The Healing (16 page)

Quickly, almost mechanically, he put everything back in its original position, conscious that he was doing it for
the last time. He felt tired, very tired, almost as if he was coming to the final stages of a long journey. Suddenly, he spun round, his eyes darting everywhere, certain that someone was watching. But only the webbed crevices of silence stared back at him. He angled his head, listening for any sound that might have betrayed a presence, but he heard nothing except a far-off car. When he went out he did not bother to lock the door behind him but made his way into the house and climbed the stairs, his hand grasping the smooth surface of the wooden banister for support, and his breath coming in broken wheezes. If he had left it too late he knew that he would not be forgiven. He and the boy had been chosen to bring about the healing and yet if they were to do this holy thing their own lives had to be pure and free from any taint of sin. For too long he had sought to deny the truth about his son, hoping against hope that God's touch would save him, but he knew it was too late now – his son had turned his back on God's truth and could not be reached.

The door of his son's bedroom was closed and his hand hesitated before opening it. He had not slept at home for a couple of nights and opposite an unmade bed the curtains were still closed. He opened them just wide enough to let some light into the room, then turned suddenly, feeling once more that someone was watching him, but he stood alone in the small room, surrounded by the sprawl of his son's possessions. He began with the wardrobe, flicking through the assortment of coats and jackets, checking in all of their pockets, then pulling clothes out of the top shelf and dropping them in a pile on the floor. His hands clutched expectantly at a cardboard
box buried under the last articles of clothing, but when his nervous fingers flicked open the lid, a confetti shower of tiny jigsaw pieces sprinkled to the floor. He flung the empty box into the wardrobe and went to the dresser, pulling out drawers with increasing desperation. Their contents piled up in layers about the floor but he was mindless of the growing confusion. At the back of the bottom drawer he found a locked wooden box – he hadn't seen it for maybe twenty years, but he recognized it as a box he had given his son as a child.

He tried to force the lid open with his hands but it was too solid, so he rummaged again through the dresser looking for a key. But there was none to be found and he tried again with his hands until his face tightened with the strain. It was no use. He looked around him and saw a screwdriver sitting on top of a partially dismantled amplifier and used it to lever open the lid. Wearied by his efforts, he sat down on the end of the bed and examined the contents. There were five or six blue-coloured envelopes fastened together by an elastic band. He opened the first one – it was a letter from some girl he had never heard of – read the first few lines and then set them on the bed. Underneath was a series of school reports but he did not open them, and below these a football medal with his son's name engraved on the back of it, and a few foreign coins. He was about to close the box when he found an old black and white photograph. It was his son as a baby in his mother's arms. It had been taken at Christmas and in the background could be seen the tiny silver tree they had used every year. He tried to remember taking the photograph but the years blurred into confusion. Perhaps
it was their first Christmas with the boy, perhaps it was later. He could not remember.

He put it back in the box and shut the lid. It all belonged in the past and the past was something which no longer had any meaning. All that mattered now were the coming hours and days. He knew it was that close. But before that moment could begin, he had to put his own house in order and do the thing which he had avoided for too long. He let the box drop to the floor and continued his search, pulling posters off the walls and crumpling them into ragged balls in rising frustration. Records and books avalanched onto the spreading heap. He pulled the clothes off the bed and threw them into a corner, then lifted up the pillows and mattress. As he stood still and stared round the room, struggling a little to get his breath back, his eye caught the photograph which had spilled out of the box, the two faces in it watching him. He knelt down beside it, afraid to touch it, and then as he turned his face away he saw the raised edge of the carpet under the bed. It flapped back effortlessly under his touch like a page in a book, revealing the wooden floorboards underneath, and he could see without touching them that one was loose, but he rocked back on his knees, unwilling for a second to find out what was concealed.

