The Fields (30 page)

Saidhbh breaks the silence, finally, and tells me that He is always with her. He never leaves her. I say, Right? And I act dead normal and dead interested, and even do a little scan around the room, as if I’m trying to pick out the sight of a teensy-tiny mucus blob with arms and legs wearing an even tinier microscopic nappy. There’s another monumental pause before Saidhbh finally shuts her notepad with a bang and says, He likes trees.

I tell Deano the very next morning that I’ll give Community a shot. He’s thrilled to pieces, and says that I’ll have to wait till the following night, because the School of Astral Sciences only practises three nights a week. For the rest of the time, Community is taken up with yoga, tantra, pathway work, family constellations, and a load of other binjy-banjy shite.

On the night, of course, I get cold feet. I think of every excuse in the book to try and wriggle out of it, but no luck. And it doesn’t help that Fiona’s been slagging me all day, and calling me a hippie in front of the girls at Grace’s Angels. She thinks it’s hilarious that I’m actually going to an Astral Science class with Deano in the first place. And it’s even funnier, but in an odd and slightly disturbing way, that I think it’s going to have the added bonus of making Saidhbh mentally stable again. She says that the best I should hope for is the ability to give Saidhbh a long and slightly boring massage. That is, she adds, if I can ever manage to peel her out of those stinking dungarees for long enough.

I go bonkers at this, and call Fiona a fecking berk, and tell her to shut her fecking mouth, right in front of three of the Grace’s Angels who are at the typewriters. Then I run out on to the fire escape and have a big cry. Fiona’s out beside me in seconds, and with her arms tight around me, and calling me Jimbo, and telling me that everything will be all right with Saidhbh, and that I’m a great lad for going to all this trouble, and that Mam and Dad would be dead proud of me if they could see how I’m taking this problem on, like a real man. And what’s more, she was just joking with me, she says, because Deano’s told her some ace stories
about the Astral Science healings and the things they’ve done to the lame and the blind. Real miracles, she says, before pinching me on the cheek like a baby and adding, You’ll do grand.

Still, I get a massive case of the collywobbles right before Deano shoves me into the front seat of the Peugeot, and I feel like I’m going to be sick. I tell Deano that Community sounds like Camp Generation down in Connemara, which is full of Goddy loo-las, and so I’ve changed my mind and don’t want to go. But he just says, Nonsense, and drives off into the traffic like it’s the most exciting night of our lives even though something deep down in my stomach is telling me that I should fling myself out the moving car door like T. J. Hooker on a good day rather than proceed any further.

I ask him if we could go to the cinema instead, and see the new Eddie Murphy flick,
Beverly Hills Cop
, but he just hoots with laughter, in a hee-haw hee-haw Eddie Murphy way, and then coldly says, No. I tell him that we could see
Beverly Hills Cop
ten times for the amount of money this one class is going to cost, but he just winks at me and tells me that this one is on the house.

The church hall is all concretey and freezing, even in the dog days of August. It still has some stained-glass windows of old, and some white church columns on the sides. But there’s no actual seating left, like long wooden benches from the Mass days, and instead the whole inside of the hall has been neatly arranged for the night, with five rows of five massage beds, all facing the king massage bed on the stone platform where the altar used to live. The Astral Science students begin to arrive in dribs and drabs, and gather round the herbal tea table right next to the rear double doors. They look like younger versions of Deano, all of them, even some of the girls. And they all seem to favour the ponytail style, and the smiley Jesus eyes, with clothes made out of baggy anything. Baggy jumpers, baggy T-shirts, baggy sweatshirts, and baggy tracksuit bottoms. And they smell too, like
proper stinky BO. Like the way I used to smell after school, just before I started getting hairy, and Mam had to leave a bar of Lifebuoy soap and a can of Imperial Leather deodorant on my bed with a note that said simply, ‘Use!’ which was a way of saying that my hormones were kicking in and that I was really stinking up the house so I needed to get washing, fast.

Deano tells me later that soap interferes with your natural electrochemical balance. And that the Astral Science students are actually dead clean, and always washing themselves with plain water. And so what I’m really smelling, in their stink, is the whiff of genuine and natural humanity at its best, and not some chemical poison that’s been invented by American companies and sold by fellas running through the desert on TV so that fellas like me will spend our pocket money, or get our mams to spend their housekeeping money, on little pressurised tins of poison that will make us all smell like robots and knock our electrochemical balance right out of whack.

