The Healer

by Thompson, Sharon

  I gawp at him. His small teeth are nice in the sunlight from the kitchen as I stand more to his right. The hall is narrow and his sleeve brushes off my breast.

  ‘You don’t talk much?’ he asks. ‘Is there anything I can help you with? My job is to heal?’

  I chuckle.

  ‘What’s so funny? A doctor is a man of great power, you know.’

  ‘Your knees hurt,’ I tell him.

  It’s his turn to gawp at me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me hold them.’ I take his hand and lead him into the kitchen. He sits on the hard chair. I kneel in front of him. Muttering my prayers, I hold his knee-cap into the palm of one hand and wrap my fingers around the joint so that my fingertips dig into his muscle. He winces. The heat from my hands is hotter than it’s been in a long while. I have to let go. He sighs. I do the same with the other leg and then take both together. When the heat gets too much I hover my hands over his hurt and soothe it away. His eyes are closed with his head tilted back and his mouth slightly open. ‘They should feel better, I’ll do more next time you are here.’

  His eyes open and he rubs at his knees. ‘They feel much better. Thank you. What did you do?’

  ‘I’m a healer too.’

  He’s on his flat feet in his nice shoes and pulling at his suit’s trouser legs in disbelief that he’s no longer in pain. ‘My goodness,’ he mutters and we stroll up the hall. He stops at Peggy’s medicines room door. ‘Do you help the women who come here too?’ He’s checking to see do I understand what Peggy does in the medicines room.

  ‘I don’t help them. They come for Peggy. Not me.’

  ‘She makes a lot of money in there.’

  ‘Yes. She’s a different kind of healer.’

  ‘Some might call her a murderer. But the women I send to her are in a lot of anguish about their condition. They might need your hands on them?’

  I take his wrist and there’s a steady rhythm. His mouth opens and closes. My lips go towards his cheek and then his ear. ‘After they lose the life inside them, it’s all too horrid for them. I couldn’t heal them then and they don’t come back.’

  His cheek is next to mine when he asks, ‘They’re afraid. Peggy warns them not to return here for all our sakes. Do you think it is a mortal sin what happens in that room?’

  I kiss his cheek. ‘Being forced against your will to do anything is not right. No woman is forced to do anything here.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He nods and pats my hand that’s on his wrist.

  ‘You’re a good man with a fine heart,’ I tell him. ‘Doctors must always be good men.’

  ‘You’re definitely my favourite. What a wonderful woman you are.’

  ‘I will be a great woman someday.’

  He leans on the front door when I open it. ‘Take care of yourself, Molly. I’ll pay to see you the next time.’

  ‘What I do for you is our little secret,’ I say. Over his shoulder, I notice there’s a big black car parked opposite 34. There’s a large man driving it, looking at me. ‘It is our secret?’ I ask the doctor.

  ‘Yes. Peggy might be jealous if she knew you were someone who could help others too.’ He’s off down the steps and I notice that the car’s gone. ‘Goodbye,’ the doctor says back to me and touches the side of his nose to tell me he’s willing to keep my healing just between us.

  He is right, Peggy would be jealous. Peggy is a damaged woman. Now that I am coming back to myself, I’m noticing things about her. She can be selfish, stubborn and vicious to others. I’ve always wanted a mother to look at me with love in her heart. Peggy does this for me every day and because of this, I will overlook almost everything else.

  I love the goodness in Peggy, but even I see that it is slowly slipping away from us both.

  34

  Peggy writes the address on the envelope every month to send the money to Cavan. We place it inside a card and I ask her to write little messages from me to Fionn. She does and always kisses my curls and holds my head in her arms afterwards. She longs for a child of her own. She has given up all hope of that happening. As she writes on the paper now, I touch her belly and hold my hand there. She lets me. I ask the stars to bring her a child.

  ‘Tess got us bacon and cabbage for this evening,’ she tells me as she moves away towards the sink. Her hands rest on the edge of it and she looks out into the backyard. ‘Life is about surviving as best we can, but we must also try to make things better.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We must dream, Molly, but not dream too big.’

