The Healer: a dark family drama

by Sharon Thompson

  I’m always laying my hands on people. On and on they come. The more I do it, the stronger I get. My wounds have healed quickly and I can roll up my sleeves to care for Fionn and the callers to 340 Cricklewood Broadway. It is like the whole of the past is fading like my scars.

  There are no thoughts of Vincent or Bredagh.

  Peggy and Daddy enter my thoughts sometimes and I pray for them. My mornings can be full of people coming and Fionn plays happily or naps. I can’t help watching him breathe when I’m alone with him. Sometimes long into the night, I watch his little chest move up and down and see his eyelids flutter. My hands slip over him taking the temper tantrums away. They come sometimes when he needs me and I’m busy. There is nothing of his father in him. Nothing at all, and he hums along when I sing now. We have fresh food a few steps from the door and I barely pay for a thing as the grocer loves Fionn. He has no children and chucks at Fionn's chin.

  Sometimes the fellows from the truck call in to talk of home and to bring injured men to see me. Scaffolders fallen from great heights are beyond my healing powers and I go to them sometimes and shake my head. Many others have battered skulls, busted fingers, bruising or aching joints and call to me. The battered Irishmen queue outside The Crown, not far away, and wait on the ganger. These souls wait on him to nod or pick them ‘for the start’, to pick and shovel all day.

  A foreman needed me when he fell into the ditch six-foot deep and someone didn’t throw the rubble back but forward on top of him. It was me, rather than a doctor that the other foremen asked to look at him. He survived and I told him that he ‘just needed his tongue tied for a while’. He listened, as he was never unfortunate enough to fall again. Ever since I healed him, I have had a stream of men coming from all over London, with notes from gangers and foremen asking me to heal this and that, to get them back to work. I give the notes to the grocer and he collects the pay.

  ‘Paddys with shovels are better than the Germans!’ I’ve heard it said and although some are ashamed by their dirty hands and boots, there is a pride in most of them about the building up of a destroyed city. They are my best source of income.

  Since I’ve come here, Fionn never leaves my sight. A happiness has blossomed in me that I can’t explain. I fill my lungs with it. Every morning I waken and lean into Fionn to waken him and he smiles at me. There’s nothing better in this world than his smile, nothing better until he laughs or hums along with me.

  One woman who comes for the healing always has a toothache. I explain that I can’t pull out teeth. ‘Take the pain away until it falls out,’ she states as if it is so easy. I take the pain away and she comes back offering to look after Fionn for me. Her hair is thinning and her mouth is laden with rotten teeth. ‘We all know that lovely Italian calls to take you dancing. You must go. Live while you are pretty and young.’

  She is a good woman, called Mary and she has twelve grown-up children, who she tells me all about. I sense she also knows the Bradys and she is like an earthly guardian angel they’ve sent to watch over us.

  ‘I’ll stay here where Fionn knows, until you come home. Go now, get ready. I read books and can be content until you come home.’

  I watch her take a book from her bag.

  ‘Go get ready. He’ll take you out if he sees you dressed for dancing.’

  Something in me wants to go. I long to dance with Luca.

  ‘Mary say we go dancing?’ Luca swings me with him when I appear into the kitchen. Booky Mary is delighted with herself and so am I.

  Luca skips down the stairs and runs around me like a puppy. Many people know us well and men bob their caps and the women smile. He swings his hand into mine and he tells anyone on the way to the dance hall that is where we are going.

  ‘I’m happy,’ I tell him. His lips hit mine with a smack. Right there in the street he folds his arms around me and smacks his lips against mine again. His stubble is hair now and it scratches me. I like it against my cheek as he nuzzles into my neck and I wriggle free. ‘Don’t. Not here.’

  He always listens to me and wants to please me. Without a complaint, he holds my hand all the way to the Galtymore Dance Hall.

  The music is loud but lively. Choking smoke stings my eyes while I sip on the lemonade Luca buys for me. The round tables rock a bit if you lean on them and there is a stickiness to the floor. A few familiar faces, red with the heat, nod their welcome. There is a band on a raised stage with lights on it. They are battering out The Walls of Limerick and the floor pounds with the people all following a routine they know without thinking. I’ve never seen the likes of it. An odd time as a little girl, I watched a small group take to the floor in McLaughlin’s in Collooney but this makes me excited to just watch. The whole place moves to the music and everyone is enjoying themselves. Laughing, the women leap and cross over and through arms of the men, and they all look happy. It is good to be in such air.

