Lucky Break (36 page)

‘If you're interested,' he wrapped the delicate purple stone in swathes of paper, ‘there's a tarot reading course, starting tonight in the shop.' He looked at her, quickly, closely. ‘I'm picking up on something. I think you might have a feeling for it, a gift.'

Charlie laughed out loud. ‘Bye,' she remembered to say as she reached the door, and she repeated to herself, astounded, hilarious, ‘a gift. I don't think so.' And still laughing, reaching for another handful of dried fruit, she walked off down the road.

 

The next morning there was a message from Maisie. ‘What happened?' Her voice was tight. ‘The people at Opus were worried about you. Call me and we'll set up another meeting.'

Charlie lay in the bath and looked at the oblong of blue sky above her. A bird flew across the skylight, and then far above it, a plane.
If I ever have to listen to your impertinence again
. And she closed her eyes.

 

The homeopath, when she next visited, encouraged her to keep on with the diet. She diagnosed a yeast infection that needed to be treated, and after writing down the unappealing names of various herbal remedies, she suggested she get them at the Planet Organic shop, just opened, not far from where she lived. The shop was large, two floors of pulses, juices, whole grains and rice crackers. Upstairs was a pharmacy with an enormous selection of bath and beauty products, and a revolving pillar of books.
Depression
,
Sleeplessness
,
Anxiety
,
Addiction
,
Living with ME
. . . Charlie leafed through the imprints. Bloody hell, she thought, I've got off lightly, and she visualised her Silk Cut, like a holy relic lying in the shrine of the kitchen drawer. As she spun the pillar round, she became aware of someone talking on the phone. ‘Sure, but isn't that the problem . . .' It was a man. ‘Really? OK, try me. And this time, I promise, I'll actually listen.'

On the other side of the pillar the titles were more optimistic.
Visualisation. Meditation. Reiki. Yoga
. Charlie plucked
You Can Heal Your Life
from its wire rack and listened to the man listening. After a while, when the silence had gone on longer than most silences lasted, Charlie looked up. The man was young, a boy really, skinny and messy with bright blue eyes. He caught her looking and smiled.

‘OK,' he said eventually. ‘I didn't understand.' He took a breath. ‘So let's meet. Let's sort it out.' Charlie moved towards the till. ‘What? No, I mean now. I've got a break at three.' He laughed, and the person at the other end must have laughed too. ‘Great. See you tonight then. Good. And don't forget whenever you're ready, I'll give you your next attunement.'

Charlie felt she was allowed. ‘What's an attunement?' She looked at him, and his blue eyes sparkled. ‘And if it's nice, can I have one?'

‘Sure,' he said, taking her list, and scouring the shelves for what she needed. ‘I train people, I'm a Reiki Master, and if you want an attunement, I'm doing one next Thursday. Do you know anything about Reiki?'

‘No,' Charlie glanced at the stack of books.

‘That's all right,' he slid her remedies on to the counter. ‘An attunement is where I pass on the power to start healing. No one knows anything when they start. I got my first attunement from a nun in Shoreditch. It was just chance. Or maybe,' he opened his eyes wide, ‘it was Meant to Be.'

‘OK.' Charlie scrabbled in her bag for a piece of paper. ‘Tell me when and where and I'll try it.'

The phone was ringing and there was another customer waiting, but he bent over the paper and wrote down the details. ‘I'm Bram,' he told her. ‘I'll see you then. Look forward to it.'

‘Charlie,' she said, and when she walked outside she realised she hadn't thought once about her skin.

 

