The Fields (29 page)

Aunty Grace breaks up the fun at 11.30 p.m. with some heavy thumping on Billy’s flat door and a furious face on her when she eventually steps inside. She glares at me for keeping her up so late, but Billy works his magic, and after a small glass of red wine
and chinwag about the highs and lows of the employment business all seems to be forgiven. In the car on the way home she tells me that Billy is a lovely fella, and one of the best gays around. She says too that she knows I’ve been drinking loads by the smell of me. She says that it doesn’t bother her, but that I’d better drink plenty of water, and wash it all through me before tomorrow morning. Wouldn’t want it wrecking your vibes, she says, half joking to herself.

That’s the other brilliant thing about working at Border Town. It gives me plenty of time to practise my healing.

Normally I wouldn’t be into healing, or anything binjy-banjy like that. Actually, Fiona calls it binjy-banjy. It means that it comes from India and other faraway places, where everyone speaks all binjy-banjy with their heads wobbling on their shoulders and everything about them is a bit funny and not funny at the same time. She says that the fact that Deano’s into all the binjy-banjy stuff is why she loves him. Because he’s a trier, and he never says that anything is rubbish, and God loves a trier, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Deano was in her life right now, over here, in this England, and in this London, despite all the brilliant bits about working in Grace’s Angels and being in the biggest and best city in the world, she probably wouldn’t be able to breathe. Because, when it comes down to it, she is the opposite of Deano, and so many things are rubbish and thick to her, so together, she says, they make the perfect match. Plus, she adds, after all that, that she finds the healings very relaxing. Like having a super-long massage, but with heavy breathing on the side.

It takes Deano ages to persuade me to go to Community. He doesn’t use the word ‘the’. It’s just called Community, on its own. That’s the way. And it’s meant to symbolise the bigness of it all, and the fact that it’s not a lone, single idea. But everywhere.
When I ask Deano about it, we have our first genuine argument, because he tells me that there’s no ‘I’ in ‘We’, but when I answer that there’s an ‘I’ in ‘Community’ he goes mental.

Anyway, the building itself is a converted church in Islington, which is nearly an hour away from us by the regular overground train. So it’s a big hassle to get there in the first place, even if you’re not being dragged by your ears. Deano, from day one, was forever shoving leaflets into my face, brochures that featured photos of healers, who were mainly beardy fellas with ponytails and smiley eyes, or else mammy-aged women with grey hair, chunky wooden necklaces and multicoloured tops, and all of them, men and women, looking into the camera with their best Jesusy faces on. Or else they were wearing baggy vests and tracksuit bottoms, and standing with their legs apart and half bent beside massage tables, and leaning, arms outstretched over their seemingly sleeping healees, and with their own eyes shut tight and their heads tilted upwards to the sky.

At the top of the leaflets were the words,
The School of Astral Sciences
, and on the back page they had a photo of the School’s big boss, a woman with jet black witch’s hair and big white American teeth. She was called Serenity Powers, and she had a little printed speech below the photo, where she said that she was originally a top-secret scientist working working on all sorts of cutting edge stuff for a huge American corporation when she discovered that she had the gift of seeing auric fields, and being able to manipulate the many subtle energy pathways within our bodies. And that she now wants more than anything to share this gift with the world, and that’s why she’s opening up schools of Astral Sciences everywhere she can. And she wants you, meaning me, to enjoy the gift, and finally feel what it’s like to have the power to heal.

I thank Deano for the offer, but tell him, copying Fiona, that it all sounds a bit binjy-banjy to me. He doesn’t gives up though, and comes back to me again and again with a million different
arguments for why I should join him at Community. He says that since I’m doing nothing during my weekdays other than mooching around The Business and stuffing a few envelopes, it’s time that I started thinking about school again. But with his plan, he says, a couple of sessions in Community will give me more than I could possibly learn from a lifetime of lessons in any real-world schooling system.

I tell him that it sounds brilliant but the main thing for me, I say, coming up with a winning escape clause, is the money. At thirty pounds a session, it’s nearly my entire weekend’s wages, minus tips. Which means I wouldn’t have any left for Aunty Grace’s rent. Deano tells me that money is just energy, and it’s irrelevant to the School of Astral Sciences, and that they only charge a lot because the service they provide is so specialised and has come, essentially, from the highest ranks of the scientific community. You wouldn’t ask the biggest corporations in America to hand over their best products, their chemical advances and their scientific weapons for free, would you? Well, this is just the same. It’s about turning your hands into highly evolved scientific weapons, but weapons of wonder and healing.