  ‘We’ll calm things down now,’ the man on the stage says standing forward. ‘When Irish eyes are smiling…’

  ‘It’s Dr Brady’s song,’ I tell Luca.

  He’s been sitting staring at me. ‘I look at you all night. Forever, I look at you.’

  I know what he means. That is what I do to Fionn. I love to watch him be happy.

  When the band play a waltz, Luca holds me in his strong arms and steps with me showing me what we should do. I’ve never done it before but by the third song in the same rhythm I’m not looking at my feet. He whispers, ‘One, two, three,’ into my ear. His breath tickles me and puts my feet in the wrong direction. He loves to hold me tighter then. Luca makes me tingle like Tommy did. More than Tommy did. It’s been a long time since I thought of Tommy.

  ‘I sing,’ Luca says and stops my memories. ‘They ask me. This song I sing for you.’

  He is on the stage in a flash and I’m on the floor with people standing cheering, clapping and stomping, delighted to see my Luca is about to sing.

  The world stops.

  He is up there away from me, but he keeps sticking his arm out towards me. ‘Which way did my heart go, from me straight to you. Which way did my heart go? One look and I knew, that I was yours forever, my search for love was over…’

  I am mortified! Struck to the spot on the dance floor. I’ve never heard a voice like it. Deep and smooth, his Italian accent sings loud and clear. The words are sometimes slurred as he is not sure if they are the right English ones. But, those words are all for me. My face is like a beetroot, I know it must be. I hold my ears, I know people are looking. Are they laughing? No. They love his singing. On he goes. He likes being in everyone’s ears. On his voice goes, telling me and everyone else of his love for me. It is beautiful but through my fingers I listen and stare at the wooden floor hoping he’ll stop soon. I want to sit down and be alone with him.

  The whole place claps and roars at him to sing more and someone nudges me. Luca is calling me towards him with his hands. I get shoved towards the stage and I’m lifted up the steps along the side and whooshed across the stage. ‘When Irish eyes are smiling…’

  Nobody minds that we start singing that song again. The full room roars along and I think the roof might come off. Luca’s heart yearns to make me happier. I’m not sure I could feel more alive, more content.

  I close my eyes, hold my head back and sing loud and long. Suddenly, I notice there is no-one else singing. Luca has silenced them all, and they and he urge me to sing on. I can’t. My words stop. He sings the next words with me and then gets more silent waiting for me to go on. I try to please him and sing to the end of the verse. The people shout, whistle and clap and I hold my ears again. Luca’s arms lift me up and into them and he swirls me around to more clapping. I think I’ll die from blushing.

  ‘Italians have no shame,’ he tells me on the way home when I’ve slapped him and told him off. ‘You need to be heard and seen. Beautiful Molly Brady cannot be hidden away in rooms in the dark. You need to be… in the light. Like a flower…’ he starts all this fanc
y talk in his ‘broken English’ as the grocer calls it and I love him for loving me.

  ‘Next Saturday, we go again? Yes?’

  I find myself agreeing without thinking if the Booky Mary lady will mind Fionn again.

  ‘Course I will. You are in love. You need this happiness,’ she tells me as she puts her book into her bag and is away with a kiss to Fionn’s sleeping head. ‘We all deserve to be happy. Let it in, my dear. Let it in.’

  51

  The letters from home come now with slips of the newspaper in them. I ask Booky Mary to read them for me. ‘I could teach you to read,’ she says. I hand her a slip of note paper from Jane, fancy paper from Violet and a scribble from Dr Brady, which she usually can’t make out for ages.

  The newspaper clippings tell us about the rise of badness in the capital. There are not too many names mentioned, but Sheeran stands out. Sergeant Bushell who used to call to number 34 is dead after a bad beating. Peggy’s photo comes with one letter. She is standing in a fancy gown, with a glass in her hand in the ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park. Times sure have changed for the bold Peggy. Am I glad? I don’t know how I am about it.

