The Healing (4 page)

As his uncle parked the car across the driveway of their new home he peered up at the house. The windows stared back betraying no trace of what lay beyond. The SOLD sign moved slightly in the rising breeze. His mother seemed suddenly gripped by doubt and made no move to get out of the car. His uncle began to unload the cases, hoping to generate some enthusiasm through his display of energy, while his aunt fumbled for something in her handbag. Slowly his mother opened her door,
got out and stood looking up at the house. She smoothed her hair nervously, then stretched her hand out towards him, signalling him to accompany her. He followed a few paces behind as she opened the gate and inspected the tiny mess of garden.

‘Give us something to do,' she said. ‘We'll soon have it in shape.'

The key wouldn't turn in the lock and as his mother struggled with it he stood close behind her. She took the key out, looked at it, then tried again. This time it turned and she pushed open the door for him to enter. He stepped cautiously into the silent hall, then hesitated by the foot of the stairs, his senses searching the sounds and smells, sifting through their strangeness for signs of danger. He took it all in – the wooden banisters faded and smoothed by the touch of many hands, a brown carpet with a yellow-flowered pattern, cream painted doors with grey metal handles and black scuff-marks at the bottom. His hand felt the textured surface of the white and gold embossed wallpaper. A white metal glass-topped telephone table jutted out from the wall. The draught from the open door moved the bowl-shaped lamp shade very slightly. Through the kitchen he could see blue formica work tops, the window and the garden beyond. A stillness held the house fast, uncertain, weightless, undefined.

‘Go on, it won't bite you.'

His mother touched him gently on the back. He walked down the hall, his fingers lightly skimming the closest wall. Looking into the front sitting-room, he recognized their furniture from home.

‘Doesn't it look well?' his mother asked, her voice flecked with pride.

He nodded his head and then walked into the living-room. His mother followed and opened the windows before going into the kitchen and filling the kettle. His uncle carried the suitcases into the hall. It was smaller than their room at home but the familiar furniture did nothing to make the room less strange. All around him were furniture and ornaments which had been brought from the farm but they looked anxious and ill-at-ease. Familiar photographs hung on strange walls, chairs sat at awkward angles to each other. The whole house seemed like a man wearing someone else's ill-fitting clothes.

‘Go up and look at your room. Your things are in the front room – the one with the view.'

His aunt and uncle were sitting on stools in the kitchen, opening tins and looking for spoons. He let his hand slide along the rounded smoothness of the banister and climbed the stairs, feeling the muffled looseness of the carpet beneath his feet. The stairs were shorter and less steep than those at home. In the room squatted the tea-chests with his unpacked belongings but he walked past them and stared down into the city below. That night before sleep, he stared down once again, searched the deep trough of blackness where amber lights glowed – a great trough scooped out between the hills and beaded with amber. And as he stood he could hear their mocking laughter, and though he clasped his hands to his ears, it burst out loud and fierce, and he knew that nothing had changed.

He had finally come. He watched from his kitchen window as the boy explored the garden and shed. He was smaller than he had imagined and his hair was red, rather than the brown colour the newspaper photograph had suggested. He gave a little prayer of thanks. Already the burden of the work which lay ahead felt lighter; God had sent him a helpmate and soon He would reveal the plan that He wished them both to carry out – the plan that would send His holy light to vanquish the darkness, bring healing to the sick and the dying.

He watched the boy intently, absorbing his every movement, anxious to miss nothing. He felt frustrated as the boy disappeared inside the shed, impatient at the time he spent out of view. Part of him wished to go straight to him but he knew he must be careful, listen to the guiding voice which pulsed in his head. A few minutes later the boy emerged and closed the shed door behind him, then studied the straggle of shrubs and trees which bordered the bottom of the garden. Beyond the back fence a field of
tussocky grass swept upwards into the overlooking hills. When the boy turned and came back towards the house he saw his face clearly for the first time. His eyes narrowed in concentration as he took in the boy's features, committing them to memory. As he came closer he watched his light-coloured eyes flit nervously from side to side, saw a small pale moon of a face stippled with freckles and red hair which got redder as the light hit it. He moved to the side of the kitchen curtain so that the boy would not see him.

