Under the lettuce

" A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN, UNDER YOUR LETTUCE "

Mary Kelly was often fond of saying, " It's nothing special" and this
is how she largely thought of herself. The birth of her two children
had been a magical event in her life, but she knew deep down that the
feelings she'd had when she cradled the sticky baby were the same as
nearly every other mother. So, nothing really special had ever happened
to Mary Kelly.

Until the day she was making packed lunch for her children and found
the face of Jesus inside a Morrison's bread bun.

She made these sandwiches every weekday, very dilligently, adding
lettuce and nice cheese, cold meats from the counter, not that
vacumn-packed muck. She was aware that the children never ate these
sandwiches, that they quickly ate the Club biscuit and the packet of
Mini Cheddars and then threw the sandwiches away, but she made them
every day, nevertheless. She knew the children threw them away, because
she had a friend who picked her own children up in a car from school
and her friend had told her how the children filtered out of the school
gates and flipped their sandwiches into the garden of a house next to
the school, a procession of discus throwers.

Her friend said that the house next door to the school was always up
for sale and it was no wonder, who wanted to have a garden full of
corned beef sandwiches ? Imagine going out to mow your lawn. This image
made Mary a little unwell as she thought about her bare feet sinking
slowly into a lawn of limp sandwiches, the damp bread oozing between
her toes.

But, be that as it may, she still made the sandwiches every day.

She had the cheese sliced up and waiting on a small saucer, she had
washed the lettuce and was letting it dry on a chopping-board. She
sliced open the first breadbun with a sharp breadknife and flipped the
top half over like a tortoise onto its back, exposed and at the mercy
of the butter.

There was a blemish on the bun.

The lower half of the bun had brown marks spreading across it. She
tutted to herself and picked up the bag the buns had come in. She was
well inside the use-by date. She would take the bun back and
complain.

She had a better look at the bun. The discolouration looked a little
bit like a face. Not very much, it was true, but it looked a little bit
like a face with a beard.

There was only one other bun in the bag, and she scowled to herself.
She could hardly send one of the children off with a bun and the other
not.

" Come on you two, " she called, making her decision, " Your lunch is
ready. No sandwiches today. I've put you an extra Penguin in to make up
for it ."

A look like Christmas moved over the children's faces.

Mary sighed a deep sigh of peace as the children left, this was always
the best time of the day. She made herself a cup of hot chocolate,
Boots vanilla fudge flavour, which made the kitchen smell
gorgeous.

She wrapped her hands round the mug and took another look at the
offending bread bun from a variety of angles. From some directions it
barely looked like a face at all, but from others it became reasonably
sharp and clear. She decided to keep the bun, mostly for evidence when
she went down to Morrisons later that day, but firstly to show to her
friend Jean, who would pop round in about an hour.

Jean was a bit more adventurous than Mary, she sometimes dyed her hair
at home, using one of those kits you can buy in Boots, something Mary
would never risk doing. Jean was pretty sure that it did look like a
face in her bread bun.

For Mary, that was the end of it, but Jean seemed reluctant to leave it
alone. She picked up the bun very reverently, like an antique and
walked over to the window to bathe it in light and rotate it to get the
best view.

Mary had really wanted to just get back into her routine, but Jean was
fascinated by the mark on the bread.

" Do you know, " she said, " This does look like a man with a beard.
You should do something about this. "

" Like what ? " asked Mary, bored, as she looked in the fridge and
counted up the Petit Filous yoghurts, she'd need to get some more at
the weekend.

