The Fields (31 page)

I think that this must be from holding my stomach so hard in anti-laugh mode, but the funny thing is, they’ve started in my feet, and are now working their way up my legs. I feel dead embarrassed, because my heels start to click clack clack against the wooden frame of the massage table, and I’m sure everyone can hear. I open one eye and have a peak at Deano. He’s in
another zone, head tilting upwards, and I’m not even sure if he notices.

Crown Chakra! she continues, and Dean’s hands shoot right up to the top of my head. This one’s about connecting us fully to the spiritual essence of the universe. Normally Rain likes her healers to work their way methodically up the body, but today, Waylean and Mestapheen are detecting a block of such magnitude that they’re going to have to mix and match through the chakras in order to toggle it loose.

My hips go too. Shake, shake, thump, thump. Up and down on the table, like I’m showing everyone how I used to do it with Saidhbh, back when we lived on planet Earth. I keep my eyes shut tight now and try to ride out the storm. I can’t imagine what Deano’s thinking. Probably thrilled that his healer’s hands are finally doing the trick. Like he’s Paul Daniels under laboratory conditions. And it reminds me of watching a film one summer night back in Dublin, when everyone was out in the garden chatting about the goings-on in The Sorrows, and I was alone inside with the real-life story of an American schoolkid who is actually a mentaller but doesn’t know it. Then one day in class a really evil bully calls him a retard, which is the American way of saying mentaller. He comes home that night and bursts out crying to his mom, and says, ‘They called me retarded, am I retarded?’ Only the way he says retarded is with an accent, and dead sad. Am I retawded?

I bawled my eyes out, alone in the room. And I worried for weeks that I was retawded and no one had the guts to tell me. I think about this film, suddenly and clearly, as I’m pinging around on the table, like a mad fish, flapping for his life.

I’m concentrating so hard on controlling the flips that I miss the next three chakras. Third Eye, Throat and Solar Plexus chakras. They go by in a blur, and I’m not even sure if Winter Rain, or Waylean and Mestapheen, actually says anything about
them. It’s just heat from Deano’s hands, and everything, every part of me, banging and bobbing, and flipping and bopping, right there on the spot.

Then she says it. Heart Chakra! Deano moves his hands down, right over the centre of my chest. Bam! I shoot up on the table, like my chest is either going to burst right open and splatter everyone with gore, or I’m going to have a massive diarrhoea attack. Thankfully I avoid both by flipping myself right off the table and landing face down on the ground. Deano breaks the trance and hoists me to my knees. There’s a general commotion as all the healers around me, all twenty-something of them, snap back out into reality. Naturally, I’m a bit freaked, so I shake myself free from Deano’s grasp, tell him to leave me the feck alone, and make a mad dart for the double doors by the tea table.

And then I hear it.

Jim Finnegan!

My name is shouted, bellowed even, right across the hall, as loud as be damned. I grab the handle, yank it down and reef one half of the heavy wooden door wide open.

Jim Finnegan!

Again. I’m almost out the door, but I give a little backwards glance, just to see which mentaller exactly is trying to make me stay.

Of course, I almost collapse when I see it myself. I definitely don’t let go of the door handle. Just for support. Because there, up on the altar, lifting her veil high above her head and bellowing out my name for all to hear is none other than old fizzy eyes and scarface herself, Helen Macker.

It’s me! she says, ripping the veil off altogether. It’s Helen!

Meeting Helen changes everything. I start taking my healings dead seriously from then on. She says that she can see something in me, something glowy and bright, and if I could only harness its power I could be a brilliant healer too, just like her. The limits are only your own, she says, sounding a bit Goddy, but smiling all the same, and telling me that, with the right instruction, I could cure Saidhbh in a single session. Easy-peasy, she says, clicking her fingers and shaking her head. I could heal the loss inside her biological body and simultaneously make her ethereal soul excited and motivated to face the world anew, and I could help her make pure and quiet peace with the soul of our dead baby.