  ‘I’m going to be a great woman. I’ll be rich someday and get Fionn.’

  Peggy sighs.

  ‘You must help me, Peggy.’

  ‘Did you look around you lately?’

  ‘You must not force me to…’

  ‘I love you like my own.’

  ‘I know.’

  Tess strides in through the door complaining as usual about her lot and how we’re sitting doing nothing. She doesn’t like Peggy being soft on me. None of them do. Tess is on about some soldier who she saw on the way back from getting her cigarettes.

  ‘Where were you?’ she howls at me. I can’t and won’t tell her that I was at the best chapel I’ve found yet. One that’s huge and smells of incense and echoes with the songs of angels even when there’s no-one else there or any music playing. ‘The soldier boy said he was seen to. He kisses ya down below and he is the nicest man to come about here. Someone seen to him? It must’ve been you?’

  I’m away in my own mind. I am back at the chapel and listening to the lovely sounds. Tess can’t break in, if I’m away there in my mind.

  ‘I won’t listen to this any more,’ Peggy says. I’m glad she’s stopped the annoyance. Tess keeps on at it, going on and on about how I’m everyone’s favourite. She’s probably meaning the bank clerk who keeps paying me to jump up and down on the bed and scream and laugh with him. He says he needs to have a ‘reputation for the women’. I’m not sure what he means exactly, but he and I have such fun together. He pays me well and now and again he asks me to see my breasts and that’s it. He says they don’t do anything for him but I don’t really care. He paid me more money to talk about him loudly outside the window of the bank. He was very generous for just two sentences. He makes up for the bastard who stole the money the doctor’s been giving me for his knee healing. I don’t know who took it. Peggy thinks I showed it to Tommy or someone else, but I didn’t.

  I know in my guts that Tess is the thief, but I can’t prove it. She is a bad egg I don’t want to crack. She’d ooze out a horrid smell, so she would.

  Tommy is at the door again. This makes Tess as mad as Aunt Bredagh used to get. He never goes with any of the others and most men now don’t seem to want Tess at all. Her teeth do make her mouth smell. She isn’t the best looking with her greasy hair and bad temper. If I was a man, I wouldn’t pay to put my mickey in her.

  Tommy’s arms are around me as soon as he is in my bedroom door. ‘Can I stay overnight?’ he asks as he takes off his trousers. ‘Peggy will say yes. She’ll let me stay, if you ask her again.’ He loves being in my bed these last few times he’s here and he’s managed to get me to lie and sleep next to him.

  His breath is nice in my hair and his arms are strong. In them, I feel safe. He’s tried to get his tongue into my mouth, but I’m not ready for that slopping yet.

  ‘I’m happy to wait,’ he told me last time and since then I’ve thought about nothing else. What it might feel like to have his tongue in my mouth and his bare chest against me? I even wondered what his mickey might look like. In the bed now that he’s sleeping, I take a peek under the covers. There’s a bulge in his underwear and his chest is bare. The hair on his legs are fair and he has lots of long, thick hairs under his arms too. His smell is nice. I notice he has one eye open. ‘What are you doin’?’

  ‘Lookin’.’

  ‘Do you like what ya see?’

  ‘I do.’

  He lifts himself up on
to on one elbow. His lips touch softly off mine. They’re warm and soft. I like them. I start at the slopping nonsense I’ve heard the others on about. There’s a nice throbbing starting in me, a breathless panting and a deep want. Yes. It is like a need. I want to have him wrapped around me. With my nightdress off me in a flash, he is inside me before I really remember anything of Vincent. Suddenly my legs clench and my inside place doesn’t want him in there. He’s on top of my chest and I can’t breathe. It’s not his weight, it’s the memories. He stops and holds my jaw and makes me look into his blue eyes. ‘I love you, Molly. I’ll never hurt you. Trust me.’ I breathe out and try to let the worry away with it. He is not on top of me for long. He thanks me for the pleasure he moans into my ear. Then he snores. I take a peek under the cover at his mickey again. And yes, it is as ugly as I thought it would be.

