Read Online Healer by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online Page A

leg, supposed to be buried out in the sands of Egypt forty years back. Shut my eyes, and there it is. I can move it around, wiggle the toes—doing that now. Reach out and scratch my shin, only the bloody thing’s not there and my hand goes clean through the itch.”
    â€œBut we’ve stopped it hurting,” said Pinkie, smug and decisive.
    â€œUsed to give me hell,” said Mr. Stott, “and that made me hell to live with. My fool of a wife got the worst of it. Ought to have left me years before she did, and no doubt there’s some will say that’s why my daughter’s turned out how she has. Be that as may be, four years back I took a fancy to inspect my granddaughter I’d never seen. Had to pay my daughter a hundred pounds for the privilege, mind you. Cut a long story short, along they came when I was having one of my bad days, yelling and cursing fit to make the moon blush. Ugly little thing she was, but no escaping the family likeness.
    â€œPulled myself together best I could—been a hundred down the drain otherwise, eh? She came close up. I reckoned my daughter had ordered her to kiss me, and I was starting to push her away when she grabbed hold of my hand and started babbling on about my leg. I felt like chucking her across the room that moment, but somehow I didn’t, and then—bloody rum thing, the mind, I tell you—the pain that had had me squealing a couple of minutes before went clean away. What do you make of that? My daughter didn’t like it at all, I can tell you for a start. Mind over matter, eh? If you can call it matter when the leg’s not there in the first place.”
    Mr. Stott’s face was so red, his eyes so fierce a blue, his moustache so spiky, his voice so loud, that he looked and sounded furious still. Barry could see what he meant about the family likeness. It wasn’t only the flat oval of their big faces; there was something about the look in their eyes, his and Mrs. Proudfoot’s and Pinkie’s, too. They were loners. No, that wasn’t quite right because most loners are really only sulkers. But these three were truly separate. They were like stars that are not part of any galaxy. Only Pinkie had found her extraordinary bridge.
    â€œI get migraines,” said Barry, using the posh word to impress. “Pinkie thinks she got rid of one for me.”
    â€œAnd what do you think?”
    â€œWell, it went. It might have been going to anyway.”
    â€œTold anyone else?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDon’t. Playing with fire. I suppose you’ve come for a game, young woman?”
    Pinkie jumped up and down in eagerness.
    â€œWhat about your friend?” said Mr. Stott.
    â€œHe can just watch.”
    Mr. Stott glanced at Barry and nodded.
    â€œUp on the porch, young man,” he said.
    Barry felt snubbed for a moment. You couldn’t expect Pinkie to understand, but the old buffer ought to have realised that it had been a nuisance to use up half a fine Saturday plugging out here and then get left out of things. But as soon as the game started, he saw why. It was a kind of hide-and-seek. Mr. Stott chased Pinkie up and down the trenches, yelling at her in his huge sergeant-major voice that she was a bloody Hun and he was coming to get her with his bayonet. He could rush his wheelchair down the straights at fantastic speed but had to slow drastically for the corners.
    In a straight chase he would have caught Pinkie quite easily, but she was able to hide, and move about still hidden, by crouching below trench level. She had to poke her head up to see where he was, and that might give her own position away. There were only certain points where the wheelchair could turn; sometimes Mr. Stott would rush bellowing to one of these, spin around, and glide back in silence, hoping to catch Pinkie sneaking around the other way. Barry thought he was trying as hard as he could. There was just enough of a maze to