CHAPTER 5
‘Franz, wake up!’
‘What?’ He sat up so suddenly that Ella jumped back from him. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Two in the morning.’
‘Huh?’
‘Franz, are you all right? You were thrashing about in your sleep and shouting.’
He groaned and lay back on the pillows. ‘You scared me. I thought the building was on fire or something!’
‘Well, you scared me! Were you having a nightmare?’
‘No. Just a dream.’
‘Some dream! What was it about?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You do! What did Earl tell us at that dream workshop? Recall one detail and start from there. I’ll get the notebook.’
‘Ella. Can’t we just go back to sleep?’
‘No, this is important, Franz. One detail. Come on – think.’
He pretended to think but in fact all the details were horribly clear. He might as well come clean and get it over with.
‘Okay. I was walking along a path and then suddenly it was a rope, above a ravine. Then the lights went out and it was dark.’
Ella was scribbling notes. ‘Very good. What else?’
‘There was a light on the other side of the ravine, with three people standing there.’
‘Do you know who they were?’
‘One was you, one was that vicar bloke – Phil – and a girl.’
‘The girl who went to Jamaica? Who reminded you of your sister?’
‘No,’ he said reluctantly. ‘It was my sister. Rachel.’
Ella looked as though she wanted to ask more questions but bit her lip and said, ‘Keep going.’
‘Phil was praying but it was more like chatting to somebody I couldn’t see. He was saying, “You’ve called him by his name, haven’t you?”’
Ella stopped writing and looked at him. ‘You’ve called him by his name?’
‘That was it. Then someone was there on the other side of the ravine – my side, behind me – shouting at me, only it was the wrong name. He was trying to warn me that someone was coming up behind me. I couldn’t see anything but I felt someone put their foot on the tightrope and their weight toppled me and I started falling.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then you shook me and I woke up.’
‘What was the name he was shouting?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay, so use the visualization technique. Place yourself back there and …’
‘I said, I don’t know! It was some name that meant nothing. It wasn’t me.’
‘You might be able to remember if you just …’
‘Ella, I don’t want to play these games in the middle of the night! I want to go back to sleep, all right?’
She was hurt. ‘I was trying to help.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, dreams are important, aren’t they? That’s why you do those dream workshops – how many times a year? Three?’
He felt weary. ‘Eight or nine probably, this year. Supply and demand. It doesn’t mean I want to stay up all night every time I dream something.’
‘Don’t you want to know what it means? It sounds scary.’
‘It means I shouldn’t drink Guinness and cocoa before going to bed. Goodnight.’
Ella put the notebook aside and lay down beside him. ‘You want me to get you some rosehip tea?’
‘No. Thanks.’
‘Franz?’
‘Yuh.’
‘Sometime – not now, obviously – but sometime soon, can we make time for a chat?’
‘About what?’
‘General things.’
He was wide awake now. ‘What things?’
‘It’s not the right moment. Go to sleep.’
He sat up. ‘Now I have to pee. Okay, I’ll make the tea. We’ll talk.’
By the time he came in with the tea, she had lit candles and an incense stick. The crystals that hung in the window were visible in the pale light of the moon filtering through the voile draped over the pane. Ella hoped that moonlight on crystal was a good omen but was afraid it meant nothing at all.
She found it strange that the things in which she believed so firmly by day seemed to evaporate in the dark hours of night. She wondered whether her beliefs were of no actual use to her if they only made sense by daylight, or whether that was better than the opposite. She had known religious people, for instance, in her childhood, who were untroubled by doubt in the dark cosy privacy of their homes and synagogue yet didn’t seem able to put its principles into practice in the cold light of everyday life.
Franz felt cold when he sat beside her under the duvet.
‘This is nice,’ she said, without much hope.
‘I’m sorry I scared you,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry I woke you. I was worried. I have been worried about you, recently.’
‘There’s no need,’ he said.
‘You’re working really long hours, Franz. You said it was going to be possible to delegate.’
