Healer (3 page)

3

“Medium response,” called a voice. “Four-point eight. Point-nine. Five-oh-five. Five-oh. Five-oh-five. Steady.”

The aerial pointed at Barry for another few seconds and then moved on. The assistant had to come right around behind the rows to give him his badge. Dazed with the violence of memory, he barely noticed.

Of course, if he'd been asked about his first meeting with Pinkie at any time since, he would have remembered it, though probably not told whoever had asked him. And he had often thought about it in a more theoretical way, trying to make up his mind what, if anything, Pinkie did when she “helped” someone get well. His main conclusion was that she'd got it right. She helped. You were due to get well anyway, your body had geared itself up to that point, and there was something about her that triggered the process of recovery off. That was all.

But thinking about it, Barry had only used as much of his memory of that morning as he needed to make his theory work. What it had actually been like—the knowledge of peace, the sense of the world's life flowing through him—had been left out. It hadn't been forgotten. It was like a once-favourite book he'd stopped reading, there on the shelf still, available but never opened. But as the aerial aimed at him and the word “harmony” hummed in his mind, it was that part of the memory which he had snatched up from the jumble of past days.

It was more than memory. It was the same thing happening again. Everything belonged, and he belonged with everything, a speck of the universe, a speck called Barry Evans, but the speck was also the universe, and one of the billion billion names of the universe was Barry Evans. Only one moment more, and he would dissolve and become the universe, exist along its infinite network, knowing all its past, all its future …

But first …

Yes, there was something to do. A reason. Why he was here, standing, gripping this rail …

He made an effort, like deliberately waking from deep sleep, from a marvellous dream. He couldn't have dozed off (if you could call it that) for more than half a minute, but he felt like a time traveller who has spent perhaps years of his own life going back and forth through the ages and has only now returned almost to the instant when he set out.

He continued the effort by pushing the experience away, so that he could think about it, make sense of it. (That was Barry, the impatient, disbelieving mind. Old Bear had been with him on the trip but was surly about waking up, still trying to snuggle back into the dream.) Of course, it was the same old either/or problem you always got with Pinkie, magnified by the setup in this place.
Either
the Moses-man was on to something, and all this kit and the circle of patients and Pinkie herself were actually producing an effect, even if they weren't sure what, but call it focusing this Harmonic Energy stuff,
or
it had all happened in Barry's mind, was going to happen soon anyway but had come with an extra rush now, with the chocolate and brandy wearing off, and the mild delirium of not having eaten a proper meal since Monday, and seeing Pinkie again, and the tension of whether he was going to get picked to talk to her close up, all working together.

His hand slid to his hip pocket and touched the receipt for Mr. Stott's four hundred pounds. Hell, his hand knew what it thought. The Moses-man was a fraud, getting money out of sick suckers. So it was all in the mind, according to his hand. Good while it lasted, though—a high without dope.

The sense that this was his morning, the gambler's certainty of luck running the right way, came back strongly. He was feeling pretty good.

Wrong, growled Bear.

It was true. He was supposed to be feeling lousy, but the implacable, pulsing pain of the migraine was dying to a dull ache, and the nausea was almost gone. He felt feeble and shivery still, but that was mostly hunger now. Going to have to play-act a bit when his turn came …

Dr. Geare and Baldie met near the centre of the horse-shoe. They murmured briefly to each other, then took the aerials back to the cart and spoke to the Moses-man. He straightened from the control panel and gazed around the room.

“Excellent,” he said. “This looks like being one of our really good sessions. The levels of Harmonic Energy are almost as high as I have seen them. Fifteen of you, an unusually large number, have shown yourselves to be truly in tune with the Energy. If I believed in luck, I would say this was our lucky day. But I do not believe in luck; I believe in you. It is your effort, your concentration, that has brought this effect about. Almost all of us will benefit from that effort. So don't stop now. Especially while your representatives are in contact with the Healer, concentrate on your own personal Harmonies. My assistants will fetch the representatives from their places. I want them to sit facing the Healer, let her take their hands, and then reply to what she says as naturally as possible. There is nothing to be frightened of. We are in the presence of a great power, but it is wholly beneficent. It is the power that makes all things new. The power of healing.”

