The Healing (18 page)

He journeyed into the past to a day when it felt
as if the whole scent of summer was in the flowers. Surprised to see them, surprised and proud . . . drinking the lemonade she had brought . . . showing the child off to the other workmen. He could taste the sweetness of the day, hear the child's laughter as the swing carried them higher, just a little higher each time, his arms outstretched to catch them both. Into the past on a warm slipstream of memory.

Suddenly, he started, his head jerking upright, his eyes staring wildly into the shadows. Someone outside was trying to unlock the already-open door. His lips moved in a frenzy of prayer, hoping even now that God would take away this bitter cup. He stood up and pushed his back against the wall. Some other way, some lamb in the thicket. He stood, imperceptible and motionless, while the door opened and a vague, ill-defined figure entered, its sudden, hurried movements scattering the stillness. He pushed his back more tightly against the wall, the plaster cold as the ice on the palms of his hands. It felt as though they were burning as he gripped the wall for support.

He watched as the figure began to uncover the secret place and in the greyness he saw a bright flash of the oilskinned package and he knew then what he had always known. He stepped forward out of his hiding place, the voices in his head growing louder and more insistent with each step he took until they pounded like hammers in his head. The oil-stained carpet softened his tread as he moved to within a few feet of the stooping figure and suddenly, without warning, the shadowy shape spun round and there was a gleam of a pale face in the gloom. The package clattered to the floor.

‘What the hell – '

He was close enough to see the look of recognition in his son's eyes replace the first jolt of fear.

‘In the name of God, Da, what're you doing standing there like some ghost? What the hell do you think you're doing?'

No other way, no lamb in the thicket. Stretching out his arm he rested it gently on his son's shoulder, then pulled him close.

‘I loved you, William,' he whispered.

There was no scream, just a sudden spasm and a gurgling noise as the body slumped forward into his arms. He held on to it tightly until the final jerk had ended. Blood was still coming from his son's mouth as he laid him down on the threadbare carpet, then knelt over him, rocking back and forward as he lightly cradled his head.

‘I loved you,' he whispered. ‘It would have been just like it was before. You remember what it was like – the cancer eating away her body day by day, her eyes brimming with pain. I can't let this sickness spread any more, can't let it infect more and more people.'

He sat holding his son for a long time, rocking in the dust-filled darkess, and then he heard the voices speaking to him once more, but their words twisted and turned and were like the radio's confused crackling of static. He stroked his son's hair as if he was a sleeping child, then slowly stood up. The package lay where it had fallen. He pushed it into his pocket and went out, locking the door behind him.

As he turned away he glanced up at the boy's house.
There were lights on now, and somewhere the boy was there. The whispering spoke to him about the boy but he could not be sure what they wanted him to do. Perhaps now the boy himself was contaminated, his purity tainted and besmirched by the sickness. The voices in his head were like tongues of fire and he put both hands to his temples in an attempt to soothe the pain. He felt the warm blood on his hands and dropped them to his side, wiping them on the front of his coat, and then with a final look at the lights in the boy's house, he staggered into the night, his mouth moving constantly as it framed silent prayers.

Time now ceased to exist and without knowing how he got there, he found himself walking the embankment, following the black snake of the river, its skin glazed with neon. The water seemed to have no motion or movement except the silvery tremble of its surface as he stopped on the bridge and stared down at it. So much darkness in the heart of man, so much sickness. The voices had faded now and he knew that he had failed God, had not been worthy of His calling. The knowledge chilled him with a shiver of shame and his hands gripped the parapet for support. A trembling sheen of white light fastened on the water below. From his pocket he took the oilskinned package and dropped it into the secret depths, only a brief splash of white marking its entry into the water. His hand touched something else – the photograph. He clutched it as though it was something sacred, something he could carry with him on his journey.

