Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  “Uh … well, it sounds great … but I mean, what about Pinkie’s mum—Mrs. Proudfoot?”

  “She is in America. I will telephone her this afternoon and get her consent. You will be glad to know that she has altered her views on Pinkie’s healing abilities since you knew her. She is, by the way, now Mrs. Freeman.”

  He’d done it on purpose. This time the shock was sharp enough to stimulate old Bear into a snarl of warning. Barry continued to stare at Mr. Freeman in astonishment because that was what the man wanted. He was the puppet master. You twitched at his bidding, and what amused him was watching you do so. It didn’t prove anything, didn’t in any way solve the crook-or-genius riddle, not at a rational level. But at Bear level it did. You couldn’t pull that on old Bear; he wasn’t anyone’s puppet. Crook!

  “She is doing excellent work,” said Mr. Freeman, “both in putting suitable clients in touch with us and in exploring the possibilities of extending our work to America. I don’t think we need anticipate any objections to your joining us, apart from one small matter.”

  “Uh?”

  “My father-in-law. Mr. Stott. I have not yet met him, by the way. I understand from Pinkie that you know him, and to judge by what you said to her this morning, you have recently seen him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Will you tell me about that?”

  “You see, I used to take Pinkie over there sometimes. Her mum didn’t like going. I hadn’t been since she left Marsden Ash, but when I heard about this kid who was healing people, I biked out to ask him if it was her. He said yes.”

  “You didn’t tell me this earlier?”

  “Because of Mrs. Proudfoot—Mrs. Freeman, I mean. She and Mr. Stott don’t get on.”

  “But when you applied to come here, you in fact knew you would be seeing Pinkie?”

  “He wasn’t dead certain. He said he’d written, but no one had answered.”

  “That is the case. Tell me, Mr. Evans, would you describe Pinkie’s grandfather as a harmonious character?”

  “Jesus, no!”

  “You will have to get out of the habit of blasphemy if you are to come here. For one thing, it deeply offends certain of our clients.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “I simply tell you. But about my wife’s father. You are right. There are, alas, certain personalities which are profoundly disruptive of the Harmonies. It is not a question of their being good or bad people, it is almost a physical trait, but it can present me with agonizing dilemmas. Only this morning I and my colleagues had to consider the case of a young woman who in her interview with Dr. Hamm revealed personal disharmonies strong enough to disrupt the energy flow we struggle to focus during our sessions. I had the distressing task of telling her we could not accept her. This sort of thing is a commonplace of medical practice, but that does not make the individual instances any less painful. You follow me?”

  He looked at Barry, waiting. But Barry, after his earlier uncertainty, knew where he was again. He kept his inward anger under control. Better not make it too easy, though. Let him do a bit of persuading

  “They used to be pretty fond of each other,” he muttered.

  “So it must have seemed. But remember Pinkie had very few people to be fond of. Would you say she used to be fond of you?”

  “Uh, she just needed me, I suppose.”

  “Exactly. When I spoke to her twenty minutes ago, she was tired after the session. She did not mention your having been there. I had to question her. She’d been pleased to see you but was quite unexcited,”

  “Oh.”

  (Mild disappointment, that’s right. She’s fooling you, mister. She’s told you she wants out—you think she’s going to let on she’s even interested? You don’t know Pinkie the way old Bear does.)

  “She has changed,” said Mr. Freeman. “Her world has widened and now contains many friends. She can make comparisons. She has found she neither wants nor needs her grandfather as she used to. Now I must ask you to look at the matter from my point of view. You heard me this morning describe Pinkie as a lens. Of course, that is only a metaphor, but one could extend it by saying that Pinkie is a lens of great accuracy, and this means of great delicacy. Partly this is her natural talent, but partly it is her training since she has been with us. And her treatment. I have taken trouble to see that she is not subjected to emotional stress of any kind …”

  He paused and raised an eyebrow. There had been a slight emphasis on the word “any.” And Pinkie’s mum had somehow been persuaded to leave her and go to America.

