Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  Almost accidentally Barry glanced at the view, and all of a sudden his whole focus changed. Mr. Stott and his garden and the game had been odd enough to occupy his conscious attention, and he had been only vaguely aware of height and of the whistling spaces around the bungalow. It was a soft midwinter morning, moist but clear. The valley and its buildings were out of sight, and beyond it stone-walled fields rose to moorland and the ancient shapes of hills pocked and moulded by mine workings. None of the tips and tracks and conduits had been used for more than fifty years, and now most of them had begun to look like natural outcrops of underlying rock. Even where they were still obviously man-made they seemed to have moved outside ordinary time and become as immeasurably old as the great stone circle up at Ferriby. Above them all hung the grey sky full of this wide, soft wind. It was easy to feel, up here, that you were as much a creature of the air as of the earth. Barry had said it was a funny place for someone with a bad leg to live. Now he realised it was a funny place for anyone to live. It was very different from 9 Viola Street, but the two houses had one thing in common: They were ways of being alone.

  Barry was trying to see whether he could actually spot Ferriby—not the circle but the parking lot—when the bellows of the game were joined by screams. Mr. Stott’s manoeuvre had worked. He had surprised Pinkie by a sudden reverse and met her head on in the central trench. She fled, screaming, making no attempt to dodge around a corner. Mr. Stott was racing up behind her, yelling that he was going to get her now, when she shot up the ramp to the porch and clung to Barry, burying her head in his chest and making a noise which could have been real screams. Mr. Stott braked with the step of his chair only a couple of inches from her calves.

  “Bloody cheating,” he roared. “Hand her over.”

  “No! No! No!” screamed Pinkie.

  “Bayonet the both of you!”

  “That’s a star game, sir.”

  Mr. Stott snorted so violently that he might have been trying to blast his moustache off. Barry smiled. Pinkie’s screams were clearly laughter now.

  “You’ve got a terrific view, sir. I was trying to see Ferriby.”

  “Can’t—just around the corner. Beat you that time, young woman. Let’s have some cocoa.”

  On the way back in the bus Barry said, “What’s the problem then?”

  Pinkie looked at him and shook her head. She was almost right back into her usual self. All the time at Mr. Stott’s she had been more like other kids, fidgety, overexcited, a bit of a nuisance. Barry had walked up on the moor after cocoa, telling himself he was giving them a bit of time to themselves, but really more to get away from Pinkie. That wasn’t the Pinkie he wanted, a kid sister, a spoiled one, too. Mr. Stott would obviously do anything for her…Or was it that Barry minded about her not needing him while she had Mr. Stott? Yes, probably. Anyway, he let some of that come out now.

  “Look, kid, didn’t I tell you? I was supposed to be going for a bike ride with Ted this morning, but I cried off because you gave me the signal you had a problem. I’m not going to do this again unless you can stick to the rules. We agreed it had to be something important. I’ve got better things to do with my time. And money.”

  (That rankled, too. He’d only worked out too late that if he told Mrs. Proudfoot that he was going over to Dallington anyway, he couldn’t then ask her to pay for his bus fare. It had had to come out of his jam jar.)

  “Was important,” said Pinkie.

  “You just said there wasn’t anything.”

  “Granddad seeing you.”

  “Okay. Well, he’s seen me now. But next time…”

  7

  There were, apparently, seven energies. Or, rather, Seven Energies.

  After lunch Barry lay on the lawn beneath the cedar tree and read the pamphlet Mr. Freeman had given him. It was rubbish, he thought, but much more amusing, much less hateful than the glossy brochures and other literature left lying around in the Foundation for patients to pick up and glance at the pretty pictures, the vague, warm sentences. This was a close-printed scientific pamphlet. The only breaks in the long grey paragraphs were for equations and graphs.

  It wasn’t easy reading, and from time to time Barry would roll on his side and look around. A little above him, across the lawn, the main building—a glittering white frontage, three stories high, and topped with a wide-eaved roof of purplish slates—blocked the view. Apparently it was about a hundred years old. It had been built as a country house for a rich merchant, but then, as families could no longer afford to live in houses like that, the paint had begun to flake, the roof to leak, the rafters to rot. Soon it would have fallen down if the Foundation hadn’t bought it. Now it looked smart and rich again, but it would never look beautiful.

  Still, the landscape it faced would never stop looking beautiful, Barry thought. It was Thursley all over again. Thursley squared, the Englishman’s dream of England. The house was built near the top of a gentle hill, facing out over a view of pasture and trees. Just below, a church spire, sheathed in green-blue copper, rose above the treetops, with the ridge of a big tiled barn beyond it, and a few chimneys and corners of roofs. There was a village down there. In his mind’s eye Barry could see the thatched pub and the white ducks on the pond and the cricketers on the green. Twelve miles farther off the view ended with the long blue line of the South Downs, and the whole landscape was bathed in that soft, easy Hampshire air and sunlight which never seem to have been touched by the grit and grime of the North. It was beautiful all right, beautiful because it was a landscape that had lived easily over the centuries, protected by its lovers’ money. Money made in the grit and grime. Money from the North. Barry’s North, Bear’s North.