The old man's house was still and silent. It was already mid-morning and yet there was no sign of him. The boy wondered if something had happened because of what he had done at the ice rink the night before. He did not understand what the old man had wanted, but he knew he would never harm anyone and he felt, too, that if the old man had got into trouble it was because of him. As he looked around the garden they had worked on and almost rescued from neglect, he wondered where the men had taken him. A strong wind was blowing and it pulled at the heads of the flowers they had planted. Only the red spears of salvia stood steady against it. An empty plastic pot rolled across the lawn until it was trapped by the roots of the hedge, and a polythene bag which was also caught, inflated like a balloon. Across the bottom of the garden the blackened trees bent over at crazy angles. Perhaps the old man had decided not to work in the garden, perhaps he was resting somewhere in his house.

He looked up at it with curiosity. Outwardly it looked
no different from all the other houses, maybe a little shabbier, but that was all. A few blistered flakes of plaster moved in the wind and a wire which came from an upstairs window and ended without purpose, flapped loose, snapping like a whip. He stood in the gap in the hedge, his head level with its top, and pulled at the branches, shredding leaves between his fingers and letting the wind carry them out of sight. Some of them stuck to his jumper and he brushed them off quickly as if they were dangerous insects.

There was no smoke coming from the chimney. As he looked at the house he began to think that he himself might be the cause of all the bad things that had happened in his life. His father had never done harm to anyone – he had heard his mother say it – so perhaps it was not his father whom God was punishing but himself. Maybe now the old man would also be punished because of him; maybe it was something about him that caused all these things to happen. But why should God single him out? What had he done to make God hate him so? He wondered if it was something terrible which God could see in his heart. And as the wind whipped past him, he remembered guiltily the words he had used in the cleft of the rock. Perhaps he could begin to love God, or even deceive Him with a pretence of love. But if God could really see everything and knew everything in the world He had created, then He would not be deceived. He tried to pray for forgiveness, to submit himself to God's will, but his thoughts flew up in all directions like birds scattered from a field. The old man often spoke of God, perhaps he might know how he could be forgiven and passed over in the days to come,
how he might be erased from God's memory. But the old man was nowhere to be seen.

He moved out of the gap in the hedge and walked towards the house, the windows watching each step he took. The small kitchen window was slightly open and the curtains shivered in the draught. He knocked and peered through the frosted glass, putting his face so close that his nose pressed against its coldness, but no one came to answer. Inside he could see only a misted world receding into milky space. His hand gripped the door handle and without meaning to, he leaned his weight on it, pushing it open. It opened only a few inches. He did not go in, but stood looking into the exposed section of kitchen, where uncleared plates and cups sat on the table, and a filament of cracks ran down the wall. He knocked the open door again and the noise drummed in the silence before he pushed it fully open and stepped into the kitchen. A chair was lying on its back on the floor, but there was no sign of the old man.

He wondered if he should look in the living-room, but before he went any further into the house he turned to make sure that the door behind him was still open. He stepped slowly and quietly, moving stealthily through the silence that grew louder with each step he took. Everything in the room looked the way he remembered it except for the size. It seemed to have grown smaller, almost as if he could reach out his arms and touch the faded wallpaper, the worn furniture, the wedding photograph on the wall with the bride's face that could hardly be seen. The fire was a blackened smattering of cinders and ash and the whole house felt cold and damp. Outside he heard the
wind rattling the lid of a dustbin and as he glanced back towards the kitchen once more, he saw that the open door was being blown slowly shut.

As his eyes fastened on the green ledgers on the table he felt an urge to leave. Somewhere above him the wind disturbed rafters and slates and suddenly he grabbed the top ledger and ran out the way he had come, almost tripping over the fallen chair in his haste to be gone. Pulling the back door shut behind him, he pressed his face once more to the opaque glass, staring to see if any dark shape was striding after him, but after a few seconds he turned away and walked back down the garden.

He paused at the garage, wondering if perhaps the old man might be working inside, but when he tried the door he found that it was locked, and he pushed at it roughly with his hands. He wondered why the old man took so much care to keep it locked when it looked as if it contained nothing of value. He fiddled with the bolt but knew he would not be able to open it, and then noticing a thin rip in one of the curtains, he put the ledger down on the path and, placing his forearms on the window, scrambled his feet against the brick, until his head was level with the tiny hole. He squinted into the gloom but all he could distinguish was the vague outline of things stacked against the far wall. Only able to support his weight for a few seconds, he dropped back onto the ground, and as he picked up the ledger, he noticed that he had scuffed the toes of both his shoes. He bent over and spat on them, then rubbed them with the pulled-down cuff of his jumper.

