Relatively Strange

by Marilyn Messik

  “You can’t, I want to know the rest.”

  “Later.” she said and left.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Tiredness caught up with me as she left and I suddenly felt like I’d run a marathon. I couldn’t face heading upstairs so I curled up on the sofa pulling the blanket over me, still warm from Glory. I must have fallen asleep because when I woke, the curtains were drawn back, the room was filled with light and there were breakfast type noises going on. I was lovely and warm, someone had covered me with an extra heavy blanket, although as I moved it did too and I realised Hamlet, an opportunist if ever I met one, had made himself at home. My mother would have died a death!

  Ed was setting out the breakfast things in his inimitable way.

  “Morning.” I said and if he was surprised to find me asleep under Hamlet, he naturally didn’t show it. I headed for the door to wash and dress, out of the corner of my eye I noted a box of Cornflakes and jug of milk on their way to the table.

  I was starving, so in the upstairs bathroom administered only what Grandma called a lick and a promise although, as the familiar phrase came into my mind, so too did the woman in the hospital bed who wasn’t Grandma any more.

  When I came down again it was to find the three women already at the table. Glory, in a hectically patterned canary-yellow silk top and matching trousers looked as exotic as usual and showed no sign of having been up half the night. Ruth, the half-moon glasses halfway down her nose was scanning a newspaper and smiled at me. She was in another oversized jumper, this one with a migraine-inducing wavy line theme. Miss Peacock herself, looked exactly the same, I was to learn she had a whole wardrobe of white shirts and grey skirts, maybe it was a reaction to the choice of the others. I helped myself to a bowl of cereal and poured a cup of tea.

  “Eat quickly, lot to do.” Briskly unprepared to waste greeting time, Miss P was working her way through the post, sorting it decisively into two piles.

  “Glory said she’d tell me the rest of her story.” I protested.

  “I’ll do some of the telling, she’s eating.” Ruth folded her paper and sat back, nursing a coffee. “Now where did she get to?” I opened my mouth but she was there before me, “Right, I’ll carry on from there.” I’d no doubt get used to this in time, but was obviously still leaving far too much hanging out for public consumption.

  *

  “By the time Glory was – sixteen?” she raised an eyebrow for confirmation and Glory nodded, “Just a little younger than you are now, my dear, she’d come to live with us full time. In the intervening nine years, Rachael and I had continued our teaching work, often obtaining surprising results and our reputations and practice had grown accordingly.

  “Hang on.” I said, “The children you help, are many like us?”

  “It’s not as simple as that.” Miss Peacock stifled, not very well, a sigh. I hoped she had more patience with her patients. “There’s an enormous spectrum of ability, no two people exactly the same, you must know that by now.” I was stung,

  “Why would I, you’re the only ones I’ve met.”

  “Nonsense,” she shook her head, irritably, “You haven’t been looking properly – there’ll be people you’ve known with particularly sharp intuition. People whose guesses are always a shade more accurate than they should be. They’re at the other end of the scale from you, nevertheless they’re on the same scale, even if they never know it.” I thought – Miss Macpharlane.

  “Precisely,” said Miss Peacock, “Quite a number around like that, not so many like us.”

  “How many?”

  “Heaven’s sake girl, we can’t be exact. We’ve personally seen over the years and with all the children who’ve been through our hands, probably only about four true adepts, another eight or so with varying milder degrees of ability.”

  “But there must be others, people you haven’t come across personally.”

  “Obviously, but I can’t dish out facts and figures. We believe these abilities are latent in almost everyone, although it’s only a tiny minority who seem to have a switch thrown to activate them.”

  Ruth leaned forward a hand on my arm to call my attention,

  “Understand dear, for many this is not a gift, but a curse. Voices in the head have driven people insane for centuries. Those who are unable to learn control, who don’t know what they’re hearing, end up sedated in mental homes, often misdiagnosed schizophrenics.” She paused while I thought this through then went on, “An acceptance of what you are, is essential, your parents have done an excellent job with you. They can be very proud.” I stored that to take home.

  “But in the long run, each and every one of us has to choose our own path. Some opt to school themselves to as near normality as possible, teach themselves to completely shut away what they have, what they are. Others shape their ability, grab it with both hands and make it work for them.” I opened my mouth on a host of questions, but Miss Peacock interrupted swiftly.

  “Levitating, can you still do it?”

  “Levitating?” She tutted,

  “You think of it as flying, it’s not really you know.”

  “Not like I used to,” I was regretful both for the vanishing ability and the different slant on it, “It takes so much more effort now, makes me feel a bit sick, so I don’t bother – no fun anymore.” She nodded,

  “Goes that way, never come across anyone who really enjoys it after a certain age. We think it’s simply an increase in body weight.” She looked at me critically and I automatically pulled in my stomach. “You can still do it though?”

  “Don’t know, haven’t tried in ages.”