Just then the front door of the house opened and he heard loud laughter. He pulled back from the curtain and started to fill the kettle, but he turned the tap on too hard and the water splashed off its rim and sprayed onto the boards. Some of it splashed onto his clothes.

‘All right, Da? Trying to start another flood?'

He made no answer but brushed the droplets off with the palms of his hands, then reached for the dishcloth and dried the boards.

‘If you're putting the kettle on, make Cindy and me a cup. I've a throat like a sandpit. Traipsin' round the town'd put years on you. It's not fit work for any man.'

‘If you like, Mr Ellison, I'll do it,' the girl said, smiling up at him and reaching out to take the kettle. He pulled it away from her hand.

‘I can make a cup of tea,' he said.

‘Come on, Dad, don't start. Cindy's only trying to be helpful. Let her make the tea.'

Reluctantly, he handed over the kettle and she patted him on the arm as she might have a child. He sat down
at the kitchen table and stared at the blue chequered cloth.

‘Billy, do you want one of these buns we bought, or do you want to keep it for later?'

‘Ah, give us it now. Who knows, we might all be dead later on. And give ma da one as well – keep him happy.'

At his son's words he turned his head away and looked at the wall. A fine crack ran down the plaster then broke into a rush of tributaries. His son took off his leather jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, its metal zips bristling coldly.

‘Well, what've you been getting up to today, Dad?' he said, winking at the girl. ‘Out saving the world from eternal damnation?'

‘Don't mock God's work. God is not mocked. Why do you always scorn what is precious?'

‘Sorry, Dad,' he said as he loosened the laces of his trainers. ‘No messing, what've you been doing?'

‘I've been working in the garden, getting things ready.'

‘Right, the garden . . . good. Don't go overdoing things, though – I don't want you laid up with a bad back. I've better things to do with my time than waiting hand and foot on you.'

‘Have you, William? What better things have you to do with your time? Tell me, son,' he said, looking into his son's eyes.

‘You know already, Dad. What are you asking again for? I scrape a living. I get by. And anyway, it's not as if I go around asking you for money.'

‘But I don't know. And that's always worried me.'

‘Give it a break, Da, give it a break.'

‘Come on you two, the tea's almost ready. Don't be fighting, now – you're worse than children.'

She shook the blond sweep of curls from her face and set the table, her wrist jangling with jewellery. She set it precisely and self-consciously, like a child determined to do it properly under the supervision of a parent, then she served him the bun on a saucer.

‘There you go, Mr Ellison – get tore into that. That'll soon make you feel better.'

He glanced up at her, took in her bright red lips and the mass of dyed blond hair which tumbled about one side of her face. Why did she always paint herself? Why did her clothes always reveal so much of her shape? It wasn't seemly for a woman to dress that way. He turned his head away, ashamed.

‘Are you not having one?' his son asked her.

‘Me? No, sure don't I have to mind my figure,' she said, giggling in the way that always made her sound like a child.

‘What figure?' he asked, pushing the first half of the bun into his mouth.

She flicked him playfully on the shoulder then poured the tea, her mouth open with concentration. There were only two chairs so she stood at the sink holding the cup in both hands and looking into the garden. Sometimes a snatch of song slipped from her mouth and she moved her feet in a little shuffle of a dance.

‘Your new neighbours have arrived, then. You never said.'

‘Have they, Dad?' his son asked, standing up and
staring into the next door garden. ‘Right enough – there's the boy.'

He put his arm across the shoulders of the girl and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘There's not much to him,' he said. ‘Blink and you'd miss him.'

‘Leave him alone, Billy. Poor wee thing. It must've been awful for him. He is very pale looking, though.'

‘Looks like a little ghost, apart from that red hair. Poor bugger – he'll not forget what he saw too easily. What do you think, Da?'