  Bear was grumbly still after the migraine and the interview with Mr. Freeman. Or was it more than that? For the first time, lying there on the sunlit lawn in front of the Foundation, Barry began to feel as though a change had taken place that morning in his relationship with his other, imaginary self. When somebody raises a big wild animal, such as a lion cub, in captivity, they can treat it almost as though it was tame for the first year or so, though there may be a few tricky moments. But one day, practically without warning, it somehow discovers its own wildness, and from then on it is a pet no longer. It becomes too dangerous and unpredictable to play with.

  All his life Barry had treated Bear as an imaginary pet, part game, part companion. But now he felt a strangeness in himself. It was as though the stress of the migraine and the healing had woken Bear from a long hibernation, and the animal that had gone to sleep as a manageable and often cuddly cub had woken as an adult, wild.

  Barry shivered in the sunlight. I’m not standing for that he thought. Watch it, Bear. You become a nuisance, and I’ll get rid of you.

  Bear vanished. He was only a trick of the mind, of course. The moment you applied rational thought you were in control. Barry rolled onto his stomach and returned to the Seven Energies.

  The first four came from the textbooks: electromagnetism, gravity, weak interaction, strong interaction. The fifth was something called time-flow, which wasn’t exactly time; the sixth was so far undiscovered; and the seventh was Harmonic Energy. Barry had got an A on his maths exams, but the formulas were beyond him. All he could say was that they didn’t feel stupid. It was neat, he thought, having a missing energy. It gave the theory a sort of mysterious excitement which still smelled scientific, like the Periodic Table before all the elements had been discovered. And then Harmonic Energy, with its hint of Rings of Power—One Energy to rule them all, one Energy to find them—and all that.

  The pamphlet was written by Dr. John Q. Freeman, D.Sc. Barry wondered whether it was the same man. It didn’t have one whiff of the rich, poetical stuff he’d put out during the session. And it was funny him not calling himself Dr. Freeman. You’d have thought …

  Tyres scrunched on the gravel between the house and the lawn. The bus to take th
e one-day patients back to Winchester Station pulled up in front of the white-pillared portico. Barry rose, went inside, and found the office. Mrs. Elliott turned out to be the woman who had taken him to Mr. Freeman just after the Harmony Session. She smiled as he came in and handed him a white envelope with just his name on it.

  “So you may be joining us?” she said.

  “Uh … well …”

  “I hope you do. Sphere One—Mr. Freeman—often offers jobs to young people who show strong positive reactions during the Harmony Sessions. That’s how most of our best staff have come to us.”

  “Oh? I suppose I’d been wondering …”

  “They’re much more committed, you see. They know it’s real.”

  “Right,” said Barry.

  She smiled again. She thought he meant he agreed. In fact, she’d made up his mind for him. It was another Bear decision. He was coming.

  On the bus a woman a bit like his mum sat next to him and talked and talked about what a wonderful experience it had been. She particularly wanted him to know, she said, because he was the one who had obviously got the most out of it. Bear tried to make him snarl at her, but he kept control. It would be unfair on the poor cow, he thought. And it was good practice for the job, too, smiling and saying yes. Being what Mrs. Elliott called committed. The woman babbled on. He didn’t have to listen much. Thinking of Mrs. Elliott made him wonder whether Freeman had told her to say what she had. Were there other reasons for the job offer? Get him away from Mr. Stott? Get him on the side of the Foundation? As far as Barry knew, there’d been only three people who’d mattered much to Pinkie before she went south: her mother, Mr. Stott, and Barry. Did Freeman see them all as threats to his power over Pinkie? Mr. Stott he couldn’t do much about, so he kept him at arm’s length. Mrs. Proudfoot he’d married and sent to America. But Barry he was going to take on, suck in, own, too.

  Yeah? sneered Bear.

  8

  It was June, so most of the plants were above ground now, and many in flower, but Mr. Stott’s plot still didn’t look like anyone else’s idea of a garden. You noticed the rows of white labels first. The plants were arranged not for looks but in botanical order, and the effect was that of a stamp collection. In the main area there was only one specimen of anything, though in a patch around the back Mr. Stott raised batches of seedlings or cuttings, either for replacements or to swap with some other alpine nut for something he hadn’t got, or to sell to a big garden centre over at Brant which had what it called a plantsman’s corner. Any spares he couldn’t use one of these ways he slung out, no matter how rare or beautiful. Rare was much more important than beautiful, of course.

  At the sound of the gate Mr. Stott swivelled round, ready to yell, saw who it was, and bent back to what he was doing. Barry locked the Galaxy to the gate. It was inconceivable that a bike thief was going to chance by, but all of Barry’s savings from last summer (the money he’d pretended to Mr. Freeman that he’d spent on the fee for the Foundation) had gone into the Galaxy, and he’d become almost neurotically careful. He’d even got a lock and chain so heavy that the weight was a nuisance on long rides.

  He watched while Mr. Stott snipped the petals off a small mauve flower, fertilized it with pollen he had ready on an artist’s brush, and tied the maimed and distorted flower head into a paper bag. Mr. Stott had immensely strong arms and hands, and his huge fingers moved with brutal deftness. He said nothing until he had slotted a pane of glass into clips which held it above the plant to keep the rain off.