" You should phone the paper. "

Mary looked at her scornfully, " Oh, they'll be fascinated by a mark on
a bread roll, I'm certain"

Jean very carefully placed the bun down on a cream coloured saucer, "
Mary, the image of a face of a man with a beard has appeared inside a
sealed bread bun. The papers lap this sort of thing up. I saw a story
in the news last year, the face of Jesus in my duster. "

" It's not the face of Jesus, it's just an odd mark that looks a bit
like a face. Like looking at clouds. "

" It looks enough like Jesus to interest the papers. I'll give the
local rag a call now. "

Some words made Mary's spine twist unpleasantly, she hated people to
call the Echo a local rag, it made her think of a man sitting in a
chair, casually leafing through a newspaper made up of oily-rag pages,
unknowingly drenching his hands in dark ink and oil. She hated to think
about chewing gum as well, but that was incidental.

The man from the Echo did turn up later that day and interviewed her
briefly, no she was not deeply religious, no she had never heard the
voice of the Virgin Mary, yes she supposed it did look like a face and
yes (reluctantly) it could be the face of the Lord Jesus. He
photographed the bread roll a number of times from many different
angles and told her that she should put the bun in a bag and keep it
safe, might be worth freezing it, though he wouldn't guarantee that
freezing wouldn't damage the mark.

Privately, he felt it was two bored housewives who'd been playing
around with gravy browning.

The photograph and short article was in the Echo that night, on page
three ( although there was a reference to it on the front page - "Local
Woman finds Jesus - in a Bakery !" ). She bought two copies and put one
copy of the front page and page three into a clear plastic binder with
holes punched down one side that the children usually used when handing
in their homework, in the belief that it would raise their marks.

The children felt it was "embarrassing" and that their mother looked
like a "god-botherer". It was true that the article had not been a true
reflection of her opinion that it was just a funny shape which looked a
bit like a face, rather than a bona fide miracle, but she was still
disappointed by their reaction.

As for her husband, he seemed barely interested at all. Most of the
time, Mary felt he was hardly there at all. He felt like a husband on
an advert on television for beefburgers or oven chips, just there to
show a blissful reaction to the food he was eating. Occasionally she
felt jealous of the level of intimacy Linda Bellingham seemed to share
with her husband in the Oxo adverts.

The next day, there were references to the bun in the letter page.
Opinion seemed divided as to whether it was genuine or quite hurtfully,
whether " Mary Kelly is a sad nutcase with too much time on her hands".
One thing was certain, people were interested.

She had more visitors that day than she'd had in the last three months,
all of them chatting of this and that, before working the bun into the
conversation. Some went away convinced, others were disappointed that
they didn't get any sort of "miracley feelings" when they touched the
bun.

After the fourteenth visitor, she decided that she ought to preserve
the bun, just in case. She wasn't happy about all these people handling
it. She put it inside a freezer bag and opened up the heavy lid of the
chest freezer. Then she worried about it being squashed, so she put it
inside a tupperware box she usually used for blackberries. They picked
and froze about two pounds of blackberries every summer and every March
she ended up throwing three quarters of them away.

Now the bun was safe.

The next morning some of the nationals had got interested. It was
buried away in the second third of the papers and it took her friend's
phone calls to alert Mary, since she only ever read the Mail on Sunday,
and even then it was only the supplements. "Oh bun all ye faithful" was
one headline that she snipped and filed. The Star had sunk to " Baps
the way, aha aha, I like it" which seemed to be more a reference to
bosoms than a potential religious miracle, judging by the other picture
which took up the bulk of the page.

There were a few more visits that day, but Mary wasn't prepared to get
the bun out and defrost it. She also had a letter from a very kind
gentleman wanting to buy the bun from her, offering sixty four pounds.
She was surprised by this sum of money, but decided that she would hang
onto it for the time being.

When she went to the shop to buy washing powder, a few people called
out to her in the street, in a fairly friendly fashion. The man behind
the counter jokingly made the sign of the cross as he put the change
into her palm, but there was no spite in it. After a few days had
passed, even this limited amount of fame and attention went away.

Her husband had taken to saying, " Pop a few slices of our Lord in the
toaster, will you Mary ?" in the mornings, but she never responded to
the baiting and even he stopped after a few days.

That was all there was to it really.