‘Come away from the window. Leave the child alone – don't let him see you staring at him, like you're gawking at something in the zoo. The boy will be all right. In time, he will be all right.'

‘Sure, he's not the first and he won't be the last,' his son said, draining the last dregs from his cup. ‘And the boys that done it are still walking about out there laughing about it.'

‘There's a day of judgement coming, coming for them and for all of us.'

‘It's not coming quickly enough for the boys that done that.'

‘It's for God to punish.'

‘It's all right you saying that, but these scum have been doing just that and getting away with it for as long as I can remember.'

‘Billy's right, Mr Ellison. But let's not fight about it. Life's too short to be always arguing and fighting. Maybe these new people'll be a bit of company for you. Maybe they'll be nice.'

He turned his face away and ran his fingers along the cracks in the wall.

‘Come on, Cindy, let's sit next door and look at what you've spent my money on,' his son said, the serious tone of his voice replaced by the familiar ring of casual indifference.

‘Wait till I clean up here. It'll only take a few minutes.'

‘Leave it, you can do it later.' His voice was insistent and she followed him submissively.

He rose and stared into the garden, but the boy had vanished. He refilled the kettle and began to wash the cups. On the girl's cup was a tiny smudge of lipstick. He scrubbed it with the dishcloth until it was gone. From the living-room came the sound of laughter and bantering argument. Their words flitted in and out of his consciousness. Music began to play. He felt their presence had frightened off the boy, sent him into the shelter of the house. They did not understand. They did not understand anything about the boy. He laid the washed cups and saucers upside down on the draining board. Their voices and the music faded in and out of a crackling static like someone tuning a radio along a waveband. They grew louder and he longed to silence them. The water gurgled down the sink in a throaty roar. Music and voices pounded in his ears and he covered them with his hands but the girl's high-pitched laughter splintered his senses. She was laughing at him, like all the others.

He knew they would go soon. Mostly they only stayed long enough to rest and get ready to go somewhere else. Sometimes he didn't see his son for days at a time. The boy had always loved his own secrets, his own mystery.
Friends, places, possessions – he had always guarded them closely as if sharing them might mean their destruction. Now they were strangers to each other. As each year passed, the secrets grew larger until they encompassed whole areas of their lives. Sometimes he watched his son and wondered who he was. The laughter twisted and tightened round his head. Once the boy had run away from home. He had found him in a secret den he had built from bits of wood he had taken from the building site. It had taken him hours to find him, hours of walking the streets, knocking doors, asking people he met. And when he found him, he found a small boy huddled in the corner of a makeshift den who told him that he wanted to stay there for ever.

He had failed with the boy, failed in every way, and he could not shirk from that knowledge or escape from its wounding pain. The knowledge gnawed away at him, a thorn in his side he must bear to the end of his days. When he thought about it he wondered where it had gone wrong, but he could trawl no answer from the depths of his memories. He had tried to bring the boy up in the right way but he had turned his back on God, followed his own road, and now exulted in his own waywardness. It was a deep trouble to him. What his son did was an abomination before God and one day they must both suffer for it. Now they talked more with silence, terrible silences which seared his soul. He remembered it first when they returned to the empty house after the funeral. And when eventually they spoke, their voices had echoed in the crushing emptiness.

Words seeped slowly from the edges of his memory
like wisps of smoke, and drifted across his mind. Bitter words. Sharp as knives. He tried to shut them out but the laughter burst into a scornful crescendo. And yet he knew too that soon the laughter would cease, for despite his son's transgressions and all his own personal inadequacies, God had chosen him to be the instrument of His will. Why this should be was a mystery which he no longer sought to understand because the ways of God were far beyond the minds of men. What God required of him was not understanding but unquenchable faith and obedience to His voice. If he had harboured lingering doubts, the arrival of the boy dispelled their last traces. The boy had come just as God had promised. Soon it would be time. Their moment drew closer every day. He did not know yet how God would use him to save the sick and the dying, but he did know that it too would be revealed if he had eyes to see and ears to hear. He must still his soul and be ready to hear no other voices but the still, small voice of God.