He had dropped his voice to a throbbing whisper, but it still filled the big room. As soon as he finished, somebody brought an ordinary wooden chair and placed it opposite the steel one in which Pinkie sat, and two of the women started to fetch the “representatives” out from opposite ends of the horseshoe. Soon the first “representative” was sitting talking to Pinkie. The next was waiting in a wheelchair a few feet away. Pinkie took the patient's hands and said something in a low voice. They talked for about a minute, and then Pinkie let go, and the patient stood up and walked slowly back to his place. An assistant took the wooden chair to one side to make room for the wheelchair. Another patient was brought to wait her turn. So it went on.

There were no miraculous cures, no cripples slinging their crutches away and starting to waltz, but most of the patients came back to their places with dazed, smiling, holy looks. One old man who had needed to be helped into the chair pushed himself firmly to his feet when his turn was over and nodded briskly as he came back to his place, telling himself, “Yes, I feel better already.” On the other hand, a woman with a red face and bulging legs started to sob noisily before Pinkie had finished with her. It was an ugly sound, not at all like crying with happiness or relief.

When it was the baby's turn, Pinkie took it onto her lap to hold and almost dropped it as she handed it back—fairly typical Pinkie, if she'd done so. Next was a boy from the far side, about seven or eight, with huge eyes and a face like a starvation poster. Barry couldn't watch whether Pinkie did anything different with him because it was his turn now to come out, following the assistant right around the back. He got a glimpse of the box on the pedestal as he passed it. It was more complicated than he'd expected, like a miniature video game with a display screen and controls. Two curves, one green and one pink, oscillated across the screen, and the woman who was working it seemed to be trying to keep them in phase with each other. She looked totally absorbed.

While he stood and waited for Pinkie to finish talking to the boy, Barry did his best to think himself back to how he'd been feeling half an hour ago. A fit of the shivers came, and he let it happen. He hung his head, drooped his shoulders, and when the assistant touched his elbow to tell him to move forward, he shuffled like an old man and lowered himself into the chair as though the slightest jolt would be agony. Pinkie leaned forward and took his hands.

“You've got a bad head,” she whispered.

There was something wrong with her voice. It had always been slow and quiet, but it had been careful, too, with every word clear. Now it was somehow blurred and uncertain.

“That's right,” he muttered. “Same old thing.”

“But it's going. Going. If I help you, you can make it go.”

She sounded a bit less listless now. Perhaps she was just tired. Doing whatever she did for all these people must take something out of her.

“It gives up sometimes,” he said. “But it only comes back, bad as ever.”

“You can stop it from ever coming back. You can tune yourself to the Energy. We'll show you how, after. Now tell it to go away. Now.”

Still, she gave no sign of having recognized him, of having even seen him. It was difficult to tell with Pinkie. Her flat, pale face with its wrong-size features (though the eyes looked normal now without the magnifying glasses) was like the unchanging mask of some animal that signals its feelings in different ways from humans. The second time Barry had met her—when he'd mended her glasses on the school bus—he hadn't understood how much breaking them mattered until he'd talked to Mrs. Proudfoot about it. It was the same now. He was the one who must have looked startled when she spoke his name.

“Barry? You're Barry.”

“Uh. Yeah. Hi.”

“Have you seen Granddad?”

“He's fine. Sends his love.”

“Thanks.”

She produced one of her tiny smiles. He didn't expect any more. That was a long conversation for Pinkie to have in public like this. She was still holding his hands. He couldn't do what he wanted till she let go.

“Your head is getting better,” she said, her voice quite clear now.

“Right.”

“It's getting well. Help me make it well. Help me.”

No need. The pain, the nausea had vanished, rinsed away, like stale and smoky air rinsed pure by a sudden shower. He felt weak and chilly, but whole. It had happened during the few moments while Pinkie was recognizing him and asking about Mr. Stott.

Watch it
snuffled Bear.