If anything, the wind had grown stronger and so he clutched the ledger tightly as he climbed over the back
wall into the fields in case it should be snatched from his hands. The ragged grass quivered all around him as the wind quickened it and set it spinning in wavering patterns, and his free hand snapped shut on streaming thistledown before releasing them on their journey once more. The wind was behind, billowing his clothes and pushing him on. Half-way there he stopped for a rest and looked back to where smoke spiralled angrily from chimneys. The grass was damp and fine wisps of water latticed his trousers. As he set off again his pace slowed as he reached the steepest part of the slope, and he used his free hand to push his knee into the incline, working it like a piece of machinery. When he reached the outcrop he touched the cold surface of the stone and traced the raised ridges of its surface with the tips of his fingers. Tiny tufts of velvety moss lined the cracks and it seemed to him that the rock was something very old. Wriggling his way into the fissure he pushed his back tightly into the crevice, and in the narrow gap above his head he could see the open sky and windswept clouds racing across it.

He pulled his knees up towards his chest and propped the ledger against them. He was not sure why he had taken it and now as he looked at its cover, it reminded him of the books the police had shown him. Books with faces in them – the faces he carried round in his head and which he could not forget, no matter how hard he tried. But none of them had been the men who had killed his father. He found it hard to remember clearly what they looked like. Only the eyes of the man who had looked at him remained clear in his memory – empty, pupilless eyes, like grey seas where no fish swam; on a summer's evening, cold as the
rock that his hand now touched. He wondered where the man was now. Did he have a family? Maybe a wife, children of his own? How could they live with him, look into those eyes every day and not know what he had done? Probably he had killed before, and maybe he had killed again since that evening. He wondered, too, if the man ever thought of him, remembered what he looked like. He could never feel safe until he knew that both of them were dead, but how would he ever know that, when he did not know their names, or even remember their faces? Some day they might come back to seek him out, to kill him too. He knew they would come silently and quickly like that summer's evening when they had burst from the shelter of the hedgerow and moved through the soft-edged light of the setting sun. For the rest of his life he would have to hide, have to search strangers' faces to see if they were the ones.

He looked up at the sliver of sky. Summer was slipping away day by day. Once it had been the hub around which his whole year turned, with endless weeks of freedom stretching lazily into a boundless haze of pleasure, but now he was glad it was passing, and he looked forward to the days when advancing shadows would cover the world and hide it from the spying eyes of light. Soon, too, he would be going home. His mother had decided it was the best thing to do, but he no longer believed that any ‘best thing' existed. No matter how hard he had looked, he had been unable to find the door which led into some different world. He could often see it in his imagination, just like some picture in a children's story, old and ivy-covered, disguised by age and ancient vines,
set in a brick wall which was weathered and pock-marked, and when the rusted handle was turned it opened to reveal a secret world where nothing bad was ever able to enter. Perhaps there was no door because no such world existed, and never could, but why then did he go on looking for it, believing that he might be able to find it?

He fingered the cover of the ledger. The old man had said that God told him to record the names of the dead in it. As he moved his hand across it, he noticed a little yellow blister on his palm, a witness to how much spade-work he had done in recent weeks, and he pulled the raised skin off with his teeth, revealing a tiny weal of pink. It stung as he opened at the first page and started to read. A man ambushed as he drove down the lane to his farmyard. The newsprint had started to yellow and one of the edges was crinkled where it had not been smoothed out properly. They had lain in wait behind an old stone wall and shot him as he turned off the engine. He turned the page. A policeman shot in the back of his head as he visited his elderly mother. Another page. Three men shot dead in a dock-side bar after being singled out and everyone made to lie on the floor, blood and drink swilling round their bodies. A body found on waste-ground, the face battered with a breeze block beyond recognition. Another page. A man shot on a building site while he drank from a mug of tea; a seventeen-year-old girl killed as she left an evening service, her Bible in her hand; a man blown up in his car as he set out for work.