Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  Usually the solutions to her problems were straightforward—mending something or suggesting where to look for it or inventing a story to explain its breakage or loss or else simply getting her to see how some part of the system worked. But sometimes they were more mysterious. Later that term, without a word of explanation, she pushed something into the pocket of his jacket. It turned out to be a small teddy bear, black, missing one eye and very grubby. It was surprising that Mrs. Proudfoot allowed such an object in the house. In fact, Barry guessed, that might be the explanation: Pinkie had somehow got it filthy, and Mrs. Proudfoot wanted to put it in the garbage. He shampooed it and put it to dry, and his mum must have found it like that because when he got home it had two eyes and its torn ear was stitched up and it was wearing a yellow bow tie. When he gave it back to Pinkie a couple of days later, she took it without a word; in fact, nothing was ever said about the whole business. It was curiously satisfying, getting it right like that. Old Bear approved, but then old Bear didn’t trust words much ever. Old Bear was scared stiff of Mrs. Proudfoot too.

  On Fridays Barry walked with Pinkie to Viola Street and, as it were, handed her over to Mrs. Proudfoot for the weekend. She paid him off with a bit of whatever she was baking. She always baked on Fridays for the “meeting,” whatever that might be. Barry seldom came into the house, and Mrs. Proudfoot gave the impression that she was glad to have him off her doorstep, but the arrangement was fair because she cooked the best cakes Barry had ever tasted. This gave him something to tell Ted and Paul and the others—a reason why he bothered with a kid from the Infants’; he told himself it was just something he’d somehow got stuck with, like the stray dog the Evanses had got stuck with back at Thursley when Don had brought it home.

  It wasn’t because of the migraines. He didn’t have another one to bother with for more than a month, and when it came, he deliberately kept clear of Pinkie. He wasn’t going to have her holding his hands on the school bus in front of everyone.

  Toward the end of the term, one Friday afternoon—so near to Christmas that the sky was already halfway dark and the streetlamps had come on—they had reached the corner before Viola Street when Barry said, “Hope your mum’s baked something special. It’s going to have to last me through till Jan.”

  Pinkie stopped dead. He glanced at her. Her face seemed extra pale under the dusk and neon.

  “You’ll be okay,” he said. “No school equals no problems.”

  Her eyes glistened, enlarged by her glasses. He crouched down, as if he was talking to a toddler.

  “Look, it’s only four weeks … less. You’ll be all right. Nobody’s going to hurt you. We’ll start up again next term, uh? Look, I suppose I can drop around Fridays, like I was hoping to get a cake out of your mum anyway, and then … If I said can I take you for a walk, d’you think she’d … No …? But it’s no use if she’s going to be there, Pinkie. Isn’t there anywhere you go without her, supposing there’s someone to take you?”

  “Granddad’s.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Dallington.”

  Barry teased at his earlobe, thinking. Dallington was another grimy town like Marsden Ash, a few miles along the valley. There was a bus.

  “I suppose I could tell your mum I’ve got to go over to Dallington,” he said, “and shall I take you because of your granddad living there. Think she’d wear that? Right, but listen, I can’t afford the bus fare that often, and in any case I don’t fancy plugging all the way out to Dallington just because you want a pencil sharpened or something. It’s got to be worth it—something important. So before I say anything to your mum about Dallington, you’ve got to tell me whether … okay, that’ll do. You wrinkle your nose like that. No, wait a minute. Supposing I’ve got something on …”

  That was how it began. The code didn’t evolve in one go, and over the months, as Barry was more and more allowed to come right into the house in Viola Street, other signals were added. Some were definite, agreed in words for specific purposes. Others were vaguer, tiny gestures Pinkie might make whose meaning Barry learned to read. But the core of the code remained. If Barry put up his hand to tease his right lobe, it meant “Do you want me to suggest going over to Dallington?” And if Pinkie then wrinkled her nose, it meant “Yes.” And it meant that she had something important she needed his help with.

