Healer

by Peter Dickinson

  After that there was a busy period, answering clients’ questions in the entrance hail, helping them find their way about, fetching them for interviews and so on, and at last getting them into the Harmony Session. Then a lull. Barry went to get his lunch before the session was finished, so that he could take over in the porter’s booth and let Sergeant Coyne off. He was just about finishing when the first of the assistants, two women and a man, still in their white uniforms, came in.

  “How did it go then?” asked the fat grey-haired woman who was working behind the self-service counter.

  “H.E. a bit variable,” said the man.

  “You can say that again,” said the taller of the two girls.

  The stout woman sighed as if hearing of a bad result at a local football match. Another bad result in a bad season.

  “One old fellow started yelling till Dr. Hamm got him quiet. You’d have thought it might have unsettled Miss Pinkie, but she didn’t seem to notice. We came up with only nine reps.”

  “You win some, you lose some,” said the other girl.

  As she turned from the counter, Barry saw that it was in fact Karen, a plump, earnest, rather thick blonde he’d got into a chat with at supper last night. (Okay, she was a Sphere Four, but a lot of the staff wanted to make contact with Barry, because of his “good” reaction at the Harmony Session.) He hadn’t been especially struck with her—jeans and a T-shirt, and you didn’t look at her twice—but uniforms did something for some girls. He felt the familiar mild glow of interest—something like an intelligent electric heater might feel when it’s first turned on, he’d often thought.

  As he crossed with his empty tray to the counter, he made a deliberate effort to decide whether there was any of that in what he felt about Pinkie. More and more, since Mr. Stott’s warning, he had come to realise what most people would think and say if a sixteen-year-old boy ran off with a ten-year-old girl—kidnapped her, it was going to look like. So it seemed to him important to be sure in his mind that there was no truth in it. He tried to think about Pinkie and compare his reaction with his thoughts (if you could call them thoughts) about Karen. Yes, there was warmth there, and actual physical sensation, slight but real, across his shoulder blades and the back of his neck; with it went a movement in his mind, but again feeling like something physical, something beginning to open … Inside himself he knew it was quite different, nothing to do with sex at all. But yes, there’d be problems persuading anyone. Old Stott had been right about that. He felt depressed as he made his way back to the entrance hail.

  “That’s for you,” said Sergeant Coyne, tapping a white envelope on the counter. It was, too—“B. Evans” in large floppy writing. The card inside said, “Will you please come to tea in the nursery wing today, 4:00 P.M.? Louise Butterfield.”

  “Who’s Louise Butterfield?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Butterfield to you, my lad. She’s a Sphere Three. Lady plays the harp at the sessions.”

  “Oh. I’ve got to go have tea with her in the nursery wing. Where’s that?”

  Sergeant Coyne couldn’t alter the tone of his voice, but his eyes widened.

  “Up the stairs back end of kitchen passage,” he said, “Top floor, turn right. You’ll see a notice says ‘No Unauthorized persons,’ but if you’ve been asked, you don’t have to mind that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s where Miss Pinkie lives, see? Mrs. Butterfield watches after her.”

  It was a private apartment. There was a door with a lock to it, a bell push, a peephole. From beyond the door the plinkety sounds of harp scales came faintly, but they stopped at the ring of the bell.

  Mrs. Butterfield opened the door. Barry didn’t recognize her for a moment because she was standing, though with the help of a stick. He’d seen her that morning being wheeled into the Harmony Session and hadn’t realised she could walk. She gave Barry a lovely smile, a typical Foundation smile, full of peace and happiness.

  “You must be Barry,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Louise Butterfield. Pinkie’s told me a lot about you…”

  (False note? A lot—Pinkie?)

  “It’ll be great to see her again.”

  “She’s just getting up from her rest. She seems extra tired today. It was a difficult session.”

  “So I heard. Must be a strain any time.”

  “She’s wonderful how she stands it.”

  “Right.”