  Then one day, there is only a thin bit of the newspaper in an envelope with a short note in Jane’s handwriting.

  ‘Vincent McCarthy has died,’ Booky Mary tells me. ‘This is his death notice.’

  There are no clues given in the paper but Jane’s note tells me that he was killed for being a criminal boyo in Dublin. There is no word of Bredagh but she’s been missing for a long while and a woman’s corpse was found in the canal. Jane thinks what I think, that Bredagh is gone too. Mary sympathises with me, ‘I’m sorry for your trouble. But it sounds like he was not the best egg in the basket. And I know Bredagh’s disappearance will hit you hard, too, my love. Stay strong, though, the world is changing and you need to shine. Be careful but enjoy your new life.’

  ‘He was my uncle on one side of the family and she was my aunt on the other,’ I tell Booky Mary when she stops reading Jane’s words and wipes her nose.

  ‘Is this Vincent the one they say you went to prison over?’ There is no disgust in her voice. ‘A woman needs to protect herself. I had a man once who needed a knife stuck in him, only I hadn’t the gumption.’ Mary gets to her feet to put Fionn into our bed for me.

  ‘Thank you, Mary.’

  ‘It’s not right that I have to read your private letters.’

  ‘I’ll never read nor write. I’ve other gifts.’

  ‘You are a wonderful mother and that is one of the best gifts you can give.’

  Vincent is not in the light. Of that I am certain. As hard as it is to understand where souls go, his is wiped out. He might be burning. He will never be at peace. It is clear to me that I am free now.

  ‘My Fionn must never know or be like his father,’ I pray. Yet, it is an empty wish. It will be hard to keep Fionn from his nature and I can’t change his blood. I cry a little with a mother’s worry.

  Luca is always mad for dancing. He jigs out on the street, before we get to the Galtymore Dance Hall. He’s full of life and good humour. I love being near him, can’t wait to see him and long for him to look at me the way he does. He never promises me anything or gets angry with me. I’ve no need to give him a part of me, although I do want to.

  ‘We must be married,’ he says when I tease him. ‘Take off that ring,’ he says as we dance a slow waltz together. ‘It is not a right ring.’

  The teasing from folks is fierce, I know others mock about making an honest woman of me.

  ‘My family – I get Booky Mary to write and tell them about you,’ he says. ‘I say, Irish girl, red hair, I love her. Do you love me?’ When he is tickling my neck and whispering in my ear, I almost burst with the love in me for him. ‘Tell me you feel it? You do?’ His hand puts mine on his heart and there it beats over and over. I seep all the love I have in me into his chest. His nose touches mine. The whiskey on his lips meet mine and neither of us care if anyone sees.

  We sing most nights together. Sometimes a country song, other times an Irish or a simple Italian folk song and an odd time, I’ll sing alone.

  ‘No-one speaks when you sing,’ Luca says. ‘You were born to do it.’

  I think of how I’ve always been singing but didn’t know that I was. For me, it was to heal myself, sort out the badness around me, to melt me away from the world. I’d never heard much music until I came to London. Yes, the Professor bought me a gramophone and somehow he knew that I’d love it, but it only had two records. Dr Brady sang and I heard the wireless sometimes but he’d turn it off to talk to me. I was only wanting to listen to it and go over the waves it made in my mind.

  ‘I’ve been on the sea, but I couldn’t look at it,’ I say to Luca on the way home. ‘Fionn was in my arms and I didn’t want the deep water to take him.’

  ‘We’ll go to the ocean soon,’ he says. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Please. I want to take Fionn to the seaside. I dream of it.’

  ‘In Italy the sun, the sand it all is beautiful. Someday, I take you there.’

  My healing is going well and yet it is making me very tired. I only go out now to be alone with Luca, but I would far rather sleep. My stash of cash is big. That is all that I know. I have no wants for anything. The grocer is suggesting I place my money in a bank. I am not keen on that and as he keeps it for me, I don’t think I need to worry. I can’t count it well and need him and Luca to keep me right. If Peggy was here she’d tell me I was mad to trust men, and she may be right, but I have little choice. I must believe that the better times are here for me now. Like always, though, I worry about when and how the better times will end.

