Relatively Strange

by Marilyn Messik

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  We made our way down a flight of softly lit, uncarpeted stairs which led into a sizeable, low ceilinged area which must have run under the entire ground floor of the house. Highly polished wooden parquet flooring reflected diffused overhead lights back onto mellow, glossy wood panelled walls, so the lack of natural light wasn’t really a problem. At one end of the room, around a low table were grouped a few comfortable looking leather chairs and nearby were several upright wooden chairs around another higher table. The opposite end of the room however was a far more intimidating set-up. Facing each other were two thickly, frosted-glassed, telephone-box sized booths, uncomfortably reminiscent of the one I’d done time in at Oxford. Further along the same wall was another much larger glassed booth although I could see into this one. There was a large double spooled tape recorder fixed on the far wall, alongside a tv screen. There was no sound of traffic down here and I assumed the whole room was soundproofed, it must have cost a fortune to fit out. I knew teachers’ salaries weren’t high. Nobody else round here was backward in coming forward, so I turned and asked Glory, she grinned,

  “Money’s never a problem, Ruth dabbles on the Stock Exchange.”

  “Oh?”

  “Takes herself out regularly for a nice lunch in one of the city restaurants popular with stockbrokers. Let’s just say, she picks up more tips than the waiters.”

  I was still turning this over when Miss Peacock put a hand on my shoulder and steered me towards one of the smaller glass booths. I saw Ruth had already opened the door of the other one and entering, was reaching for a set of headphones. Miss P explained what they wanted me to do. I stared at her appalled. She tutted crisply and gave me a little shove in the direction she wanted me to go. The booth’s glass door swung easily on its hinges, although it was surprisingly heavy, it must have been at least three inches thick. It swung shut again, just as silently, behind me. I settled uneasily in the high-backed, padded leather chair which was set facing the blank wall against which the booth was set. I swivelled the chair round and pushed the door open a bit to see what was going on. Glory and Miss P had seated themselves in the upright chairs at the other end of the room and the latter, catching my eye, cupped both hands over her ears impatiently. I looked around me, black leather headphones were on a hook on the wall. I put them on gingerly and at once her dulcet tones came through, tinnily amplified. I looked around again to see she was leaning forward to speak into a microphone placed on the table. She whirled her finger to indicate I should face the wall, the door swung shut again and she repeated in my ears what it was she wanted.

  I was genuinely frightened to follow her instruction. In the not yet twenty four hours I’d spent at that house, I’d learnt more about myself and others like me than in the whole of my previous, often confused sixteen years. But knowledge acquired, showed me just how much more there was to learn. And now, now they wanted me to hurt Ruth. I didn’t think I could do that. I’d already discovered, to Chief Inspector Brackman’s cost, just how easy it was to do.

  “Well?” Miss Peacock was impatient.

  “I can’t.” I didn’t know whether she could hear me but obviously there was a mic somewhere in the booth because she came back quick as a flash.

  “You’re not a lot of use to us unless you can.”

  “Fine. Find someone else.”

  “Do it.”

  “Sod you.” If I was a little surprised to find one of Grandma’s more vulgar expressions flowing so easily off the tongue, I was satisfied it seemed to fit the bill. Through the mic I heard Glory and Miss Peacock arguing, then it went dead. I was waiting for the next move but when it came, it was from an entirely unexpected direction. My head bounced painfully back against the headrest of the chair, my face stung as if it had been slapped – hard. It was Ruth, I recognised her taste instantly.

  “Now,” she commanded in my head, “Stop me.” I hesitated and she slapped me again. This time as my head rocked backward I bit my tongue in surprise – it hurt and my mouth filled with that unpleasant metallic flavour blood brings. When she came at me again I was ready, I didn’t know quite what I was doing, but I blocked most of the blow and felt it just as a minor shove. I shoved back.