He pulled himself out of the trance just in time, as she let go of his hands. He leaned forward, turning his head slightly away and putting up his right hand to tease the lobe of his ear. Surely she could see at this distance! His heart sank as she sat impassive. Perhaps she hadn't seen. Perhaps she was refusing to answer. Then her nose wrinkled itself up, just as though she was suppressing a sneeze. She closed her eyes.

Done it! Got it right? Wheeeee!

As Barry rose from the chair, he stretched his arms to release the feeling of exultation, of triumph. It all was worth it, worth his time and the sickness and Mr. Stott's money. They'd been right in their guess. Okay, that meant the game had only just started, and there were impossible problems still to solve, but they'd got their pieces on the board against all the odds. They were in.

Barry didn't notice how he got back to his place in the horseshoe. He was vaguely aware of the next two or three patients having their interviews with Pinkie. She carried on just as before, gave no sign. She wouldn't. Teachers and people like that sometimes decided that Pinkie was a complete liar because of the toneless way she answered their questions. When they got to know her better, they changed their minds and thought she was too dreamy to know how to lie, but they were wrong about that, too. She could keep a secret as well as anyone. At this very moment she was sitting in that crazy chair, telling the woman in front of her that she could help her blood run clean or her joints move without pain or whatever, when all the while she knew quite well that Barry had asked her whether she wanted to get away from this place and she'd told him yes.

4

Barry just happened to glance down as he walked back along the aisle of the bus. It was the same kid, sitting perfectly still, unlike all the other little wrigglers from the Infants' School.

“Tape hold out?” he asked.

She nodded and put her hand to touch the corner of her glasses, where he'd mended the broken hinge on the way to school that morning. He never knew what told him that there was something still badly wrong.

“In your seats!” yelled the driver.

He dropped into the place beside her, though Ted and Paul were keeping one for him on the back bench.

“What's up then?” he said.

She didn't answer.

“Trouble at school?”

She shook her head.

“At home?”

She nodded.

It was like one of those stupid guessing games, and just like that, he had one of those flashes when you know before you've even asked the question.

“They're going to get at you about the glasses?” She nodded.

“Right. I'll come home with you and say I busted them. I'll think of a way it wasn't my fault. There's nothing they can do to either of us.”

He grinned, rose, and nipped back to his friends.

“Siddown!” yelled the driver.

Viola Street was a cul-de-sac, about a quarter of a mile from the roaring main road where Barry lived. And it was in any case only half a street, nine little houses down one side and the blank wall of a mill filling the other. The houses had tiny front gardens. One was filled with vast chrysanthemums all lashed to individual canes, another was mainly a sandpit littered with battered toys, but the house in the farthest corner, Number 9, had only a checkerboard of black and white tiles. The centre tile had been removed, and two yellow pansies grew in the hole. The kid—she'd told him her name was Pinkie, but he couldn't think of her like that, couldn't really believe anyone had a name like that—reached up to the gleaming brass knocker and tapped it so softly that you wouldn't have thought anyone would hear. The door opened almost at once.

“And who might this be?” said the woman.

She had the same soft, clear voice as the kid, and the same flat, pale face, though her mouth and nose were normal size. She wore a blue striped apron. Her hair was as shiny yellow as the door knocker.

“Barry Evans, ma'am. I've come to say I'm sorry I busted, uh, Pinkie's glasses getting off the bus this morning.”

Her pale brown eyes flicked to the glasses, checked the mended earpiece, stared hard at Barry, and then glanced down the street as if to make sure there weren't any witnesses around.

“You'd best come in,” she said.

The front room had a never-used feeling. Barry had noticed the same thing in the two sets of lodgings where his family had stayed between Thursley and Marsden Ash. (Later he found that all of Number 9 felt like that. Even the bathroom was like a exhibition room in a store, where nobody has ever cleaned their teeth at the basin or sat on the toilet.) The carpet was sharp blue, the chairs green, the walls cream. The pictures were large photographs of snowy mountains.

