The Fields (35 page)

Healing Saidhbh is total rubbish. She’s come back from the mental home a changed woman, and is all cocky and full of herself. It’s just before Christmas week, and it takes me a whole five days to persuade her to let me even try to heal her. And even then she spends most of the time looking at her watch, and asking me to hurry up.

I’ve got the bedroom set up and everything. Good and dark, and with three candles, and some Indian binjy-banjy music playing in the background, one of Deano’s tapes. I don’t yet have a massage table, although I’m saving up for one, which I’ll buy after I’ve paid the full whack on the flights – although I’m in serious trouble there, and getting nervous calls from Pika at Kilburn Student Travel, telling me that I’ve only got two days left to cough up the balance on the tickets or else the flights get cancelled, and I’ll have to find another way to get back to Dublin for Christmas. Which, with only one week to go, is a tall order indeed.

So, anyway, I have to do the healing on the floor, on a lilo mattress, and me on my knees, shuffling round it as I move along the body. Saidhbh, meanwhile, is dead distracted and says that she has oodles left to do for her portfolio, so she asks me to make it
a snappy one. She’s facing into a super-tight deadline for her course – which is to learn painting for a whole year in a school called Chelsea, where you study nothing but drawing and painting and doing arty things. She says that Toby, one of the occupational therapists from the mental home, who has a skinhead haircut and big loopy earrings, is also a part-time teacher at Chelsea. And he’s going to put in a word for her, to get her on the one-year course, with a view, she says, to doing three more years after that. Toby, she says, believes in her drawings. He says that they are raw, and real, and speak to something utterly painful about a woman’s experience in the modern world. And if she just fills up her portfolio with another twenty top-class pics, then it should be a cinch to get her in the door.

She’ll have to move house though, according to Toby. She can’t be travelling right across London every day when there’s oodles of squats near Chelsea, filled with oodles of painting students who’d love to hang out with Saidhbh and compare pics all morning and then smoke drugs and talk about the Great Masters and be a bit angry about the way that Maggie Thatcher and the businessmen in red braces are making everyone selfish. Toby lives in a squat too, she says. He doesn’t believe in having your own house and needing piles of money. Everything he has goes on painting gear and earrings. He’s definitely mad about Saidhbh. He’s already met Aunty Grace, only the once, but even from that short meeting out on the street, next to his bicycle, she said that he was ‘the business’. After he’s gone, Aunty Grace comes running into Saidhbh’s room – which she shares again with Fiona since she stopped trying to kill herself – and she tells her, in front of Fiona, that Toby is a real keeper, even with the skinhead haircut, and that she should hang on to him at all costs.

Fiona tells me the whole story that night and I feel like shooting myself. I don’t think that it’s fair, that people can do that.
That an aunty could choose an artistic skinhead on a bicycle over her own nephew in the blink of an eye, despite all the things that she’s seen me do, and the things I’ve been planning for Saidhbh while she was on the inside. All the healings I’ve been practising. All the training. And I don’t think it’s fair either that Saidhbh could walk out through the gates of a mental home and leave her entire old self behind, like a rubbish bomber jacket that you wouldn’t mind losing at a New Year hoolie. Or that she could suddenly start acting so grown-up and adulty, and treat me like we’re just best bender buddies again, or like I’m back to being this little fella who runs around his sister’s parties in Spider Man pyjamas. Like it’s all been a rubbish dream, everything, from then until now. World without end.

You could go mad. You really could. Or at least you could do some serious damage to a knotty tree trunk with the action end of your skull. As it happens, I don’t have a tree trunk to hand so I use my pillow instead. I have a right old tantrum, alone in the room, underneath the
Rubber Soul
poster, and I whimper through tears and scream into the bed linen, and occasionally think to myself that this is what it must’ve been like for Heathcliff in the English bog, going, Ah Jaysus, women are fecking mental and they’re driving me crazy!

