For the next couple of minutes, Wei recites a list which Julie writes down. Then he gives her the other piece of paper, which has something from the book of Chuang Tzu written on it that he tells her to read later. When she leaves, she has the excerpt from Chuang Tzu, and the following list:
Wash food before preparing it
Wash your hands before eating or preparing food
Keep cold food cold and hot food hot (never eat reheated rice)
Look each way twice before crossing the road
Be kind to people, animals, plants and the earth
Relax like a baby does, and you will not be harmed
Learn First Aid
Follow the Highway Code
Exercise regularly
If you have a problem, make a journey; you will find the answer
Stop thinking about infinity
Chapter 47
When Julie comes to pick up Luke, she looks different in some way that Luke wouldn’t be able to describe. Wei must truly be a wonderful healer. Perhaps now Julie is completely free of fear.
‘So can you go on motorways now?’ Luke asks.
Julie smiles. ‘I have no desire to go on a motorway,’ she says.
‘Oh.’
Then she shows him a piece of yellow paper with something written on it about fish. One man is saying something to another man about how happy the fish are when they’re playing in the river. Then the other man asks the first man how he can know that, since he’s not a fish. Then the first man asks the second man how he can know that he cannot know what the fish are thinking, since he is not him . . . This is too confusing. Luke can’t understand this right now, and he’s not really concentrating anyway, because he’s thinking about seeing Wei. Without finishing reading it, he gives the piece of paper back to Julie.
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ she says, but he doesn’t reply.
As Luke, covered in a fleece blanket, walks down to Wei’s room with Julie, he thinks about the moment he will be able to take off the blanket and his space-suit. It’ll be like an uplifting film and he’ll dance around, full of gratitude, and he’ll give Wei all (or almost all) his money to give to his charity and then he’ll go and climb a mountain. Of course, right now, Luke’s terrified of the idea of mountains. After all, he couldn’t even navigate his way around a hotel. But he knows that Wei is going to do something to make all that go away, and Luke will be normal just like everybody else.
Before he enters the room, he thinks to himself: This is my last moment as a freak.
About ten minutes later, he leaves the room and slams the door. He’s angry.
‘Take me home,’ he says to Julie.
‘But what about . . .?’
‘He isn’t a proper healer. He can’t heal me.’
‘But what did he say?’
‘He said, “The answer is inside you,” or something.’
‘And?’
‘That’s stupid. He said something about how I’d always had the answer and I knew what it was, but he’s just fucking insane. I don’t want to talk about it. Take me home.’
‘But we’ve come all this way.’
‘And now I want to go back.’
‘Oh, Christ. OK. We’ll have to go and tell Charlotte.’
Julie throws the fleece blanket back over Luke and he knows this is it: he’ll never see light, not natural light, ever. The blanket feels like death to him; a soft shroud. He wants to cry but he can’t. He can’t rub his eyes because of the helmet. But who cares? His life may as well end now anyway. Under the blanket and the helmet Luke does cry and the blackness in front of him smears and he can’t see any more. He doesn’t care. He wants to choke on his tears and his snot and his sadness.
Julie’s leading him by the arm, gripping him too hard. He likes the pain.
‘There are stairs now,’ she warns in a cold voice.
Luke stumbles but he doesn’t care.
When they get back to their room, Charlotte’s still asleep.
‘You’ll have to wait while I get her up,’ Julie says. Her voice still sounds weird and cold.
Luke sits on the pullout bed holding the fleece blanket in his hands. Through his tears he can see Julie moving around, collecting things in the room, trying to wake Charlotte, lighting a cigarette. Luke thinks of those commercials that show how economy batteries run down quicker than branded ones. Julie looks an economy-powered toy about to stop or break.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Luke says.
‘I wanted it to all get better,’ she says, staring at him for a moment.
‘Well, it isn’t,’ Luke says.
‘Oh, yuck,’ Charlotte says, when Julie wakes her up. ‘What time is it?’
‘Almost eight,’ Julie says. ‘Luke’s upset. We have to go.’
‘Go?’
‘Home. Sorry.’
‘Shit.’ Charlotte sits up in bed and starts rolling a cigarette. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I think it just didn’t work.’
‘Has he tested it?’
‘I don’t think the “healing” actually took place at all.’
‘The guy’s an idiot,’ says Luke. ‘That’s why.’
‘He’s not an idiot,’ Charlotte says. ‘Are you sure you understood what he was saying to you?’
‘Yes, I understood,’ Luke says. ‘Can we go soon?’
He lies down on the pullout bed until Charlotte’s ready. While he’s there, Julie and Charlotte say nothing, and all he can hear are the sounds of them folding things up, and then Charlotte putting her clothes on. Luke can’t even think any more; he’s just aching to go home, back to the horror of what he knows, which is better than the unfamiliar, lost horror of being outside. At least he can’t get lost at home. And he knows he’s being horrible again and he knows Julie’s upset, but this is probably the most depressing thing that’s ever happened to him.