Oh yes, she says, giving me a face that means that I can’t wriggle out of this one. Your baby is very much a spiritual being, and ethereally alive, and tied to Saidhbh’s energetic cords with a near unbreakable bond. With her, beside her, above and below. Which is a thing that I’ve heard before from Mass, but Helen has gone and made it her own.

We have a brilliant chatting session together that first night, me and Helen. No one in the hall can believe that we know each
other. And they’re totally shocked at the way Helen ripped off her veil and ‘broke healing’, which is basically like staring Waylean and Mestapheen in the face and then slamming the door shut on them without a word of explanation. Helen isn’t bothered though, and instead runs down through the beds and tells me that she recognised me the minute she saw my field. She says that she can see auric fields with her naked eyes, and that everyone has different-coloured fields that correspond to the movement of their chakras within. Healthy Root Chakra means lots of red in the field. Throat Chakra is blue. Solar Chakra yellow, and so on. She doesn’t tell me my colour but just giggles and will only say that it’s very, how can she put it, distinctive.

She’s still gorgeous. Even with the hockey damage. Her eyes still fizz with crystal blue when she looks at you. Her hair is shorter, but still wavy. And the scars that snake outwards from her mouth, like the manky legs of a dead spider, only make her look more interesting. As if she’s got a story to tell.

She says that she never meant to get into this healing lark in the first place, and that it was thanks to the guiding hands of the universe, and to Gaia, that she ended up here. When she says the word Gaia she does a tiny little bow. Which is kind of funny, because it makes me nod too, as if I’m also a big Gaia fan. Although Deano later tells me that Gaia is just another name for the spiritual energy of the Earth, which, I suppose, actually does make me a fan, and certainly explains why Obi-Wan Kenobi clutches his heart in
Star Wars
when Princess Leia’s home world is blown to pieces, because it’s like the whole planet itself has just died, and since it clearly has a big giant spirit too, like Gaia, and Obi-Wan is like Serenity Powers and can see all the magic stuff in the universe, he’s taking it all a bit personally. Hence the chest pains.

Helen says that things went bad after the hockey-ball accident. And that even after her teeth were done and the stitches were
taken out she felt rubbish about herself and her mashed-up face and would’ve had a full-blown mental breakdown, and gone into St John of Gods and everything, only her mam was a dead strong countrywoman and dead practical, and immediately signed Helen up for an eight-week course in Beauty Therapy and Cosmetology in Kilcuman Tech. My eyes go a bit glazy when she says Cosmetology. I’m thinking of the old fat fella with the eyeglass on BBC2 who does the star-watching programme that Dad pretends to watch when he wants to feel brainy. But Helen says that it was all about make-up, and that for the first few weeks she was gutted, because you had to look at yourself every day in the mirror, and use your own face as a Girl’s World-style dummy for a million different make-up techniques.

Eventually, and with the help of the other girls on the course, she got over it. Two of them especially, lovely young wans called Bernie and Delores, were brilliant at helping her apply tons of filler and foundation all over her scars, and by week four you wouldn’t even know that she had a single mark, let alone a faceful of crooked snaky lines. They became best buddies and were instantly known around town, because of their love of make-up, and of the bronzed Caribbean Deluxe style in particular, as the three Oompa Loompas. These are the little fellas in
Willy Wonka
who have green hair and orangey faces and are great at whipping together catchy tunes about spoilt kids who’ve just nearly died. Helen laughs now, and says that sometimes the rugger players from Rock, meaning Blackrock school, which is a posh school for boys with rich dads, would start singing Oompa Loompa Doopadee Do whenever she and Bernie and Delores would walk into McSorely’s in Ranelagh for an evening bevvie after a hard day at the mirror, and wearing the full-on Caribbean Deluxe. It wouldn’t bother them, though, she adds, laughing again at the way she was then, because they’d still be all over you by the end of the night.

