The Fields (33 page)

I try mentioning Helen a few times to Saidhbh too, but it
comes out all wrong, and it sounds like I fancy her, which is totally not true, and we end up having a mini-argument because I say to Saidhbh, when I’m denying fancying Helen, are you mental? And she just gives me a really hurt look that says, how can you ask me that? How can you say those words when you know that every day I’m having this monumental battle with the possibility of becoming a mentaller for the rest of my life?

Helen says that she’s chosen me as her permanent healing partner because I’m on a fast-track system and need to be up and operational as soon as possible. It’s a life-or-death matter, she says, without mentioning Saidhbh by name, but I know all the same that she can read Saidhbh, and the dangers that she’s facing, within my own field. Helen says that the auric field is like, among other things, a video camera, and it records and absorbs your emotional and personal interactions and exchanges at the most profound level. This could be anything from a sudden and unexpected slap from your mam when you were seven years old, right up to a worried look that you shared with your potentially suicidal ex-girlfriend yesterday morning when you were having a mini-argument about whether you fancied your healing teacher or not. They all matter, she says. And they all leave an impression.

She says that she was particularly blessed because she was taught auric field reading directly by Serenity Powers herself. And depending on the type of person you are, and the healer you’re about to become, it can either take you the full five years of Astral Science studies, or you can get it in a couple of weeks. With me, she says, not being cocky at all, but proud all the same, I got it over a single weekend.

Serenity saw something in me, and she drew it out of me just like that, she says, arcing up her arms into the air and twinkling her fingers, as if following the path of a glitter-filled fountain.

She explains that you normally start by staring at bananas and pineapples for hours on end, with no toilet breaks, no food breaks, no nothing, until you can see their auric fields. Because fruit, like any living thing, has a field. Once you’re totally comfortable with the fruit, they move you on to small animals, mostly cats, because they’re quieter, can sit still longer than dogs and have lots more thinky stuff going on inside them. And then finally, real people, with rainbow colours in their fields, and patterns within those colours that read like very simple books, or the strange Czechoslovakian cartoons that they show on BBC2.

Feeling the field, on the other hand, is dead easy. Baby stuff. And it’s how Helen starts me off. She does a couple of demos on the old timers, and gets four of them lying down on massage beds that are arranged in a cross formation around her. She then does a little dainty jump and lets herself land, legs apart, in a sort of half-squat that allows, she explains, the energy of the cosmos to flow up through the floor of the church hall and right into your body, along your Hara line. She has a joke about the Hara line, and says that it’s just like having a long electrical flex hanging down from between your legs, and that you need to plug it into the universe whenever you want to do a proper healing. The old timers hoot at this, because it’s a bit funny to start imagining yourself as a healing machine, with plugs and everything.

Anyway, she gets into the half-squat and says that her Hara line is now plugged in and then she waddles over to her first healee, which turns out to be one of Deano’s buddies, Feather Way. Helen does the big breaths that are so much part of the healer’s tool kit, then she raises her hands high in the air before letting them fall slowly down towards Feather Way’s body. Only they don’t actually make contact with her body. Instead, kerthunk, Helen’s hands stop around three feet above the table itself, and she mimes moving around a giant invisible egg. This, Helen tells us, is the outer shell of Feather Way’s auric field.

At first it looks dead silly, and I can’t help thinking of the Kenny Everett fella in black tights in the white room who’s always pretending to be bumping up against walls. But Helen’s miming is excellent, and she even does little bumps and creases as she moves along the field’s uneven surface. Best of all, she asks us to join in, and gets us to stand in a circle around Feather, then to breathe big and loud, to plug in our own Hara lines, and to feel the field. And sure enough, if you concentrate hard enough, and imagine hard enough, and believe hard enough, you eventually find it, not quite rock hard, but certainly a resistance, pushing back against the force of our hands pushing down.

