The Healing (19 page)

He read each story carefully, leaving nothing out and holding the ledger reverently as if it was a holy object. More pages. A taxi-driver shot as he waited to collect a
mother and baby from hospital; a man dragged from a shopping centre in front of his wife and child and shot as he knelt in the carpark. Page after page of yellowing newsprint. Pictures of tarpaulin-covered bodies dumped in ditches under hedgerows; the twisted wreckage of burnt-out cars; tattered wreaths hanging from wire fences on country roads; cortèges with slow processions of people. Stories of ambush and bullet, of atrocity and revenge. Pictures, too, of the victims. He looked into their faces and tried to know them, but they had faded like their stories into the past. Sometimes there were small portraits, like passport photographs, but often their images were taken from family snapshots, preserved mementoes of weddings or celebrations which sat strangely beside the stories which surrounded them.

He paused from reading, using his thumb as a bookmark as he closed the ledger, while above him the wedge of sky darkened and dropped lower towards him. He pushed his back against the steadying support of stone, conscious that his breathing had quickened and a whirl of sickness was spinning wildly in his stomach. He tried to calm himself by counting, counting anything he could see – the eyelets on his shoes, the scores on the leather, bits of damp grass stuck to the soles – but all the time he knew he had to go on reading and with every page he turned, the newspaper cuttings carried him closer to the present. His reading had become slower and his mouth was dry but he moved through the years, and as he did so the paper began to lose its faded look. He started to close his eyes for the second it took his forefinger to flick over the next page and then the second lengthened and he had to make himself look.
It seemed to go on for a long time, a frightened game of roulette between hand and eye.

And then he reached it. He pushed as hard as he could against the rock, his heels dug into the ground and legs tightening with the strain. The sickness swirled in his stomach but he forced himself to look at the photograph. He had never seen it before, never known it existed. As he stared at his mother's face he recognized the marks of pain which now lived permanently in her features, and then as he looked at himself he saw the fear in his eyes, and in that moment everything came flooding back, breaching all his strongest barriers – birds scattering to the sky, the setting sun sinking into the dark ridge of the horizon, kneeling beside his father's head afraid to touch him, while his blood seeped into the stubble.

Suddenly, his hands tore at the pages of the ledger, plucking them from the spine and ripping them into shreds, pulling page after page and tearing them into pieces. The fragments fluttered around him like snow and, scooping them up, he pushed them through the gap above his head and watched the wind sweep them skywards. He looked about, frantic that the last fragment had gone, and then he saw that his hands were blackened with the print of the newspaper. He rubbed them violently on his trousers, but all it did was smear the print across his skin. He wanted the marks off his hands more than anything else, but the harder he rubbed the deeper it became engrained. He was crying now, slowly at first, and then in shuddering sobs which he could not control or stop, crying until there was nothing left except a heaving emptiness and the smell of his urine. The print would not come off his hands.

He had sat with his back pressed so hard against the rock that now it felt part of his spine and as he thought of the pages he had torn, he knew for sure that the old man was right. Down below in the scooped-out hollow of a city lived a terrible sickness and each day it spread to more people as the serpents slithered silently among them, infecting them with the poison. The old man had spoken of a cure but maybe it had existed only inside his head, buried amidst the tangle of words. Maybe Billy was right and words were only the shit of the world, empty meaningless things like dead leaves trapped in the spring grass.

The emptiness inside him felt so big it seemed that nothing could fill it, that nothing could ever deaden the pain. He watched a solitary bird fall through the sky. And then from somewhere deep inside his hurt he knew what he had to do without understanding why he had been chosen or what would happen to him. At first he tried to push the knowledge below the surface of his silence and he fought against it, wanting to go on hiding in the fissure of the rock, to grow small and safe like the stone in the ditch.

He crawled out of the crevice, his legs stiff and awkward at first, then clambered over the stone to the top of the outcrop. All about him the wind whipped through the grass. At first, he crouched low under the torn rag of a sky, but then he stood up slowly and nervously, like a hunted creature emerging from shadows, and looked down into the city; over the serried ridges of roofs, over the tall towers of the centre and across to the scattered scabs of estates blistering the far side of the hollow. As the wind
broke coldly on his face and tore at his tousle of hair, he stretched out his arms and hovered weightlessly like a small bird. Unclenching his fists, he let the air beat against his print-blackened palms and rush through his open fingers.

He felt raised up above the world, high enough for all to see him, but down below it seemed the city still slumbered in its sickness, unwilling to lift its eyes. He grew desperate as the wind stabbed his clothes and sought to dislodge him from the stone. There was so little time left. Soon it might be too late, and in his desperation he reached deep into his sealed and secret places, slipping open the hoops of silence which bound him fast. And as he lifted his face words faltered in the fiery flux of his throat, each sound a tiny flame which seared the softness of his being. They stuttered brokenly to his lips, melting at first into nothingness like snow falling on water, but he forced them forward until at last they broke free. His voice rang out raw and strange, but he shouted again and again, calling the world to look, and as he hung trembling on the air, the wind scattered the words like seed.

David Park was born in Belfast and now teaches in Downpatrick, County Down. He is married with two young children.

Oranges From Spain
The Rye Man
Stone Kingdoms

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain
by Jonathan Cape in 1992

Reissued 1997

Bloomsbury Publishing, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © David Park 1992

The right of David Park to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 4088 3627 9

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