  “Again.” she said, “I won’t let you hurt me, but you have to try.” I pushed back, harder this time, but immediately felt the force of my move slide harmlessly away down some sort of a mind chute she constructed. When she came for me again, I was ready. My chute was nowhere near as effective, but it did some of the trick and I didn’t bang my head so hard. I made as if to strike her again but this time, changed direction at the last moment, she wasn’t ready for that and I sensed her pain, surprise and beyond that, pleasure that I was thinking for myself. I turned to see if I could crane my neck and see into the neighbouring booth.

  “Don’t look round.” Miss P was back, buzzing in my ear. Honestly, I thought, with Ruth in my head and her sister in the earphones, it was like Piccadilly blooming Circus. I was just grinning to myself at this amusing thought when the blank back wall of the booth to which I had obediently turned back, imploded in my face. Glass shot in towards me, followed by black roiling smoke and beyond that, fiercely licking flames propelling raw heat. I felt the small bones in my neck crack against each other as I ducked reflexively, desperately protecting my eyes and face from the cutting shards. I was scrambling frantically to get the headphones off and get out of the chair, out of the booth but I couldn’t get the door open. Choking smoke sandpapered its way down my throat, I needed to take a breath, had to but as I gasped and sucked, the small space in which I was trapped, became an airless vacuum, all oxygen swallowed by the greediness of the flames. And then they were gone, not there any more. Glass wall intact.

  “Bloody Norah!” Another favourite of Grandma and the Aunts, my language was deteriorating as fast as my nerves.

  “That wasn’t fair.” I yelled, hoarse and indignant.

  “Fair? Do you think people are always going to play fair?” In Miss Peacock’s mimicry, whined my own offended tone.

  “O.K.” I thought, “O bloody Kay.” and I shut my eyes and went into Ruth’s booth and into her head and I started with an ominous darkening. And then the walls of her glass compartment became opaqued by millions of tiny fissures and when the thickened glass could hold out no longer, the water broke through. Initially it trickled through the cracks and then, as force built, it smashed and gushed, covering first her feet then rising swiftly to her knees, causing her to gasp deeply. It was icily salty and it rose swiftly and inexorably to her chest then her chin. I could feel her desperately trying to banish it, eject me, but I took it further. Her mouth then her nose filled not only with the water but with its rank odour. The power of what was rushing through me and out of me felt liberating. Her vision blurred as she held her breath despite herself and her eyes, wide now with fear, stung unbearably as the salt-filled waters flooded them. Then they engulfed her and she lost consciousness.

  I tore off the headphones and wrenched open the door, reaching Ruth’s booth at the same instant as Miss Peacock, Glory not far behind. She was slumped forward, her head turned to one side, lips slightly blued, mouth open in a last desperate gasp for air not water. I think, beyond doubt, that moment remains one of the most awful of my entire life and I include all those subsequent, as yet undreamt of occasions, when things got pretty dreadful. I’d killed her. Got carried away, showed off and killed her. Glory and Miss Peacock had both squeezed into the booth and obscured the stricken woman from sight. I stood, sick and frozen and waited.

  “Not bad, not bad at all.” her voice was weak, but as they helped her out of the booth, one on either side, she smiled at me. “Good girl.” My knees gave way then and I sat heavily on the floor. My stomach debated throwing up, my throat muscles, spasmed tight with fear, said not a chance.

  They helped Ruth into one of the armchairs and she beckoned me. I got up and staggered over on rubber legs,

  “I’m so,
so sorry.” She grinned and I could see colour coming back into her cheeks,

  “We needed to know whether you can take care of yourself. Those booths are designed to sort the men from the boys.”

  “She means,” clarified Glory, “They’re thick, bullet-proof glass. If you can read and send as easily as you did through those sort of barriers, you’re pretty strong stuff. I thought you probably were, I just wasn’t sure.”

