Does Your Mother Know? (24 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I returned in about half an hour. The sheep had been indifferent, but the softness of the air and the quiet of the fields had worked on me. I walked back in and said I would do it.

It was obvious from his expression that MacKenzie’s faith in the essential goodness of humanity had been grievously shaken by my lack of filial loyalty. However, Joan had enough lightness for all of us. She positively sparkled.

“Oh, I knew you would. Thank you, Chris. What do we do first?”

“The session will have to be taped. Do you have a tape recorder and blank tapes?” I asked Duncan.

“Aye. Will you be needing notepaper as well?’

“Yes.”

He went off at the trot and disappeared through a back door that I presumed led to the bedrooms.

“I don’t know what I’d do without him,” said Joan in a conspiratorial tone. “What do you think of him, Chris?”

As Yogi Berra said, this was “déjà vu all over again.”
What do you think of Joe, Pet? Of Tony? Of Clark?

“He seems better than a lot of them.”

She chose to take it straight. “Oh, he is. He’s the best.”

And I’m betting he’s the reason for the sexy lingerie, not to
mention the condoms. The return of the prodigal daughter to the arms of her childhood sweetheart.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“First off, make sure your bladder is emptied. I don’t want you to have to go to the bathroom in mid-session.”

“Och. I’ll go right now.”

She passed Duncan as he came back with the tape recorder. They smiled at each other. Both of them in their sixties, he in good shape, she overweight and bruised and battered, but there was no hiding that glow of sexually satisfied love.

“Here you go. Where do you want me to put it?”

“She’ll have to lie down on the couch, so I’ll sit to one side and it can be on the floor between us. Is there a microphone?”

“Yes.” He grinned at me. He was thawing a little. “I go in for the local singing competitions, and it’s good to record yourself.”

“Did you ever win one?”

“Placed second last year. I’m hoping for better this time. Oh, sorry, about paper, all I could find was my accounting book. Will it do?”

He handed me a blue bound book which had a hard cover.

“Great, thanks.” I was trying for politeness at least.

Joan came back. “I’m ready.”

“Okay. Go and lie on the couch, feet uncrossed, hands by your sides. I’ll sit in the chair.”

“What about me?” asked Duncan. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No, it’s better if we have a witness to the authenticity of the tape.”

“I thought you said it couldn’t be used as evidence?”

“It can’t, but it might be considered an investigative tool.”

Joan lay on the couch and, without being asked, he covered her with a blue mohair blanket.

“Mr. MacKenzie, I’d rather you sat at the table,” I said. “And please don’t move or, of course, talk”

“No, Ma’am.” He made a mocking salute.

So much for my being nice to the guy. He couldn’t stand me, that was clear.

“Will you feel inhibited by having Mr. MacKenzie present?” I asked Joan.

“I’m sure he’d prefer you to call him ‘Duncan.’ Wouldn’t you, Dunc?”

“If it makes her feel better to call me Mr. MacKenzie, it’s no matter to me.”

Okay. And it did make me feel better. The formality was propping up my pretence that I was actually working.

“To get back to your question,” said Joan. “I’m happy to have Dunc here, but we are only going to deal with the accident, aren’t we? You’re not going to go into anything else, are you?”

“No, but you can’t always control what comes up.”

She raised her head. “I thought you said I could.”

Once again, I held tight to my patience. “You can and you can’t. We won’t know what you’re thinking or remembering unless you tell us, but you yourself might experience things you didn’t expect.”

She was starting to seem doubtful, and I wondered what she so much wanted to avoid. Could be her entire sordid history, of course, if she wanted to impress the latest boyfriend.

“Do you want to go on with this or not?”

She lay back on the couch. “I have to.”

Her voice was full of emotion, and I could see how close to the edge she was. I leaned in a little. No smell of liquor. I wanted to make sure she hadn’t taken a fast nip of something while she was out of the room.

I lifted the microphone. “Testing, one, two, three.” I hit the playback button. Fine.

“All right, let’s start.”

I pressed RECORD.

Although few people nowadays think a hypnotist has to have a Svengali-like personality and deep-set burning eyes, there are still common misconceptions. The truth is you simply cannot be hypnotized against your will, but some people are more hypnotizable than others. It has a lot to do with fear of losing control. When we were practising with each other at Quantico, I could only allow myself to go to a certain level of trance. Not for me the imperviousness
to a pin prick, which a few — not many I can tell you — experienced. I just went into a pleasantly relaxed state and never lost awareness of my surroundings. I was considered one of the control freaks.

