“Next, using the apparatus, I and my assistants will choose your representatives, the ten or twelve of you who are most nearly in phase with the Harmonic Energy we have concentrated in the room. The representatives will come out in turn and make individual contact with the Healer. Please, please do not think that these few are the only ones who will benefit from the process. They will be working for you and you for them.
“We have seen remarkable things happen in this room. I have watched a blind girl turn her head and discover for the first time what her mother’s face looked like. I have seen a man crippled in the prime of his life with rheumatoid arthritis stand up from his wheelchair and walk, and leap for joy. Both these events took place where you are standing or sitting, while the Healer was in contact with a representative. The contact with the representatives is the final stage in the process of concentrating the Harmonic Energy. So you must not waste your own precious powers in worrying whether you are going to be one of those chosen. In fact, if you do so, you will not be chosen because your reading on our meters will be low. More important, if you do that, your presence here will be of little benefit to you.
“Now I have finished. If you are selected for physical contact with the Healer, wait for an assistant to come and help you out. Answer any questions in a low voice, so as not to disturb the concentration of the others. Be as brief as you can. What you say will be recorded for use in our research but will otherwise be kept totally confidential.
“Above all, I beg you to concentrate on Harmony. The harmony you know best. The harmony of your own bodies. You are that magnet you saw in the film, gathering the lines of force. The Healer is the lens, concentrating them yet further. Between you you can achieve marvellous things.”
He nodded and moved behind the control panel on the cart.
Crank, snarled Bear. And crap.
Barry agreed. Despite the beam of pain that pierced his head, he’d listened to every word. If he’d been well, he’d probably have thought it was amusing rubbish at first and then become impatient with the lack of actual facts and the vagueness: about whether the horseshoe curve which he was a part of worked like a reflector or a magnet—you couldn’t have it both ways. As it was, he was most aware that he was being sold something, something he didn’t want, by a super-salesman … TV ads … Harmony wouldn’t be a bad name for a shampoo … more money in this, though? How many in the room? Bit under a hundred? Say eighty. Times four hundred. Thirty-two thousand pounds a session. Times three a week times fifty a year. Almost five million. Jesus! Place like this cost a packet to run, of course …
The harpist was making a quiet, rainy plink-plunk. The man on Barry’s left was breathing deeply, with closed eyes, as if he’d dropped off. His way of concentrating? His face was a muddle of yellow-grey folds, as if it had been round and rosy until illness had wrinkled it like a leaky balloon. A woman sitting in the row in front couldn’t stop shivering. In front of her was a healthy-looking young woman with a pale, drowsy baby in her lap. Better not keep staring around like this. You concentrating, Bear? Yearrgh.
Head bowed, hands on the rail, Barry watched what was happening out of the corner of his eye. Dr. Geare and the little bald man who’d come in beside him were in action now. Apart from the Moses-man, they were the only two of the white-coated staff who looked much more than thirty. The rest of them might have come pretty well straight from the Job Centre , been given a haircut and a white uniform, and told what to do, but Geare and Baldie could have been real doctors. They stood at opposite ends of the horseshoe, holding the aerial gadgets as if they were ray guns and pointing them at each patient in turn. A woman assistant stood just behind them. Nothing happened until Dr. Geare was aiming his gadget at a grossly fat young woman in a wheelchair, two along from the end. The assistant who was watching the box on the pedestal on that side called out in a clear voice, “Response. Medium response.”
She made an adjustment. Dr. Geare turned a knob at the side of his aerial.
“Four-point-eight,” called the woman at the pedestal. “Five-one. Five-two. Five-two-five. Five-one-five. Five-two plus. Steady.”
Dr. Geare nodded, and the assistant behind him stepped forward and pressed a purple blob, a Foundation badge, onto the fat girl’s shoulder. The same kind of thing was happening with a yellow-faced man sitting in the second row on the far side.
Something about the process infuriated Bear. He was working up into one of his rages, those sudden inward tornadoes, terrifying but thrilling, which had been part of Barry’s experience ever since he could remember. He gripped the rail and tried to master the rising pressure. Last thing he wanted now. Cool it he whispered. Sure, it’s only a con, a slick trick with a lot of shiny apparatus to fool us. Only we’re not fools, Bear. Nobody thinks you’re a fool, Bear…
He gripped the rail tighter yet. The pain in his head was appalling. He had to scream, and if he began to scream, old Bear would get out…
The man on his left stirred, as if he’d noticed something happening next door to him. Barry jerked his head away, fighting the Bear-rage. He saw Pinkie sitting in her chair, drawn into herself, still, waiting, a pallid, plain little girl nobody would ever notice. He stared at her, and as he did so, the pressure inside him collapsed. The pain in his head dulled to an ache.