Helen pushes down hard too, and, with the aid of some more breaths and Hara energy, breaks through the outer layer, and down through six more layers until she comes to the root layer. At which point her hands just hover, inches over Feather Way’s tracksuit, sensing the static crackle point where the spiritual, and the mad and the binjy-banjy meet the physical and real and the fleshy.

She breaks us into twos and, naturally, hops on to the bed before me and tells me, with a wink, to do my worst. I do the breaths, plug in the Hara line and, within seconds, I can feel her field. It’s huge, and almost sparking against my hands, certainly pushing them backwards, right away from her invisible egg of energy. Helen speaks softly all the while, and tells me that I’m doing marvellous, which is just what I want to hear. She tells me to push against her field with all my strength, and to work my way towards her skin. She barks out orders to the class as she does so, and tells them that they need to harness the energy of each auric layer in order to push their way into the one below it. She tells us that we need to be open to the interplay of energies between our two fields, the healer and the healee. And we are not to be afraid, she warns us, of the things we see and the things we feel in the fields of others.

Right on cue my hand plunges right down, through six entire auric layers, until it comes smack up against Helen’s root layer, hovering inches over her belly button, with my fingers splayed out towards her boobs. I feel a great big whoosh inside me, like the first time I had a sexy dream and didn’t know what was happening until I woke up panic-stricken in the sticky-cold darkness of the Bert & Ernie bedsheets at midnight. It’s the same here. There’s a whoosh. I can barely look Helen in the eyes. She tells the class not to be afraid of any feelings that the healings arouse within us. It’s just our cosmic bodies speaking to us, often for the first time.

I hold my hand over her belly, and breathe. Helen slowly whispers the words, ‘Look, At, Me,’ under her breath. Inch by inch, painfully, I lift my eyes up, along the stitching line of her white silky shirt and to her neck, chin, the scars around her mouth and, finally, to her eyes. I almost puke. We burn together. Our eyes on fire. It’s like our souls inter-lock, madly, and for ever in all eternity. Helen smiles, dead chuffed with herself to have got me this far so effortlessly, and, without breaking contact, she whispers to me, her quietest words yet: ‘This. Is. Love.’

I don’t feel like saying much in the car back to Glengall. Deano blabs away and wants to compare notes about how many layers I could feel, and how hard it was to push through the outer shell. He’s especially interested in the size of Helen’s fields, and how firm they felt. He wants to know, once and for all, if she’s the real deal? Or is she just a make-up artist who got lucky?

I grunt a bit. I have a million thoughts racing through my head about Helen, and about what she said to me during the healing, and about love, and what is love? Is it the stuff that you make together with someone after ages of going out together and turning all the giddy stomach stuff and the holdy hands stuff and the eye-staring stuff into something safe and rock solid and huge and big enough for you to want to catch a bullet for them or at least
want to stay in another country and change your life completely all in the hope that they’ll come back to you as the person they once were? Or is it just this magical thing that’s there, or not there, and you know it when you feel it, flowing through you like a river, or a happy poison? And if love is like that, and it’s just this huge blob of cosmic honey, what’s wrong with feeling it, and having a taste? And can you have the rock love and the honey love at the same time, or is that cheating? What would Saidhbh say if I told her that Helen Macker had opened up a channel for cosmic love within me? I know Fiona would go mental, because she’s always talking about all the old perverts who are attracted to binjy-banjy stuff because it’s just a way to get free sex. She says that Deano’s an exception, but mostly the fellas who are into spiritual stuff are all like, and here she does a brilliant impression of someone who’s a bit hippie-ish, like the fella from
The Young Ones
, and she goes, Hey man, my energy has just totally collided with your energy, I think we should have a shag!