  “You don’t understand …” I stopped, aware both of the absurdity of that statement and the depths of my self-disgust. I didn’t want to be pretty strong stuff, not when the stuff involved was so unpleasantly vicious. I could feel my clothes sticking where I’d sweated effort, anxiety and exhilaration. Glory said softly.

  “I told you once before – use it misuse it, up to you.”

  “Nothing wrong in enjoying something you’re good at.” Added Ruth.

  “But …” I struggled to explain.

  “What you felt,” she interrupted, “Was the exhilaration of the power, not what you were doing with it. You were pushed hard, you reacted and some day you might have to do it for real.”

  “And,” pointed out Miss Peacock, “You weren’t out of control, some part of you knew exactly what you were doing, how far you could go. You didn’t kill her did you?”

  A sickly thumping headache had arrived, fully fledged above my right eye. A glass of water and two white pills floated gently over my left shoulder, followed by a clean white hanky. Ed had come in, was leaning on the wall, head nearly touching the ceiling.

  “Like a gun,” he said in the voice that seemed too small for the rest of him. “Enjoy target practice, you don’t have to use that skill to kill.” I reached for the glass, swallowed the aspirin, utilised the handkerchief and nodded. At the rate we were going, he and I were going to get through a lot of handkerchiefs. He nodded back expressionlessly then turned away. He went to stand in front of a television set I hadn’t noticed, set in a far corner of the room, reached behind him for a chair sat and began to gaze at the screen which was completely blank. Odd, but then no odder than anything else that was going on.

  The three women were talking earnestly, Ruth still in the chair, Glory perched on the arm. I felt too drained to bother listening and moved to an unoccupied chair, leaning my head back to let the aspirin do its stuff. After a moment, I became peripherally aware of Ed and the tv which was starting to disintegrate or rather to dismantle itself. At first slowly, then faster and faster. Screws, backing board, wires, tube, control knob, glass screen – each of the component parts flying swiftly through the air, coming to land gently in neatly assembled piles – a tidily set out assortment of innards, not to mention outers. He contemplated this pile with satisfaction then closed his eyes and put it all back again, re-building the set from the inside out in even less time than he’d taken to demolish it.

  I closed my eyes too. I was, by that stage, pretty much beyond being surprised at anything. I must have dropped off, because when I came to, I was alone. My headache seemed to have cleared thanks to Ed and aspirin. I suspected it would take a lot longer to get rid of some of my other feelings. I climbed the stairs like a little old lady, arms and legs heavy and achey and shut the door to the basement firmly behind me. Kitchen and living room were deserted apart from Hamlet who, after what I’d experienced in the last hour or so was really the least of my worries. He obviously though, felt good manners called for some action and dragged himself politely to his feet to give me a hefty but companionable shove in the hip with his head. I tottered a little, I was glad Hamlet was my friend and not, as my father was wont to say with a wink, my enema. That brought to mind the fact I hadn’t phoned home yet but to be honest wasn’t quite sure how to give them a run down of events without causing them to send in the troops. I’d phone later.

  There was something savoury on the stove and I was surprised to find, despite everything, eating didn’t seem to be out of the question. As if summoned by the thought, the household re-congregated one by one, Ed’s pilaff was served – Fanny would have been so proud – and Glory kept her promise to tell me more.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Preparation for Glory to get into The Newcombe Foundation hadn’t taken long, she didn’t need a cover story, her own being quite adequately dramatic. Miss Peacock called Dr Dreck direct as one professional to another. She’d heard, she explained, through the grapevine about the sterling work he was doing and indeed had been fortunate enough to attend one of his lectures a couple of years back, most impressive. She was calling to find out whether there would be any chance of him seeing her young ward. Although, at 18, Glory was possibly a little older than many of the patients he habitually dealt with, nevertheless she did suffer from a major handicap which appeared to be pulling her into a spiral of depression. There had also been some rather unsettling incidents recently, on which she would very much welcome Dr Dreck’s professional opinion and input.