After ten days, all there was to evidence the "miracle" were some
newspaper clippings and a bun in a tupperware box, inside the chest
freezer.

Of course, when she was making herself a roll to eat during Richard and
Judy a month later, the face appeared again. She smiled to herself
wryly and set it to one side. She'd show Jean later on and then get the
other one out of the freezer and they'd laugh and remember the week she
was a celebrity.

She picked up another roll, fingers gripping it and denting its soft
surface ever so slightly. She began to slice it in half, sawing at
first until the knife got purchase and then easing through it like a
skate over ice. There was a face with a beard inside that roll as
well.

And the next one.

For the first time ever, Mary went out of the kitchen and opened the
drinks cabinet. They called it that, but it was really a cupboard with
a flap and a hinge at the bottom, where they kept the phone bills and
insurance details and a few bottles of spirits that they bought at
Christmas and made last nearly the whole year. She usually drank
Advocaat at Christmas, snowballs, but the colour in the bottle seemed
livid and curdled and it did not seem right. Her fingers closed around
the neck of a bottle of Gordons Gin, that green colour that only seems
to exist in glass form, and pulled it free of the cupboard
smoothly.

She poured herself a stiff gin and sat down at the table to leaf
through the Argos catalogue, pulling out calm from the pages of
paddling pools and dolls prams.

This was not funny any more. She had not bought these rolls from the
same place as the bread buns, so there couldn't be a problem with the
manufacturing process. And these rolls were different, smaller and more
square than the fried egg shape of the bread bun.

If there had been a problem with the factory or whatever, other people
would have come forward after seeing her story in the paper, told the
papers that they'd had bread with faces as well. One of the papers had
even given a "Miracle Hotline" number to ring.

She walked into the kitchen and standing hard on the pedal, opened the
bin and dropped all three buns into it. That was an end to that.

There were three rolls left in that packet. She didn't know whether she
dared to try those.

She leaned against the counter, looking at her new oven, gas - she
didn't like those ugly orange rings you get on electric cookers, the
rings that look the way a child might have drawn them, no more complex
than that. She didn't think that the bin was solving anything, so she
put on her rubber gloves and fished them out.

It was rare that her husband did any housework at all, but on the few
occasions that he'd done the washing up, he'd done it bareback,
plunging his bare hands to the wrist into the lukewarm water he'd used,
thrashing around for forks like a bear trying to catch a plump fish.
She couldn't bear to watch him do it without gloves. Later, she
realised she couldn't bear to be in the same house while he did it, so
she went out into the garden and stood resolutely looking away from the
house.

She looked again at the rolls. If anything, the image was slightly
clearer this time, the mouth seemed to have a kindliness to it that
wasn't there before. She left the kitchen and walked over to the
telephone. She was frightened that her voice might have disappeared.
When she had nightmares, they were always that she was shouting but
that nobody could hear her. There were differing situations, but that
germ of fear was always there, the fear of silent shouting. She spoke
aloud to herself for reassurance, rehearsing what she was going to say
to Jean.

Jean came over and looked at the rolls, " You just did these today ?
"

Mary nodded, somehow ashamed of it.

" One after the other, slice - face, slice - face, slice - face ?
"

Mary nodded again, her cheeks beginning to colour up.

Jean let out a low whistle and put her hands on her hips, thumbs
forward, palms to the back. For a brief moment, she resembled a
pantomime boy. Her eyes alighted on the other three rolls.

" Try it with one of those. "

Mary wasn't keen, in fact, she trembled a little as she used the knife.
She wasn't sure whether she was scared that a face would appear, or
that one wouldn't, that this was something she could only do
alone.

The face was there, she could see it before she even finished slicing.
And she looked at the previous rolls she'd sliced, the third had not
been cut in equal halves at all, the top bun was substantially bigger
than all of the others. That seemed to mean something and she tried to
explain it to Jean.

Jean felt that they should ring that hotline from the papers, that this
was more than just a coincidence now, this was something genuinely
spooky.