Or it’s like Jerry Casey, who’s Steven Casey’s dad from St Cormac’s, and who runs a cement company, is dead successful and lives three doors down from the Connells. He had serious solid-rock love with his wife Patricia, who backed him all the way, and raised their four kids during twenty-five brilliant years of marriage, and made them the envy couple of all Kilcuman. Jerry played in a band too, with some of the other dads. And when they played their four best Beatles numbers at the St Cormac’s prize-giving night everyone told Patricia that she was super lucky to have landed a smasher like Jerry Casey. But then, as a result of twenty-five long years of child work and house care, Patricia got all old and wrinkly, with saggy boobs, a bent-over back and sad downturned eyes, and Jerry went out and found cosmic-honey love with a girl from the office who had lovely legs and huge young boobs. He came home and had a big cry in Patricia’s arms, and said that he was so sorry but he had never felt
anything like this in his life before and had decided to go with his heart this time. But then the office girl slowly became all annoying and talky, with words and everything. And it turned out that she didn’t even like the Beatles, and Jerry had to look for cosmic-honey love elsewhere because when he eventually went begging back home to Patricia he found that her solid-rock love had been broken into pieces, and was useless now, lying in fragments all around her, like a Cadbury’s Flake on a bad day.

Still, I wish there was some way to raise it with Saidhbh. Because it wouldn’t have to be bad. And it wouldn’t be harsh. And it wouldn’t be like I was telling her that she couldn’t even rely on me, of all people, for solid-rock love any more. No, instead, it would be all chatty like. And it would be her and me discussing, face to face, the two different types of love theory. She’d probably have some totally wacky angle on it that she got while out tree painting that day. Or she might be all interested, and chin-strokey and convinced that this is the best subject to talk about, ever. And so, while Deano’s banging away about Winter Rain’s field, and guessing wildly about what sort of reactions it provoked within me, I decide that, yes, I’ll just play it dead honest with Saidhbh, and I’ll start with, no messing about, You won’t believe what happened to me in tonight’s healing?!

Saidhbh, of course, has other ideas. When we get home, Aunty Grace is furious, and says that she’s just back from dropping Saidhbh off at the hospital after a big dramatic Lady Shave incident.

Don’t worry, she says, she didn’t do any real damage, the crazy berk, although she’ll need stitches.

But, more importantly, Aunty Grace says that Saidhbh’s being transferred to the Cricklewood Mental Health Centre first thing in the morning. She says that Saidhbh has burnt her bridges with the folks at the hospital, and they won’t allow her home. Not this time, and not until she can prove that she’s not a danger to
herself and not a complete loony. Fiona’s with her for now, until lights out, but Aunty Grace says that she can’t handle any more of this madness. She spills some wine on her mustard yellow carpet and bashes her fist down on the small brown side table next to her armchair. She pushes herself out of the chair and shuffles around the room distractedly, weeping quietly, and muttering to herself in between, about why she should have kept her nose out of everyone’s business in the first place, and left Ireland well and good alone. Deano says, Listen, Grace … and tries to put his arm around her, but she slaps him coldly away. She tells him that he disgusts her, with all his binjy-banjy shite.

Yes! she says, suddenly turning to me, as if she’s had the best idea ever. Where is your binjy-banjy healing shite now, eh? she says, with a real scary sneer on her face. Her eyes are bloodshot, her breath close enough to smell. All booze. Some fecking healer, you are! she says. Who are you supposed to be healing if you can’t heal your own fecking girlfriend?!

The next entire month is a mad bonkers blur. Aunty Grace, of course, was dead right, and so I snap myself to my senses, and set my heart on healing Saidhbh, and curing her from all the sadness inside of her, as soon as possible. Definitely can’t wait till Christmas. It’s now or never. Helen isn’t too keen, though. She says that I could do more damage than good if I start healing Saidhbh without mastering even the most basic Astral Science programme first. Deliberately pulsing enormous amounts of cosmic energy up and down the body isn’t child’s play, she warns. A wrong turn here, an anti-clockwise chakra spin there, a half-breath inhalation instead of a full-breath exhalation, and I’m liable to turn Saidhbh’s inner sadness into full-blown mental psychosis. She agrees nonetheless to hurry me through to operational level, or at least to give me the basics to get me up and going, pronto. Of course, the moment she hears of the latest suicide attempt she offers to do the healing herself, but when I suggest it to Saidhbh she says that if Helen Fecking Scarface comes within half a mile of the Cricklewood Mad-house she’ll stab herself in the eye with the splintered T-square
that she uses for drawing horizontal planes during occupational therapy.