  Mrs. Butterfield, still smiling, nodded as though they had agreed on something really important, then turned and hobbled down the passage. Barry followed her into a large room brimming with light. The bright-coloured furniture looked used and comfortable. There was a harp by the fireplace and an enormous doll’s house between the windows. Over in the far corner was a desk with schoolbooks on it, a blackboard, a globe of the world.

  “I used to be a teacher,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “It’s worked out very luckily—that’s the Harmony, of course. We do our lessons here and—”

  She was interrupted by the crash of the door being flung open. As Barry turned, Pinkie charged headlong into him, the way she used to rush at Mr. Stott. She threw her arms around him and nuzzled her face into his chest. At the same time she tried to jump up and down.

  “Hi, mind my toes,” said Barry.

  When he put his hands round her rib cage to lift her free, she giggled and clung to him yet more ferociously so that he wasn’t sure he could force her loose without hurting her. He twisted his head and gave Mrs. Butterfield a sorry-not-my-fault shrug.

  Mrs. Butterfield was watching, still with a smile on her lips but a slight frown on her forehead. She answered his signal with a warning shake of the head. He stopped struggling against Pinkie’s hug and went limp.

  It worked. As she let go, she pinched him hard on the hip.

  “Oi!” he yelped.

  She rushed away, around to the back of the big sofa, where she stopped and turned to watch him, so wild with excitement that her laughter was more like screams, unpleasant to listen to. Suddenly she crouched, peeping at him over the back of the sofa. Yes, of course. If she was treating him as a sort of substitute for her grandfather, the next thing would be…

  He glanced around the room. It was an airy space, lit by its three big barred windows, one in the north wall and two in the east. Beyond the stable roof was a view of wooded fields sloping up to the skyline, lit by the strong afternoon sun. Despite the height and light and openness, there was something prison-like about the room, just as there had been about the close little house in Viola Street. Perhaps it was the bars on the windows, though they obviously hadn’t been put there just to keep Pinkie in. They looked much older than that.

  “Okay,” he said. “You want to play a game?”

  She poked her head up and nodded violently.

  “It’ll mean pushing the furniture around,” he said to Mrs. Butterfield.

  “In that case why don’t you wait till after tea?” she said. “It’s all in the hatch, and the kettle’s just boiled. Then you can push the furniture around to your heart’s content. It sounds as if your game will be a bit too active for me.”

  Pinkie straightened up, looking sulky. Then she seemed to make a deliberate effort and switched to her other self, the one Barry knew and preferred, sedate and rather secret.

  He smiled encouragingly at her, and she signalled back with a tiny movement of her lips. But she’d changed. There was something different about her, though he couldn’t at the moment see what.

  “Pinkie will show you where the hatch is, and I’ll make the tea,” said Mrs. Butterfield.

  Pinkie led the way out into the corridor, where she opened the doors of what looked like a cupboard set into the wall. Inside there seemed to be only one bare shelf with a rope going up from its centre, but Pinkie took hold of another rope which ran dow
n by the hinges and gave it a tug. With a deep, rattling groan from above the shelf slid upward, and another came into view, carrying a tray loaded with crockery and cutlery. Yet another shelf and tray appeared, this time with honey, jam, butter, scones, and a walnut cream cake. There was a dull thud as the whole contraption stopped rising. Now it looked like an ordinary cupboard, apart from being unusually deep. They each took a tray and carried them back into the room.

  “That’s quite a gadget out there,” he said to Mrs. Butterfield.

  “The old lift? It goes right down to the kitchen passage. This all used to be the nursery wing, you see, with a nanny and at least a couple of nursemaids and a whole brood of children. Poor darlings, they’d never have gone down to eat with their parents until they were almost grown-up, except on birthdays and times like that. Mostly they’d stay up here and have all their meals sent up in the lift. Boiled mutton and sprouts, my mother told me. She used to live in a house a bit like this. Help me down into my chair, will you, darling?”

