it as a spare,” he said. “You should rotate them.”
“Rotate, yes,” I said. “Okay.”
He could have told me anything and I’d have said “Okay”. I stood there looking at him for a while longer. We all did. A truce seemed to exist now between the other two boys. After a while I asked him:
“Shall I pay you, then, or…”
“Yes. Pay me,” he said. “Ten pounds.”
I paid him ten pounds. I remembered that my windscreen washer reservoir was empty and I asked him for some fill-up. He glanced at the middling boy and slightly raised his chin; the middling boy ran into the shop and came out with a litre of blue liquid which he and the youngest boy poured into the windscreen washer reservoir for me, operating in sync together now, the youngest one holding the lid off while the middling one poured, then passing the lid over for the middling one to screw on while he, the youngest one, carried the empty bottle over to a bin. They closed the bonnet for me and I got back into my car.
Before I drove off I pushed the windscreen spurter button to make sure it worked. Liquid should have squirted out onto the glass, but nothing happened. I pushed it some more. Still nothing. I got out, opened the bonnet again and checked the reservoir. It was empty.
“It’s all gone!” I said.
The boys peered in. The oldest one got down on his knees and looked under the car.
“There’s no patch,” he said. “It hasn’t leaked. It should be there.” He turned to the middling boy and said: “Go get another bottle.”
Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened—and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.
“Two litres!” I said. “Where has it all gone?”
They’d vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a miracle: matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He’d taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christian martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated—elated and inspired.
“If only…” I started, but paused.
“What?” he asked.
“If only everything could…”
I trailed off again. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:
“Thank you.”
Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught—and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin.
10
I SHOULD HAVE JUMPED out of the car as fast as I could, but I sat there instead, letting the blue liquid gush all over me. When it had finished gushing it trickled, then dribbled, then dripped. I sat impassive while it ran itself out. It took a long time: even when it seemed to have dripped itself dry it still managed to grind out another half-drip a few seconds later, and another half-half-drip a few seconds after that.
Slowly, tentatively, the three boys edged over to the car and peered in. The youngest one gasped when he saw my trousers soaked in the sticky blue liquid. The other two said nothing: they just stared. I stared too: we all stared at the dashboard and my legs. We stayed there, static like that, for a long while. Then I drove back to my building.
When I got there, I took off my wet clothes and had a bath. I lay in my bath looking at the crack and thinking about what had happened. It was something very sad—not in the normal sense but on a grander scale, the scale that really big events are measured in, like centuries of history or the death of stars: very, very sad. A miracle seemed to have taken place, a miracle of transubstantiation—in contravention of the very laws of physics, laws that make swings stop swinging and fridge doors catch and large, unsuspended objects fall out of the sky. This miracle, this triumph over matter, seemed to have