She’s not bothered at all by the clinic, and in fact she says that it makes a nice change from puffing fags out the window of the Glengall gaff. She says that Jackson loves it too, and that the poor little soul likes nothing better than to hang down by her legs, swinging around on the umbilical while she completes a million different masterpieces on every kind of artistic material known to man. Me and Fiona visit her as often as we can. The place looks all flash and posh on the outside, like a lovely big country house with holly running up the walls and huge gardens back and front, but inside it’s pretty manky, and smells of superstrong Dettol. It’s got hard marble floors and rooms as big as classrooms, with doors made of glass with wire through the glass, so you can peek in and see what the mentallers are up to without them smashing the door to pieces with their big nutty heads and then slitting themselves to ribbons with the bladey-like shards.

The other mentallers are mostly old, and mostly men with bad teeth and old mad hair, like a big gang of tramps in pyjamas. But Saidhbh doesn’t seem to notice, and instead she spends all her time at the table on the corner room on the second floor, which is the art room, surrounded by paint brushes and pastel trays, scribbling, sketching and splashing out the nasty demons that have brought her here in the first place. And she’s not just doing trees either. She’s doing eyes now. Loads of them. Massive ones. All in close-up. She says that the nurses have promised to collect all her pictures into one huge folder, and that she can have it when she leaves. Then she adds with a mad grin, If I ever leave!

This is clearly a joke. Although it’s hard to tell with Saidhbh. Because at times like this, when she’s head down against the page, biting her tongue with concentration, drawing dark blue
pastel lines, and brushing just the right amount of chalk dust away to create just the right amount of blue that’s needed to make the blue bit of the eye look both real and reflecty, she seems like the old Saidhbh, back on track. And when she starts cracking jokes too, about being in the mental home for ever, well, you want to pick her up in your arms, and let her head loll on your shoulder and smell the back of her neck, and run right out through the doors and tell everyone that the world has gone completely barmy if they think that a young wan like this belongs with a load of wonky grandads in a Dettol-filled stink zone.

But, as always with Saidhbh, there’s the flipside too. And the darkness. And you could go crazy thinking about it, and you could bang your head against a knotty trunk like Heathcliff in the English bog, just from the sadness and the madness of it all, and how she teases with the one hand and slaps with the other, and without even knowing what she’s doing. Deano says that this is because the universe is in a state of complete Karmic balance, but he doesn’t mention that when you’re standing in front of the universe with your mouth agog at the madness it also crushes, and it hurts, and it leaves you nowhere to look.

Saidhbh’s new thing is that she finds the actions of breathing and talking hard to do at one and the same time. And so, in her new way of being, she will stop herself speaking by putting a hand up to her own mouth, which is both funny odd, and funny scary, but not funny funny. And then she closes her eyes, and seems to be going through some sort of checklist in her brain, and then she takes a big gulp of breath inwards and rushes out a speedy sentence before the air finally runs out, and then she stops her mouth with her hand again, and goes through the whole shebang once more.

It’s pretty mental, and I know that it’s something that we are thinking about, me and Fiona, on the long walk back to Kilburn. We don’t say much out loud. Because I’m normally a bit wobbly
after it all. And Fiona knows better. It’s like when Jack Downs smacks you to blazes for ruining Fats Madigan’s geography class, and then someone like Gary comes over at the end of the lesson and asks you if you’re all right. And all you want to do is burst out crying, because you’re still in shock from the smacks and the shouts, and because your insides are aching at the fact that there is still kindness and warmth and love in the hearts of little fellas like Gary Connell.

This is what it’s like after visiting Saidhbh. We walk past all the bric-a-brac shops on Cricklewood Broadway, and Fiona says, Well, she seemed grand, didn’t she?