‘You helping me with some of the admin is good,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it. Got your note about scheduling Primal Scream next to the silent contemplatives!’ He nudged her, trying to make her laugh, but she refused to take the bait.
‘It’s a lot of responsibility, all on your own,’ she said. ‘You promised to think about sharing it, inviting Sharma and some of the others to become partners.’
‘I did think. The problem is, the ethos of The Healing Place is inclusion and Sharma just doesn’t agree with me on that; he wants to pick and choose the disciplines and the philosophies. I call it prejudice and he calls it discernment. If I appointed a management committee from a representative range of guides and therapists, Sharma wouldn’t come on it - and I wouldn’t want a committee that Sharma wasn’t on.’
Ella leaned against him and sighed.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked. ‘Give me the benefit of your finely honed feminine instincts.’
‘I’ve got a lot of time for Sharma.’
He waited, then laughed. ‘Yes? So have I. Is that it?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose it is. I mean, I don’t understand what he does and I don’t suppose anyone else does, if they don’t have that gift. But he does have some kind of insight. I’m not sure about his way of using it. I’m not into clairvoyance and that stuff really.’
‘That stuff?’ Franz teased her. ‘Don’t let anyone at The Healing Place hear you talk like that. They’d think you were one of the unenlightened.’
‘I don’t think those people who call themselves enlightened necessarily understand more than anyone else does, or even their own jargon sometimes,’ said Ella. ‘Some of them are trying so hard to sell people a concept that I suspect they’re really trying to convince themselves it makes some kind of sense.’
Franz laughed. ‘Go get ‘em, babe! Was this what you wanted to talk about?’
‘No.’ She hunched herself up, tucking her feet underneath her.
‘What then?’
Her expression was suddenly closed; he could see the line of bone from the outer cavity of her eyes to her high cheekbones. Her skin had a translucent quality, her olive colouring almost white.
‘You’re sick,’ he said, alarmed.
‘I’m not sick, Franz. I’m pregnant.’
She didn’t look at him, not even when the silence extended into several minutes. Nor did he look at her: he seemed transfixed by the slight breeze moving the voile so that it shifted and sighed like a ghost, and by the wisps of smoke curling up from the incense taper in the flickering candlelight.
They sat together like that, not moving, not touching. In the morning when they awoke, still sitting side by side, neither could have said which of them had fallen asleep first.
Ella joined Franz for breakfast. Saturday was the busiest workday for them both.‘Say something,’ she pleaded, when he made her toast without asking.
‘I tho
ught we would have discussed something so life-changing,’ he said.
‘I didn’t plan it.’
‘If you were thinking along those lines, even, you could have said.’
‘Franz, I didn’t discuss being pregnant even with myself! It happened.’
She knew he wouldn’t be convinced. He had read too many theories on subliminal choice and synchronicity to believe in accidents.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said, when he was silent.
‘So you’ve become psychic overnight as well as pregnant?’ he said.
His sarcasm shocked her. It wasn’t his style.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to say. But I’m guessing that you think I made a subconscious decision that I was ready to have a baby and somehow, subconsciously, forgot to do my natural family planning testing one morning.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. Six months ago, I found I was forgetting. So I went on the Pill.’
‘The contraceptive pill?’
She was tempted to retort that it wouldn’t have been much use to take paracetamol but one sarcastic participant was enough. ‘Yes. And no, I didn’t discuss that with you first …’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m telling you, if you’ll listen, Franz. I didn’t discuss it with you because we’d made the decision not to risk pregnancy and I didn’t want to put pressure on you. So when I realized I was forgetting to do my morning testing I thought maybe my biological clock was ticking and prompting me to forget, and as we had decided we weren’t ready to be a family I thought I’d better take the initiative and switch to something more accident-proof. Like the Pill.’
‘You’re telling me you got pregnant on the Pill.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what the chances are of that happening?’