  ‘All good things come to an end,’ I tell Booky Mary when she asks me why I’m so glum.

  ‘Luca loves you. He will ask you to marry him any day now. He’s saving up because he knows how much you earn. He needs to provide for you when you stop working.’

  ‘I’ll never stop the healing,’ I tell Mary as she tidies Fionn’s toys into the old orange crate and her books into her shopping net. ‘I need to do my healing.’

  ‘A man like Luca might not let you,’ she says and lets herself out the door with a ‘Good-night now.’

  I don’t sleep well, tossing and turning, thinking and worrying. It isn’t like me to fret about the future. I live like a dog does, wandering from one feed and moment to the next. Loving loyally as best I can no matter what the kicking I get is like. The shadows, of course, are in my hair with their long fingers, telling me all will be well and that there is a plan.

  I try to believe them. Fionn snores and cuddles in his new soft bear. I thank the stars that he has none of the worries I had as a child. I talk to myself and watch him sleep and offer all my worries up and away from me.

  ‘What will be will be,’ I tell the night. ‘There is no point in going up to meet the rain.’

  I see myself with Luca and feel the sand in my toes and the water racing in to meet me. All will be grand if I just let in the love. All will be fine if I believe I deserve the best.

  52

  It is Jude’s handwriting on the envelope. I race all the way to where Booky Mary lives and thump on her door.

  ‘It’s the doctor,’ she tells me. ‘I can read it word for word to you. But it is your doctor friend. He’s very sick and Jude wants you to come home and heal him. He says the others didn’t want to tell you, but he wants you to come home. The doctor does too.’

  ‘I just knew something was brewing. I felt something coming, Mary, but I didn’t want to think about it.’

  Mary shudders.

  ‘I must go home to him.’

  ‘But if he’s going to die, is there any point? It’s not all that easy to get across that short stretch of ocean. Should you go back if you are avoiding trouble?’

  ‘I need to give him a safe death. I need to be with him as he goes into the light.’

  Mary holds on to my hand and squeezes. ‘Will you do that for me
when it’s my time?’ she asks, showing me her rotten teeth.

  ‘I may die before you, Mary,’ I say, and am not sure why I do.

  Her tut-tuts could be heard in Cork.

  The Irish lads in the truck will be different men than the ones I travelled with before, but I don’t care. Booky Mary offers to keep Fionn but I know that Jane and Violet will want to see him, and I can’t leave him behind me ever again.

  ‘Isn’t it bad to go?’ Luca begs. ‘The police?’

  ‘By the sound of the slips of newspaper coming from Ireland, they’ve more to bother them these days.’

  ‘But this Peggy?’

  ‘She needs me too. I can tell.’

  He sighs a big sigh. ‘I don’t like you going.’

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘Marry me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Marry me?’ His handsome brow is all furrowed. ‘I need to know you’ll come back. I know you find it hard to say you love me, but in time you will. Marry me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come…’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  He lifts me into the truck, warning the men, ‘She’s my woman. Leave her be.’ He leans up and in and kisses me square on the mouth, then both cheeks. He holds my face in his palm and slips his tongue in making a spectacle of us and stirring the place between my legs something shocking.

  The men whistle and mock as he slams the door and thumps the truck, for it to go, before he changes his mind.

  ‘He’s not happy at you leavin’,’ one of them says and Fionn waves at the busy London street. ‘Aren’t you the healer woman?’

  ‘I am.’

  It’s then they all start with every ailment they’ve ever had and it is no time until we’re on the ocean. The waves lash the boat and the storm makes me sick. Vomiting, I try not to frighten Fionn. He seems to love the sea and wanders out onto the deck, hand in hand with some of the younger men who aren’t tired of children. The drive to Sligo is a miserable one with me dry heaving into a bucket. The men tease me that I can’t heal myself of what’s wrong with me. They suspect I’m pregnant, but I’m not. There has been no man since Dublin. I try to sleep when Fionn does and I don’t know it until we are pulling into Ballisodare village and up the lane to Violet Cottage.