Sorry, grumbled Bear.
The room became real again, something he had to see and study. Dr. Geare seemed to have found another high scorer and was adjusting the knob on his aerial while the assistant at the pedestal called out numbers. Geare would know it was all a con, of course, and the Moses-man and Baldie. But the others? The women calling out the numbers? Suppose Geare could press something on his aerial to produce a reading at the pedestal and then, when he turned the knob, make the readings change … Yeah, that’s how it would look if he was picking up genuine signals and tuning them in …
Barry breathed out a slow sigh and managed to relax a little. As he did so, he became aware that what was happening in the room wasn’t only Geare and Baldie messing around with their gadgets—not even mainly that. As the two men moved steadily toward the centre of the curve and the women at the pedestals called out the numbers in calm, chanting voices, a kind of group tension had begun to build, stronger and stronger, a slow tautening, like a guitar wire being tuned. Touch it, and it would hum with the harmony natural to its length. Even outside it, distrustful of it, fighting not to be part of it, Barry was aware of the group excitement rising and rising. Each time a fresh representative was chosen, it notched itself up a further pitch. The “readings” varied from 3.4 to 7. There was only one 7. The cut off point was 5. If you didn’t register 5 or more, steady, then you didn’t get a badge. Barry lost count of how many had been chosen. Four or five on his side, at least. Probably about the same from Baldie. Say nine. Not many to go.
It was a slow process, five seconds a patient when there wasn’t a reading and more than a minute when there was. Almost there now. The aerial pointed at the baby on the woman’s lap. “Response. High response, Six-point-two. Point-three-five. Point-four. Steady.” The woman sagged as though she was going to faint from relief. The assistant whispered in her ear as she pressed the badge onto the baby’s frock, and she managed to pull herself straight. The aerial moved up the rows. Nothing from the shivering woman. Nothing from the balloon man. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It pointed at Barry.
The process was hypnotic. He’d no time to get ready. He’d spent the whole time doing just what he’d been ordered not to, watching what was going on, working out the odds on getting chosen … Now, at this last instant, he realised it was no use just looking like a sick lad who’s hoping for a miracle. You have genuinely to long for the miracle, be that person, believe like the others believed, forget that it’s all a flash fraud.
Harmony! Once …
Like one of the iron filings leaping to the pull of the magnet, Barry’s memory leaped to a morning three and a half y
ears ago, the corridor outside the secretary’s office at Marsden Ash Junior School.
2
Why did he have to have one today? Why today? Barry was used to his headaches. Mum called them migraines. She had them, too. You realised you were going to have one while you were still asleep—in your last dream it was there—and then you woke up with a dry, sick mouth and a pulsing, stodgy ache filling your skull, and the moment you moved, it rose to a whine of pain. On a good day it would ease off around teatime, but sometimes it would carry on into next day. If you still had it when you went to bed, you knew you’d wake up with it the next morning. Aspirin just made it a bit duller.
Mum’s answer was to draw the curtains and lie on the sofa and moan, but if you did that, it was worse because you had only your headache to think about, so Barry had invented a sort of cupboard in his mind and learned how to stuff most of the pain into it and get the door almost shut, which left the rest of his mind free to try and think about other things. Trouble was the cupboard door didn’t lock, so you had to keep your foot against it all the time, which messed you up when it came to doing your best at anything important …
Such as the first football game. Today. This afternoon. Why did he have to have one today? He’d felt fine yesterday, barging around, letting the other kids know he’d been in the first team two years at his old school and got a record number of goals last year. But now …
Wouldn’t have mattered back in Thursley. He could just have said he’d got one of his headaches, and they’d still have kept him a place. But here, in filthy, rotten Marsden Ash, they’d reckon he was scared after his boasting. Why did it …
Around and around and around in his skull. Bear in his pit, around and around and around.
The bench was a shiny old varnished thing, the corridor outside the secretary’s office was green tiles below and dirty whitewashed brick above. It was typical of everything in this grotty old school, with its beat-up old books and its soap smells and cabbage smells and echoes. And the school was typical of dirty, drab Marsden Ash, which wasn’t much more than a lot of run-down mills and factories crammed into a valley because a canal had once been there. At Thursley there’d been farms, and a new house with a lawn big enough to kick a ball around on, and he hadn’t had to share a bedroom with Don; and at school there’d been Jeff and Paul and Gavin and the others, whereas here there were just a lot of roughs who picked on you because of the way you talked and put in a swear every third word to prove how tough they were. No wonder he’d shot his mouth off a bit over the football.