It lifted out smoothly and completely, revealing only a pair of black woollen gloves. He sat back on the edge of the bed and looked at them, trying to remember if he had ever seen them before. Once, he had sheltered behind self-deception, but he knew now if he tried to hold fast to the lie it would be the harbinger of his own failure. Then, as he fidgeted with one of the gloves, he touched
a tiny piece of rolled paper pushed up inside one of the fingers. It was rolled tightly like a cigarette paper and his hands found it difficult at first to find the opening edge. Unrolled, it was only a few inches square, and written on it in black ink was a list of four names. He read them slowly and carefully, but they held no meaning for him. He read them again, this time aloud, the heavy emphasis of his voice trying to force some significance from them, but they squatted on the page, indifferent to his efforts: John Connolly, Anthony McCallan, Sean Hughes, Francis Bradley.

Rising from the bed, he pulled the curtains fully open, making his eyes blink at the sudden light. As he stared down into the city, where each day more people were bitten by the serpents of fire, he heard the voice of the boy speaking to him, telling him what he must do, and the words filled him with fear.

He descended the stairs carefully, one hand clutching the banisters, the other, the tiny piece of paper. Halfway down, he paused as if reluctant to go any further, but then forced himself forward. In the living-room he opened the cupboard, took out the ledgers and laid them on the table. He opened the piece of paper and smoothed it flat: John Connolly, Anthony McCallan, Sean Hughes, Francis Bradley.

He found Hughes first. The date was only five weeks earlier, but the name had already passed from memory. There was no photograph of the man but he held his face close to the newspaper cutting, his lips moving deliberately as his finger probed the words like a blind man's stick: . . . SHOT IN FRONT OF HIS FAMILY AS THEY WERE HAVING
SUPPER. TWO MASKED MEN ENTERED THROUGH THE UNLOCKED KITCHEN DOOR AND SHOT HIM REPEATEDLY . . . DIED INSTANTLY . . . FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER WAS GRAZED BY A BULLET . . . THE FAMILY HAVE CALLED FOR NO REVENGE.

It took him a few minutes to find McCallan, a taxi driver who had picked up two fares and driven them to some waste-ground where they shot him in the back of the head as he sat in his driver's seat. A single man who lived with his mother. There was a photograph of a winding cortège of taxis.

He turned back more pages and found John Connolly. His badly beaten body had been found in an alley behind a leisure centre. LAST SEEN DRINKING IN A SOCIAL CLUB IN THE NEW LODGE AREA. HIS FAMILY DENY THAT HE HAD ANY CONNECTION WITH PARAMILITARIES. There was a photograph of Connolly, a man in his early fifties with a spray in his lapel. Taken at a wedding probably, maybe his son's or daughter's.

As he read the cuttings he felt a fist of sickness clench in his stomach. So much shedding of blood and now some of it was splashed on his hands, the very hands that were supposed to bring healing. He stumbled into the kitchen and hunched over the sink, then spattered his face with water and without drying it, turned back to the table. There was one more name he had to find.

At first he turned the pages slowly, scrutinizing each cutting, but soon his fingers flicked through them feverishly as he searched more frantically. Further back in time, through the years, one ledger after another and then forward again to the present, but no Francis Bradley. It had
to be there, recorded along with the three others, because he had carried out his task faithfully and unerringly. Droplets of water dripped onto the pages, doubling their size as they soaked into the newsprint. Francis Bradley. He repeated it again and again, trying to summon it from the host of names, but it could not be found, and then he understood the reason. Francis Bradley was still alive. Somewhere down in the ravelled rows of streets, Francis Bradley was living his life, unaware that his name was on a tiny piece of paper hidden below floorboards. Then he heard the beating of the dark angel's wings as it moved from door to door. Perhaps it was already too late. He crumpled the piece of paper once more and placed it carefully in the fire, watching as the flames consumed it.

Was it too late? He remembered his son's radio in the kitchen and he lurched away from the table, knocking over the chair as he went. When he switched the radio on, discordant music screamed at him, mocking his frustrated fumbling with the dial as he searched for a speaking voice, but his fingers only pushed it in and out of static. Spitting, hissing voices and broken snatches of song broke from the wavebands of the night. It was no use. He switched it off, and then, in the brittle silence, he heard once more the boy's whispering voice. It was calling him, telling him to stay close, telling him that the time had finally come.

Hurriedly, he put on his overcoat and got ready, pausing only to take a black-handled knife from the kitchen drawer and drop it noiselessly into his pocket.

