. But you’re looking at two to three years of treatment – that’s chemotherapy which will feel worse than the disease itself, and very likely some painful surgical procedures. There’s no miracle cure and absolutely no shortcuts, and if one single cell escapes the treatment the whole circus could start up again. There is treatment, but nothing to stop it from happening again, and the sooner you accommodate yourself to that fact the better. Well, he and Becky had accommodated themselves to it, made all the concessions, taken Alice to all the treatments, held her hand while she cried with the pain of lumbar punctures and the nausea of chemo. To offer the hope of a cure after all of that – however impossible – was just unfair.
‘I don’t care,’ he said, trying to make himself believe it. ‘It’s not possible. This must be a trick.’
Big Ed turned to Jason, puzzled. ‘Was he not paying attention just now?’
‘Why would it be a trick?’ asked Everett. ‘There’s nothing set up here. We didn’t even know you were coming, remember?’
Ardwyn looked disappointed. ‘There’s a fine line between scepticism and a stubborn refusal to accept the truth, David. Personally, I don’t care which side of that line you choose to live on, but just ask yourself whether you have the right to make your sick daughter go with you.’
David swallowed. ‘Okay, let’s for the moment assume that I’m not going insane and that everything you’ve all told me is true. What about the how?’
Ardwyn stood. ‘Come. I’ll show you.’
Feeling like he was sleepwalking, he let Ardwyn and Everett lead him out through the back door and across the yard to a large outbuilding, the door of which was secured by a huge padlock. He expected some kind of illegal medical clinic – something with stainless steel tables and trays of surgical instruments like in one of those horror movies – but as Everett unfastened the lock and opened the door, he saw nothing like that. It was an empty, cavernous space lit by bare electric bulbs. Hanging from the ceiling at the centre