  Barry nodded.

  “Have I the right,” said Mr. Freeman, speaking so slowly and quietly that he might have been asking himself the question, “Have I the right, for the sake of one man’s brief happiness, to risk the violent emotion of a meeting that would certainly distort and might even shatter our precious lens? So many people’s lifelong happiness depends on Pinkie.”

  “Um …”

  “I think not. Mr. Stott, as he told you, wrote to us, but with my wife’s strong support as well as that of our senior staff I decided not to respond. It was a painful decision. I did not tell Pinkie that I had made it. Were you proposing to visit Mr. Stott on your return North?”

  “Nip out, I thought—just tell him she’s okay.”

  “Good. I would be truly grateful if you could do just that. I have no wish to cause the old gentleman any distress, so it would be an excellent thing if you could set his mind at rest.”

  “Right.”

  “But do not encourage him to think that he will be able to see her.”

  “I get you.”

  “Excellent,” said Mr. Freeman, rising. “I’m afraid I have kept you from your lunch.”

  “That’s all right. Can I talk to Pinkie? I mean, if I’m going to tell her granddad she’s happy …”

  Mr. Freeman shook his head.

  “The sessions are very exhausting for her. She has to rest after lunch and will still be asleep when the bus leaves. In any case I am not sure it would be wise. I would prefer to see how she reacts tomorrow to having met you again.”

  “I could—”

  “If all goes well, you will be returning here, won’t you? Perhaps then. But speaking of that, will you call at the office before the bus leaves? Mrs. Elliott will have a letter for you, setting out the terms of employment I am suggesting. Think it over for a couple of days, talk to your parents, and let me know. And since you seem interested in the scientific background to our work, you might care to read this. You will find it less simplistic than much of our literature.”

  He handed Barry a pamphlet bound in grey paper, smiling as he did so to welcome him into the great game of blinding suckers with science. Barry smiled back and left.

  As he walked toward the smell of cooking, he realised that he was trembling. Partly this was weakness after the violent migraine, partly it was the relaxation of tension from the interview, but partly it was anger. Bear was awake again, growling. Nobody used old Bear as a puppet. Nobody bought him with smiles and flattery and a three-month job. Thought he was the kind to stab his friends in the back, did he? Sweet-talk an old cripple who was only asking to see a kid he was fond of? Neither wants nor needs her grandfather … Grrrrr.

  6

  It was less than eight miles to Dallington, but the journey took almost fifty minutes. The bus dithered this way and that off the main road, visiting steep and soot- smeared villages where half the houses were boarded up and practically no one got on or off. Barry stared out the window. Pinkie did her trick of folding herself inward as if she was watching private landscapes which no one else would ever visit. Why bother with her? grumbled Bear. Crazy kid. Barry pulled out of his lethargy to try to think why.

  At first it had been just because he’d got himself stuck with her, but now…There was something about her. She didn’t seem to know ho
w to play. You couldn’t imagine Mrs. Proudfoot counting pink toes in the bath: “This little pig went to market.” He’d noticed her tagging along with other little kids; they liked having her around, but she wasn’t best friends with anyone, as far as he could make out.

  Sometimes she seemed even younger than she was, but other times Barry felt that she was really more like an adult, armoured and unknowable—even, in an extraordinary way, dangerous. Though she needed looking after in her dealings with the outside world, inside she could look after herself. Nobody had power over her there, not even her mother. She was a funny kid, all right, but she was somehow special. Being with her, Barry decided, made him feel in charge—not just in charge of her, but of himself, too, and what was going to happen.