I dig my heels in and say that I’m trying to save for a surprise present for Saidhbh – an aeroplane trip home at Christmas time. The travel agent has said that it’s going to be five hundred pounds all in for both of us, so every penny counts, science weapons or not.

Deano’s had enough, and he goes a bit red in the face and says that I’m missing the point entirely. What does money matter, he says, hissing furiously, when compared to the health and well-being of those you love? If not for yourself, he says, then why not for Saidhbh?

I’m not expecting that. And it kind of knocks the wind out of me. Hurt, I blurt back at him anything I can, and I tell him that Saidhbh’s grand, and just needs a couple more weeks to get over the baby, and she’ll be right as rain. He puts a hand to his mouth
and pretends to gag and to scoff all at once, and gives me a look down his nose that means that he knows, and I know, and we all know, that this might not be totally true. Eventually, hand down, and moving in towards me, he speaks. He tells me to come on now. And he says that she’s just not normal any more. Meaning Saidhbh. And, well, the binjy-banjy bastard is right.

Saidhbh is on the slippery slope. And it’s not in the big dramatic stuff either, like slitting herself open with broken glasses, but in the way she is, and the way she won’t look at you, and how she acts all twitchy and flinchy when she passes you on the stairs, like she’s about to be hit at any minute by a big thundering bamboo stick from the heavens. And her clothes are filthy, but she won’t let Aunty Grace go near them. Especially the dungarees. And her hair’s a mess, all knotty not silky, and stinking of smoke, because she smokes now, tons of them, right out the bedroom window, like a secondary Glengall chimney. And at first they were the only things that got her out of the house, down to the corner shop beside the launderette, for a packet of twenty Rothmans and a pack of Hula Hoops. But then she went further afield, away from Kilburn altogether and through Lonsdale Road, across Salusbury Road and right into Queen’s Park, the parky bit, itself.

She came back from that day on a high, and looked everyone in the eye for the first time in ages, from person to person, and really locked us with some killer stares, all buzzy and blinkless and super-happy, and said that what she wanted to do more than anything else, right now, was her art. She turned to Aunty Grace and made her go out to the High Road, at that very minute of the evening, and buy her a giant art pad, with huge tear-off paper pages, and a box of colour pastels for drawing lines and smudging colours. And when Aunty Grace came back with the gear, Saidhbh just grabbed it roughly from her, and didn’t say thank you or anything, and instead dashed out the
door again and straight down to the parky bit of Queen’s Park to do her art.

She draws trees all the time, and that’s all she does. And sometimes the same tree for days on end. And, depending on how satisfied she is with the drawing she’s done that day, she’ll be in a brilliant mood or a mad mood when she comes in the door. It’s like she has a job, and it involves grabbing her art gear and two packets of Rothmans and Aunty Grace’s camping stool, all at the crack of dawn, and heading down to the park to draw nothing but trees till the darkness. On her very first early riser I had no clue, and totally panicked when I popped into her room, and worked my way through the first few bars of ‘Good morning! Good morning …’ before I realised that she wasn’t even in the fecking bed. I raised the alarm down at Grace’s Angels and Deano was sent out in the Peugeot on scouting duty, but he found her almost immediately in the park, stuck to her stool, sketching away like a woman possessed, smack bang in front of a bright green elm tree with huge overhanging branches.

Deano had a word with a fella wearing a bright yellow hat and jacket who is the park Keeper, and who knows Saidhbh on sight, and says that she has a nickname already, and that everyone there just calls her the Tree Woman behind her back, even some of the mams with prams. When she’s not drawing, the Keeper says that Saidhbh sometimes approaches the mams with prams, especially when they roll close by her camping stool, and she asks them if she can look inside at the little ones. The Keeper thought that this was going to be a big problem when he saw her do it first, maybe a job for the cops, and he even started jogging towards Saidhbh with his whistle out, and was ready to tell her to feck off with herself and her filthy loony ways. But the mams were brilliant with her, and one of them even lifted a baby out of the pram for Saidhbh, and let her hold it and cuddle it. And the keeper said that Saidhbh was brilliant right back with the baby, all soft and
stroky, and hushed, like a mam that you’d see in an advert for washing powder, who cuddles a baby with a fresh yellow towel and makes the baby beam with happiness just because she’s there, looking, in that instant, eye to sacred eye. It made the Keeper feel like an awful eejit for getting it so wrong, and for forgetting that mams together are like a tribe of their own, and that women and babies is a fierce combination. He backed away slowly, and let Saidhbh alone. And never interferes any more when she bothers the pram mams.