  5

  The patients crowded to the door, not quite jostling. The wheelchairs slowed them down. Mutters of commonplace chat were exchanged as the tension of the last ninety minutes eased away. A man was nudged against Barry’s side by the pressure of people beyond him.

  “Sorry,” they both said.

  Then the man gave him a glance of recognition and smiled.

  “Feeling better?” he whispered.

  “Yeah, suppose I am,” said Barry.

  He hadn’t thought about it. The exhilaration of achieving his purpose, of winning out against these frauds, had masked the fact that both headache and nausea were clean gone. There wasn’t even much of the watery feebleness he used to have to put up with after a bad go of migraine. Suppose he’d not been chosen to make contact with Pinkie, suppose he’d had no chance to exchange the old signals with her, maybe he’d now be feeling sick and stupid still. Or maybe not—you couldn’t tell with Pinkie. But the man at his side, a total stranger to Barry, had no doubts.

  “Not surprised,” he said. “You know, the roses came back into your cheeks the moment she touched you. It was marvellous to see. Wasn’t that so? Roses back in his cheeks?”

  “It was really lovely,” said the woman beyond. “Lovely for all of us. It’s been a simply beautiful occasion, quite the best session I’ve been to. I could feel the Energy working.”

  Barry heard murmurs from others within earshot, little noises of trust and hope and happiness. Poor sods, he thought. Well, not poor. The woman talked as though she could afford to fork out four hundred pounds whenever she felt like a session. She had a fluty, upper-crust voice which wasn’t quite the real thing. The man sounded like an old army officer. Other voices and faces were different—you might have found them in the supermarket at Marsden Ash. Some seemed to be foreign. But they’d all paid. Paid to be conned. Barry felt the muscles around his mouth hardening into contempt and disgust but managed to convert the grimace into what must have looked like a pretty stupid grin.

  On the far side of the door a woman in a tweed suit was watching with an anxious frown as the patients emerged. Her face cleared as she spotted Barry. He braced himself for more gush, then noticed the purple badge on her jacket.

  “Oh, Mr. Evans,” she cooed. “Would you be kind enough to come with me for a moment? Mr. Freeman is anxious to talk to you.”

  She led him with the crowd for a few yards but then took him through a door marked “Private” into a long corridor that stretched toward the back of the building. Several doors down she knocked and waited. At length a man’s voice answered from inside. She held the door for Barry and closed it behind him.

  Mr. Freeman turned out to be the Moses-man.

  He had been sitting at a large desk, studying the contents of one of the purple files Barry had seen in Dr. Geare’s office, but rose as Barry came in. Close to he seemed even larger than he had in the Hall of Harmony, more than a foot taller than Barry, a great slab of a man in his white coat. The whiteness made a shock of contrast with the gold of his hair and beard and the gold of his eyes and the brown, even tan of his face.

  “Mr. Evans,” he said, and gestured to Barry to sit in a swivelling black leather chair.

  “That’s right,” said Barry.

  “Feeling better?”

  Having had some practice, Barry got his response right this time.

  “Terrific,” he said. “A bit dazed, I suppose.”

  “Dazed?”

  “Well … it’s natural. You’re feeling rotten and then—pow!”

&nb
sp; “But Pinkie tells me you are used to it. She says she has taken your headaches away before.”

  “Not like this. Anyway, it was only a couple of times. Three, maybe.”

  “In what way was it different?”

  “Oh … course I felt better those times, but … well, just sort of empty and peaceful. Not like this. I feel terrific.”

  Pushing it? Apparently not. It was true anyway. He was still on a self-induced high. He leaned back in the big, comfortable chair and relaxed. Mr. Freeman picked up the purple folder and sat looking at something in it, still and silent. The room seemed to hum with his presence. He was just as impressive sitting here quietly reading as he’d been when he was putting over his stuff in the Hall of Harmony. He might be a crook, in charge of a crooked outfit, but still Barry felt a strong urge to make a good impression on the man—not merely to string him along and con him into believing that Barry Evans was just another sucker to take a fee off, but actually to make him remember Barry Evans as a person, somebody different.