" You don't think it really is the face of Christ do you ? " asked
Mary.

" How would I know ? You need some vicar or something to tell you.
Maybe we'll get to the Vatican with this, you can butter some rolls for
the Pope. Here you are, your Eminence, a glimpse of heaven, if you'll
just look under your lettuce. It's just bloody weird Mary, that's all.
This could be a case for Mulder and Scully. "

She sort of sang the last bit and Mary didn't understand it at
all.

They rang the hotline, Jean doing most of the talking. It took a while
for them to answer, presumably the hotline had fallen into disuse, even
though only a few days had passed. The man from the newspaper wasn't
convinced, but Jean persuaded him that it was worth a gamble. Mary
whispered to her, " Tell him it's a scoop." Jean giggled and said, "
This is exclusive to you, we only talk to you. But if you're not
interested, then we go to the Mirror. "

The man from the tabloid agreed to send somebody down to look at the
rolls and said the reporter would want to see Mary slice one of the
last two bread rolls, to see if the phenomenon could be
replicated.

Jean giggled again, once she'd put the phone down, " It's not scoop
anymore Mary, it's exclusive. You need an agent. "

Mary stuck out her hand, " You've got the job. "

" So no sandwiches for me tomorrow then ? " was the only comment her
husband made when he got home. She plonked a bag of sliced bread down
on his lap. " Don't suppose even you can make faces appear in bread
that's already sliced."

She'd bought herself a new suit from Debenhams and hidden it in the
back of the wardrobe, not that there was any need, she could have worn
it in bed and her husband wouldn't have noticed. Once they'd left for
work, she ironed it and put it on, spinning on her heel gently in front
of the full length mirror to judge the effect.

The journalist duly arrived a tired looking man in a bad gray suit,
once again, Jean did much of the talking, as her agent. There was a
little bit of talk about "powers" which Mary didn't really approve of,
but she'd agreed to let Jean run things. The journalist had a look at
the rolls and nodded to himself. The photographer took a few pictures
of the rolls and of Mary, standing artistically brandishing the
knife.

" Right, " said the journalist, " Let's have a look at the other
rolls."

She fetched them from the cupboard. He examined both of them, looking
along the edges and the underside. " Looking for stitches, or
pinpricks, " he explained, before selecting one.

The photographer got in close, by the sink, down on one knee to take a
series of photographs while she sliced the roll. Once again, the face
was there, sharper than before. It was definitely a face, there could
be no doubt this time. There was no interpretation of shapes that could
probably be a nose, this was a face.

The journalist lit up a cigarette without asking, but Mary made an
effort and didn't object.

" That was pretty impressive, " he said, " If you're a fake, I can't
see how you're doing it. Do you mind if we take one of the rolls ?
"

Mary looked at Jean nervously.

" You've got six, " said the journalist.

They agreed.

" I'll just take this to a lab, see if we can work out what the brown
stuff is. As long as it isn't HP sauce, you'll be front page tomorrow.
"

After the journalist had left, Jean and Mary went into town and Jean
chose a bottle of wine for them, French stuff too. Mary had never
bought a bottle of wine unless she was going to a party, and even then
it would be her husband who would buy it - the cheapest is always
better quality than second cheapest, was his theory, shops know most
people get the second cheapest.

Jean bought two glasses and a corkscrew from Debenhams and they sat up
near the cathedral, on the green near the huge arc lamps that at night
would throw up yellow light on the old stones, drinking their wine and
laughing at the tourists who tried to photograph them.

The journalist called back later that day to say that the lab didn't
know what the marks were but they weren't paint or HP Sauce or gravy
browning or branston pickle.

" Welcome to the front page girls, " he said and they were giggly by
this stage, from the wine and impending fame.

Her husband grunted and turned away as she wriggled up to him in bed
that night, her body warm against the small of his back.