  Pinkie steadied her by the wrists as she lowered herself into an upright chair. There was a moment in the process when the calm, sweet face twitched, as if with a stab of pain. She sighed as she settled.

  “I didn’t realise you could walk at all,” said Barry.

  “I couldn’t. Six months ago. It’s living with Pinkie. The Energy streams through her even when she’s not thinking about it. I’m an extremely lucky woman.”

  Pinkie’s face was blank, bored.

  “Is Granddad all right?” she asked.

  “Fine last time I saw him. Sends his love. He was over the moon a few weeks back because he’d won an award with his new Roscoea.”

  “What an extraordinary word!” said Mrs. Butterfield.

  “Until you see it’s only named after some bloke called Roscoe,” said Barry. “It’s supposed to be yellow, but Mr. Stott’s managed to breed a white one.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know whether it’s a canary or a fish,” said Mrs. Butterfield.

  Yeah, thought Barry. And Pinkie’s told you all about me but never said anything about her granddad’s alpines. He explained, easy and smiling, Foundation-style.

  The conversation went on that way. Mrs. Butterfield, though not quite a gusher, was certainly a talker. Naturally she talked mostly about the Foundation. Everybody did. Everybody seemed to share the same enthusiasm, the same trust, and the same rather down-to-earth approach about the mystery they were supposed to be dealing with. It was as though by talking about it in a no-nonsense way, calling it H.E. and so on, they were somehow helping make it more real. But they believed all right. From nobody he’d talked to—Sergeant Coyne, Karen, several other Sphere Fours and Sphere Fives, and now Mrs. Butterfield—had Barry had the slightest hint that they were in any kind of plot or conspiracy. They didn’t have to be, of course—the fewer who knew, the better, from Freeman’s point of view—but it was unnerving. Barry wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to go on smiling and agreeing without some flicker of his eyes, some twist of his mouth or note of sourness in his voice giving him away, showing that he wasn’t really one of them, but only pretending. It was just the sort of situation you’d expect would stir old Bear up, but Bear, since that moment up on the moors at Ferriby, seemed to have gone back into hibernation. So Barry was able to look Mrs. Butterfield straight in the eye and nod and smile and agree that it was wonderful to be here and they were all extraordinarily lucky people.

  Pinkie said nothing. At one moment Barry tried to draw her into the conversation. As he finished his first mouthful of the walnut cake, he said, “Almost as good as your mum used to make, Pinkie.”

  Pinkie looked at him.

  “Mum’s in America,” she muttered.

  “And doing marvellous work,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “A lot of our clients are coming from there now.”

  “Mum likes it in America,” said Pinkie. “She wants me to go.”

  “I don’t think there’s any question of that for the moment,” said Mrs. Butterfield, “not until the next stage in the program. There’s still a lot of basic research to be done, Sphere One says. Then he’ll be able to start looking for other people with Pinkie’s gifts and other places where the flow lines converge, the way they do here.”

  She chatted on. Pinkie retreated into herself after her two brief remarks about her mother. Barry could only glance at her from time to time, but he became more and more convinced that something had happened to her, and it wasn’t just that she was older. He couldn’t make up his mind what, but he felt that she had lost, or was losing, part of whatever it was that had made her special—not her healing powers, which he’d always thought, even if they were real, were only a sort of by-product of this other quality, but the quality itself. He remembered travelling back with her on the first bus trip from Dallington, and the idea that she had inner landscapes which only she could visit. Now it was as though she found those places harder to reach and the land, when she got there, less welcoming, colder and poorer.

  He was guessing. It was only a feeling. She didn’t do or say anything which he could use as a clue that he was right, but he thought also that he detected in Mrs. Butterfield’s tone, when she mentioned Pinkie, that she was troubled about something too.

  After tea he and Pinkie carried the trays out to the hatch. Pinkie pulled at a rope on the other side of the door opening, and the lift began to slide down. Under the cover of its steady rumble Barry muttered, “Still want to get away from this place?”

