Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  It had been an accident. It had been inevitable. Yet it was still Barry’s fault. He couldn’t have done anything else, any more than Norah could have, but he was as much to blame as she was. More.

  Time went slowly by. Sergeant Coyne and Mr. Stott talked a bit. They seemed to understand each other. They were both old soldiers, used to people being horribly killed. Mr. Stott must have seen what happened. He was a long way away, but he had good eyesight. That was something.

  At last feet scrunched on the cinders where Barry sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the parapet while he stared unseeing at the hills opposite. The road below was busy with people going to work. The day was only just beginning for them.

  “Right, let’s have you now,” said a man’s voice.

  Groggily Barry stood. There were two men in plain clothes. One of them jerked his head, and Barry walked with them up onto the moor and along the track to the circle. The area near the missing stones was roped off with white tape on stakes and guarded by a uniformed policeman. A TV camera crew had arrived from somewhere. One of the plainclothes policemen began to ask questions while the other took notes of Barry’s answers. Neither of them looked as if he ever believed anything. Barry gave his name and address, and then they took him straight into the details of Mr. Freeman’s death. Barry found he could describe it with detached clarity—first this, then because of it that, but meanwhile that—as though he’d been telling a friend the plot of a film he’d seen. He pointed out the positions where he thought everyone had been at the various times. The policemen had evidently heard the story already, from Sergeant Coyne probably, though he couldn’t have seen how the fight with Norah had begun. Mr. Stott had been too far off for details. There was only Barry who really understood—and Pinkie, if she remembered anything.

  There was a long pause when he’d finished while the policeman taking notes went on writing.

  “Okay,” said the other one. He’d sounded totally bored so far, but now a tinge of interest crept into his voice. “That’ll do for that for the moment. Now about what you were doing up here with this kid in the first place …”

  “I was bringing her to see her granddad. That’s Mr. Stott. You see …”

  “Long story, eh?”

  “Well … yeah … bit …”

  “Take it down at the station, then.”

  Barry became used to police stations over the next few weeks—the hard chairs and the waiting, and the glimpses of other people in more or less trouble than him, and always the same lot of questions as last time. He thought, that first day, that he was going to spend the night in a cell, but Dad turned up and got him out somehow.

  “Somehow” was the word. The most frustrating thing about getting caught up in something like a police investigation is that you never can see how the system works, why things happen to you, what’s really going on. Nobody tells you anything. You may not actually be in a prison cell, but that’s still how it feels, as though all you could see of the outside world was a patch of a courtyard, which you stare at through a small square window. Somebody crosses the yard, carrying a file of papers; you hear voices arguing; three doors in your corridor open and close, but not yours. You try to fit these events into a pattern; you can’t help it, though you know they may have no connection with your problem. And when at last somebody does come to visit you, it’s a stranger who doesn’t tell you who he is, doesn’t answer your questions, but asks you ones you’ve answered twenty times already and then goes away.

  At times Barry almost believed they were doing it because somehow they knew about Bear, knew that this was just the way to infuriate him and drive him into the open, and then he’d do or say something which they could pounce on. But both Barry and Bear were too wary to let it happen. That moment on the moor when he had nearly attacked and killed Mr. Freeman had frightened them both, badly, in different ways. So Bear lurked grumbling in his lair, and Barry saw that he stayed there.

  Slowly he discovered that the treatment wasn’t, in fact, deliberate, wasn’t even part of a general softening-up process. It was how things were, because the system was a system, and he might as well get used to it. From the first he told the exact truth (except about one thing, and they hardly bothered to ask him that). Yes, he used to keep an eye on Pinkie at school because her mum had worried about her; yes, she’d gone away, and he’d lost sight of her till Mr. Stott had given him money to fake an illness and get into the Foundation to find out how she was; he’d managed to exchange a signal with her that told him she wanted to get away; Mr. Freeman had given him a job, but he hadn’t managed to see Pinkie alone for a bit; when he had, he’d tried to explain to her about the problems of running off with her, but then she’d told him about Mr. Freeman’s giving her drugs and he’d realised he had to give it a go; and so on. They weren’t much interested in the escape—nothing for them there—and they got bored with the fight on the moor after the first few times.

  One morning there was a new man with the two he was used to. Same old questions, though; same old answers—Pinkie, Stott, the Foundation, the job, tea with Mrs. Butterfield, night duty, finding the lift shaft, Pinkie’s cupboard, Pinkie’s arm … Always the flat, oh-yes voices had prodded away at that bit. They didn’t believe anything, but that least of all. When he suggested they should get Pinkie to confirm what he said, they just looked at him. They had, and they didn’t believe her either.

  This morning, though, it was different. The new man asked questions. He was interested. And the other two were bored in a different way from usual. Till now they had been the patient hunters, waiting for him to make a mistake. Now they’d given up.

