The Healing (9 page)

The boy looked over at him and told him to be still and patient, to wait calmly for that moment. He nodded his understanding, then continued hoeing the bed which ran along the hedge, stooping from time to time to pick out the weeds he had uprooted. The boy crouched close by and pulled out grass and weeds with his hands, tearing at them as if his life depended upon it.

His mother was very excited, taking pleasure in her preparations and checking the picnic for things she knew had already been included. She talked continuously, fussing about and looking through the kitchen window to check the weather. The trip was supposed to be for him, but he knew she was pursuing some memory of the past, a memory which warmed and consoled her, and he knew she wanted him to be touched by its gentle healing. The idea had been planted in her mind by his uncle, but she had chosen to keep the trip for the two of them, as if afraid that sharing it might dilute its power. It meant nothing to him but he did not want to spoil it for her.

They were to catch the ten o'clock train to Portrush and everything they needed was packed into two shopping bags. There were rows of sandwiches in plastic containers, a flask of tea, a rug and waterproofs, and more things than they would need. As they set off down the hill towards the bus stop a haze hung over the city. They carried a bag each and walked in step while his mother talked a great deal,
describing all the attractions of the seaside resort. It was a Saturday morning and a bus came quickly to carry them into town. When they got off just before the bridge he looked at his mother with some confusion. No one else had got off with them and there was nothing to point the way to a station, but his mother led the way across the road and stepped out with a confidence that reassured him. But the confidence did not last long as they turned down the quayside and suddenly came to a halt. He looked up at his mother's face. She was glancing about her nervously as she set her bag down and plucked at her hair with the freed hand.

‘The station isn't here. It used to be just there.'

They stared in silence at the missing station. She clockworked about him, refusing to believe her own eyes. He looked at the stains on the pavement and its moss-filled cracks. His hand was sore from carrying the bag and a thin white welt had formed across his fingers. A man in a bright yellow jacket appeared, brushing the street, and when his mother asked him where the station was, he smiled at her and gave them directions. Even if the station had still been there, it would not have been the right one. She made a little joke to hide her embarrassment and when the man had moved away, she picked up her bag and hurried them on to their new destination.

They arrived with only five minutes to spare, but there were others later than them – a group of skinheads in T-shirts and jeans, bristling with tattoos and noise. Each of them carried two six-packs of beer and they shouted and whooped along the length of the platform. His mother turned her back with disdain and ushered him onto the
train. It was a connecting train with a central aisle and tables set between groups of four seats. They sat opposite each other in the window seats and his mother spread their possessions over the other two seats, as if making a territorial claim for invisible travelling companions. She rummaged in the bag and handed him a little carton of orange juice and he speared the tiny silver hole with the straw, then sat back and watched as the train began to move.

The start of all journeys filled him with misgivings. It always felt good to be moving from where he was, to be putting space between himself and his pursuers, but it also brought a fear of being stopped at the last minute, caught at the point of attempted escape. He knew they would resist such attempts to outstretch their reach, knew they would seek to watch him closely in case he might try to break free. He scanned the world outside while he held the carton of juice close to his face. The train crawled past the backs of terraced houses where the scabbed brickwork festered in sores of black and brown, while rotting wooden window frames, often painted in ugly, bright colours, framed small windows. Windows bordered by thin strips of curtain. Windows watching. A sudden glimpse of a faceless head pushed him back into his seat. The train gathered speed, his mind urging it on, the fingers of his left hand pressing into the fabric of the seat, as if pushing an accelerator. Past rows of blackened roofs with missing slates replaced by lighter-coloured ones; television aerials jutting at crazy angles from chimneys; pigeon lofts – makeshift patchworks of felt-covered scraps of wood, balancing on precarious structures. At intervals,
derelict houses, their roofs punctured like colanders, with pigeons fluttering in and out of the holes. Fragile purple weeds growing in cracks and crevices, and by the side of the track, foxgloves leaning forwards out of steep banks.

He glimpsed another bonfire – a piled tangle of debris squatting on waste-ground, a windblown haystack of the unwanted and discarded. Past gable walls where rungs of bunting made bright ladders of the streets. And everywhere there was a wall, or square of concrete, the spider writing spread its messages of warning and hate. The words spat at him, hissing white-teethed whispers into his head and as he shivered and turned his head away, the train assumed a quicker and more repetitive rhythm. Across the aisle sat an elderly man reading a newspaper. The woman opposite him seemed to be his wife.

His mother took the empty carton out of his hand and placed it in a polythene bag she had brought for rubbish. He felt reluctant to let it go. The bright orange of the carton glowed through the thin skin of polythene. A little dribble of orange had dripped onto the table and vibrated gently like mercury, until his mother took a tissue and wiped the whole table, her hand rubbing furiously at invisible stains like a windscreen wiper out of control. The elderly man looked at her for a few seconds from behind his paper, then flicked his eyes back to the pages.

The city eventually gave way to fields and the countryside, hedgerows acting as gradations of speed and distance. Ploughed fields, cattle grazing, indifferent to their passing; lonely little farms sheltering in hollows; others perched boldly on skylines, braving the winds which tattered the
dye-daubed sheep, and bent the gaunt trees into contorted and bitter shapes. A familiar landscape echoing in his memory. He looked away again, tried to silence the echoes, let his heart beat in syncopated rhythm with the motion of the train, rocked himself gently, let his being run with the rocking, rolling momentum of the train, carrying him away from the past, taking him to some new place. Past empty stations and houses, roads and rivers, momentary glimpses, fragments of the past jolting his memory.