The tabloid was true to its word, big photograph and the headline, " I
am the way, the truth and the slice" underneath in smaller writing, "
Let's face it - Lincoln's bun woman finds another five "

" Must've been a slow news day, " said her husband, slurping at his mug
of tea, " If they'd had a picture of some game show bird on a beach
they'd have used that instead. "

Her children asked if they could stay off school that day for fear of
embarassment.

Jean was more excited when she came round. She gave Mary a big hug
round the shoulders and told her how good she looked in the photograph,
something her husband hadn't even mentioned. They must have read the
short article about five times.

" Pity you're not pregnant, " Jean said, " We could get another front
page tomorrow - bun woman has bun in the oven. Will baby have the face
of Jesus ? "

" Oh shush, " said Mary, feeling embarassed, " It's not any message
from Heaven, it's just something odd that happened. I can't believe
that God is so bothered about me not going to church that he wants to
send messages to me. "

" Who knows, " said Jean, " Maybe it's a publicity campaign."

Mary wanted to cross herself here, but felt that Jean would
laugh.

A few minutes later, just as they were opening the Hobnobs, the
telephone rang. It was someone called Lester, a researcher he said,
from the television show. You may watch it, he said, This morning,
Richard and Judy, he said. It's sort of a magazine format, but on the
television.

" You'd better speak to my agent, " said Mary, who felt like she wanted
a paper bag to blow into, like you see people do in films.

Jean spoke for a few minutes, while Mary waited in the kitchen, digging
her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She was trying hard not to
really think about why any of this was happening to her, she was
nothing special.

Perhaps there was no reason, maybe it was just one of those
astronomical coincidences, like the chance of picking six numbers
randomly chosen from 50 were unbelievable when you looked at the odds,
but somebody still did it every Wednesday and Saturday.

" They want us to go on Richard and Judy tomorrow and slice the last
roll, " said Jean when she came into the kitchen, " Richard and Judy,
my God ! "

This didn't seem possible at all to Mary. Jean was far more excited
than she was, Mary was just convinced that she would sit herself down
on the comfy sofa and Richard Madeley would call security to have her
thrown out.

" We need to try something, " said Jean, " I had an idea, just before
the tv rang, for what we'd do if we got on tv. But we need a dry run.
Come with me. "

She'd had her hair done the afternoon before, asking for something a
bit special. Although they had to be on the six thirty train from
Lincoln, she'd spent a long time doing her make-up before she set off,
using techniques she'd only read about before. The girl sponged all
this off her face before starting again, " It's different techniques
for television, " she explained, " It all has to look different to real
life. "

Judy didn't tremble as much as Mary had imagined in real life, she
always looked very nervous on television. Richard was thin and elegant,
like unfolding a letter on high-quality writing paper. They put her at
ease and Jean was allowed to sit next to her on the sofa, although Mary
noticed that Jean seemed to freeze up during the programme and didn't
want to say anything.

They had a phone in poll to see if she was genuine and she appeared in
the running order between Monty Don and an item about whether Indian
fashion such as saris and asian music was filtering through to the high
street ( an item Mary had herself watched on many programmes on and off
for about a five year period ).

She cut the last roll and the camera came in close to show that she
wasn't switching the rolls or anything. There was the face. The
"Genuine" calls began to overtake the "Fake" on the graphic and the
numbers Richard read out.

" Now, " he said, " You yourself don't believe this to be a miracle, do
you ? "

" No, " Mary said, " I have never claimed to be anything special. I
don't think anyone is sending a message through me. I just think it's a
bit odd. I'm surprised that everybody is so interested to be honest.
"

Richard looked at his clipboard that was beside him on the sofa, " But
there are people saying that this face is the face of Jesus ( can we
have a close-up please ? )...... There we are. "

" It does look a little like it, " said Judy, " Not that... really we
know what Jesus looked like. I always think of him as Robert Powell,
from Jesus Christ Superstar. "

" But there are connections, aren't there, " said Richard, " The bible
does talk about bread in connection with Jesus. There's feeding the
five thousand with loaves and fish and then there's the last supper -
this wine is my blood, this bread is my body. "

" I hadn't thought about that, " Mary said, quite genuinely.