By week eight they all graduated with flying colours, and by that Christmas, which just happened to be my worst one ever, they had all emigrated to London, because London is where you find the best make-up jobs in the whole world, including ads, movies, TV and weddings. Bernie, Delores and Helen mostly did weddings. They clubbed their talents together and decided to call themselves The Oompa Loompas as an eye-catching business thing, and even hired a van with it written on the side, just above their phone number and a picture of lipstick and a make-up brush. They weren’t fussy at all, and they did graduations too, and even naming ceremonies. And this is where Helen met Serenity Powers.

Helen gets a bit choked at this point. She’s not upset, as in crying and going red-faced. But her eyes are watering all the same. We’re sitting opposite each other, on two different massage beds, and I’m half lying back, with one leg kind of cocked up in the air, like Burt Reynolds when he poses for magazine shoots. I’m cold, but I don’t show it. And it’s gone dark outside, because the few remaining stained-glass windows are now totally coal black, and you can’t see the picture at all. The rest of the class is all murmur-murmur in the background, down by the tea table at the double doors. I can tell that they’re looking up at us, and making comments, but I pretend there’s no one around, and I just listen, all ears, to Helen’s story.

She says that she did the make-up for this little Portuguese wan with lethal acne, who asked her to drop by the naming ceremony itself, to say congratulations for five years of hard healing finally done, and to raise a glass of orange juice in her name. Helen, always with an eye for the business, and imagining raking in a shedload of clients for The Oompa Loompas, turned up at the bash, in this very same church hall in Islington, expecting to laugh her head off at a bunch of beardy mentalists, and instead met her Maker in Serenity.

She says that Serenity clocked her from miles off, from about here to the tea table. And even though Serenity was surrounded by students and friends and colleagues who were hanging on her every word and generally licking up to her big time, she simply stood up and walked over to Helen and – and this is the maddest bit – she reached into her own handbag and pulled out a paper hankie and wiped all of Helen’s make-up away, right in front of everyone. Helen says that she stood there, scars showing to the whole world for the first time in ages, and she cried out loud, really bawling, louder than ever before, with her whole heart in it. Serenity just stood still, smiling in front of her, and held Helen’s face so softly in her hands and said, I see you. And you are beautiful.

And that was it. That was the beginning. She says that she does a couple of shifts now and then with The Oompas, just to make up the rent and her part of the weekly Safeways shop, but generally she’s taken to the School like a duck to water. She says, between you and me, she thinks that the hockey-ball impact kind of dislodged some primal block in her spirit, which possibly explains why she’s picked up the tools of the trade so quickly. And why Serenity allows her to take so many classes. Like tonight, for instance! She makes her eyeballs go big at this, and lifts her eyebrows high, to show that it’s a funny old world.

I tell her, in return, that it’s totally mad that me and her should meet again, and in London of all places. But she instantly goes all wise and quiet and just shakes her head and tells me that she knew this would happen. She says that you can’t fight the forces of the universe, and of light and of energy. And then she smiles and strokes the side of my face, like I’m a lost puppy returned, or the prodigal son.

Deano doesn’t know what to be doing during all this. He’s mostly awkward and stuttery around Helen, especially because
he’s never seen her as anything other than Winter Rain, who is either the annoying little rip who jumped the Astral Science queue or else someone who just might be, thanks to the Serenity Powers’ stamp of approval, the real deal.

Looking at her, sitting on the massage beds and being all relaxed and chatty and young, is odd for him. He occasionally floats over to us when he hears me talking, and butts in, adding little decorative details to my story, such as how long we’ve been staying at Aunty Grace’s. But otherwise, and especially when me and Helen are getting down to the nitty gritty, he simply floats backwards away through the empty hall towards the other students who’ve long since packed up their healing towels and folded away the rest of the beds, and have gathered near the tea table for hot water and lemon juice, and wheat-and gluten-free flapjacks, and are hoping for the inside scoop on Winter Rain’s sudden break with the School of Astral Sciences play-book.