As more days and weeks went by, he found himself beginning to think of it. Not all of it, but just the small parts he could control, the parts he could rearrange into new shapes. At the start his whole being had sought to deny his memory, refusing to accept his own experience, but now he crept lightly towards it, ready at any moment to flee its grasp, ready to block it out once more with disbelief. As the train hurtled forward, he felt increasingly detached from time and place, in a safer nowhere world where he was moving from place to place so quickly that perhaps he could not be caught. Cautiously, he circled the moment, always keeping it at a safe distance. Now he found himself trying to imagine different paths to that moment with different exits and different outcomes.

In his mind he manufactured them with bitter ease – a change in the weather as rain fell in a deluge, making the grass steeped and sodden; something wrong with the tractor's engine – dark spurts of smoke pouring from the innards; his mother calling them back to the house because cattle had broken loose from a field. There was no end to the long list which he constructed, and even though some
were as small as the smallest stone they, too, could have changed the most terrible thing that had happened. And as he pondered how so many small things could easily have prevented such a big thing, he wondered once again why God did not care enough to let one of these small things happen. Only a second's intervention, the tiniest drop of caring could have saved his father, and the more he thought about it, the more he thought that God had helped the men kill his father. He had given them the shelter of the hedgerow, the soft light of the setting sun, the silent grass under their feet. He had kept his father's mind concentrated on the work he was doing. Though He could have done so easily, He had given no warning shout, had not swallowed their evil in the burning light of the sun.

Why did God care about his father so little? He could not find a reason even though he searched for a long time. Perhaps his father had done something he did not know about, some terrible thing for which God had chosen to punish him, but he could not think that it was true, and in his head he heard his mother's voice saying, ‘He never did harm to anyone.' Over and over, ‘He never did harm to anyone,' and the more he thought of those words, the more he began to hate God, to hate Him for not caring enough to do even a little thing to save his father. He hated Him with a little flame of intensity and was glad he had not trusted the minister's words. He felt, too, that God returned his hatred, because if it was not His will, why did He allow such fear to clutch at his heart, and so many dark spirits to pursue him by day and night?

He thought, too, of the old man, the old man who
seemed to know so much about him, but whose words were inexplicable riddles which made no sense. The old man talked about God a great deal, as if he understood what He was thinking. Perhaps he knew why God had allowed his father to be killed. As the train sped on, his mother was talking about days long gone when she had visited Portrush, and she was still excited, but the more she tried to reassure them both about the good time they would have, the more doubts sprang up in his mind. Two of the skinheads appeared in the carriage, swaggering down the aisle and pulling themselves forward by the tops of the seats. One of them winked at him, silently offering him a drink from his can of beer, then they were gone, joking and shouting loudly to each other. His mother and the woman opposite shook their heads at each other in silent condemnation.

When they arrived at Portrush, the group of skinheads was first off, jumping from the train while it was still moving. Their whoops and screams punctured the air and one of them banged the window of the carriage as he ran past, but his mother pretended not to notice and concentrated on gathering up their possessions, making sure that everything was safely packed into the shopping bag.

Much of her confidence had drained away, to be replaced by a kind of grim determination that they should both enjoy themselves. It was as if she wanted to prove through this first excursion that it was possible for them to pull themselves out of the hollow in which they found themselves, and move forward with their lives. He understood what she was trying to do, and although the
crowded shops and pavements made him uneasy, he tried his best to help her achieve her goal. But right from the start, everything seemed to conspire to defeat them. The weather itself dampened much of their initial enthusiasm, with overcast skies preventing them from spending any time on the beach, and there was an aggressive edge to the bristling crowds which made them both increasingly nervous. At times, he felt as if the people who flowed all around might suddenly swallow them up, or that he would be separated from his mother and swept further and further away by the ebbing tide of faces. The fear made him hold on to her coat as they drifted aimlessly round stores which sold similar seaside novelties, and rows of fast-food shops. Rubbish littered the pavements and sometimes they almost stumbled over groups of young people sitting on the pavements drinking from bottles of wine.

They had their picnic in a shelter facing the sea, and he knew his mother had almost used up what remained of her will. He felt sad for her and wanted to take her burden and carry it on his own shoulders for a while, but did not know how. As his mother poured tea from the flask and they sat cupping the mugs in both hands, both of them knew they did not belong in this place; both wanted to go home, but there were several hours before a train returned to Belfast. He listened as his mother attempted to revive her flagging spirits, trying as always to soldier on, to put on a brave face, but it seemed that the harder she tried, the more things slipped away from her.

As a fine rain began to fall, they made their way into the amusements, despite his mother's obvious reluctance.
He led her by the hand, determined to salvage something from the day and forcing himself to look people in the face with darting deliberate glances. He tried to walk tall and strong, meeting the noise and spark of the screaming machines with unflinching resolve and making his hand touch the surface of the objects which he passed. They went on a machine called the Cyclone, which hurled them towards the surrounding railings, only stopping at the final moment before hurtling them in new directions. His mother gave little gasps of shock, tucked her head into her chest and held on tightly to the safety bar, but he leaned back against the seat and kept his eyes open all the time. The wind streamed through his hair as he hurtled towards the faces spectating at the barriers, but he met their gaze defiantly and then, as the machine slowed down his mother lifted her head and laughed with relief.

They tried other things, spurring each other on with little spurts of unaccustomed recklessness, teasing each other and trying not to be afraid. Sometimes they put money into machines without really knowing how they worked, and did not care when they lost it. His mother bought him a helium-filled parrot. It was the most out-of-character thing he had ever seen her do, but he held the string tightly in case it slipped out of his fingers. It felt almost like they were riding a little wave so he let it carry him, and when they reached the ghost train he did not resist but dragged his mother into one of the tiny carriages. She grew quiet and placed her arm round him protectively, but in the darkness she could not see him smiling at the fluorescent skeletons and tawdry silhouettes which sprang up at them in pathetic counterfeits of fear.