They mostly have funny names, the students, and mostly taken from nature. And they are names from the good part of nature, like Forest Leaves, and Sunny Day, and not stuff like Drizzly Sunday or Piranha Faeces. I ask Deano why he hasn’t changed his name yet and he says that you can only do it when you’ve graduated from your fifth year of Astral Sciences studies. There’s a whole ceremony and everything, where Serenity Powers officially hands you the name in a rolled-up document. He says that he has a name all geared up and waiting, and will be able to use it from next January onwards. He won’t tell me the name, but gives me a hint and says that it’s connected to fish (he tells me three weeks later that it’s Swimming Water, but only because I keep tormenting him with stupid suggestions: Cod in Batter? Captain Birdseye? And so on). He tells me that I should start thinking of one now. I groan. But he says, confident, You’ll see!
The students hug each other too, for ages. They come in and they go, Hi, Blue Blossom, and then fall into these huge epic five-minute hugs, as if someone had just died. Deano gets loads of them. After which he’ll usually say, How are you? And then the hugger, instead of saying, Fine, and you? will actually bang on for another five minutes about how they’re really feeling, and how they feel disappointed in themselves for re-enacting old patterns and giving in to the old story of their personal negativity and the very idea of the ego. At the end of all this Deano introduces me to each one of the huggers, but I just nod hello at them, and am careful to back away as I do, in case they get any ideas. Although, they can probably smell my Sure extra-strength deodorant from ten paces and are worried that if they hugged me I might actually rub some of their pongy electrochemical doo-dah away.

Either way, Deano does a good twenty minutes of hugging and mutual moaning, during which time he’s careful to introduce me to three different women, clearly his favourites and all Mam’s age and older, in matching grey tracksuits, who are called, by their first names, Peach, Feather and White. They tell me that they envy me and that my life’s about to change right now. Your first Astral Science class? they coo. You’ll never be the same again. Although, says Peach, it’s a shame that Mossy Bough is too ill to hold the class tonight, because that would’ve been a first class to remember. Instead, I’ll have to make do with Winter Rain.

Deano groans when he hears that Winter Rain is taking the class, but the women tell him not to be so critical. Winter Rain, he explains to me in a whisper, is not a patch on Mossy Bough, and is, in fact, just a little upstart who’s been given preferential treatment by Serenity Powers and hasn’t even finished a single fecking year out of the full five yet!

Jealous! jokes Feather, making big fond eyes at him.

But I thought I was going to meet Serenity Powers? I ask.

They hoot, all four, and collectively explain that Serenity Powers lives in California, and only visits her Astral Science classes once a year, for the January naming ceremony. Other than that, they say, the classes are held by her brightest students, chosen personally by Serenity herself.

And they’re supposed to be fifth years! adds Deano, with a loud and disappointed tut, meaning that Winter Rain is a right little rip for skipping the queue.

And, in fact, he begins, if you ask me …

Right on cue a ding-dongy bong-bell rings, and Winter Rain appears from behind the altar, dressed in bright and baggy white pyjamas, a red sash around the waist, but with her face completely covered in a white veil. When Deano sees the veil he sighs, and rolls his eyes. Feather turns to me and explains that Winter is going to call her guides to help us through the class tonight. A bit of a murmur-murmur goes round the hall. The guides are a big deal. Peach pinches me, and gives me a hefty wink, letting me know that I am in for the time of my life.

The guides, however, are actually a bit of a letdown, and certainly not as interesting as anything you’d see in
Beverly Hills Cop
, or
Ghostbusters
for that matter. Rain just tilts her head back and in a normal speaky voice asks the guides, who are called Waylean and Mestapheen, to come into her from the Earth, the stars and beyond and purify this room, and these people, meaning us, and help her hold this session with power and focus. At which point she goes a bit jerky, like a break-dancer, and then does a scratchy exorcist voice, totally deep, and says really thick things like, I am with you now, and My hands are your hands, and I am the light within and all around. Deano explains later that the veil is to keep the class leader, and her or his guides, completely in the healing zone, and to make sure that they’re not distracted by the sight of a hall full of eager-eyed students before them. But I’m betting with myself that it’s there
mostly to hide the fact that she’s laughing her head off while doing the funny voices.