And I say, Grand.

And that’s it. And we keep walking, and keep glancing at the bric-a-brac, and I hope for hope’s sake that Fiona doesn’t put an arm around me, and squeeze me kindly, and ask me if I’m OK, and tell me that everything will work out fine in the end.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the news of Saidhbh’s full-time move to a London mental home has gone off like a super-directional bomb that sends killer shock waves out in only one direction – home. Gary sends me one of his mega-foolscap epics about it, and says that everyone in Dublin goes crazy when they find out, and it makes Dad and Mam have another big family-to-family meeting with the Donohues, where Mam spills the beans and Taighdhg Donohue bursts into tears and says that he’d give his right arm to go back and change the day that I first strolled into their house and into Saidhbh’s life. He can’t believe that Saidhbh’s in a London mental home, which is for him, basically, another way of describing a British prison. He says that he always knew I was a bad egg, and a big argument follows, with Mam defending me, and Taighdhg pointing the finger at Mam and Dad, for being rubbish parents. Gary says that Sinead’s job was to calm Taighdhg down, while my own dad just
stands up halfway through and walks silently out of the room in his dressing gown and goes back to bed. Taighdhg shouts a load of rude things after him as he left, about sticking his head in the sand, but Gary reckons that my dad was too out of it on his meds to pay much attention. Which leaves everything in Mam’s hands.

Mam, thanks to a lifetime spent at the dinner table juggling seven different personalities at once, is brilliant at calming people down, and avoiding fights. So, according to Gary, who learnt some of this from eavesdropping on his mam, and the rest of it from the gossips down at the gates of Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha, Mam fills the Donohues up with booze and shares stories about how hard it is to have kids these days. Then Taighdhg stops shouting at her, and everyone agrees to a ceasefire for the time being. Mam waves them off at the door, with a promise that they’ll phone each other in the morning, but nothing actually happens. Mam’s too embarrassed, and can’t think of anything to do – other than waste all her savings on a super-expensive plane ticket just so she can see her son, who’s doing grand by all accounts, and then tell his ex-girlfriend to stop killing herself because it’s scaring everyone back in Dublin.

Taighdhg Donohue is wrecked the next day, and quickly falls into a deep dark place worthy of his own daughter’s mental home. Gary says that he drinks for days on end, and disappears completely from Dublin and all his usual haunts. In fact, the Vice-Principal of Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha is on the phone to Sinead and they’re just about to send for the guards when Taighdhg returns bright and breezy one morning, looking fab, as if nothing has happened at all, and says that it’s time to get on with their lives, that Saidhbh will be grand in London, and sure won’t they see her over the Christmas break anyway?

No one can explain the change in him, but Gary says that there’s a million rumours flying round. Most of them involve The
Movement. It’s all guesswork, but Peadar Clancy from Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha, who’s best buddies with Saidhbh’s brother Eaghdheanaghdh, reckons that Taighdhg went up the North and made contact with the ‘RA. He reckons they must owe him loads of favours for letting them youngfellas sleep on his sitting-room floor back in the day. He must’ve asked the ‘RA to send over a couple of operatives to London to get his daughter back and to do a punishment shooting on the fella that got her pregnant. Or maybe it was easier still. Just a phone call to London, to some sleeper members of a Knightsbridge Flying Column, who were on a break from blowing up department stores and horses. Just a code word and an address, and the order to bring back that poor colleen and teach that young pup a lesson about how we treat our womenfolk in the Emerald Isle.

Of course, Gary writes that all of this is guesswork, and that Peadar Clancy said that Eaghdheanaghdh told everyone that they were full of shit and that his dad was just bollixed for five days in a ditch down the bog. But then, Peadar Clancy says, this is what you have to do once you’ve contacted The Movement. It involves total commitment to their truth, and not yours. Lying is the first skill they teach you up in the North. Peadar has a friend, Gary says, who was best friends with a ‘RA man and never even knew it. The two of them were both in their first year at university and the ‘RA fella was always going on trips up to the North, saying that he was visiting his aunty in Belfast. Then one day he drops out of college and it turns out that he’s been arrested by the RUC for shooting a Proddy solicitor in the head. To be a real ‘RA man you’ve got to be able to look your own mam in the eyes and be totally believable when you say, No, I never shot that fella, and I’m not even a member!