  The valley narrowed, squeezed between the steepening fells. Road and railway and the rotted canal ran side by side. Wherever there was space, somebody had built an old factory, though a few of these had been pulled down and replaced by modern warehouses. There’d been no room, down here on the precious levels, for people, so lanes led up on either side to ranks of little brick houses perched on slopes so steep that the upstairs windows looked clear over the roofs of those below. In places acres of these old cottages had been cleared, leaving a sort of pink brick and mortar scree spilling down the hill. Just before Dallington the bus turned up one of the lanes, churning in bottom gear between the poky cottages and then on up through an estate of bright new houses, just as poky, and then, steeper and steeper, between stone-walled fields where the thin turf was dotted with ragwort and patches of bracken, as though the moor above, long held back by farmers, had started a slow invasion down the hill.

  The bus stopped in front of a brick chapel with boarded windows. The rest of the village consisted of a few old brick cottages, just like the ones below, crumbs of town spilled here by accident when the others had been crammed into the valley. Pinkie got out of her seat without a word and went to the door. Barry followed.

  “This it?” he shouted above the racket of the bus reversing to turn back down the hill. “I thought your granddad lived in Dallington.”

  Pinkie shook her head. The lane led on, towards the true moors. She started up it.

  “Funny place to live if you’ve got a bad leg,” said Barry.

  “Not got any legs.”

  “You said you used to make his leg better.”

  “When it hurts.”

  “I don’t … Anyway, it’s still a funny place.”

  They climbed on. About a quarter of a mile above the last house in the village Barry could see a new-looking bungalow, built of stone, standing on a buttressed terrace. It seemed the only place they could be going, but as they approached, Pinkie moved around to Barry’s other side and fell back a little, keeping him between herself and the house. The lane led close by the jut of the terrace, and the moment they reached it she left his side and scuttered up by the wall, crouching until she was bent almost double by the time she came to the garden gate. She pushed it open and made signs to Barry to stop in the gateway.

  The terrace supported a garden, but nothing like Barry had ever seen. The soil was piled high as the outer walls and crisscrossed with yard-wide concrete trenches. All over the level surface stood white labels, sometimes with winter-blasted plants in front of them but often marking only a patch of bare earth. The labels made the garden look like a cemetery for toy soldiers. From a trench halfway across the garden projected the head and shoulders of a man; close-shorn white hair showed beneath a knitted blue hat with a bobble on top. Hearing the click of the gate latch, the man had half craned around, then moved a few feet to the right and swivelled completely to see who it was. Two ferocious blue eyes glared from a scarlet face. A white moustache bristled like the antennas of a weapons system.

  “Get the bloody hell out of my garden,” bellowed an enormous voice.

  Barry hesitated. Pinkie was creeping along the trench in front of him. He fell back, just outside the gate. The man gestured vigorously with the trowel he held, commanding Barry to move on and not stand there insulting his privacy by looking at his garden. Pinkie slipped out of sight. The man gestured again and was drawing breath for another good yell when Pinkie leaped at him.

  She had ambushed him from close by. His furious face had no time to change before she was in his lap and kissing him, almost like a dog that had jumped up to lick his face. He pushed her off, still as if she’d been a dog. She scampered to the gate and took Barry by the hand. He’d never seen her like this. She’d let go; she was laughing, her eyes sparkling behind the glasses, her hair all over the place.

  The man had come gliding after her. When he rounded the corner, Barry saw that he was sitting in a wheelchair. A pair of empty trouser legs drooped in front of him, with shoes somehow fastened to the ends. The shoes made little shuffling dance movements as the chair joggled them.

  “Here’s Barry,” said Pinkie. “He brought me. It’s Granddad, Barry.”

  “Mr. Stott to you, young man.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

  “We’ll see about that. Don’t count your chickens. Where’s that mother of yours, young woman?”

  “At home.”

  “Can’t stand the sight of her,” explained Mr. Stott. “Feeling’s mutual. Met her, I daresay.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you’ll know what I mean, eh?”

  “Well, er, she’s a good cook.”

  “Please, Granddad,” said Pinkie.

  “Say what you think and think what you say. Bottle it up and regret it one day.”

  “Is your leg hurting?”