When Fiona comes into the room it only makes things worse. I’m all sort of sweaty from the tantrum, but the way she looks at me is so kind, and makes me feel so young and so small that I don’t know whether to take a running jump straight into her arms and let her hug me into heaven for the rest of my life or to tell her to feck off with herself because I’m not a big fecking baby any more. I do neither, and decide to bury my head into the pillow goodo. Fiona’s brilliant though, and just strokes the back of my head and tells me that I’m to try and be happy for Saidhbh, because of everything she’s been through, and because this is the best that we, or anyone, has seen her in for ever.

I do some more whimpering, and Fiona does some more stroking, and in the silence she tells me not to worry about Toby, and that even though he’s three times my age and has a brilliant job in Chelsea, he’s only half the man that I am. This makes me sniffle slowly back to life again, and straighten up on the bed, like a teary toddler who’s just realised that he is getting a second scoop of ice-cream after all.

I look fully into Fiona’s face.

But what about the healing? I say, desperately needy, needing to help, and wanting to prove.

You show her! says Fiona, not missing a beat, not a second’s delay. And you show him too! Meaning Toby.

She then holds my hands tightly, and says, no joke, that I’m to clean myself up, and go down there to Saidhbh, and I’m to show her exactly what these things, meaning my hands, are made of!

Saidhbh giggles a bit during the start of the healing, and she keeps on peeking out at me through squinty eyes when I’m trying to find the outside of her field. It’s almost impossible to concentrate, and I end up, a bit angry, skipping this part, and skipping the chakra testing too, and going straight for the Third Eye Seeing. This is rubbish too, and I can’t see anything other than Saidhbh lying out in front of me in dungarees and Doc Martens, gripping both sides of the lilo mattress and biting her lip with how funny it is to see how mental I’ve become while she’s been on the inside. She smirks and giggles every time I do a big breath. And she says things like ‘Easy, tiger’ any time my hands hover near her root chakra or her heart chakra. I try to tell her to stop messing, and to take it seriously, because it worked brilliantly on a sick chicken in London Zoo. But she’s not interested.

I get no readings at all from her being, physical or cosmic. I re-plug my Hara line about ten times and with each new deep inhalation from the soul of the universe I get nothing. Not a
single flicker. Not a vibration. Not a colour, a glow, or a spin. Nothing. Helen warned us that sessions like this exist. She said that if you ever found yourself in this situation – and pray you don’t – it means only one of two things: that the person you’re healing is dead, or that you, to put it bluntly, are simply not a healer. You don’t have what it takes.

I wonder, for a second or two, if Saidhbh is dead. Perhaps she killed herself for good in the mental home and this is nothing less than her ghostly memory in front of me. It’s unlikely, though. For one, we would’ve got the call-up from the mental home in the wee hours. And besides, the body in front of me is now sweating lightly all round the mouth and forehead area with the effort that it’s taking her to hold in the giggles.

We finish the session early. I don’t even bother calling my guides for the direct conversation with her spiritual essence. Saidhbh can see that I’m upset, and tries to make it better by saying that she feels amazing, and so relaxed and calm and like a new woman. She’s almost halfway out the door when she turns and says she’ll definitely have another one of them, in a month or two, and that I’ve really got a genuine gift in them there hands of mine.

I go to work feeling sadder than I’ve felt in ages. Sick with myself, and with my life. My head feels like it’s sitting in a bucket of glue, and I’m about to burst out crying again at any minute. Aunty Grace was right. Helen’s a nutter. All that binjy-banjy shite for nothing.

The place is all done up, Christmas style, with tinsel wrapped around the Mexican hats, and fairy lights running the entire length of the restaurant. Naturally, O’Culigeen’s already there when I arrive, staring up at me from his booth like the toilet-paper puppy on telly, and it makes me so furious that I feel like tipping a whole skillet of boiling fajita oil over him. I shuffle
down to the end of the restaurant and into the staffroom, where Billy’s having a sneaky ciggie and, to make matters worse, is in a right grouchy state. He’s a bit snappy with me when I tell him that my locker’s empty, and that I’ve left my second busboy outfit at home and can I please borrow one of his spare aprons. He gives me a mini lecture about being a big baby who can’t stand up for myself, and should know by now how to keep track of my aprons. So I feel even more useless. And yet immediately, just as quickly, Billy waves his arms about in front of his face and apologises for his mood, and says that his dinner party buddies are coming in tonight, so his nerves aren’t the best. I don’t ask why. He hovers round his own locker, and makes sure that it’s shut good and tight by banging it closed around five times in a row.