  “We can help, but we don’t have a great deal of time. Ruth, finish what she needs to know. I promise I won’t interrupt again.” Ruth rolled her eyes at me in disbelief, took a sip of coffee and continued.

  “The number of people working in our child-care field is small. When there’s interesting news it spreads quickly and around the time Glory came to live with us, we started hearing about a doctor who’d come to this country from South Africa. He’d some interesting and innovative theories, was covering new territory with his work with disabled and disturbed children. Rachael and I went along one day to a lecture he was giving in London. He was younger than we’d expected, mid-forties probably then, and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work.” She made a small moue of distaste. “He was, it quickly became apparent, exceedingly clever, drivingly ambitious and hungry for a breakthrough discovery that would make his name and fortune. He’d trained, qualified, risen through the ranks and been working for a number of years in various hospitals in South Africa. He’d opened his own highly successful private practice and, we later found out, left the country in something of a hurry, just ahead of a breaking scandal.

  Apparently some of the work and his methods were a little less than orthodox – he was never much in favour of due diligence on some of the drug combinations he used. He’d also, it was rumoured, been involved in highly unsavoury stuff involving tests – experimentation? – on children from some of the most poverty stricken townships. There was no doubt, he’d produced some interesting results and, as sometimes happens, something about the work he was doing was of its time. It caught the imagination of professional colleagues over here and he became the blue-eyed boy for a while, with pieces in the paper, articles in the Lancet, comment in the BMJ and plenty of people happy to hop on his band-wagon.

  His research was based on the fact that some physically or mentally disabled children can be gifted in often unlikely ways, musically, artistically or with precocious numbers skills. His ostensible aim was to establish a series of standardised tests to locate, identify and quantify these special talents. Theory was sound – once found and isolated, these talents could be nurtured. This would not only enormously enhance quality of life for the individual child but could be utilised to bring him or her on to develop everyday skills. Progress was gratifying.

  He spoke of a severely brain damaged
boy, unable to communicate verbally but with an uncanny ability to hear a complicated musical piece just once and then correctly reproduce it, even after a gap of several months, note for note on the piano. Another example was a five year old girl, blind, deaf and dumb from birth but given an object such as a carved statuette to handle for just a few moments, able to reproduce it completely accurately on paper.” Ruth paused, only for breath, but long enough for her sister to nip in again.

  “Ruth and I knew though, immediately what it really was Dreck was looking for and locating in these children and it wasn’t just musical abilities! He was frustratingly difficult to read, occasionally you come across people like that, can’t get anything from them unless they’re in a highly emotional state. They’re not shielding deliberately, they wouldn’t know how, there’s just a natural barrier that only lets things in or out in a strangely muted way, like listening to a radio underwater. Dreck’s a prime example, although we could sense enough to know he was not good news.

  At the end of the lecture he announced he’d received some serious Government funding and was establishing a base at Oxford where the project would develop, eventually offering hope to disabled children and their parents from all over the country. Similar centres in Europe and America, were already working on methods to establish new brain path patterns in such children, but he hoped, within a short time, he and Britain would be leading the field.”

  “Couldn’t you have stopped him?”

  “Stopped him?” Miss Peacock snapped, “We’re not Batman and Robin!” Ruth grinned,

  “She’s right of course, my dear, think about it, what could we have done? For all we knew, the whole scheme could have come to nothing. We agreed we’d keep an eye on him, but other than that, there appeared to be little action we could take.”

  “Things went quiet for a while, but after a year or so,” Glory had finished eating and now took over the telling, “Rachael and Ruth started to get odd whiffs of fishy goings-on at the Foundation now established in Oxford. Rumours flying around which, if you put up your hand and caught them weren’t very substantial, a whisper here, a raised eyebrow there, nothing widespread or concrete. He was still the blue-eyed boy of this area of research and most professionals, working in glass houses as they do, are pretty cautious about casting the first stone. She paused and Miss Peacock slid in, “There was a child, Ben, an eight year old I’d met at one of the respite centres. His mother asked if I’d see him privately as he seemed to respond well to me. He’d suffered hypoxia – oxygen deprivation – at birth and the resulting handicaps were pretty overwhelming. He was unable to communicate verbally, had no vision and very little motor control. His mother was a scrap of a thing, devoted to Ben, worn down with his care. I’ve no idea where she found the strength to haul him about the way she did. Her husband had left early on, couldn’t cope and I’m not sure she was sorry, meant she could concentrate on Ben without distraction. She was wracked with guilt, poor woman, blamed herself for his condition.