Deano, despite the moans at first, is soon hooked by the stage show and by Winter Rain. And so are all the others. She’s obviously good at what she does, and the students go crazy when she speaks in her guide voice, and Peach even gives a little mini-scream, as if she can’t bear the excitement, like she’s one of the black-and-white girls at old Beatles concerts who just have to let it out because the very idea of being near John, Paul and Ringo and the other fella is so thrilling. I’m mostly looking at my watch, and thinking about what a big disappointment this whole night has been, and how I’m not going to get magical healing powers to help Saidhbh, and how I wish that we could’ve gone to the flicks instead. Winter Rain seems fine, and a very good performer, but after everything that me and Saidhbh have been through, I’m finding it really hard to get involved in the play-acting on the altar, and can’t stop myself from wondering why, if all the whirling powers of the universe came pouring down into one particular person on Earth, the first thing they’d do would be to put on a silly voice?

And still, there’s something about Winter Rain that I can’t quite shake. Something about her first voice, her speaking voice, before she went into cosmic ghost mode. Something in the tone that won’t let me go. She tells us, still throaty, and still pretending to be Waylean and Mestapheen, to divide ourselves up between healers and healees and to get on to our massage beds. Naturally, I choose to be a healee and Deano becomes my healer, and I hop up on to the bed, facing heavenward. Deano isn’t even looking at me. All eyes are on Rain. She barks out words like ‘ground’, ‘deeper’, ‘breathe’, ‘centre’ and ‘hold your Haras’ and ‘breathe deeper, louder’ until the entire church is filled with a chorus of noisy hissy breaths, mostly a bit stinky also (I’m guessing that minty toothpaste is an electrochemical blocker too),
from over twenty healers who are pumping themselves up, and into the zone.

We, the healees, are also given ghostly instructions from the altar. We are told to close our eyes and abandon our physical senses, and to give ourselves up to the universe. I close my eyes and wonder if there’s as many f-words in
Beverly Hills Cop
as there was in
48 Hours
. We were shown
48 Hours
in our video club in school and Spits McGee went mental. He passed by the room, with just me and five other fellas glued to the screen, and he stopped immediately when he saw Eddie Murphy. Spits gave that know-all look that he does, as if to say that he knew all about the black fellas because of his time in Africa. But within seconds he had turned puce and was looking around, wanting to know who in God’s name had told us that we could watch these unadulterated corner boys unsupervised. He marched up to the video recorder, bent down and let his hand hover over the big thunky buttons. But you could tell that he didn’t have a clue and so he gave it a thump with his fist and charged out the door again. By the time he’d found Jack McQuaid, the careers guidance counsellor, and the one man who’s supposed to be in charge of video recorders in the school, we’d already got past the final blow-out where Eddie Murphy shoots Billy Bear stone dead.

Rain warns us to be wary of our conscious mind. It is the enemy, she grumbles, before telling us that we must un-become what we have become in order to receive the energies that Waylean and Mestapheen are guiding into the hall.

Begin! she barks, and I feel Deano instantly leaning over me. He starts straight away at my mickey, and I nearly burst out laughing. His hands hover over my jeans, right at the zip, while Rain shouts the words ‘Root Chakra’ and explains to the healees that this chakra, this small spinning ball of internal energy, no bigger than a tennis ball, connects us to our basic survival instincts and must be restored to a healthy clockwise rotation if
we want to be at peace in the world. She tells the healers not to block the flow, and adds that she can feel a lot of blocks in the room. Breathe! she shouts again. I told you to breathe! There follows more hissing, even louder, from the healers. In fact I’m sure Deano hits me with some flying spit, but I dare not open my eyes. I’m putting all my energies into not giggling, especially as Deano’s hands keep bashing off my zip every time he takes a huge breath.

Sacral Chakra, orders Rain, and tells us that this chakra is connected to our sexuality and pleasure. Deano moves his hands upwards a tad along my body, but he’s still basically hovering over my mickey. Rain warns us that in the Western world this chakra is usually the most damaged and decrepit because of our fear, our misunderstanding and our abuse of sex. She orders her pupils to think back to the purity of their beginnings and to unblock with all their might in order to allow Waylean and Mestapheen to get to work on these banjaxed tennis balls. More breathing. More hissing. I start to feel a bit rubbish about my Sacral Chakra, and the giggling totally stops. I can only imagine how bollixed up it is, probably not even the shape of a tennis ball at all, and not spinning in any direction either, just lying there, like the living dead, shocked, knackered, and screwed. And I feel angry with the Western world for being so crap, just like Rain says. And I’m angry with rapist priests too, and unwanted fecking babies. And I suddenly feel like saying all the curse words in the world, like shit and feck, right there on the massage table, when I notice that instead of the giggles I’ve now got the shakes.