  She looked sideways at him, as though it was the first time that anybody had suggested such an idea to her. Then she nodded.

  “Not going to be easy,” he said.

  “Want to see Granddad.”

  “I know, I know, but … Look, we’ve got to talk sometime. Alone. Can you get them to let me take you for a walk or something? It’ll have to be you does the asking. I’m the lowest of the low.”

  She looked puzzled. He felt that she wasn’t really understanding; somehow it was an effort for her to mesh into the real world. It always had been, slightly, of course, but she’d been quick enough about setting up codes and systems to get around Mrs. Proudfoot.

  “Are we going to play a game now?” she said. “I’ll get Louise’s wheelie.”

  She darted off down the corridor, leaving the lift still rumbling down under its own momentum. Inquisitive about its workings, Barry craned into the gap and peered up. In the dimness he could just make out the central rope unwinding from a wooden drum. The ropes on either side of the door were spaced too far apart to go directly over the drum, so presumably they ran over some sort of wheel, and the drum was really the axle of the wheel. The rumbling came from wooden bearings. Plenty of friction there. The momentum ran out in a few seconds, but when Barry pulled experimentally at the side rope, he found there was very little resistance. The lift itself must have a counterweight, of course, running up the side of the shaft. Always amused and curious about the workings of things, he was still leaning into the shaft, peering down into darkness, when Pinkie rammed his calf with the step of Mrs. Butterfield’s wheelchair.

  The game barely worked. Barry managed to push the furniture into positions which made quite a promising maze, but though Pinkie could dodge, there were very few places she could really hide. Besides, Barry found that wheelchairs aren’t at all easy to control and manoeuvre without practice, and he soon realised that for all Pinkie’s apparent excitement, her heart wasn’t really in it, any more than his was. They tried. Barry crashed and blundered around the sofa, and Pinkie dodged and screamed; for a moment it sounded as though she was working herself into another fit of hysteria, but all at once she straightened from where she’d been crawling behind the table, pushed her glasses straight, and said, in a tired voice, “Let’s stop.”

  Mrs. Butterfield, who had been sitting in a defensive position between her precious harp and the action, laughed with obvi
ous relief.

  “I was beginning to worry about my poor chair,” she said. “You’ve no idea what a good one costs. Where on earth did you learn that extraordinary game?”

  Barry explained about Mr. Stott and his garden and the trenches. Mrs. Butterfield shook her head, still smiling.

  “It’s a mistake to try and go back,” she said. “You can’t do it, not with anything—places, love affairs, careers, friendships, anything. They’re always different. I used to be quite a good harpist, you know. I played with a very good orchestra. I only gave it up and became a teacher when my fingers started to stiffen. And later, when my illness got really bad, I used to sit and stare at my hands—they were all curled up like the claws of a bird, you know—and tell myself stories about what my life would have been like if it hadn’t happened. I thought that was all I longed for, to get well and pick up my career. I was good enough, and I think I still am, but now that it’s possible, I don’t want to do it. You see, something else has happened, something I could never have imagined when my head was full of dreams. Yes, I might become a rich and famous soloist, I might believe I was happy and lucky, but it would be a disaster because I would be missing this.”

  She really meant it, Barry saw, though she spoke easily enough, without making an emotional meal of what she said. She’d staked a lot on the Foundation, hadn’t she, so for her it had to be true. Her life here had to be worth while, so in her own mind the career she had given up for it needed to be a starry one. The same applied with all the people at the Foundation, in their different ways. If H.E. was a fairy tale, if Freeman was a crook or a phony or both, then their whole lives would fall apart. Barry would find no allies here. He really liked Mrs. Butterfield, for instance, despite her fluty upper-class voice. He thought she wanted to do the best she could for Pinkie, but nothing he could say or do would persuade her to help him, ever. He was alone. He’d been aware of this all along, really, but what Mrs. Butterfield said made up his mind.