The woman took the glasses off the kid's face as if she'd been lifting them off a shelf and studied the mend. Though Barry had made a neat job of it, she smoothed the tape with her fingertips before putting them back.

“And just how did this come about?” she said.

“Bit of bad luck,” said Barry easily. He had in fact no idea how the kid had broken the glasses. She'd been at the stop that morning with them broken, and he'd had a roll of tape in his satchel, that was all. But he could see it wouldn't do now.

“No such thing,” said the woman, softer than ever. It was worse than if she'd snapped. Now Barry understood why the kid had been worried.

“I mean, we were getting off the bus,” he said. “The little kids get off first, see. Pinkie was last of them, and I was first of the juniors. I'd left her a bit of a gap, but somebody gave me a shove behind, and I had to jump, save myself from falling. That's how my satchel swung out and bashed into her glasses. Couple of inches more, and it'd have caught the side of her head.”

From the back of the house a timer sounded. The woman left without a word. Barry winked at the kid, who replied with the smallest possible smile—you almost needed a magnifying glass to see it. The timer stopped, and the woman came back, bringing with her a waft of sweet fresh baking.

“Hey, that smells like a million pounds!” said Barry.

Who said there was no such thing as luck? They were the first words that came, a simple reaction to the glorious odour, but he couldn't have got them righter, both in what he said and in the way he said it. The kid, surprisingly, did her bit.

“Mum's a super cook,” she said.

“It comes of standing around instead of getting on into school,” said the woman. “Standing around dreaming.”

“It wasn't like that,” said Barry. “There were other kids in the way. It's always a crush. I caught up with her, having to jump.”

“And you didn't see who pushed you, of course.”

“No, ma'am. Wouldn't have been his fault either probably. Someone could have given him a shove from behind.”

“I don't like her going on that bus. Never wanted her to go to school in the first place, but it seems I've got no choice.”

“I could keep an eye on her if you're bothered,” said Barry. “See she's all right.”

Mrs. Proudfoot stared coldly at him, and then at the glasses, and then back at him.

“Since you've shown yourself honest … so far,” she said. “Not many I'd say that of. Wait here.”

She was back almost at once, carrying a rack of rock buns. The fusty little room was filled with the freshness of them. She handed Barry a paper napkin.

“They're for the meeting,” she said. “But there's one here broken you can have. Put it on the napkin—I don't want crumbs on the carpet.”

The bun was still too hot to bite into, so Barry started on an outer fragment.

“Tastes like a million pounds, too,” he said.

This time he used the words on purpose. There was something about Mrs. Proudfoot, about this house … She'd wanted to make him pay for the glasses, probably. And then she'd seen she was getting a child-minder for the price of a broken bun. But the kid's clothes didn't look like cheapies.

She nodded and stood aside, leaving him a clear path to the door.

“You can finish it on your way home,” she said.

“Right. See you at the bus stop Monday, Pinkie. Thanks for the cake, Mrs … er …”

“Proudfoot.”

“Bye, Pinkie.”

The kid wrinkled her nose at him. Bit like a hamster, he thought.

It became a routine. If there was nothing bothering her, she left him alone, but if she wanted to talk, she'd give him some kind of signal—brush against the back of his hand as he chatted with friends at the bus stop or do her nose-wrinkling trick as he passed her on his way down the aisle. He would sit with her for a bit and try and sort out her problem or else arrange to walk back with her to Viola Street, which gave them a little more time to talk before they actually reached Number 9. It could be anything. For a start she was incredibly clumsy and was always breaking things or losing them. Then she didn't understand about school. Even the simple arrangements at the Infants' seemed beyond her. This wasn't entirely her fault because Mrs. Proudfoot had kept her at home till this term, so she was thrown in with a lot of kids who'd been there a couple of years. You'd have thought they'd have shown her the ropes, the way kids do, but she took weeks to learn. She wasn't stupid. For instance, she could read, which was more than most of the little kids could do, because Mrs. Proudfoot had started to teach her when she was only four. But even so, Barry gradually came to realise, she was funny about words. She usually understood what people said, but it was as though it was somehow not real to her. She seemed to live the important part of her life in a different lot of dimensions from everyone else, a sort of Pinkie universe in which language only made half sense. That was why she preferred signals, like the touch on the back of the hand or the wrinkled nose.