‘It has roughly a one percent failure rate, apparently.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Maz looked it up on the internet.’ She bit her lip, too late.
‘You told Maz? Before telling me?’
‘Yes. Because I care about upsetting you, and Maz isn’t going to be personally affected so it’s not as important as telling you!’ Ella countered.
He nodded slowly. ‘Okay.’
His acceptance did nothing to reassure her. ‘I need to know how you feel,’ she said.
‘I don't know how I feel. How do you feel?’
‘It depends on you. Do you want me to get rid of it?’
‘I didn’t say that!’ he shouted, slamming his fist down on a plate so hard that it shattered. They both jumped, scared.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry too. You want time to think and I’m pressuring you.’
‘Ella, you don’t have to handle me with kid gloves!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t bloody apologize!’
He was ashamed to see he had made her cry. He sat down beside her and took her hand and said as gently as he could, ‘I didn’t mean to blame you. And it’s good news, okay? How could it be anything else – the birth of a child? Our child. I want you to be happy. I want you to enjoy this.’
‘I can’t be happy about it if you’re not,’ she whispered.
‘I am. I will be, I promise. We’ll be fine.’
They sat in silence, both aware that time was ticking away.
‘You’d better get to work,’ Ella said.
‘We’ll talk this evening, okay?’
‘Yes. Franz – don’t get tactful with me either, right? If you’ve got doubts I need to know what they are.’
‘Okay.’
He stood up, picked up his pile of papers and pushed them into his briefcase then leaned over the table and kissed her. ‘Will you be all right today?’
‘Yes, no worries.’
‘I’ll phone you if I get a break.’
‘You won’t get a break,’ she said, smiling.
He was halfway out of the door when he turned back. ‘You should start taking folic acid or something, shouldn’t you?’
She laughed at him. ‘I work in a wholefood store! Maz will ply me with every supplement whether I like it or not!’
She hoped his mentioning it was a sign of accepting of the pregnancy. It was not like Franz to get angry or sarcastic. Ella could see no real reason why, unplanned though it was, Franz would see it as a bad time to have a baby. They were committed to each other, financially solvent, healthy, and with a combined age of sixty-four surely he wouldn’t have wanted to leave it much longer? And a baby determined to come to life despite the chemical restraints of the Pill deserved some encouragement. She picked up her door keys and, on the walk to work, found herself smiling as she envisioned their unborn child’s developing personality.
Franz, walking to work in the opposite direction, had different thoughts. There were many reasons for receiving the news in a wholly positive spirit. Out of habit, he recited affirmations in time with his steps but stopped short at 'I am in control of my destiny.' The unwelcome possibility occurred to him that he wasn’t in control of anything - that nobody was. He shook himself. 'I am in control of my responses to circumstances,' he recited silently as he entered The Healing Place by the side door.
That didn’t reassure him either. Had he been in control of his response to the girl Jacqui when he shouted at her, ‘Don’t get in that car!’ - Phil and Jan’s car, which she was entering of her free will? Was he in control of his anger when Phil prayed, anger which he could not in all honesty explain to himself? Was he in control of his apprehension about the crack in the ceiling of The Healing Place’s main hall, or in control of his hand now, which was shaking as he called the builder's number?
He was as much in control of his destiny, he thought, as that figure on the tightrope in his dream, putting one foot in front of the other on a precariously narrow lifeline above a chasm, in the dark, alone.
The builder, Rory, was unperturbed by Franz’s call. ‘Righty-hoh!’ he said cheerily. ‘I’ll drop by sometime Monday. You’ll be in your office if I come straight up?’
‘I’ll be all over the place, if it’s a normal day,’ said Franz. ‘You can get the receptionist to page me but if you want to save waiting, call me on my mobile when you’re on your way and I’ll meet you in the foyer.’
‘Will do. It’s probably just a crack in the plaster but we’ll take a look for you.’
‘It’s not the plaster,’ said Franz firmly. ‘A plasterer has already looked at it.’
