Trash - Andy Mulligan [48]
And at that time the sky grew dark and Jesus cried out, ‘It is accomplished’ – and the curtain of the temple was rent in two, top to bottom – the earth quaked and the graves were opened and the saints were raised …
Gardo saw that each line of print had a tiny number to mark out the Bible verse, so now we tried out a hundred combinations, muddling backwards and forwards. We put the numbers in the strip against the numbers in the column. We tried counting down, and then across, but it wasn’t easy because nobody knew what it was we were expecting – so he’d do one thing, I’d do another and contradict. We got to a point where we were going over the same ground again and again. All we knew was that the numbers we had – 940.4.18.13.14 – had to be set against the lines somehow, so as to turn them into letters – that was what the old man had said. But whatever we tried we ended up with gibberish.
Rat came back smelling of rum, with a nip for each of us. We ate, and he went to sleep for a while.
Gardo and me settled to trying more variations. We put out new candles, and we weren’t fighting any more. He’d have a go, and hand over to me. While he tried again, I just sat and thought and thought, then he did the same.
Midnight came round, I think, and maybe that was the magic. It was the end of the month, and we were slipping into All Souls’ Day – that’s the Day of the Dead here. Maybe José Angelico and Gabriel Olondriz came and sat beside us – I swear it was crowded in the room. Maybe they put the answer right in his head – because Gardo hit the jackpot. Instead of going left to right, he went right to left. 4 lines down, 18 words to the left, he got a capital ‘G’. 13 down, and 14 to the left, he got an ‘o’. It was the first time we had a word.
He moved on 5 letters and got nowhere, so we decided that the slash might mean change the page, so we turned over. That didn’t help us, so we turned the page back. 5 lines down, 3 letters in, we got ‘t’; then 6 down, 4 across, we got our next little ‘o’. The slash meant ‘turn back a page’, and now we had two very meaningful words, and we just looked at them, hardly breathing:
Go to
We turned back a page whenever there was a slash, so we were going backwards through the book of John. It was falling out all over us, just counting carefully, straining our eyes because the words were so small. We made mistakes, but we were laughing, because the whole thing was opening up.
Go to the map ref where we lay look for the brightest light my child.
Rat woke up and we read it to him.
He shook our hands, then we hugged him, and he said: ‘I know what a map ref is.’ My, were his eyes big and shiny. ‘I was in some class,’ he said, ‘and they’re all doing maps. That’s a map “reference”, that’s what it’s talking about. Where we lay is where we were – where we met, maybe? And he’s thinking his little girl is reading this.’
‘Open the map,’ I said. I thought even then he was being a smart-arse, but we were learning to try everything anyone said, every way. ‘Let’s look at it again,’ I said.
We’d stared at the map a hundred times, hunting it for arrows or crosses, wondering if they’d been marked and removed, straining our eyes over it. We stared and stared, and Rat said, ‘A map ref is a reference to the numbers, OK? It’s a line of numbers.’
‘Numbers again?’ I said. My head was aching, but we went back to the letter. There were no numbers apart from the code we’d just cracked, so we turned back to the map. Numbers all round the edges, but still no way in. Until I looked at the envelope and saw: Prisoner 746229.
I read it aloud.
‘That wasn’t his number,’ said Gardo quietly.
‘What wasn’t? What are you saying?’
‘When we arrived. We were in the waiting room, and the prison boss came in and asked Sister Olivia about the name. He said we had the number wrong,