‘I've been thinking about it for some time now, Samuel. I think we should go back home.'

His mother paused and looked at him, trying to gauge his reaction and when he looked into her face he knew that she was serious about what she said.

‘I've given it a lot of thought and a lot of prayer, and I feel it would be best for us to go back and live where we used to. Not in the same house, because we couldn't, of course, but somewhere in that area. Somewhere in the country, close to the church and the people we know.'

He knew the admission of failure was painful for her and that it had taken a long time to bring her to this moment. He glanced away from her face and out to the ice where the crowds of skaters circled the rink in a constant procession.

‘It just hasn't worked here. I don't know why, or if it's my fault, but things just haven't worked. I thought at the start it would be better for us – better for you – but something's gone wrong with it. I thought it would
be a fresh start, a chance to pick up the pieces and begin again.'

She paused once more and he knew she was talking to the silent parts of herself as well as to him.

‘If anything, I think it made things worse. It's not the place I remember. Everything's changed and you can't build a new life on memories. I know my family visits us, but it's not like we really know anybody and I just don't think I want to live here.'

Out on the ice, the skilled skaters gathered speed and wove in and out of the slower groups.

‘It hasn't helped you, Samuel, has it? You still have the dreams, you still feel the fear. Running away didn't change anything for either of us, didn't help us forget, or make the pain any less. It was a mistake, but I thought I was doing it for the best and I was too ready to listen to other people. They meant well enough, but at the end of the day all it amounted to was running away.'

She was trying not to cry and he took her hand and held it tightly. She bit her bottom lip and nodded her head slowly as if to say that shedding any more tears was pointless and she was not going to be weak.

‘And why should we run away? It's not us that have anything to be ashamed of, it's not us that need to hide our faces from the world. It's our home and why should we let those types of people drive us out of it? At the end of the day, that's just what they want – for all of us to be scared and leave the towns and farms for those who never did anything to build them. Why should we let them think they've won? I think, Samuel, we should sell the house and go back,
hold our heads high and be brave for your father's sake.'

She was watching him for some sign but he felt confused. He didn't want to go back, but he didn't want to stay. Instead, he wanted to live in some different place, but he didn't know where that place was. He wanted to find some secret door and pass through it into some safer, better world where there were no men with nothing in their eyes.

‘There's something else wrong with this place. It's hard to describe it because it's something you can't touch or see, but it's there all the time, a feeling that it's sitting on the edge of something more terrible than anything that's gone before.'

She flicked hair that was not there away from her eyes.

‘Maybe that sounds stupid – I don't know. I don't know very much for sure any more.'

Her free hand plucked at invisible specks of fluff on her skirt. He felt she was talking to him as she had never done before, but he knew he could not be brave for her or his father because there was no protection in bravery. Better to grow small and safe, hide where cruel hands could not reach. His mother still believed that God would look after them, but he knew that God did not care and would do nothing to help them.

Out on the ice the skating circle went round and round. She motioned him out onto the ice and although he was reluctant to leave her she urged him to join the skaters. She seemed to want to be on her own for a while, so carefully holding the rail with both hands, he took little sideways steps and manoeuvred himself onto the ice.
She had brought him here as a treat and as a way of saying sorry for what had happened, but he had never blamed her. It had been the fault of the letter, the crumpled letter with its spider writing.

He took small cautious steps at first, his legs stiff and still unaccustomed to balancing on the narrow blades, but it was easier than he had imagined and so far he had only fallen once, two tiny spots of damp bearing witness to his brief moment on the ice. His arms jutted from his sides as if he was walking a tightrope and his face was taut with concentration as he stayed close to the side, his eyes fixed mostly on the ice, lifting occasionally to check that the way ahead was clear. Gradually, as his confidence increased, some of the rigidity vanished from his legs and he began to push each foot out with greater fluency, and his hesitant movements took on the characteristics of a glide. He began to push more of himself into the forward motion, straightening and relaxing as it carried him across the ice, and as he completed a circuit and drew level with his mother, she waved to him and encouraged him to keep going.