‘Well, whatever. See you then.’
What if Rory, for the sake of his reputation and the desire to avoid redoing work he had done badly and would not be paid again for remedying, insisted that a bit of filler would fix it? What if, as Mick Murphy had said, a load-bearing wall had been taken out without a steel joist or other support being substituted? A surveyor would have to be called in, and the building regulations inspector from the Council. The Healing Place could be closed down till it was officially secure. Franz might have to take out a lawsuit to ascertain who was to blame. He could also be sued, if damage occurred.
The phone rang three times in succession. A Japanese lady, newly arrived in the UK and not yet proficient in English, was looking for a venue to practise Shiatsu. She had a small number of clients, all Japanese, and wanted help to attract some English ones. Franz arranged a meeting with her for the following week. A genuine Japanese practitioner could be a marketing bonus but he wondered if he could find somebody to coach her in spoken English; she would need an interpreter at least for a couple of months.
While on the phone to her, Franz studied the printed floor-plans of The Healing Place on his office wall. He recalled every stage of The Healing Place’s transformation from derelict cinema to showcase building. There had been so many discussions over walls and partitions.
He had been away several times during the construction process, for a week at a time, raising financial support and talkin
g to interested organizations. He tried to remember whether the reinforced joists for the supporting walls had been scheduled for installation during one of those absences and whether the builder had reported it done when he returned. Surely something so vital could not have been overlooked, by either of them? And what were project managers and building regulations inspectors for, if they hadn’t checked on something so fundamental?
The second call was from a Leroy Watson, who called himself a ‘Lucy-Fairian’ – at least, it sounded like that; Franz couldn’t quite place his accent. French-speaking African? The man wanted to use The Healing Place’s publicity package and possibly its facilities for a ‘smallish’ group that was already established and hoped to attract more seekers. He went into a lengthy, abstract dissertation when Franz asked him to explain what Lucy-Fairianism was, and Franz was reluctant to admit to difficulty in understanding his accent in case the man thought he was racist. He also felt unable to work up much interest, with other concerns occupying his mind, so he postponed the discussion by giving Leroy also an appointment to meet him next week.
The third call was far more serious. It was Sharma, sounding more harassed than Franz had ever heard him, with worse news than Franz could have expected: he wanted to cancel all his courses at The Healing Place, until further notice.
‘I can’t explain over the phone,’ Sharma said. ‘Is there a time when I could come in and see you?’
‘Come now!’ said Franz. ‘Sharma, whatever it is, I hope we can find another solution!’
‘I’ll see you soon.’ His tone didn’t hold much promise.
Franz occupied himself with drafting timetables and allocating rooms for new courses and was annoyed with himself when he found he had reallocated Sharma’s room without thinking about it. Think positive, he told himself. I have many gifts, including charisma and the power of persuasion. I can make my destiny work for me. Somehow that didn’t seem appropriate to Sharma, who was unpersuadable on matters of principle.
Franz’s only hope was that Sharma had hit personal difficulties – he had heard rumours last year that Sharma’s marriage was not going smoothly – and not that he was having another attack of ethics regarding the running of The Healing Place. Franz asked himself how much he was prepared to compromise, in order to keep Sharma on side, and was surprised that he felt almost tearful at the thought of losing him. He would be prepared to compromise quite considerably, he decided.
When Sharma arrived, Franz was shocked by his appearance. The man had aged overnight, his brown skin tinged with grey, his eyes haggard. Paradoxically, Franz felt relief. Definitely personal issues. Franz would offer sympathy, time off, even paid compassionate leave, professional counselling – whatever it took.
Franz drew up a chair for him. ‘I can see something’s troubling you.’
‘Franz, have you seen the papers this morning?’
‘I picked one up on the way in but I haven’t looked at it yet. Why?’
‘Two little boys from this area have gone missing since yesterday morning on their way to school. Somebody thought they saw a child being pulled into a car at the traffic lights by the library.’