  35

  My latest chapel doesn’t have any angel song in it today. The whole place is like an empty shell and the cold walls urge me out of the place. The walls there are normally fine and I don’t have many other places to be. Definitely the chapel doesn’t want me here today and my legs take me out the door and down the street. I get a whiff of cleanliness from myself as I move, and I like it. I’ve been getting into trouble for loving the bath and having longer time in it than the others. I adore the sound of water moving. I stop at the canal. It reminds me of the Owenmore River in Collooney. Near the canal brings some sounds I remember. The swish of the grass and the rustle of the trees, and Hull’s bark. The fresh water on my toes brings me back.

  Daddy took me once to see the sea. Only once. The wind was in my hair on that balmy day when we somehow got to the ocean. It wasn’t hundreds of miles but the train didn’t go to the ocean and so Daddy wasn’t interested in it. The roar each time its mouth moved made it seem like a giant beast to me. ‘Waves, they’re called waves,’ Daddy said. ‘I can’t stay here all day while you stare at them and play in the sand.’

  ‘I love the sea,’ I told him as he dragged me by the arm up the road with him. I waved at the waves until we went around a bend and they were gone. My ears still heard them until we turned another corner and then I cried. I knew it would be a long, long time until I’d see or hear it again. ‘Do you love me at all?’ I remember asking before I got a whack across the back of my legs from the stick he’d found in the ditch. The mark had stayed for days and burned when the raised blister had come off it.

  Peggy’s head pops out of the parlour when I come in the door of 34. There on the best chair is the bad man I met in the chapel a while back. I don’t want to stay with the weasel, but Peggy beckons me in and closes the parlour door.

  ‘This is a powerful man, Molly. He’s called the Professor and he has noticed you at Mass. He has been trying to find you.’

  Peggy is using her posh voice. I’ve heard Tess talk of this creature. She told us all that he is a man with many enemies. Like me, he can’t read or write, or even count very well either, but he stole some papers from a university to make himself educated. He’s got money all his life for killing and that’s all he knows.

  ‘The Professor wants to spend time with you,’ Peggy says.

  ‘All about here owe me money for… protection. No-one mentioned you girls.’

  ‘We can come to some arrangement,’ Peggy says, pointing at me. ‘Molly could be yours for free once a fortnight… If you look after us?’ Peggy purrs. I know she’s frightened but I’m not her property. How dare she do this? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I cover my ears and hum.

  ‘Once a week at least,’ the thin man in the striped suit says. His silly hat is on the chair. I can picture Vincent in a similar one. My arms are itchy. I scratch them and search for my shadows.

  ‘No,’ Peggy says.

  He jumps up and holds Peggy’s face and says, ‘No-one says no to me.’

  ‘It is up to Molly.’

  She needs me to agree. The air is thick like glue.

  He doesn’t realise how powerful I am. None of them do. The angels whisper that I’m going to be all right. They’ve a plan. I believe them. Peggy is urging me to agree to something to get him out the door. I can almost hear her heart thumping from here and can hear her words as they scream from her brain. Get him out the door. Out the door.

  I look at this thin, short man from head to toe, like he’s a piece of hen dung. I walk around him and the angels warn me that he’s a bad animal and to be clever. ‘Once a fortnight and I get presents,’ I say. He sits next to me. It’s then that I know that although he’s a bad man, he can’t do what Vincent did to me. His mickey doesn’t work at all. It hasn’t for years and this makes him angry and very dangerous.

  ‘All the presents in the world for you, Molly. And if you’re good, I’ll pay you as well. Time is money after all.’ He rubs his thin moustache down with his fingers and slicks back his hair. ‘You gals will have no bother if people know that I come here.’

  ‘That’s good,’ says Peggy.

  I want to slap her smile all the way to fucking Cork.

  He’s grinning too, ‘And sure there’s no time like the present.’

  ‘No,’ Peggy says. ‘Molly has a caller coming shortly. Not today.’ Her wink is supposed to make me grateful to her. I can’t look at them and start my humming instead.

  The front door snaps him out onto the street and that is when Peggy changes to me. Like Violet – suddenly she is not mine any more. She is lost in a selfish haze and cannot or won’t see how all this is for me. My talking with her stops. I hear her nightmares at night and I’m almost glad that she has them. Peggy’s air is trying to change me too. I can’t let it.