Right up until Thursday Charlie wasn't sure that she was going to go. Maybe she'd be offered the headmistress job anyway, and be taken up with fittings for shoulder-padded jackets. Or her mother might suffer complications and be re-admitted to hospital and she'd have to dash back to Cheltenham and stand by her bed. But Thursday came with nothing in her diary but a question mark and the word ‘Bram'. The address he'd given her was in Stoke Newington. What should she expect? A temple of some sort, with supplicants bowing before a shrine, or the nunnery he'd mentioned, with a light-filled room and one white bed? But in fact Charlie found herself welcomed into a perfectly normal basement flat, a futon racked up with cushions, socks drying on the radiator, tea offered in thick stained mugs. There was one other girl there, watchful like her, unsure what to expect. ‘Hi,' she said, ‘I'm Tasha,' and they sipped their tea while Bram asked them both to say why they were there and what they hoped to learn. The room smelt of incense. Three candles, their wicks alight in caves of wax, glowed palely on the narrow ledge above the gas fire. Tasha told them she was a massage therapist and wanted to heighten her skills, Charlie said she didn't know, she supposed she was just curious. Then for a while no one spoke. Music played quietly, not music really, but a series of sounds, burbles and gongs and sharp metallic chimes. A bird twittered, a car hummed by outside. Then Bram spoke quietly from where he sat. ‘OK, now I can feel that everything is open and receptive I'm going to give you your attunement.'

He asked them to hold out their hands in a prayer position, and he moved across the room and, without warning, seized Charlie's palms from behind and drawing them up above her head, blew into them. Charlie tried not to laugh. His breath was cool and ticklish, his grip surprisingly firm. She took a breath to steady herself as he returned her hands, dipping them towards her forehead, her throat, setting them back before her heart. ‘That's good,' he murmured, ‘now I'm going to place my hands on your energy chakras.' Charlie waited for his touch, but she felt nothing. ‘What the hell am I doing here?' she asked herself, but soon she felt heat spread out across her shoulders. She shifted. It felt good. Like the sun shining down on her. The heat moved up her neck, down over her head like a hood. Her brain stilled, her thoughts lulled, her eyelids drooped. For a long time she sat there, aware of where his hands were, drawing waves of energy she didn't know she had around her body. She could feel it like the tail of a Chinese dragon, undulating in a concertina dance, and then, as it moved across her chest, it stuck. There was a layer of resistance, as if her heart were sealed in a padded, heart-shaped box. ‘That's better,' Bram muttered, as with a little tear the dragon tail shifted free, and he reached down for her hands again, blew into her palms, and moved away. Come back! she wanted to call after him, Don't leave me here, but actually she was full.

Later, Bram showed them the system of placing hands, over and over until they had the order. He told them that for twenty-one days they should give themselves healing, starting at their heads and working their way down to the feet. ‘First you need to put energy into your hands,' he said, ‘then focus on the parallel space between the hands.'

‘Reiki, Reiki, Reiki,' he chanted, and he asked them to do the same. Charlie waited for a smirk to rise and overwhelm her, but there was something so straightforward about Bram, so charming and light-hearted, that it never came. ‘Reiki, Reiki, Reiki,' she said, and she attended to the energy accumulating between her palms.

‘That's great,' Bram encouraged. ‘Now, before you start your healing it's nice to ask the person you are working with, or yourself, what it is they want. What do you want?' he asked Tasha.

‘Strength and peace.' She sounded sure, and Charlie was relieved she hadn't suggested a lead role opposite Daniel Craig.

‘Health and happiness?'

‘Health and happiness,' Bram repeated, and as he moved his hands across the force field of her body, he told her that sometimes it was possible to get a sensation in your own body that directed you to where the other person needed healing.

 

That first night Charlie sat at home and tried out her new skills. She held her hands in parallel. Reiki, Reiki, Reiki, but the space between them remained empty and cool. She made a bowl of her palms and blew into it, asking herself what she wanted. Nothing, it seemed. There was nothing there. Instead she flicked on the TV and found to her horror that she was watching a repeat of the first episode of
The Inspectors
, the detective series she'd made in Manchester the year before. There she was, with that idiot John Bulling, as they ran from a burning house and took shelter in a warehouse filled with feathers. Her finger hovered over the remote, but she was unable to look away as, turning sharply to avoid John's embrace, she caught his arm and pulled him down into the soft mountain of a stack of pillows. She watched, nostalgic for the flicker of desire that still existed between them, cursing herself for ruining it one late bored night when she set herself the challenge of seducing him. For the rest of that long series she had to meet his hurt and angry eye, and listen to the make-up women report on his increasing desperation, especially when, through some misguided notion of the importance of honesty, he decided to tell his wife, who promptly left him. ‘Pathetic,' she muttered to herself, and the scene still playing, Charlie held her hands up to her face. ‘Peace and Forgiveness,' she pleaded, and she felt the first warm tingling as her fingers responded.