A fairly resonant voice and calm manner were assets when taking somebody into a trance. I didn’t know how much calm I was going to project, but I sat down and tried to resonate. Joan opened her eyes, startled. Too loud. I tempered my volume and we were off and running. It wasn’t quite as difficult as I’d thought it would be, because I had in fact done dozens of practice sessions and, like riding a bike, the familiar patter came back immediately.

“Breathe deeply and exhale completely. Every muscle, every nerve relaxes.”

I went through each muscle group from bottom to top, repeating the command to relax. Calf muscles relax, thighs relax, and so on. After about ten minutes, Joan’s breathing had deepened considerably and she was entering into a light trance. Taking a person down into a deeper trance usually is done by counting in a slow and measured way to a plateau, like taking a boat down a series of canal locks.

By the time I reached fifty I thought she had gone down pretty deep.

“I’m going to touch your hand with the tip of my pen. If you feel the touch, just raise your forefinger on that hand. You do not have to speak.”

I pressed the pen into the back of her hand, hard enough to leave a blue ink mark. She didn’t stir. I pushed a little harder, no response. She was hypnotized.

I glanced over at Duncan, who was literally on the edge of his seat.

“Now, Joan. In a moment I am going to ask you to speak, but this will not disturb your state of relaxation. At any time you feel uncomfortable, you can tell me and we will end the session. Okay so far? You can just raise your finger again if the answer is, ‘yes.’”

She did so and I continued. “I’m going to take you back to this past Friday evening. Just say whatever comes to you. Don’t worry
about whether or not it is true or what it means. You will have to talk, but it won’t disturb your relaxed state. Deep breath again. Good. Now, can you tell me where you are?”

She was slow to answer, licking her lips. “I am outside the hotel in the parking lot.” Her voice was low and breathy, as if talking were an effort, a typical trance voice.

“Is there anybody with you?”

“Yes, Sarah.”

“Why are you meeting her?”

Her eyelids flickered, and I was afraid I’d been too directive. “Always keep your questions neutral,” the instructor’s Yankee twang leaped into my brain.

“Continue to relax, breathing deeply.”

She quieted again.

“What are you and Sarah doing?” I asked. That was a better way to put it.

“We’re going to see Tormod.” Joan sighed. “Poor Sarah. The truth was such a shock. I’m thinking we should wait, maybe go tomorrow. I haven’t even seen him myself yet. But she won’t. She says we’ve got to go at once. She’s had too much to drink as well, but if I don’t go with her, she’ll go herself. ”

“What is the truth that shocked her so much?”

Damn. Another mistake. Too hot a question. She licked her lips and moved her head so sharply, eyelids fluttering, I was afraid I’d blown the whole session. I slowed down, reinforced the trance again, and waited.

“Go on, Joan. Just say what you’re doing.”

“We’re in the car?”

“Who’s driving?”

“I am. She wants me to drive faster, but I can’t. She wants to know everything, but she’s crying so much, she doesn’t hear half of what I’m saying.... I can’t believe I’m on the moor again....” Another twist of her head and her breathing got more shallow. She began to speak to some unseen person. Her voice and even her face changed and she acted like a young kid. “If you make me do that, I’ll run away. No, I won’t.
Chan eil e tha mo maithir
.
Chan eil
... ” the
last words were pushed from her with so much energy she might as well have been shouting.

I glanced over at my shoulder at Duncan for a translation and he mouthed. “
You’re not my mother
.” Joan must have dropped into an age regression, and I gathered the anger was directed at the wicked stepmother. It’s quite usual for subjects in a hypnotic trance to shift time frames and revert to a previous age. Joan was still twitching and restless, muttering words in Gaelic.

I returned to the patter. “Continue to breathe deeply, relaxing completely. Breathing in... and out... in... and out... ”

It worked, and she started to calm down. I repeated a few more
in
s and
out
s, then I thought we were ready to go on.

“Joan, we are going to stay with the immediate present. Focus on being in the car with Sarah. It is Friday. You and Sarah are going to see Tormod MacAulay. Tell me what happens when you get there. What do you see?”