Sure enough, within the hour, Roger and Jamie arrive, with Soz in tow, all in denims and tight white T-shirts and Santy hats, looking super clean and fresh, and all kind of polished. Billy sits them right opposite O’Culigeen, which makes him look even beardier and trampier and them look even more like three giddy snooker balls biffing and bashing each other happily round the table. They do funny gay men things like ordering a huge jug of margarita, and clapping quickly when it comes to the table, and then making jokes about the chimichanga, asking each other if they’d like some hot beef inside them. They’re having a great time, and if I didn’t know any better I’d say that they were being even louder and gayer than ever. Roger, for instance, grabs one of the Mexican hats off the wall display next to them, and starts doing this big loud act, like a Mexican man. Only it’s not just for the other fellas, but for a lot of the other tables too, and definitely for O’Culigeen.

I’m still a bit of a zombie, and gutted about the fact that I’m rubbish at healing, despite having a bright glowy light within me. I mess up loads of orders too. I bring a lone plate of enchiladas to a family of six in Billy’s section when they were supposed to
be a starter for two girls sharing near the bar. Then I main-away one of Billy’s tables while they’re still on the nachos and waiting for their first round of drinks. And I take two orders for extra coffees from a family who are going to the theatre and then forget to tell Billy about it. They get into a big huff, and the dad says, as he’s walking out the door, that if they’re late for
Les Mis
because of my forgotten coffees they’ll be back to ask Trevor, in person, to pay for their tickets.

You really have to be strong not to cry at times like this, and if it weren’t for Billy and everyone around me telling me that the customers are fecking berks, and that I’m doing fine, I’d be in floods. But what really pushes me over the edge is these two fellas in rubbish Irish jumpers and grey pleated jeans who come in and sit down at the bar, but right at the edge of Billy’s section. They stare at me through the whole pre-theatre service and they barely touch their food. Every time I whizz past them I catch snatches of their conversation, and I’m pretty sure from their High-Nigh-Brine-Kigh accents that they’re from the North, probably Belfast.

I bravely face facts, and decide that they’re most likely two IRA hitmen sent to kill me by Taighdhg Donohue’s connections in The Movement, and the very idea gives me a sudden shot of nervous diarrhoea. I run to the loo and sit in the cubicle with everything spinning around my head while trying to remember a joke about diarrhoea that Mam used to tell which said something about the bottom falling out of your world and the world falling out of your bottom.

I don’t come back on the floor for another half an hour, but when I do it’s all change. The IRA fellas are still there, and still giving me the evil eye but feck me if O’Culigeen hasn’t gone and joined Roger and the others on the gay table. They’re all gathered around O’Culigeen, and have put one of the Santy hats on his head, and are filling his tumbler high with margarita, and pawing him and laughing wildly as he tells them about the funny things
that happened to him while he was on the missions in Papua New Guinea. As I approach the table he’s telling them about the time that he pretended to the savages, for a laugh, to mistake a native headdress for an exotic fruit cocktail, and they’re hooting about the place at the wackiness of it all. I try to duck past them but O’Culigeen’s arm shoots out and he drunkenly grabs me and pulls me to the tableside. He asks me to order a fresh jug of margaritas for his new best friends, and then tries to surprise everybody with the fact that he and I are buddies of old. From the old days, he slurs, while making a deliberately goofy sign of the cross in the air. The lads laugh again, and don’t seem too interested in our story, but instead ask O’Culigeen to tell them some more stories from his priesty days. And confessions! Yes, tell us about confessions! Don’t hold back! The grisliest? The dirtiest? Yes. Tell us them all!

The night goes on like this, with the gays and O’Culigeen making the biggest noise of any table, even as the music kicks in for the home stretch. This is the last two hours of service, when they clear a tiny space in front of the bar, and turn the restaurant into a half-disco. You can drink as much booze as you like if you stumble in at this point, but the catch is that you must order food with your booze, which proves to everyone that it’s not a real disco and still a restaurant.