Allie says, ‘That’s good. That sounds good.’ She makes a little sigh.
Roxy says, ‘I know you don’t trust them. It’s all right. You don’t have to trust them, babe.’
She reaches over and puts her hand on top of Allie’s, and they sit there like that for a long time.
After a while, Allie says, ‘One of the girls has a dad in the police force. He telephoned her two days ago to tell her she can’t be in this building on Friday.’
Roxy laughs. ‘Dads. They like keeping their daughters safe. They can’t keep secrets.’
‘Will you help us?’ says Allie.
‘What do you think is coming?’ says Roxy. ‘SWAT team?’
‘Not so much. We’re only a few girls in a convent. Practising our religion like law-abiding citizens.’
‘I can’t kill anyone else,’ says Roxy.
‘I don’t think we’ll have to,’ says Allie. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
They mopped up the rest of Primrose’s gang after he died. Wasn’t any bother; they all fell apart after he was gone. Two weeks after Terry’s funeral Bernie called Roxy on her mobile at 5 a.m., and told her to come to a lock-up garage in Dagenham. There, he fished the big bunch of keys out of his pocket, opened it up and showed her two bodies laid out, killed cold and clean and about to go into the acid, and that’d be the end of that.
She looked them in the face.
‘That them?’ said Bernie.
‘Yeah,’ she said. She snaked her arm around her dad’s waist. ‘Thanks.’
‘Anything for my girl,’ he said.
Big bloke, little bloke, the two who killed her mum. One of them with her mark still on his arm, livid and branching.
‘All done, then, sweetheart?’ he said.
‘All done, Dad.’
He kissed her on the top of the head.
They went for a walk that morning round Eastbrookend Cemetery. Slow walking, chatting, while a couple of cleaners did the necessary in the garage.
‘You know the day you was born was the day we got Jack Conaghan?’ said Bernie.
Roxy does know this. Still, she likes to hear the story again.
‘He’d been on us for years,’ said Bernie. ‘Killed Micky’s dad – you never knew him – him and the Irish boys. We got him in the end, though. Fishing in the canal. We waited all night for him, and when he got there early, we did him, chucked him in. That was that. When we was done and home and dry I checked my phone – fifteen messages from your mum! Fifteen! She’d gone into labour overnight, hadn’t she?’
Roxy felt her fingertips around the edges of this story. It always seemed slippery, something fighting its way out of her grasp. She was born in the darkness, and with people waiting for someone: her dad waiting for Jack Conaghan, her mum waiting for her dad, and Jack Conaghan, though he never knew it, waiting for Death. It’s a story about the stuff that happens just exactly when you weren’t expecting it; just on that night you thought nothing was going to happen, everything happens.
‘I picked you up – a girl! After three boys, never thought I’d have a girl. And you looked me dead in the eye, and widdled all down my trousers. And that’s how I knew you’d be good luck.’
She is good luck. Barring a few things, she’s always had good luck.
How many miracles does it take? Not too many. One, two, three is plenty. Four is a great multitude, more than enough.
There are twelve armed police officers advancing across the gardens at the back of the convent. It’s been raining. The ground is waterlogged, and more than waterlogged. There are open taps running at both sides of the garden. The girls have run a pump to bring seawater up to the top of the steps, and it’s a waterfall now, water gushing down the stone stairs. The officers aren’t wearing rubber boots; they didn’t know it’d be muddy like this. All they know is that a lady from the convent had come to tell them that girls were holed up in here and had been threatening and violent. So there are twelve trained men in body armour coming for them. It should be enough to finish this.
The men shout out, ‘Police! Leave the building now, with your hands in the air!’
Allie looks at Roxy. Roxy grins at her.
They’re waiting behind the curtains in the dining room, the one that looks out over the back gardens. Waiting until the police are all on the stone stairs leading to the terrace outside the back doors. Waiting, waiting … and there they all are.
Roxy pulls the corks out from the half-dozen barrels of seawater they’ve stored behind them. The carpet is sodden now, and the water’s gushing out under the door towards the steps. They’re all in one mass of water, Roxy and Allie and the police.
Allie puts her hand into the water around her ankles and concentrates.
Outside, on the terrace and on the stairs, the water is touching the skin of all the police officers, one way or another. It needs more control than Allie’s ever managed before; their fingers are on the triggers, they want to squeeze. But one by one she sends her message through the water, as fast as thought. And one by one, the officers jerk like puppets, the angles of their elbows fly out, their hands unclench and go numb. One by one, they drop their guns.
‘Fucking hell,’ says Roxy.
‘Now,’ says Allie, and climbs up on to a chair.
Roxy, the woman with more power than she knows what to do with, sends a bolt through the water, and each of the police officers starts and bucks and topples to the ground. Neat as you like.
It had to be only one woman doing it; a dozen convent girls couldn’t have acted together so quickly without hurting each other. A soldier had to come.
Roxy smiles.
Upstairs, Gordy’s been filming it on her cellphone. It’ll be online in an hour. You don’t need too many miracles before people start believing in you. And then sending you money and offers of legal help to get yourself properly set up. Everyone’s looking for some kind of answer, today more than ever.
Mother Eve records a message to go out over the footage. She says, ‘I have not come to tell you to give up a single strand of your belief. I am not here to convert you. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, if you are of any faith or none at all, God does not want you to change your practice.’
She pauses. She knows this is not what they’re expecting to hear.
‘God loves all of us,’ she says, ‘and She wants us to know that She has changed Her garment merely. She is beyond female and male, She is beyond human understanding. But She calls your attention to that which you have forgotten. Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.