Judy came in at this point, " Well, we've seen Mary slice the roll that
she brought in - the sixth one of the packet that had this face inside.
But she also agreed that she would give something new a try."

" We went out today, " said Richard, " And bought a selection of rolls
and buns. "

The camera showed six packets of varying bread buns sitting on a
table.

" I will select three buns, " said Richard, " Completely at random,
from these unopened packets and Mary will slice two and I will slice
the other. Mary has not handled these buns at all, they've only just
come from security"

The camera moved over to Mary, and gaped at her with metal and glass,
agog at what it had found in its view.

" I'm not promising it will work, " she said, " Remember, I don't claim
miracles or to have any special powers. We will just see what happens.
"

" Join us after the break, " said Richard.

The audience did join them after the break and saw the demonstration,
just as Richard had described it. He picked out three buns completely
randomly and then from those three picked one for himself. Mary sliced
first, a crusty cob. Very stiff and hard to cut. Inside, the familiar
face. Then Richard, cutting to reveal an ordinary bread roll, cloudlike
inside. Mary sliced the third and there was the face.

Richard gave good reaction for the camera, " This is amazing, " he
said, " I didn't believe this story when I read about it, but we've
seen her do it today. Remember, she didn't touch these buns until just
a minute ago, live on air. I chose the buns, they were in sealed
packets, opened by me. I chose them and then the individual buns were
selected by me. I can't think of any way that Mary can have cheated
here. If you can, give us a ring. "

It was a sensation. The press were all over it the next day. Mary had
to go round to Jean's and sit with her as the telephone calls came in,
to monitor what it was she was being asked to do. There was no doubt
about it, she really was something special.

She was asked to open a supermarket, the idea being that the ribbon
would run through a bread roll and she would cut the bun open and cut
the ribbon at the same time. She turned that down for being moronic.
She was asked to do an advert on television, being offered more money
for a few hours work than her husband had earned in eight years. It was
for a brand of cheese and the slogan would be " There's nothing you'd
rather find in your bread bun than ****** cheese".

It didn't seem right to earn a lot of money out of this sort of thing,
just in case it did turn out to be something religious, Mary felt.
After all, it was something that could easily disappear overnight.
There was no way of knowing before she cut each and every bread roll,
whether there would be something there or not. At the moment, it was
coming every time she cut, but there were no guarantees for the
future.

She did some public appearances, not asking for too much money, paying
Jean half and salting the rest away in her post office account.
Likewise, she did some television appearances, Des O'Connor, some
programmes on Sky and Channel 5, Late Lunch. She was disappointed not
to be asked to do Songs of Praise. Not that she had ever watched it,
but still...

" This is the most interested anyone's been in Jesus for years, " said
Jean, " You'd think the church would pull their finger out and make
something of it. "

She was interviewed by some posh woman who worked for Marie Claire,
Evelyn something. Mary had never even read Marie Claire, she told Jean
it had always intimidated her in the shops. She asked Jean if she
couldn't do Bella or Take a Break instead. Jean set up both. Bella tied
it in with a piece on fancy fillings for sandwiches.

It was the call from America that really turned things around. They'd
picked up on the story. The woman on the phone said that Mary even had
a website, www.breadfaces. She'd never even heard of it. There was
another called "breadheads", but this was a bit more
tongue-in-cheek.

They offered her a pretty large amount of money to go out there and
talk on a few of their shows. Rikki Lake being one of them. She could
go out to America for three or four weeks and travel around.

Her husband didn't want to go to America. By now, she wasn't sure she
was all that bothered. He and the children just seemed to begrudge her
success. She felt like they wanted her small and downtrodden and back
making packed lunches. The children barely spoke to her these days.
When she looked at them, they weren't children anymore, but
adolescents, keen for the day when they'd be rid of both her and her
husband. The children looked sometimes as though they hated both of
them.