‘Sharma – not your sons?’ That would explain his appearance. He looked as though he hadn’t slept at all.
‘No. Franz, I need to take some time off. I need you to release me from taking these courses.’
‘I don’t understand. What’s your involvement?’
‘I had a phone call from the police last night. They sometimes use people like me, unofficially. I asked to meet the boys’ parents but the police inspector was afraid of raising their hopes. He told me where they lived, that’s all. I went and stood across the street from their front doors.’
He was shaking, Franz noticed. ‘Why is it affecting you like this, Sharma? How does this work?’
‘I can feel their fear,’ he said. ‘The parents’ and the boys’.’ His eyes conveyed such anguish that Franz had to look away.
‘I understand you can’t think of teaching, with this going on,’ Franz said, ‘but what do you need to do? I mean, how much time ….?’
‘I need to concentrate,’ Sharma said. ‘The police will pass on information from the boys’ friends at school but I feel that their friends won’t know anything. I think this was a random, spur of the moment grab by people who are permanently on the look-out for children and take their opportunities where they find them.’
‘Do you know anything else?’
He shuddered. ‘All night I’ve been seeing scenes of abuse. Ritual abuse. In a darkened room with candles and ritual objects. I think these are evil people, Franz.’
‘So you sit and just concentrate and see what comes to mind? Is that it?’
‘No, I’m going to start walking around, starting from the point where the boys were taken. I may pick up some sense of which direction they went. I’ll follow the fear.’
Franz felt suddenly afraid for this colleague who so often exasperated him with his inconvenient objections. ‘Sharma, what will this do to you personally?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘as long as we find them.’
‘But you have your own family to think of, too.’
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘My wife left me last year. She took the children and went with another man to live in Pakistan.’
Franz was stunned. ‘Why didn’t I know this?’
‘I didn’t tell many people – only when they invited us or asked why they hadn’t seen Sarita recently. I’m sorry, Franz. I should have told you. You are my employer.’
‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Sharma. Don’t you see the children any more?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know where they are?’
‘No.’
Sharma saw the unspoken question in Franz’s eyes. A gifted psychic who couldn’t find out the whereabouts of his own children? Going on a wild goose chase after other parents’ sons?
‘What good would it do me to know where my children are, geographically,’ Sharma asked, ‘if my wife and this new partner don’t want me to have any contact with them? In their own time, the children will come and find me – at least, if they continue to feel as they are feeling now. When they are older, if they haven’t changed their minds, they will come looking and I will be here for them. But for now, Franz, the best I can do is to try and relieve the agony of these other boys’ parents.’
‘I understand. Look, do we need to cancel the courses? What if I could find someone to start them off? If the boys are found, would you consider coming back and taking the students on from where they’d got to?’
‘Of course. But I can’t say when that would be.’
Franz breathed out. ‘That’s cool. Leave it to me to arrange. You take as much time as you need. And listen ….’ He pulled his wallet out of his jacket and took out all the notes that were in it, waved aside Sharma’s protestations and pressed the notes into his hand. ‘And let me know if either Ella or I can do anything to help.’
Sharma folded the notes and placed them carefully in his pocket. ‘Thank you, Franz.’
As he stood up and extended his hand formally to shake his, Franz said, ‘You know, Sharm, you had me scared. I thought you were going to walk out on me for good. So you’re not going because of some deep objection to something I’m doing with The Healing Place!’
Sharma looked at him, and Franz was struck, as he had been the first time he’d met him, by the depth of his gaze. This man had something genuine, some far-seeing faculty that went beyond normal perception. With many of the other guides, Franz was prepared to take them at their own estimation: if they said they had a gift, or special knowledge, he was prepared to give them his best shot and support them till they were established and able to attract clients by commendations from previous ones.
Some proved they did have something which, if not a spiritual gift, was at least a proficiency or practical skill in relieving seekers’ anxiety
or pain. Others, whether misguided or simply lacking in personal charisma, fell by the wayside. Fashion and current celebrities also dictated which therapies and philosophies would draw the crowds this season.