Usually the solutions to her problems were straightforward—mending something or suggesting where to look for it or inventing a story to explain its breakage or loss or else simply getting her to see how some part of the system worked. But sometimes they were more mysterious. Later that term, without a word of explanation, she pushed something into the pocket of his jacket. It turned out to be a small teddy bear, black, missing one eye and very grubby. It was surprising that Mrs. Proudfoot allowed such an object in the house. In fact, Barry guessed, that might be the explanation: Pinkie had somehow got it filthy, and Mrs. Proudfoot wanted to put it in the garbage. He shampooed it and put it to dry, and his mum must have found it like that because when he got home it had two eyes and its torn ear was stitched up and it was wearing a yellow bow tie. When he gave it back to Pinkie a couple of days later, she took it without a word; in fact, nothing was ever said about the whole business. It was curiously satisfying, getting it right like that. Old Bear approved, but then old Bear didn't trust words much ever. Old Bear was scared stiff of Mrs. Proudfoot too.

On Fridays Barry walked with Pinkie to Viola Street and, as it were, handed her over to Mrs. Proudfoot for the weekend. She paid him off with a bit of whatever she was baking. She always baked on Fridays for the “meeting,” whatever that might be. Barry seldom came into the house, and Mrs. Proudfoot gave the impression that she was glad to have him off her doorstep, but the arrangement was fair because she cooked the best cakes Barry had ever tasted. This gave him something to tell Ted and Paul and the others—a reason why he bothered with a kid from the Infants'; he told himself it was just something he'd somehow got stuck with, like the stray dog the Evanses had got stuck with back at Thursley when Don had brought it home.

It wasn't because of the migraines. He didn't have another one to bother with for more than a month, and when it came, he deliberately kept clear of Pinkie. He wasn't going to have her holding his hands on the school bus in front of everyone.

Toward the end of the term, one Friday afternoon—so near to Christmas that the sky was already halfway dark and the streetlamps had come on—they had reached the corner before Viola Street when Barry said, “Hope your mum's baked something special. It's going to have to last me through till Jan.”

Pinkie stopped dead. He glanced at her. Her face seemed extra pale under the dusk and neon.

“You'll be okay,” he said. “No school equals no problems.”

Her eyes glistened, enlarged by her glasses. He crouched down, as if he was talking to a toddler.

“Look, it's only four weeks … less. You'll be all right. Nobody's going to hurt you. We'll start up again next term, uh? Look, I suppose I can drop around Fridays, like I was hoping to get a cake out of your mum anyway, and then … If I said can I take you for a walk, d'you think she'd … No …? But it's no use if she's going to be there, Pinkie. Isn't there anywhere you go without her, supposing there's someone to take you?”

“Granddad's.”

“Where's that?”

“Dallington.”

Barry teased at his earlobe, thinking. Dallington was another grimy town like Marsden Ash, a few miles along the valley. There was a bus.

“I suppose I could tell your mum I've got to go over to Dallington,” he said, “and shall I take you because of your granddad living there. Think she'd wear that? Right, but listen, I can't afford the bus fare that often, and in any case I don't fancy plugging all the way out to Dallington just because you want a pencil sharpened or something. It's got to be worth it—something important. So before I say anything to your mum about Dallington, you've got to tell me whether … okay, that'll do. You wrinkle your nose like that. No, wait a minute. Supposing I've got something on …”

That was how it began. The code didn't evolve in one go, and over the months, as Barry was more and more allowed to come right into the house in Viola Street, other signals were added. Some were definite, agreed in words for specific purposes. Others were vaguer, tiny gestures Pinkie might make whose meaning Barry learned to read. But the core of the code remained. If Barry put up his hand to tease his right lobe, it meant “Do you want me to suggest going over to Dallington?” And if Pinkie then wrinkled her nose, it meant “Yes.” And it meant that she had something important she needed his help with.