  They still didn’t tell him anything, and he never discovered what had caused the change. He guessed that the new man was more interested in the Foundation than he was in Barry. Had Mrs. Butterfield told him something? Or Dr. Geare? Had he actually found the remains of what Freeman had been giving Pinkie? It didn’t matter. Barry was off the hook now as far as the police were concerned.

  It wasn’t only the police. Barry had to go and see a social worker called Mr. Rucker, a grey-faced, bald little man with forty-three other problem citizens in his files. He was the sort of man who in the old days would have really stirred old Bear up. You could imagine him sending people off to prison camps with the same grey, unchanging frown and then making the same neat notes in their files. The police saw Barry as a quarry; Mr. Rucker saw him as a piece in a huge, messy, fluid, unfinishable jigsaw puzzle. Mr. Rucker’s life was doing the puzzle, and he was good at it. He made Barry have an interview with the headmaster of a new school over at Manton, and despite the missed year and the term’s being so close to starting, Mr. Rucker “somehow” worked the system so that Barry was offered a place, and “somehow” Barry found himself cornered into giving it a try.

  There were journalists, too, for a bit. For a couple of days quite a crowd of them hanging around the doorstep. It was a bit like the first lodgings the Evanses had stayed in after leaving Thursley. That had been next to a pub, and you found vomit on the sidewalk when you went out in the morning. Now you found cameramen. But soon someone at the police station must have leaked the fact that there didn’t seem to be a sex angle, and they had to switch to the much less rewarding guard-dog-slays-health-crank approach. It was just a stroke of luck that they didn’t go for the child-saint-performs-miracle-cures story. It turned out that the BBC Checkpoint team was all geared up to do an exposé of the Foundation and had a lot of dissatisfied ex-patients waiting to tell their tales; these people being there and ready were the ones the journalists got hold of. Besides, Pinkie’s mum was back in England. According to Mr. Stott, she’d taken Pinkie to stay somewhere secret about twenty miles away and was going back to America with her as soon as she could. Meanwhile, there was precious little chance of her letting anyone interview her daughter. When Barry himself talked to journalists, he told them the truth but not much of it.
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br />   Only once, in all these different kinds of questioning, did anyone ask him the thing that mattered. They all were looking through their own cell windows, all trying to piece together a picture that made sense to them out of niggling little clues. They couldn’t even see the real point because it was too big for their windows—or too small to notice. It depended how you thought about it.

  A policeman asked the question, casually, at the end of the session at which the new man had turned up and the hunt had gone dead. He wasn’t especially interested. For him it was a sort of footnote, outside the main story—a bit of gossip for his wife that evening, maybe.

  “Did you ever see Pinkie heal anyone, Barry?”

  Barry shrugged, shook his head, produced a pitying smile.

  When they let him go, he started for home. Mum always worried when he was at the police station. It wasn’t fair not to go and tell her at once that it looked as if it was all over now. But he had a sick taste in his mind. Usually he did his best not to think about Pinkie much. That was over. Nothing like it was going to happen again in his life. In a way it was like Thursley—the more clearly you remembered it, the fouler life around you began to seem. Not that the policemen would have cared much if he’d told them yes, Pinkie could do it, it was real. Gossip for the wife still. Very few things that happen to you really matter. Why should you then feel bound to betray one of them, saying it’s not true?

  He prowled, purposeless, down High Street toward home. But he knew he wasn’t ready to go there yet. On the corner of Carver Street he stopped and stood, muttering to old Bear under his breath, like one of those loonies you sometimes see lurching along the sidewalk, yelling to strangers or to no one at all about how somebody cheated them out of their rights twenty years ago. Was he going to become like that himself, one day?

  The whole thing was over. Even the police had given up.

  At the end of Carver Street lay Farm Road. A hundred yards along that stood the gaunt old warehouse with Viola Street beside it. At least he still had the sense, just, not to go mooning up that way.

  He must have been standing on the street corner for twenty minutes, feeling steadily more and more at odds with himself, more and more unreal and meaningless, when a car rolled to a stop at the end of Carver Street and waited for a gap in the traffic. He wasn’t consciously aware of its being there until the front passenger’s door swung open and Pinkie ran toward him, laughing as he picked her up. She tousled his hair and wriggled with pleasure. She’d put on a bit of weight. Yes, she was almost fat. Over her shoulder he saw the car door close and the car reverse and park. It was a taxi. There was somebody only vaguely visible in the back seat.

  “Great to see you,” he said. “I was just wondering if I ever would.”

  “1 made them take me to Viola Street. I wanted to see it. Mummy didn’t.”

  She sounded smug.

  “That’s her there now?”

  “We’re going to America next week.”

  “I heard it was soon. You made her, Pinkie?”

  “Oh, yes. You told me once. Don’t you remember? She can’t do anything.”

  “I’ve been talking to the cops all morning. I think they’ve given up.”

  “They told Mummy we could go.”

  “It’s all over.”

  There seemed to be so little to say. She was too heavy for him to carry for long and felt awkward on his arms, though a few weeks back, up on the moor, she had clung to him as though she had been part of him. He let her slide to the sidewalk. She took hold of his hand.