Charlie practised every day that week. What do I want? She closed her eyes, and she held her healing hands up like new toys.

 

‘I'm sorry,' Maisie called, ‘the headmistress job didn't work out. There's some interest from
Casualty
, though. I'm not sure if you . . .' she trailed off. ‘It would be a guest lead.' Charlie put her hand over her heart to calm herself. ‘No, that's all right, Maisie. I think I'll pass on that.'

Maisie laughed. ‘What happened? I thought you'd tell me to bog off.'

‘Bog off,' Charlie said. ‘And by the way, I'll be out of London from tomorrow. I can get back if it's urgent. But not if I don't have to. Just for a few days.'

‘OK,' Maisie sounded perplexed. ‘Talk soon.' And she rang off.

 

The next day Charlie drove to Cheltenham. It always shocked her that it only took two hours, when sometimes months, or even once, a year passed, without her finding the time to visit. Her parents were waiting, as she expected them to be, in formal black-and-white arrangement in the lounge. There was tea laid on a tray before them, a circle of biscuits on a plate. Irritation rose like a habit inside her. Now there would be a row when she said no to shortbread, concern when she asked for tea without milk.

‘My daughter, it is good to see you,' her father patted her shoulder and her mother, struggling, stood up.

‘Oh Mummy,' Charlie rushed towards her. ‘Stay where you are.'

Gratefully, her mother sank down again and Charlie took her hand. ‘How are you?' A grey pallor had taken root, and the rings under her eyes were worn and creased.

‘Oh, not too bad, you know.' Her mother smiled, and she bent forward to the teapot.

‘No milk,' Charlie stopped her. ‘Actually, I'm on a special diet. To try and sort out my skin.'

Her mother looked at her, and even her father came closer.

‘What do you mean?' They looked outraged. ‘You have lovely skin.'

‘No really . . .'

‘You don't need any special diets.' Her mother shook her head. ‘Go on, have a biscuit. If anything you're too thin.'

Charlie shrugged her shoulders. ‘I'd love a cup of tea, with lemon?' and relieved to have something to do, her father disappeared into the kitchen.

‘So,' her mother leant back. ‘So tell me, what have you been up to? It's been a while since we heard any news of that nice young man, Rob.'

Her father returned with three thin slices of lemon on a saucer. ‘Thanks, Dad,' she smiled at him and she settled back for an evening of surreal questions and disjointed conversation, broken up by her mother's occasional shudders of discomfort and her father's anguished fussing.

 

‘Mummy, can I try something?' Charlie asked when there was nothing left to do but go to bed.

‘What's that, dear?' Her mother had her feet up on a stool.

‘It's something I learnt,' Charlie told her. ‘If you close your eyes, I don't even need to touch you. Just put my hands like this.' Charlie held her hands out before her, and said Reiki, very quietly, three times to herself. She heard her father clear his throat, but then his chair squeaked as he drew it nearer. ‘How would you like to feel?' she asked, wincing at the unfamiliar question, moving her hands to hover over her mother's head.

‘Ohh,' her mother exclaimed, ‘well . . . ' she laughed, as if it was neither here nor there. ‘Well, I'd like to feel . . . comfortable, and . . .' Charlie could almost hear her thinking, ‘and optimistic. Yes.'

‘OK,' Charlie blinked away a spray of tears. ‘Right.' Warmth was spreading through her fingers, as if light was seeping into her veins. Slowly she moved her hands, resting them on the cushion of her mother's discomfort, following an invisible thread of pain. Her hands grew hot, and the harder she concentrated the brighter the light shone inside her, until she felt she was pulling her mother towards her, so unfamiliar, after a lifetime of pushing her away. Slowly, tentatively she let her hands hover over her mother's stomach, swollen, tender, setting up a corresponding throb in her own womb, but as the heat intensified, her mother's eyes sprang open. ‘No,' she struggled to get up, and unable to manage it she vomited over the side of the chair. ‘Charlotte Adedayo!' her father shouted. But her mother shushed him. ‘It was too much,' she gratefully accepted the proffered hankie. ‘It was too much for me, that's all.'