And all of this, of course, doesn’t seem too bad. Because when Saidhbh’s having a good day, and good episodes, and happy with her day’s work in the park, you get flashes of the old Saidhbh. With no twitching or flinching, and lots of proper looks, and even a few giggles. And in these moments, say, when we’re sharing a pizza while squashed around Aunty Grace’s tiny kitchen table, you’d swear that everything was back to normal, and she might even chuckle when Fiona starts telling funny stories about life back home and the things she used to do in Sister Pauline’s French class, or she might seem to be listening intensely when I read out the latest letter from Gary, about how boring a summer in Dublin really was, and how much he’s dreading the return of the school term and how well my dad seems to be these days. After that one she even rubbed my shoulders and said that Gary’s news about my dad was fantastic, and that I must be really relieved, mustn’t I? I looked round at her and touched her fingers and said yes. And as I said yes, in the moment of the yes itself, I felt that, yes, I was happy then, and with the way this was going.

But underneath it you never know. Because Aunty Grace came down one morning, hardly after seven o’clock, and got the shock of her life to find Saidhbh in the kitchen, fully dressed and ready to go, with camping stool and art pad by her side, but with an untouched bowl of Frosties in front of her, and a big plastic bottle of Domestos in her hands, and pressed right up against her
face. And she was just reading it, the whole label, like she was hypnotised, or like she was only seconds away from pouring it all over her Frosties. She didn’t say a word to Aunty Grace when she came into the kitchen either, which upset Aunty Grace no end, and made her have a huge discussion that night with Fiona and Deano about whether Saidhbh should be sectioned or not. I wasn’t invited into that discussion, because I was working in Border Town, and because I didn’t know what sectioning meant, and Fiona had to explain it all to me when I got home, and said that, for now, Saidhbh was off the hook, but that the pressure on Aunty Grace was almost becoming too much to bear, and that it didn’t help that the Donohue clan were haranguing her on a daily basis and kept the phone hopping off the hook with annoying questions about Saidhbh and the state she’s in. And, of course, worst of all, if you mention to Saidhbh the very idea of going back, or travelling anywhere further than her beloved park, and her beloved trees, then she goes berserk and twitchy, and weepy to boot, and without actually saying it, is kind of threatening to reach for the Lady Shave or glug back the Domestos at the drop of a hat.

If nothing else, Deano is persistent. Seeing that the whole Saidhbh subject has winded me into moody silence, he says that I’ve no idea how much a bit of the old Serenity Powers could help Saidhbh with her issues. And imagine how great I’d feel if I could relieve some of her pain. Me, personally. From my hands to her body. It was, after all, he says, going for a bit of levity, my hands on her body, and all the rest, that caused this mess in the first place. And what about the Donohues? he asks. And the whole Finnegan family? And Aunty Grace? And everyone who knows Saidhbh? Think of what I owe them all, and how grateful they’d be if I could just ease some of Saidhbh’s pain.

That night, still chewing over Deano’s offer, I flop down beside
Saidhbh, and she shows me her drawings. Brilliant trees, I say, as I skip through them, page after page, after page. I tell her a bit about Border Town, and how I served a beef chimichanga even after I dropped it on the kitchen floor, but mostly we just lie there in silence. She looks older, I think to myself, like a real woman. Certainly sadder, or at least like someone who could do with a good night’s sleep. Her messy knotty hair is scrunched up into a bun, and there’s loads of frizzy bits sticking out around the ears. Her mouth and nose are the same as always but her eyes, those magic eyes, are totally different now. Surrounded by ashy grey rims, they somehow seem to be bulging outwards from her face and falling back inwards into her skull at the same time. They’re also kind of blank.

What are you looking at? she asks, after an age of me staring.

I’m looking at you, I say, careful not to mess her about.

Pervert, she says, nudging me sharply in the ribs.

I ask her what she’s thinking about and she says one word. Him.

Who’s him? I say, the cat’s father? Trying to keep it light.

No, she says, blank as ever. Him.

I get it. She means Him, our dead baby. Our dead baby is now a boy. This is new. I don’t really have a good follow-on for this, so I let the moment sit there in silence. I wonder what kind of boy we would’ve had, and what it would’ve been like to be a dad to a boy. I picture myself playing football with him, and going to rugby matches, and doing all the rough tough manly things that I don’t do with my own dad. I imagine showing him how to remove the ignition housing from the central heating, and I feel suddenly sad at the speed of everything, and how life is racing and how I haven’t yet had a chance to live the dream date with my dad where both of us sit at a low pub table with pints in front of us, and we go all manly and compare froth-stained moustaches, and laugh our heads off, and maybe even punch each
other in the shoulder, which will be our way of saying, You’re the best. No, you are. No, you are. No, really, you are.