Out in the van, no one’s saying much.
‘Do you mind map-reading?’ Julie says to Charlotte.
‘Sure. The short way, yeah?’
‘You’ll have to stay under the blanket,’ Julie says to Luke. ‘It’s light outside now.’
And that’s all they say. Luke wants one of them to say something else, but they don’t. Maybe they don’t know what to say. Maybe Charlotte’s pissed off with him for thinking Wei was an idiot. Maybe even Julie’s pissed off with him; she was before. He goes under the blanket and cries again. And as he cries, and feels more and more pathetic, the answer comes to him, just as it did at the service station at South Mimms. He has no life. So: he has no life.
‘Stop the van,’ he says to Julie, coming out from under the blanket.
‘Stop the van?’ she says. ‘Luke, why aren’t you under the . . .’
‘Stop the van,’ he says again, unable to stop his voice sounding slightly mad.
‘We’d better do it,’ says Charlotte. ‘We’d better stop.’
‘Where?’ says Julie. ‘This is a main road. You can’t stop here.’
‘Hang on, Luke,’ Charlotte says. ‘We have to find somewhere to stop.’
‘Oh, God,’ says Julie.
‘There’s a big park coming up in a second,’ says Charlotte, looking at the map. ‘Look out for the sign and pull in. Can you wait two minutes, Luke?’
‘I guess so,’ he says.
‘You’ll have to,’ Julie says. ‘It’s illegal to stop here.’
Luke doesn’t even feel that scared of what he’s about to do. When the van eventually stops, he simply opens the door and steps out. He can hear Julie shouting at him to stop, and Charlotte stupidly telling her it’ll be all right. Then he takes off his helmet.
As soon as he does he feels cold, fresh air on his face and he can smell something. It’s a damp smell, new and exciting like flowers, but different. Ahead of him he can see an amazing wash of green, and it’s grass – he recognises it, but it’s bigger in real life and there’s so much more of it. Luke can’t believe he ever t
hought the whole world was made of concrete when it’s so obviously made of this. He walks forward, breathing in the air and staring at the grass, and he sees tall trees and a bird flying and a small lake in the distance, and then he starts ripping off his space-suit.
And he doesn’t die.
He doesn’t even unzip the suit; he pulls at it until the seams burst open and he’s throwing bits of ripped-off material and tin foil behind him on the grass. He kicks off the Wellington boots and takes off his socks so he can feel the grass under his feet. The cold, wet, soft feeling is so intense and pure that he almost stops breathing. This one feeling of grass under his feet is the reverse of all the pain he’s ever felt in his life. He wants to touch the ground with his hands now, so he gets down on his knees and presses both his palms into the grass. Then he’s rolling on it but he doesn’t want to wear these clothes any more. He strips off his fleece top and tracksuit bottoms and his T-shirt and flings them behind him. Then he lies face-down in the grass, breathing it in, wanting to live in this moment forever.
And then he sees a ladybird, shiny with the morning dew. Could this be real? This joy is too much. He has to get up and run. So now he’s running, trying to remember how to breathe, and Julie and Charlotte are running after him. He’s still running – not away from them, but because he can – and he’s never felt anything this soft beneath his feet before, and he wouldn’t care if he died if these things were the last things he ever saw and he could die with that wonderful smell all around him. This is some sort of paradise. Everything here is a miracle; more beautiful than the pictures in his book, more bright and soft and real than images on TV. He gets as far as the edge of the lake, and there are ducks, and Luke doesn’t know how such perfect creatures could ever exist. They float perfectly on the surface of the water, which is a blue Luke’s never seen before, rippled with orange from the sun, the colour he never thought he’d see.
He still doesn’t die. He doesn’t even feel ill.
He doesn’t want to go home any more. Everything’s wonderful; everything’s changed. Julie and Charlotte look beautiful walking towards him now with their straight brown hair, like twins. But he’s never seen women’s hair do that. It’s shining in the sun, and they both look like angels with haloes.
‘How could this happen?’ he asks Julie as she catches up with him. ‘I don’t understand. I’m healed but Wei didn’t heal me.’
Julie looks at Luke and the grass and the lake and she seems to be thinking about all the different answers to his question. Then she looks at him and smiles.
‘Didn’t he?’ she says.
Then it starts to rain.
The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion now thanked the Good Witch earnestly for her kindness, and Dorothy exclaimed:
‘You are certainly as good as you are beautiful! But you have not yet told me how to get back to Kansas.’
‘Your Silver Shoes will carry you over the desert,’ replied Glinda. ‘If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.’
‘But then I should not have had my wonderful brains!’ cried the Scarecrow. ‘I might have passed my whole life in the farmer’s cornfield.’
‘And I should not have had my lovely heart,’ said the Tin Woodman. ‘I might have stood and rusted in the forest till the end of the world.’
‘And I should have lived a coward for ever,’ declared the Lion.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my family and friends. Special thanks to Leo and Simon.
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