  While he waited, he glanced around the room. It was small but reeked of money. The big desk was made of glossy red wood with brass fittings, and beside it stood a computer terminal. There were several other high-tech gadgets on show, the furniture looked new and luxuriously comfortable, and there were two large abstract paintings— bright curves in primary colours—on the walls.

  Mr. Freeman looked up.

  “Dr. Geare does not mention that you had known the Healer before you came to us,” he said.

  Barry had been ready for this question for days.

  “I didn’t tell him, sir.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see, I’ve had these headaches since I was a kid, until I met up with Pinkie and she made them better. I must have been about thirteen then. And I was okay for a couple of years after Mrs. Proudfoot took her away, but then they started coming back worse than ever, and all the doctor could think of was to try a different pain-killer. She was useless. I was getting desperate when I heard about this place… “

  “We deliberately do not advertise, Mr. Evans.”

  “No, but my mum was talking to a friend of hers, and this friend’s cousin had been here.”

  “Do you know the cousin’s name?”

  “Suppose I could find out.”

  “Go on.”

  “My mum wasn’t especially interested. In fact, she was saying how stupid it was to think a kid could do anything a trained doctor couldn’t when I guessed it might be Pinkie or someone like her. My mum had got the name wrong, but she’d remembered ‘Harmony’ and she knew it was in Hampshire, so I went to the big library where they have all the telephone books and looked under H and got your address. That’s all.”

  “I see. You will forgive my saying so, Mr. Evans, but you do not look or sound the type of young man who has money to burn. What were your reactions on finding how much it would cost you to come here for a session?”

  “Shook me rigid. So happened I’d got the money. Had a job last summer, see, working the pumps at a big garage, and I’d been keeping it for a bike I wanted …”

  “Pinkie used to live in a town called Marsden Ash. You wrote from, um, Thursley, which I believe is some eighty miles from Marsden Ash.”

  “That’s right. I’m sorry, but I was desperate to come, and I thought if I put Marsden Ash, somebody might mention it to Mrs. Proudfoot and she’d say no.”

  Mr. Freeman raised his gold eyebrows. He looked amused.

  “You see,” said Barry, “I used to keep an eye on Pinkie at school for Mrs. Proudfoot, spite of our being different ages, and I used to go and have tea with them most weeks. Then all of a sudden Mrs. Proudfoot took against me. It was at Pinkie’s birthday party when she was eight, and I happened to mention it was more than a year since I’d had one of my headaches, and then it came out about Pinkie taking them away. Mrs. Proudfoot threw me out and told me not to come back, and what’s more, Pinkie didn’t come to school again that term and I went on to a different school next term, so I never saw her again. I’m sorry about the address, but like I say, I was desperate to come, and I thought if I put Marsden Ash, somebody might mention it to Mrs. Proudfoot and then she’d say, ‘We’re not having him!’ See? I got a friend I used to have in Thursley to let me use his address.”

  Mr. Freeman’s amusement had become more obvious while Barry was talking. He was clearly enjoying some private joke, though everything Barry had said was true, except for his having started getting his migraines again.

  “I think I should have done much the same in your place,” said Mr. Freeman.

  “Oh … well, I mean …”

  “And you worked at a garage to earn your fee?”

  “It wasn’t …”

  “But it turned out to be the case. You wouldn’t have asked your family for the money?”

  “Dad couldn’t afford it. He was out of work eighteen months, and now he’s on a lower salary than he used to get. And my mum would be furious if she knew. She’d think it was a complete waste of money.”

  “I see. Suppose your father had been able to afford the fee and suppose your mother had felt differently…”

  “No. I’d still have wanted it to be my thing.”

  “I find your attitude impressive, Mr. Evans. It is sad that in this money-obsessed age we find we get our best results by asking our clients to produce a substantial fee, often near the limit of what they can afford, to demonstrate their commitment to our work. And of course, we need the money for the work. But we do run a scheme to provide free treatment in case of genuine hardship, where the commitment has been expressed by other means. In view of what you have told me, I am prepared to refund your fee.”