Of course no one gets charged for the night’s session. And Helen even whispers to me that I won’t have to spend a penny for any of my lessons. She’ll have a word with the boss woman herself, on my behalf. It’ll be an honour, she says, to bring you out of your shell. And then she winks, as if it’s all getting a bit rude. Which is funny. Because the chat we’re having, then and there, is such full-on magic that a part of me starts to feel dead guilty, especially when my stomach goes a tiny bit giddy, like it does when you know that you’ve met someone who you fancy, or at least might fancy at some point in the future.

And I keep thinking of this jokey phrase that Mozzo used to say about birds and fannies and how he could get any bird he wanted to in all of Kilcuman but he couldn’t be arsed because of having Saidhbh at home. And the jokey phrase was about him not being fecked to go out for a mouldy burger when he had a delicious steak sitting waiting for him at home on the kitchen
table. Meaning that Saidhbh was the steak, and any other bird that he met out on the street on the way to Quinnsworth’s or to Foley’s would be a burger. Mozzo also told me and Gary that when it came to getting fanny action you shouldn’t be looking at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire, which was a rubbish thing to say, and only made us imagine some headless young wan with Christmas cards on her neck and a blazing fanny, and us with singed eyebrows for getting too close to the hot zone. But for the moment I’m stuck on the steak and the burger, and I’m thinking of Saidhbh at home right now, in her Glengall prison, puffing Rothmans out the window, or leafing through the day’s tree work. And I know that she’s steak, and that she’ll always be steak. And that Helen, with her brilliant stories and fizzy eyes, is just a special kind of burger.

And anyway, it’s only talking and gabbing and catching up. Like when Mam meets one of the aul wans from the swimming club in Bray, and she hasn’t seen them in nearly ten years and only spotted them by chance as they crossed the Ha’penny Bridge on the back route to Henry Street. The pair will hoot and hug for a few seconds and then, realising that they’re still going their separate ways at the end of the head to head, they have to rattle through everything that’s happened in the missing years, machine-gun style, no prisoners, no mercy.

Me and Helen are a bit like that. We can see that the students at the tea table are really getting restless, and kind of tapping their feet with boredom, so everything we say has to be rushed and short and bursty, with huge big stories about life and love crammed into a few jabbed words. My stuff is mostly about Saidhbh, and coming to London, and how I got Saidhbh ‘into trouble’. Helen listens to it all and nods slowly with her best Goddy smile, as if she knows everything that I’m saying already, like the way the Lord knows each one of the hairs on your head, even before you’re born and have hair, or a head. She tells me
that she can see it all, crystal clear, right in front of her face. When I ask her what she means, she laughs and calls me a dummy and says that it’s all over my field, my auric field, and that she can read it all, like a living language, in the colour swirls and energetic eddies that flow in front of my actual physical body.

I can see EVERYTHING! she says, making a mountain out of the word everything, and doing the kind of goofy nod that you do which tells someone that you know loads of secrets about them. And then she laughs, swings her leg forward, and gives me a little kick, from her massage bed over to mine, as if it’s all a big joke, but not quite.

The last of Helen’s stories are mostly about how brilliant her life’s been since joining the school. She says that even though she’s living with Bernie and Delores in a manky two-bed in Shepherd’s Bush, and still does the odd few weddings and hen nights with The Oompa Loompas, she’s hoping to give it all up and go full time into Astral Science, maybe work directly for Serenity Powers herself, maybe even move to California!

Go right to the source, eh? she says, while rolling her eyes to the roof and adding with a sigh, God, it’s such a rush! You’ll find out all about it, mark my words!

And then she suddenly stops herself and leans forward on the bed, right into my face.

You are coming back for more healing, aren’t you?

It’s as if the thought that I might want to scrap the whole healing thing and go back to being a non-multicoloured normal fella had only just occurred to her, and the thought’s very existence was a knife to the heart.