Gary ends his letter by telling me not to worry, because Eaghdheanaghdh’s probably right and everyone else is full of shit. But then he tells me, on the very last line, that I should keep an
eye out for anyone suspicious-looking, or at least some fellas sneaking around in balaclavas and camouflage jackets. Just in case. My best bet, he says, is to imagine that I am starring in my own Eddie Murphy action movie, and that the baddies are everywhere and trying to kill me. It will be fun, and kind of real at the same time.

I think about Gary’s warning straightaway on the Saturday-afternoon shift in Border Town, when this big scruffy beardy fella, who’s sitting in Billy’s section like Chewbacca the Wookie in tracksuit bottoms, makes a huge deal about meeting the busboy, meaning me, up close and personal. Billy comes sashaying into the kitchen, does a brilliant impression of a headmistress sucking her cheeks in together, and tells me that the caveman on table 18 wants to have a chat with me.

At first I nearly crap myself, and wonder if it’s the ‘RA assassin, sent by Taighdhg to sort me out. Or maybe I’m just in normal, real person’s trouble, because of the rubbish service I’ve given him, barely noticing him all shift, almost ignoring his table completely. I left him sitting there twice, with a dirty plate in front of him. First after the stuffed jalapeno peppers, and then with the remains of his fajitas – he even stacked a crumpled napkin on the skillet, which is universal restaurant sign language for, I’ve finished my dinner, thank you very much.

I decide to go out there and apologise, and explain that I’ve been concentrating all my energies on a big table of twelve women right behind him, in the horseshoe alcove. They are here, they say, to line their stomachs before the big night. They are a hen night. And the main thing I’ve learnt so far from being busboy is that hen nights are the best tippers. This is, firstly, because they’re a bit messy and blurry-eyed by bill time, and happily overpay, and chuck a big plate full of notes at you, with contributions from all the girls, no change needed. And secondly,
because they’re in such a buzzy party mood they feel like spreading the atmos’ with a big juicy tip. Either way, a big tip from them to Billy means a big tip from Billy to me. Although, to get the big tip you often have to put up with all sorts. Most of it dead rude. They usually have a load of rubber mickeys with them, all shapes and sizes, and all of them out and on the table, and often in the food, especially salsa dip. And they don’t mind waving them around either, and sticking them in my face, for a laugh, when I come to clear the mains away.

Some of the other girls tell the mickey wavers to lay off me, and say that I’m only a kid. But the mickey wavers are too busy trying to stick the fake mickeys up under my black apron and give me a pretend comedy bum-rape to care. I think he likes that, they say, and then all twelve of them will cackle at the tops of their voices, with shouldn’t-be-allowed laughter. I usually blush a bit, but I don’t really mind. Because somehow, with all the ladies together, and the shouting, the pranks and the noise, it kind of reminds me of being back home at the dinner table. Only with fake mickeys instead of comments and jokes, and with twelve drunken women in stilettos and suspender belts and
Apprentice Shagger
T-shirts, instead of five sisters and a mam.

Billy’s even better with them than me, and has a whole routine, including lines and comments that are friendly-rude, that he can hit them with at a moment’s notice. Like calling them honey a lot. And saying, No, honey, in your case I’d rather have the money, when they ask if they can buy him a drink.

With all this going on I miss out on the beardy fella’s table completely. It would’ve been a close call on the best of days anyway. But with all the Saidhbh stuff whizzing about inside me, and Helen cramming five years of Astral Science lectures into my brain in two weeks, and the possibility that a fully armed IRA unit might leap up out of the guacamole and kill me at any minute, I don’t in any way tend to him or his needs.