  She swore Ben had always been able to communicate and ask her for things. The doctors were kind but reiterated, it was just her excellent care of him that enabled her to guess his needs instinctively – I think they didn’t want her to build pointless expectations. They told her he’d never develop beyond the mental age of a year to eighteen months and the best she could ever hope for was to keep him comfortable. She was right though, they were wrong, always trust a mother’s instinct. Ben did have an ability to communicate his needs but because of the scrambled connections in his brain, only on the most basic level – too hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, tired. He was also, up to a point able, with no frame of reference and retarded mental development, to comprehend what he was reading from his mother and others. A little boy lost and locked in his own body with the damaged part of his brain blocking the way to all the rest.” She stopped and I caught just a fraction of the depth of pain she felt for this child and all the others. Ruth and Glory were silent. I plunged in, had to know,

  “Couldn’t you make him better?” She turned and looked at me,

  “Better?”

  “Yes, cure him, make him right, isn’t that what you do?” Her hand shot out, I jumped at the unexpected contact, then she flooded my mind and I shared all too completely the terrible everyday dilemmas she and her sister faced.

  Of course there were children they could help. A small blockage removed, repaired, can change a life for the better but so many others – like Ben. How far to go? How deeply to interfere? How to judge the potential damage? Even just seeing him that first time; alerting his mind by her very presence in it, to possibilities undreamt of, offering him mind to mind communication from an outside world full of communication. Unable to stop him reading in turn, how much lay beyond, out of reach. The fear, confirmed in Ben’s case that the doctors were wrong, that behind the damage lay not the mere sentient needs of an infant, easily dealt with and satisfied, but the desperation of a growing mind with until now, no hope of being able to bypass terrible physical restraints. Miss Peacock removed her hand from my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I was deeply ashamed,

  “Indeed. There’s a lot for you to learn and the first lesson is to not waste time with stupid questions. I saw Ben regularly over a period of a few months and found that although the brain damage was permanent, he was developing far beyond the gloomy prognostication of his doctors. His psi abilities were only moderate but through them, his communication skills were growing. Most importantly though, he improved immeasurably in his ability to send to his mother and was able to more easily let her know what he needed. One day when I saw him, after a gap in our sessions because I’d been away, I found he’d also discovered how to manipulate objects. Nothing too startling, but enough to enable him to bring a vase of flowers closer so he could smell them or re-angle a lampshade if there was glare in his eyes. He was, despite everything, a happy little soul and I was so delighted by his progress.

  His mother of course wanted more. She saw the improvement, had no doubt he could be brought on further still. She phoned me one day, full of excitement, to say she’d managed to get an appointment to have him assessed at a clinic in Oxford that was doing ground-breaking work with brain damaged children. I tried to talk her out of it, but she didn’t want to hear. All I could do was ask her to keep me informed.

  Apparently at the first appointment they put Ben through a battery of tests to try and find his ‘special talents’. She wasn’t allowed to stay with him, they said he’d concentrate better without her, so she couldn’t tell me exactly what went on. She was charmed however by Dr Dreck, who confirmed she had a very special little boy. So special, the Doctor felt he’d like to work with him further and thought it worthwhile admitting him to the clinic for a few days, to allow for further, more detailed tests. There was a newly-developed drug which the Doctor was convinced could prove invaluable to Ben’s progress, but the dosage had to be carefully regulated and monitored to suit him.

  She dithered a bit – she and Ben hadn’t ever spent a night apart, but the Doctor was persuasive and of course the trump card was that everyone wanted the best for Ben, so she agreed. Ben was in the clinic for five days.” Miss Peacock paused,

  “And then?” I prompted,

  “And then he died.” The evenness of her tone belied the starkness of the statement. “I didn’t find out until a couple of weeks after it happened. He’d been doing so well, his mother kept telling me, so very well but it was a heart attack, a weakness probably always there, just another of his many physical problems, but one tragically not identified until too late.” We were silent, reflecting on the brief life and swift death of a small boy. Ruth had quietly got up and made a fresh pot of coffee, her sister thanked her with a glance, poured herself a cup and continued.

  “There was no proof of anything untoward in the treatment Ben received, nor reason to suppose he came to harm through tests conducted – other than my gut feeling. But from what we were hearing, more and mor
e children were being referred to Newcombe. If there was something going on, we reluctantly decided, we owed it to the children involved and to ourselves to find out more. We’d no choice but to send in a mole.”

  “Who?” but it was all starting to fall into place.

  “And,” said Glory, “Don’t think I went willingly, they had to do a lot of talking to convince me. I knew it was the right thing to do, but that didn’t make me any more thrilled.”

  “But, dear girl,” protested Ruth, “It was only going to be for a couple of weeks.”

  “Turned out a lot longer didn’t it?”

  “But that,” pronounced Miss Peacock, rising to her feet, pushing back her chair decisively and brushing non-existent crumbs from her neatly pleated skirt, “Is another instalment altogether. Don’t worry,” she forestalled my protest, “We’ll fill in the gaps, but now we need to find out more about you and time’s short.” She headed briskly for a door I hadn’t noticed before, at the other side of the kitchen and Ruth, pausing only to send the breakfast dishes to the sink, followed in her wake obediently, as did Glory and I. I was peripherally aware of Glory using me to see where she was going, but there was no sense of intrusion.