  “Fool’s errand?” He snorted. “Money down the drain, eh?”

  “No, I made it.”

  “Saw her?”

  “I talked to her. She wants out.”

  Barry was half ashamed to hear himself talking in the tight-lipped rhythms of some TV hero. He couldn’t help it. That was how he felt: mission accomplished. Mission hardly started really.

  Mr. Stott gathered his equipment into the tray clipped to his chair and propelled himself another few feet along the trench. With a curious thin homemade scoop he began to dig a hole beside a patch of hairy grey leaves from which rose a fistful of what might have been dandelions, except that they were pink.

  “Get yourself good and sick then?” he said.

  “Worse than I meant. But it turned out okay.”

  “She cured you?”

  “It looked like that. And the boss of the place was so pleased with my reaction that he’s offered me a job.”

  “Has he now?”

  “Somebody told me he often does that. But …”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Only I wondered. He might want to get me away from you. I said I’d have to come and tell you Pinkie was okay. That’s what I’m doing now if anyone’s looking.”

  “Think they might be?”

  “Not really.”

  “Tell you something. Yesterday morning—remember I got a detective to trace where Pinkie’d got to, chap named Brasher?—yesterday morning he dropped in, looking for a couple in a yellow van, he said, thought I might have noticed it come by. Told him no. Then he asked, just out of interest, he said, if I’d done anything more about Pinkie. Told him no to that, too.”

  “You think … Bit of a coincidence, picking the same detective, isn’t it?”

  “Only three of ’em in the Yellow Pages. Brasher’s the smallest.”

  “Still …”

  “Nothing in it, most likely,” said Mr. Stott, and returned to his careful rootling.

  “I’m going to take this job,” said Barry, speaking louder than he meant.

  Mr. Stott craned from his chair to peer into the hole he had made.

  “Then I can find out more,” said Barry, “I can find out if Pinkie really wants to get away. If she does, I shall have to try.”

  Mr. Stott, working by feel, with his eyes shut, was now slicing in under the plant with a pocketknife.

  “They’re just using her,” said Barry. “And they’re not going to let her go. They make me sick.”

  Still no response as Mr. Stott pulled from the hole two pale lengths of fleshy root, which he put into a plastic bag. He started to ease the earth back into the hole.

  “Where’s that daughter of mine?” he barked.

  “In America. Did you know she’s married Mr. Freeman?”

  “Stupid sod. Who’s he then?”

  “The boss I was talking about, the one who’s offered me this job.”

  “How old?”

  “Oh … fifty plus.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Moses.”

  Mr. Stott produced a bitter, yapping laugh and glanced at the sky.

  “Stay fine now,” he said. “Time for a cup of cocoa.”

  The inside of the bungalow was just as much a part of the garden as the outside. Plants stood on every shelf and window-sill and anywhere on the floor where enough light fell; in darker corners lay withered objects going through their dormant phase. To open the cookie tin, Barry had to lift off it two pots of what looked like dead grass. Mr. Stott fussed over the cocoa, getting it almost to the boil before pouring it into blue enamel mugs. Barry explained what had happened at the Foundation.

  Putting it into words changed it. His own voice seemed to choose a tone of distrust and contempt when he talked about the Harmony Session and, in doing so, made up his mind for him about what it had meant. Till now distrust and contempt had been only one lot of feelings, implying one of a number of possible meanings. Now he had chosen, and the choice left a sourness, like an aftertaste, and a vague sense of loss. His migraine had cleared up because it was due to anyway around about then; it had been going before he’d reached Pinkie, and it had been given its final marching orders at exactly that point because of the fluke of his being chosen as a “representative” and then giving his signal to Pinkie and getting her answer. That was
now the accepted truth, and the other possible explanation had faded into no more than a nice idea.

  “Bloody rum thing, the mind,” said Mr. Stott. “I natter away to my alpines when I’m on my own. Can’t do them a blind bit of good. Only, not noticing, I look at ’em a bit closer while I’m talking, maybe, see something wrong … but I can’t help telling myself it’s the chat made the difference. This Freeman will be her stepfather now, then?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Guardian while that woman’s in America.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And your idea is simply run off with her?”

  “If that’s what she wants, yes.”

  “Where to?”

  “I’ll have to think.”

  “This’d be the first place they’d look.”

  “But couldn’t you—”

  “Listen, lad. He’s her guardian. He can get my daughter back from the States. They’d have the law on their side, and that’s not all. Suppose you read in the papers about a young man kidnapping a girl and running off with her, what’d you think?”

  “But …”

  “Ah, you might be able to talk your way out of it in the end, especially if I was to back you up, but till they’d got you, they’d have the police out after you, hundreds of ’em. They wouldn’t know what you were after. Follow me?”

  Barry felt cold and sick. There had been just such a man-hunt only last spring, on TV each evening and in all the papers until the kid’s body had been found in a wood somewhere, a couple of hundred miles from her home. They’d caught the man. He’d been two years older than Barry.