A little smile appeared at the corner of her lips. “The house hasn’t changed a bit after all this time, except he’s got a flower garden in the front. I want to give him some flowers like I used to, so I pick some from his own garden. Sarah is banging on the door.... Oh poor Tormod, oh what a shock. He looks so ill. He doesn’t even know it’s me at first. Sarah wants to burst out at him on the spot, but I make her come inside. ‘
Alo a Thormoid, ciamar tha thu?
’ Then he realizes it’s me and he starts to cry. Just as if he was a girl. He wants to hug me, but I don’t want to.... I make us all sit down at the table. Sarah starts yelling at him at once. She won’t even let him talk, but he feels bad too. ‘Oh no, look at what you’ve done. You’d better get a cloth. Stop it, you’re being a brat. Uh, uh, somebody’s come in. ‘Who is it, Uncle?... Sarah give him a chance.’ Oh poor Tormod. His skin is so yellow. I didn’t know. ‘No, Sarah, you’ve had enough... ” There was a choked-back sob at this point, and tears began spilling from beneath her eyelids. “I’m so sorry.”

Suddenly, she fell into another severe crying jag, and she opened her eyes and sat up. The trance state was shredded like paper.

I handed her some tissues and waited until she had calmed down. Duncan, not sure of what to do, was hovering behind me.

“I think that’s all we can do at the moment, Joan.”

She looked at me in alarm. “But we didn’t finish. I still don’t know what happened.”

“You came out of the trance. Something about the memory was too upsetting for you. We never got past you being at Tormod’s. Do you remember what you said?”

She nodded and wiped her face. “I do. At one point I know I was telling her she wasn’t my mother. Which she wasn’t, the bitch. My brothers sided with my father, too afraid of him probably, and Annie couldn’t have wrapped her tongue around a good word for me if you’d roasted her on a spit. I used to mind Tormod’s bairns for him whenever I could. His house was like a raft in the middle of an icy sea.”

It was my turn to flinch. I’d once said that to her about why I wanted to live with the Jacksons, and I wondered if she was using those words deliberately. She gave no indication, however, and I assumed she’d just incorporated the expression unconsciously.

“Was Tormod’s wife good to you as well?”

A quick blink. “She didn’t like him to pay attention to anybody else.”

“But you were his relative, a member of the family.”

“Even worse. She thought our side despised her for trapping him. And they did. She had a face like the back of a bus, and he could have been in the pictures he was so handsome.”

I wanted to get her back to the recent visit to Tormod, but just then we heard somebody calling from outside in the yard.

“Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?”

Duncan jumped to his feet. “God, it’s almost two. I’ve got some customers from the sound of it. The sheep-dog demonstration,” he added for my benefit.

I turned back to my mother. “You look done in. I told you it sometimes needed more than one session. Why don’t you have a rest and we can pick up again in an hour if you want to. We’ve got it on tape if we need to go back to it.”

“Okay. I am a bit knackered.”

I was curious as hell about the weird exchange she had reported between Tormod and Sarah MacDonald, but I knew we’d gone as far as we could for now.

“Do you want to come and watch the demonstration?” Duncan asked me.

“Sure.”

Joan lay back on the couch, and this time I was the one who covered her over. As I bent down, she touched my face so tentatively, in case I rejected her, that my stomach went into a knot. I gave her a quick peck on the forehead.

“Yer a brave wee lassie,” I said. Hey, maybe we hadn’t totally mended the bridges, but we were getting the pontoons in place.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Duncan grabbed his crook and tweed hat and went outside to greet his customers. The dogs were making a racket, barking excitedly because they knew it was playtime. Joan had already closed her eyes.

I followed him outside. There were two cars in the parking lot and he was directing the two sets of families to the risers at the side of the fenced field. The dozen sheep in the opposite pen were huddled together, heads up. They didn’t look as keen on the game as the dogs did. Duncan waved at me to join the other spectators, and I climbed up the riser and took my place next to a young boy who was wearing a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap. Before I could determine if we were fellow Canadians, Duncan walked into the field and stood in front of us. He was carrying a battery-operated megaphone. This was a well-organized business. The men in each group had passed him some money, and I wondered how much and if he could live on it. The four dogs were milling around his feet, heads low, making quick, agitated circling movements.