She learned, after the argument, that her husband had promised them new
bikes and a swimming pool, once the offer for the advert came in. The
whole family blamed her for not agreeing to do the advert and the house
they'd once been happy in became a brick reminder of how she'd let them
all down with stupid principles.

" If you'd invented something, " she said to him, " And everyone was
interested in it, I'd have supported you. I'd be proud of you. "

" You've done nothing special, " he said, " You can't even manage to
make a sandwich anymore. How special is that ? "

" And, " he said, " If I'd invented something, I would have made sure I
made some bloody money out of it. "

So, she went with Jean instead. They went down a storm in America. The
audiences liked her reserve, she wasn't boastful or loud, she just went
about things in a quiet way, she genuinely liked America and the
people. Her shyness was appealing to them, somehow.

She loved how open it was. Even out in the countryside in England she'd
felt a little closed in, in America, out on the roads, sometimes you
could feel like there were no cities, no buildings, just sky. It was a
beautiful feeling and the colours were like nothing she had ever seen
before, the deepest blues and streaks of purple raced over the morning
sky. She could feel the power of the weather throb through the air. The
weather here wasn't a nuisance or an inconvenience or pleasant, it was
a force, older and stronger than anything humans had made.

The Grand Canyon almost made her drop to her knees. She'd seen it on
television and in holiday brochures, but she had no idea until she got
there at the force it would have on her. It was, quite plainly, seeing
that the ground had been ripped open, torn into an orange scar by
forces that even now with computers and experts, humans couldn't
entirely explain or predict. It wasn't just a hole, a wrinkle, it was a
huge rip.

England had more history, but there seemed less power in the things
that man had placed upon the maps than the way nature had shaped the
raw material to begin with, many, many years earlier.

After four weeks, she was sure that she didn't want to go back and Jean
agreed. An offer came to them which seemed hard to turn down. There
would be a tour, people driving around the country to visit deprived
parts of the community, to help with reading and writing and have a
free health clinic for a couple of days.

As part of that, there would be a soup kitchen and the organisers felt
it would be a good way to get publicity and funding for the tour if
Mary was to work in the kitchen for a few days, slicing up the bread
and giving everyone that came their own face to take away.

" There'd be little money in it, " said the organiser dolefully, a kind
woman with hair that she never seemed to get to stay flat, " Just
living expenses while we go really. But we'd only need you to do just a
week, just to get the publicity coming in. "

Mary spoke to Jean briefly and said, " I think this could be good for
us. I don't know what this face thing is all about, but we've had a
good time over the last few months. This sounds to me, like a good
thing to do. "

Jean said, " Well, I've got nothing to go back to England for. Seems to
me like we could see what America's all about. I'll tell them we'll do
it. Not just a few weeks, the whole stretch. "

On the website, a campaign was gathering to present the Pope with a
petition that she should be declared a saint. Beatification, it was
called.

" How can I be a saint ? " she asked Jean, " I haven't done anything,
and I'm not dead. And as you'll be well aware, there's already been a
Saint Mary. Quite an important one. I don't imagine the church will be
too keen to have another. "

" We're just two people who got a bit of luck, " said Jean, " We got
some luck and did something with it. "

The first day of the tour, standing behind the counter in the van,
metal edge of the counter against her hips, a pot of margarine the size
of a breeze block to one side, a jar of thick yellow mustard with a
brush deep in its neck to the other. Mary felt happy in ways that she'd
never thought about before. She'd never considered, before all this,
what it was to be happy, it was just getting on with what life had
given her. She sliced up the first bread roll and handed it over to the
shy boy at the counter. Mary and Jean, behind her, both watched
silently as his soft dark hands tore off a chunk of fluffy bread and
popped it into his mouth, smiling at her. She realised that this was
the first roll she had sliced in two months that somebody had actually
eaten, and surely that was the point, after all.