  Barry felt his eyes widen and his jaw hang open. It wasn’t just that the offer was unexpected. It was as if the whole basis of his certainty that the Foundation was a fraud had been suddenly taken away. He could feel against his right buttock a rectangle of stiffness where the receipt for his fee was pressed against the upholstery of the chair. All morning that bit of paper had been a sort of talisman, magically helping him see through the benign-looking masks of people like Dr. Geare and Mr. Freeman, see them for the greedy crooks they were. Now the magic was taken away. He had nothing to go on. Nothing to tell him he was doing the right thing. Except that Pinkie had wrinkled her nose.

  “No?” said Mr. Freeman, more amused than ever.

  “Er, it doesn’t seem right … I mean … can I think about it?”

  “I have an alternative suggestion which you might think about at the same time. I see that you are sixteen and a half but have already left school. Would you mind telling me why? You are clearly an intelligent young man.”

  Barry shrugged. It wasn’t only a question of how to make the best impression; it just wasn’t easy to explain. He could remember the exact moment when he had been climbing the echoing concrete stairs on his way to the physics lab at Marsden Ash Senior and had suddenly known, with total certainty, that no power on earth was going to force him to come back here for another term. It had been a Bear decision, really. Mr. Freeman was looking at him. He would have to say something.

  “I did all right,” he said. “They wanted me to stay on. My parents were furious. I don’t know. I had a row with a teacher, but …”

  He was beginning to mumble, conscious of becoming just another inarticulate jerk under that golden gaze, when the mention of the row with Mr. Elias suggested a possibility, which then seemed to explode in his mind into a whole chain of connections.

  “I suppose it was that mostly. I was just sick of the way we got taught. All dead, you know? All worked out, printed in the textbooks, and you learn it, and that’s what you’re there for. If it’s not in the textbooks, it’s rubbish. I’d been reading in a magazine about evolution, about how when a new species starts to evolve somewhere, the same sort of thing happens other plac
es in the world, no connection—”

  “I know the work. There were some very significant figures about the learning behaviour of rats in laboratories remote from each other.”

  “Yeah, but it was evolution I had the row about. I just mentioned the idea, and Mr. Elias blew up. It was like I’d spat in his face or something.”

  “New ideas are always seen as threats, especially by those whose profession it is to teach old ideas. You are threatening both their self-esteem and their livelihood. I take it that this episode was not your sole reason for deciding to leave school but that it helped you crystallise that decision?”

  “That’s about it.”

  Mr. Freeman nodded, looked again at the paper in the file, and then sat still, apparently thinking. Barry watched him and tried to make up his mind. Crooked or only cracked? Or onto something? Fake or genius? Or, somehow, both? Funny how you wanted him to like you, even supposing he was a crook and fake. And if he was a genius after all …

  The gold eyes turned to him.

  “What are your immediate plans, Mr. Evans?”

  “Me? I hadn’t thought. It depends if my headaches start coming back. If they don’t, I suppose I’ll try and get a job, though there’s not much chance around us, with eighty people going for one vacancy.”

  “Unless you are committed to living with your family, I could offer you temporary employment at the Foundation.”

  Barry grunted with surprise.

  “This is what I meant by coming to an alternative arrangement over your fee,” said Mr. Freeman. “I could refund the money to you now, as a loan, which you could then repay out of your wages. Our work here is partly seasonal. Our American clients in particular prefer to visit us in the summer, so we normally take on extra staff at this time of year. Our difficulty is to find people who are adequately committed to the Foundation. One sulky kitchen hand can disrupt the Harmonies. In fact, this year I have chosen to be short of staff for lack of suitable applicants. But your reactions in the Harmony Session and also what you have told me persuade me that you would fill the bill very well. Indeed, we both might regard the arrangement as probationary, and should it work out, you might decide to join us on a more permanent basis.”