  Mr. Stott gave a great snort, as if he was determined to unbottle all his loathing of his daughter in one satisfying explosion before moving on to this new subject.

  “Been behaving itself,” he said. “Got what’s called a phantom limb, young man. Went and stood on a land mine at Alamein. Came to in the hospital and found the surgeons had been having a go at my legs, sawn off anything the mine had left. Left leg never got the message, though. Thinks it’s still there. Bloody rum thing, the human mind. You’re looking at a man that’s haunted by his own left leg, supposed to be buried out in the sands of Egypt forty years back. Shut my eyes, and there it is. I can move it around, wiggle the toes—doing that now. Reach out and scratch my shin, only the bloody thing’s not there and my hand goes clean through the itch.”

  “But we’ve stopped it hurting,” said Pinkie, smug and decisive.

  “Used to give me hell,” said Mr. Stott, “and that made me hell to live with. My fool of a wife got the worst of it. Ought to have left me years before she did, and no doubt there’s some will say that’s why my daughter’s turned out how she has. Be that as may be, four years back I took a fancy to inspect my granddaughter I’d never seen. Had to pay my daughter a hundred pounds for the privilege, mind you. Cut a long story short, along they came when I was having one of my bad days, yelling and cursing fit to make the moon blush. Ugly little thing she was, but no escaping the family likeness.

  “Pulled myself together best I could—been a hundred down the drain otherwise, eh? She came close up. I reckoned my daughter had ordered her to kiss me, and I was starting to push her away when she grabbed hold of my hand and started babbling on about my leg. I felt like chucking her across the room that moment, but somehow I didn’t, and then—bloody rum thing, the mind, I tell you—the pain that had had me squealing a couple of minutes before went clean away. What do you make of that? My daughter didn’t like it at all, I can tell you for a start. Mind over matter, eh? If you can call it matter when the leg’s not there in the first place.”

  Mr. Stott’s face was so red, his eyes so fierce a blue, his moustache so spiky, his voice so loud, that he looked and sounded furious still. Barry could see what he meant about the family likeness. It wasn’t only the flat oval of their big faces; there was something about the
look in their eyes, his and Mrs. Proudfoot’s and Pinkie’s, too. They were loners. No, that wasn’t quite right because most loners are really only sulkers. But these three were truly separate. They were like stars that are not part of any galaxy. Only Pinkie had found her extraordinary bridge.

  “I get migraines,” said Barry, using the posh word to impress. “Pinkie thinks she got rid of one for me.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Well, it went. It might have been going to anyway.”

  “Told anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t. Playing with fire. I suppose you’ve come for a game, young woman?”

  Pinkie jumped up and down in eagerness.

  “What about your friend?” said Mr. Stott.

  “He can just watch.”

  Mr. Stott glanced at Barry and nodded.

  “Up on the porch, young man,” he said.

  Barry felt snubbed for a moment. You couldn’t expect Pinkie to understand, but the old buffer ought to have realised that it had been a nuisance to use up half a fine Saturday plugging out here and then get left out of things. But as soon as the game started, he saw why. It was a kind of hide-and-seek. Mr. Stott chased Pinkie up and down the trenches, yelling at her in his huge sergeant-major voice that she was a bloody Hun and he was coming to get her with his bayonet. He could rush his wheelchair down the straights at fantastic speed but had to slow drastically for the corners.

  In a straight chase he would have caught Pinkie quite easily, but she was able to hide, and move about still hidden, by crouching below trench level. She had to poke her head up to see where he was, and that might give her own position away. There were only certain points where the wheelchair could turn; sometimes Mr. Stott would rush bellowing to one of these, spin around, and glide back in silence, hoping to catch Pinkie sneaking around the other way. Barry thought he was trying as hard as he could. There was just enough of a maze to make it an even contest; in fact, you might have thought the garden had been actually built for the purpose, though obviously the trenches were really there to allow Mr. Stott to garden comfortably from his chair.