Healer (16 page)
Authors: Peter Dickinson
“We're going to America next week.”
“I heard it was soon. You
made
her, Pinkie?”
“Oh, yes. You told me once. Don't you remember? She can't do anything.”
“I've been talking to the cops all morning. I think they've given up.”
“They told Mummy we could go.”
“It's all over.”
There seemed to be so little to say. She was too heavy for him to carry for long and felt awkward on his arms, though a few weeks back, up on the moor, she had clung to him as though she had been part of him. He let her slide to the sidewalk. She took hold of his hand.
“What's the matter, Bear?” she said, her voice almost drowned by the clatter of a passing truck.
“Nothing. Oh, it's stupid. Only I told them this morning I didn't think you could help people.”
She smiled her almost invisible smile. He was glad to see it there still, despite her new openness and freedom.
“One of them had a toothache last time,” she said.
“Oh. Did you ⦔
“He was too shy, with the other one watching.”
“They're human sometimes.”
Another long pause. Difficult to talk anyway, through the traffic racket. A hoot from the waiting car. This was the moment he'd been longing for, without knowing it, his last chance. It should have been in some friendly room, or out on a walk among trees, or high on the windy moor. Too difficult in the hurry and fume of Marsden Ash High Street.
“Something's
really
the matter, isn't it, Bear?”
“Suppose so. Not your sort of thing.”
“Please, Bear.”
“Nothing.”
“You're afraid.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
She put her other hand on his. It was no good. He felt no flow, no warmth across the shoulder blades, no strange peace. The car hooted, twice this time. He looked down and saw that Pinkie was staring up at him, biting her lower lip and frowning. She wasn't calling on mysterious forces to help him but was humanly troubled with his trouble. In his mind's eye he saw her crying out to him up by Ferriby Circle, luminous with a pain he could never reach or understand.
“It's Bear,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I want to get rid of him.”
“Oh, no!”
“He's going to take over. He's dangerous. He'll do something one day. He nearly killed Mr. Freeman up on the moor. If you hadn't stopped me ⦔
“It was Norah.”
“Before that. I was going to break his neck with my chain. 1 suppose you couldn't have seen without your glasses, but you shouted and stopped me.”
“I don't remember. I can remember falling off the bicycle and then waking up when they were carrying me out of the ambulance.”
“Don't you see? Bear's dangerous. Suppose something like that happened again? They'll say I'm mad and lock me up for the rest of my life. It's not like just losing my temper sometimes. It's real.”
A long blast on the car horn. A movement in the back seat as the passenger cleared packages away in order to get out. Pinkie was talking, whispering, earnest still but cheerful. Half of what she said was lost in traffic-racket.
“⦠because he's frightened? If you'd only ⦠to be happy ⦠on TV. It was lovely ⦠that one looked happy, I ⦔
Her mother was coming toward them across the sidewalk. Pinkie swung around, seeming to sense her presence.
“Look, Mum, it was Barry! I told you it was!”
Her mother inspected Barry from head to toe, staring at him with bright, rejecting eyes.
“Hanging around street corners,” she said. “About all he's fit for.”
Pinkie actually laughed, a normal kid's laugh.
“He was waiting for us,” she said.
“Couldn't have known.”
“Course he did. That's why he was waiting.”
Pinkie's mother puffed out an exasperated breath, a genteel, feminine version of Mr. Stott's shattering snort. She hadn't changed physically, not that Barry could see, but something about her had. Perhaps it was only that Pinkie had learned to tease her, to cope with her by treating her as a bit of a joke, and she was adapting to the role, almost beginning to enjoy it. Or perhaps it was living in America and having to be pleasant to people if she wanted to persuade them to go to the Foundation. Anyway, the change was very slight, to judge by her next remark.
“And this taxi's costing us a pound a minute, what's more.”
“All right. Coming. Bye, Barry.”
“Great to see you. And if ever you want ⦔
“I'll send you a postcard. Love to Granddad.”
“Okay.”
And that was all. He watched the taxi slip into a gap in the traffic and slide away, out of sight in ten seconds. She'd changed, yes. Laughed, chatted, shown her feelings, teased her mum. She was going to look after herself from now on. She didn't need a guardian or protector, not any more.
Strangely, he didn't feel depressed. Nothing had really happened, nothing you could explain or talk about. He wasn't sure whether Pinkie had understood about Bear, now or ever. When she'd cried out to him up by Ferriby Circle, he'd been convinced that she'd actually seen Bear, as he had once, almost in the selfsame spot. But she wasn't wearing her glasses, so how could she? And in any case she'd forgotten. He'd never know, any more than he'd know whether he'd seen that pale light shining from her, or whether it had been only an effect in his own mind.
What had she been trying to say just now? Some TV programme she'd seen, one of those wildlife pieces, with bears in it. “That one looked happy.” Fat lot of use.
He turned toward home. The September noon was bright and pleasant. Somehow, despite the traffic fumes, it felt like a spring day. His skin crawled pleasantly in the warmth. He stretched and yawned, easing the muscles below the skin, feeling the wholeness of himself settle peacefully into place, as though he had just woken from winter sleep, sleep fretful with intrusive dreams, and now was prowling out into the sun, blinking at the last quick-melting snowdrifts, sniffing the air of a world made new.
A Biography of Peter Dickinson
Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voiceâin fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf's crazy twin, but he's just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.
He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn't get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather's sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.
When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn't have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.
He's led an ordinary kind of lifeânot much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.
He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it's a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter's screams, not the boy's.)
And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine
Punch
and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.
He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.
Peter says he didn't
become
a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can't be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They've probably clipped one of its wings so that it can't hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it's still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he'd still be a writer.
But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fictionây kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children's story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children's book was made into a TV series.)
Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriterâone draft to see what he's got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all's well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of processâeasier in some ways, harder in others.
The ideas come from all over the placeâdaydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he's heard or readâa voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter's mind and said, “Write me.” Then he'll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.
Peter has written all sorts of booksâcrime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won't be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.
Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer's daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter's books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in
Perfect Gallows
.
The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan's, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.