If the secretary would give him a couple of aspirin. He hadn’t had any so far because if he’d told Mum about the headache, she’d have kept him at home … Oh, come on! The secretary had another kid with her, a Pakistani girl (far more of them here than at Thursley) who’d fallen and gravelled her knee and was snivelling while the secretary dabbed it with cream. He’d seen that when he’d put his head around the door and the secretary had snapped at him to wait. Most of the staff snapped at you here. Come on! Doesn’t take hours to put cream on a knee!
Barry stirred with impatience and, doing so, knocked the back of his head against a sort of brick ledge that jutted out above the bench. His brain yelped with the flood of pain. The world went red-black. He leaned his face forward into the palms of his hands, drowned in pain, struggling not to vomit. Whew! That had done it! He’d have to go home now after all …
“You’ve got a nasty head.”
A cold, small, soft voice, close by in the red dark. He looked up and saw a fat little girl with glasses. Couldn’t have been much more than six.
“I’m all right,” he muttered.
“No, you’re not. But you will be soon.”
“Fat chance. Goes on all day like this. Nothing’s any good.”
Barry could hear the whine in his voice. He loathed that voice.
“Shove off, will you?” he snarled. “Nothing anyone can do.”
“There’s something I can do.”
She reached out and took his hand. He jerked it, but even that twitch of effort turned itself into pain, and she’d gripped him quite hard. When she took the other hand, he let her. Stupid kid.
“Shove off, I tell you,” he said. “I don’t believe in fairies.”
“Tell it to go away,” she said. “It will go away if you tell it. I’ll help you. I helped my granddad make his bad leg go away. Your nasty head is going away. You tell it. It’s going if you tell it.”
Nothing really happened, nothing which made any sense. The swear was in Barry’s mouth to get rid of her but didn’t quite come; even feeling foul, he wasn’t going to line up with the Marsden Ash toughs. Perhaps that was it, or perhaps …
Her hands were chilly, but heat was coming from somewhere: a strong warmth on the back of his neck and his shoulder blades, as though there’d been an electric fire close behind him; only the heat began inside him, growing there …
“Tell it to go away,” she whispered. “Help me.”
The heat made him drowsy. It was like dropping off to sleep after a bad day, dropping into darkness, pain dwindling down a long corridor, a corridor that led right away, farther and farther. He gave it a feeble, sleepy shove, and it vanished completely.
“Better now?” she whispered.
His eyes were shut. When he opened them, he really felt as though he’d been asleep all night after one of the bad days and was now waking with the ache gone and the sense of a well day before him. He eased his head from side to side, trying it out. The muscles of his neck, stiff with the remains of tension, creaked a little but didn’t hurt. The warmth was still vaguely there, but with a shiver to it now, like the feeling that comes when you are lying face down on the beach and a small cloud crosses the sun. He stretched.
“Whew!” he said.
“Better?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
For the moment he had no doubt at all that she had actually done what she said: made the migraine go. She looked pleased, though she didn’t really smile. She had a round, flat, pale face which seemed too large for her body—or perhaps it was that her mouth and nose were so small. But the extra thick lenses of her glasses made her eyes look soft and huge. They were brown. Her hair was almost black, done in a pigtail. Her clothes were very neat but looked as if they’d been bought for somebody much prettier than she was.
The secretary’s door slapped open, and the Pakistani girl came out, still snivelling, with a plaster on her knee. The secretary looked at Barry.
“Well, what’s up with you?” she said.
“I had a headache, but it’s gone.”
“Good,” she said, not interested. She turned to the kid with the glasses. “And you’re in the wrong school,” she snapped.
The door shut.
The girl gave a puzzled sigh.
“How old are you?” said Barry.
“Going to be seven.”
“You’re supposed to be at the Infants’ still, she means,” said Barry. “Other side of the playground. You new here, too?”
She didn’t say anything but took his hand.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll show you. One good turn deserves another.”
On his way back along the edge of the asphalt playground Barry passed the wall of the Assembly Hall. It was built a bit like a chapel and had brick buttresses. He fitted himself into the corner of one of these, leaning his back against the sooty brick. It was a mild September morning, with misty sunlight. A corner of brickwork touched the light bruise at the back of his head, seeming to fit the invisible wound without hurting it. He let it rest there, making it part of him, himself part of it. Like that he could feel the whole world reaching out around him, not dreamy, not blurred at the edges, but sharp and clear and all in its necessary place, each worn old brick where it belonged, and the cabbage smells and the echoes of feet and voices all true to themselve
s and all full of one life, a slow, quiet thereness spreading on and on beyond the sun.
He stayed in his nook, part of this life, this quiet, until the bell rang.
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.
Healer Page 2