Increasingly, the comfortable and well-heeled, who were not comfortable or healed on the inside, were willing to pay for peace of mind. The same people who abhorred religion because it imposed rules and restrictions would happily swallow the prohibitions and prescriptions of a range of self-qualified guides.
Franz didn’t analyze the claims made for any new programme, which tended to be similar to all the existing ones, or question its proponent’s motives. He simply matched people’s professed desire to provide a route to serenity with other people’s professed desire to find one. If anyone asked what he personally believed, he found the question irrelevant. He never thought about it. He didn’t know.
Facing Sharma now, though, it occurred to Franz that of all the instructors and the instructed, the preachers and the seekers who had come and gone in the change-packed two years of The Healing Place’s existence, this man was the only one he personally had any faith in. Like Ella, Franz didn’t understand what Sharma purported to see or to achieve but Sharma, as a man, had integrity. He believed what he believed and was prepared to suffer the personal cost of doing what seemed to him the right thing. If Sharma needed time free to help the police, Franz would give it to him.
When Tanya walked into the office – Franz’s open-door policy meaning no one had to knock or wait – he realized that Sharma had been standing looking at him in silence for some time and only then did it occur to him that Sharma might have an answer to his rhetorical question about his management of The Healing Place.
‘Tanya, would you give us a moment?’ Franz asked her.
Tanya sat down in his chair and leaned her elbows on his desk. ‘Go ahead.’ She waited, watching them.
Franz took Sharma’s arm and walked with him down the corridor. He wasn’t sure whether Tanya could still hear them or not.
‘I know you need to go,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t answer my question.’
‘It’s not for me to answer,’ Sharma said. ‘The Healing Place is your project.’
‘I’m asking you,’ said Franz, ‘as a friend. I haven’t been a good friend, Sharma – to you or to anyone. I’ve been so concerned to treat everyone equally and to keep business separate from home life that I haven’t taken the time to get to know you, and now I’m afraid you’re going and won’t come back.’
He was ashamed of the tears that sprang into his eyes but more ashamed that he had kept this man, whom he trusted and liked, at arm’s length - that he hadn’t even known about his wife leaving. Ella was right, he thought again. I should have made an exception for him and invited him into our life.
Sharma took his hand. ‘I’m not going, Franz. I will be coming back.’
‘I know your reservations about some of the policies here, Sharma, and some of the guides, but … you honestly think I’m doing something fundamentally wrong with this place?’
‘Not wrong,’ Sharma said. ‘You are trying to give people help, not to tell them what they need but to provide what they believe will help them. You are insisting that all the practitioners and the guides accept each other as people with different ways, even when they don’t agree with each other’s methods and priorities.’
‘But?’
‘I’m concerned about you personally, as a friend – and I do see you and Ella as friends, and not uncaring ones. I know you work long hours and you need your space when you get home.’
‘You’re concerned that I’m overworking? Or something else?’
Sharma hesitated then spoke with an intensity Franz had never heard from him. ‘You are walking a lonely road in the dark, out of reach of those who care for you. No one can help you because you’re not letting anyone see who you really are. You have some difficult decisions to make and you are refusing to make them. Your emphasis on inclusion and being non-judgmental is blinding you to the need for real discernment.’
‘Oh, I know you don’t go for ….’ Franz began, but Sharma continued as though he hadn’t spoken. His eyes were blazing, though his voice and manner were calm.
‘You need to make real judgments about what is genuine and what is deception. You can only make these decisions in your own name. If you don’t, there is someone walking behind you who will make them for you, and they will be harmful. The Healing Place is also in danger, because although your care for people is genuine, The Healing Place is not built exclusively on your care for them; it’s also founded on rebellion, and that foundation will crumble when the testing time comes.’
He was gone before Franz was aware that Sharma had moved away from him.