  “What’s the matter, Bear?” she said, her voice almost drowned by the clatter of a passing truck.

  “Nothing. Oh, it’s stupid. Only I told them this morning I didn’t think you could help people.”

  She smiled her almost invisible smile. He was glad to see it there still, despite her new openness and freedom.

  “One of them had a toothache last time,” she said.

  “Oh. Did you …”

  “He was too shy, with the other one watching.”

  “They’re human sometimes.”

  Another long pause. Difficult to talk anyway, through the traffic racket. A hoot from the waiting car. This was the moment he’d been longing for, without knowing it, his last chance. It should have been in some friendly room, or out on a walk among trees, or high on the windy moor. Too difficult in the hurry and fume of Marsden Ash High Street.

  “Something’s really the matter, isn’t it, Bear?”

  “Suppose so. Not your sort of thing.”

  “Please, Bear.”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me.”

  She put her other hand on his. It was no good. He felt no flow, no warmth across the shoulder blades, no strange peace. The car hooted, twice this time. He looked down and saw that Pinkie was staring up at him, biting her lower lip and frowning. She wasn’t calling on mysterious forces to help him but was humanly troubled with his trouble. In his mind’s eye he saw her crying out to him up by Ferriby Circle, luminous with a pain he could never reach or understand.

  “It’s Bear,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I want to get rid of him.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “He’s going to take over. He’s dangerous. He’ll do something one day. He nearly killed Mr. Freeman up on the moor. If you hadn’t stopped me …”

  “It was Norah.”

  “Before that. I was going to break his neck with my chain. 1 suppose you couldn’t have seen without your glasses, but you shouted and stopped me.”

  “I don’t remember. I can remember falling off the bicycle and then waking up when they were carrying me out of the ambulance.”

  “Don’t you see? Bear’s dangerous. Suppose something like that happened again? They’ll say I’m mad and lock me up for the rest of my life. It’s not like just losing my temper sometimes. It’s real.”

  A long blast on the car horn. A movement in the back seat as the passenger cleared packages away in order to get out. Pinkie was talking, whispering, earnest still but cheerful. Half of what she said was lost in traffic-racket.

  “… because he’s frightened? If you’d only … to be happy … on TV. It was lovely … that one looked happy, I …”

  Her mother was coming toward them across the sidewalk. Pinkie swung around, seeming to sense her presence.

  “Look, Mum, it was Barry! I told you it was!”

  Her mother inspected Barry from head to toe, staring at him with bright, rejecting eyes.

  “Hanging around street corners,” she said. “About all he’s fit for.”

  Pinkie actually laughed, a normal kid’s laugh.

  “He was waiting for us,” she said.

  “Couldn’t have known.”

  “Course he did. That’s why he was waiting.”

  Pinkie’s mother puffed out an exasperated breath, a genteel, feminine version of Mr. Stott’s shattering snort. She hadn’t changed physically, not that Barry could see, but something about her had. Perhaps it was only that Pinkie had learned to tease her, to cope with her by treating her as a bit of a joke, and she was adapting to the role, almost beginning to enjoy it. Or perhaps it was living in America and having to be pleasant to people if she wanted to persuade them to go to the Foundation. Anyway, the change was very slight, to judge by her next remark.

  “And this taxi’s costing us a pound a minute, what’s more.”

  “All right. Coming. Bye, Barry.”

  “Great to see you. And if ever you want …”

  “I’ll send you a postcard. Love to Granddad.”

  “Okay.”

  And that was all. He watched the taxi slip into a gap in the traffic and slide away, out of sight in ten seconds. She’d changed, yes. Laughed
, chatted, shown her feelings, teased her mum. She was going to look after herself from now on. She didn’t need a guardian or protector, not any more.

  Strangely, he didn’t feel depressed. Nothing had really happened, nothing you could explain or talk about. He wasn’t sure whether Pinkie had understood about Bear, now or ever. When she’d cried out to him up by Ferriby Circle, he’d been convinced that she’d actually seen Bear, as he had once, almost in the selfsame spot. But she wasn’t wearing her glasses, so how could she? And in any case she’d forgotten. He’d never know, any more than he’d know whether he’d seen that pale light shining from her, or whether it had been only an effect in his own mind.

  What had she been trying to say just now? Some TV programme she’d seen, one of those wildlife pieces, with bears in it. “That one looked happy.” Fat lot of use.

  He turned toward home. The September noon was bright and pleasant. Somehow, despite the traffic fumes, it felt like a spring day. His skin crawled pleasantly in the warmth. He stretched and yawned, easing the muscles below the skin, feeling the wholeness of himself settle peacefully into place, as though he had just woken from winter sleep, sleep fretful with intrusive dreams, and now was prowling out into the sun, blinking at the last quick-melting snowdrifts, sniffing the air of a world made new.

  A Biography of Peter Dickinson

  Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he’s just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.