  Further questioning allowed Miss Peacock to elaborate a little. As a teacher and therapist herself, dealing with young people with a variety of issues, she was naturally disinclined to believe everything she saw, and felt that perhaps the aforementioned ‘incidents’ were mere bids for attention. Nevertheless, they certainly came under the heading of ‘worrying’. She was vague, almost embarrassed, preferring she said, not to discuss the matter fully on the phone but hinting darkly at objects flying through the air and other equally mysterious happenings. Dr Dreck swallowed the bait – hook line and blinkered and even managed, as a professional courtesy, to squeeze them in for an early appointment – within a week of the phone-call in fact. He suggested to Miss Peacock that she allow for a full day to be spent at the Foundation as he would want to run a series of tests.

  Miss Peacock and Glory duly turned up at the appointed time. Miss Peacock fluttery and anxious, every twitchy inch the spinster teacher, way out of her depth with a young, unmanageable ward and Glory, sulky, impatient and completely, angrily and helplessly blind. The tests she took that day were not dissimilar to ones I was to take a year or so later, the difference being Glory knew exactly what she was doing. There was no mistaking what the tests were designed to show and, giving them full value for money, she made sure she scored well but not as well as she could easily have done – no sense, she thought, in over-gilding the lily. While Miss Peacock waited anxiously, fluttering from magazine to window and back again in the waiting room, Glory was given over, for the duration of the tests, to the tender mercies of the misnamed Miss Merry who, though younger than when I’d had the pleasure was, apparently not a jot more jolly.

  Excitement generated by Glory’s test results was to be expected, although it opened up a whole new can of worms. Until that point, the theory had been that psi ability was most likely to be found amongst those who’d suffered brain damage. Glory, although handicapped by blindness, was certainly in no way mentally impaired. The mind of Dr D. immediately began racing like a demented greyhound. And as a fevered subtext to his measured comments to Glory and her handkerchief-twisting guardian, he was already formulating a detailed proposal which he would submit to the relevant funding bodies, just as soon as he possibly could – a stream of normal children had suddenly become top of his wish list. His state of agitation rendered him suddenly and ominously readable to the Misses Peacock and Isaacs and they were less than thrilled at the direction in which he was planning to move. It seemed, that by their very action, they’d already set in motion an unpredicted and undesired chain of events. As is often the way!

  Dr Dreck’s suggestion to Miss Peacock, that Glory’s tests were inconclusive and that she should spend a few days as an in-patient at the Newcombe Foundation’s clinic for further investigation, was greeted with near hysteria and a great deal more fluttering and uncertainty. It took the combined charm of the Doctor and his assistant – and if they believed that, they’d believe anything – to persuade both women, one desperately anxious, the other sulking for England, that this was by far the best a
nd wisest course of action. No, no reassured Dr D., patting the hand of the anxious Miss P who was, at this stage, inclined to the tearful, he really didn’t think there was anything at all to worry about. However, there were obviously some major issues regarding her handicap that Glory had to be helped to come to terms with and where better than the Foundation, so used to dealing with disturbed youngsters.

  So far, thought Miss Peacock to herself, as the train took her back to London, so good. So far, thought Glory as she settled into the little side room off the main ward in the clinic, so good. Little did either of them know it was to be nearly two years before things would revert to anything near what they would consider normal.

  Dr Dreck didn’t let the grass grow. The first night Glory spent at the clinic she was given something to drink that she knew was going to be trouble. A bitterly pink mixture in a small, measure-marked medicinal beaker, ‘A little something to help you sleep,’ Miss Merry, gliding in silently in her oiled-wheeled way had handed her the beaker, folded her arms and raised an eyebrow expectantly. There was little Glory could do to avoid swallowing the lot, despite clearly reading she shouldn’t. The whole of that next week, as far as she was concerned, was something of a sickening blur and she was certainly in no fit state to pursue so much as a coherent thought, let alone any undercover activities.