  * * *

  The clip of the Professor’s shoes on the stairs is unmistakable. I can smell the stuff he lashes into his hair. Although his clothes are clean enough there are always stains of his food somewhere. The big man he has with him is called Tiny and he hides so much from everyone. The Professor trusts him but he shouldn’t. The Professors knows sweet fuck all about anything. I decide what I will do, as his thin moustache comes around my opened bedroom door.

  ‘Your father is angry with you,’ I say from the bed and point to the chair for him to sit. My cardigan is buttoned to the top and he pokes at it as he passes me to sit on the chair. He notices that my skirt is long and my socks are pulled high. ‘Your daddy’s a grocer and is annoyed at you not taking up the trade.’

  ‘Most of Dublin know that,’ he says and pulls at his striped trouser legs, to rise them, to help him sit. ‘Are you pretending to be a fortune teller or something?’

  ‘I see things.’

  ‘Pah!’

  ‘I know you’ve marks on your back from where some men beat you a long time ago… over a horse.’

  His beady eyes are wide and his hand motions for me to tell him more.

  ‘You’ve marks on your ankle that won’t come off.’

  He pulls at his sock and shows me some ink marks.

  ‘Half of Dublin could have told ya those things.’

  ‘You have no children.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t. You have none of your own. You know you don’t.’

  He leans forward and points his thin finger covered in a thick gold ring into my face. ‘I fuckin’ do.’

  ‘Your wife hates you.’

  He laughs a bit at that. He doesn’t care that she does.

  ‘You’re scared for most of the day. Tired and afraid every day. You sometimes cry into your pillow. You wish you could get away. Far away and live by the sea.’

  He grunts, but is listening.

  ‘You are like me.’

  ‘Wha?’

  ‘You want someone to love you.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘You’re safe here with me. You can sleep here. I’ll watch over you.’

  ‘I aim to make a better use of our time. You stir things in me. Maybe…’

  ‘That will never work. You know it won’t. I see things.’

  ‘You might chang
e things for me.’

  ‘I can try to heal what’s wrong.’

  ‘You’re brave mentioning that to me.’

  ‘I can help you.’

  ‘I don’t need…’

  I place my finger to his thin lips.

  ‘If you are good to me, I might try and help you. Otherwise, I won’t.’

  ‘You are some doll…’

  ‘I know.’

  He laughs again and smooths at his moustache. He is tired.

  ‘Undress. Get in to bed. I’ll sing to you,’ I tell him.

  ‘Maybe next time I will.’

  He’s gone. There is a noise of him on the stairs leaving and he’s shouting to Tiny. I breathe again and thank my shadows.

  36

  The waft of cigar smoke reaches under my bedroom door and my gut clenches. The Professor is back. I’m his whiskey. He says that he needs me more every time he sees me. I think he also needs the sleep. Most of the time I sing to him and he snores, or he gets me to tell him things about his past. He doesn’t ask about his future. He must know in his own way that he’ll die soon enough. I can’t see exactly how it will happen, but he will be shot.

  Peggy has big guilt at leaving me to him. She asks me all the time what he’s like. She worries that he forces me to do things.

  ‘Do you hate fucking him?’ she asked me this morning. I should have put her mind to rest, but I didn’t. For her own gain, she forced me into a cage with a lion. Her eyes don’t hold the same care for me that they once did. Like Violet, I suddenly don’t know her. She cares for me, but resents me too.

  Yet, I’ve done nothing wrong. When men ask for me, she flinches. Sometimes she even rolls her eyes. Since Tommy and I have laid down together, I don’t find some of the others too bad. None are like my Tommy, of course, but I only take the ones that aren’t rotten inside. It seems, too, that the men talk and my gifts bring men lots of pleasure. It seems that I just know what to do. Like the healing, it comes naturally. I like the control I have over them and I admit now, that I enjoy that. In ways, it’s another form of healing for me. If I don’t think of it as ‘sin’, or if I am not reminded of Vincent, it’s not so bad at all.