When Charlie woke she couldn’t think where she was. She could make out the grey silhouette of a window, offering no clues, a high-backed upholstered chair entwined with vines, and then, as she moved her head, a poster of a boy band Sellotaped to a lilac wall. She closed her eyes, and heard her father’s lilting voice. ‘Charlotte? Are you up?’
Charlie, a child again, sank lower into the dip of her old bed, raising the ridge of one sharp shoulder, determined not to be disturbed. But the door eased open anyway and the sound of a teacup rattling on its saucer reached her ears. In an instant she remembered why she was here. ‘Daddy?’ She sat up.
Her father crossed the room in his dark suit, his white hair startling against the blackness of his face. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Drink up.’
Charlie glanced at the bedside clock, and saw it was exactly seven. ‘Thanks,’ she took a sip, imagining him, waiting, impatient to be allowed to wake her at what he considered this civilised hour. ‘I’ll be down in a minute. I’ll have a quick shower first.’
Charlie saw her father stiffen. The hospital was twenty minutes away. No visitors were allowed in till after nine, but even so, she could feel him fretting that she’d make him late. ‘I won’t be long,’ she yawned to hide her irritation, and slowly, he backed out into the hall.
The shower was new and powerful, the whole room, since she was last here, fitted out with a matching bathroom suite. Her mother had mentioned this refurbishment to her, even attempted to lure her in with a pretence of indecision over the colour of the tiles, but Charlie had refused to get involved. Now the decor made her laugh. A row of alternating limes and lemons stood out in relief around the bath. Why? Charlie could not imagine. And then, her hair swept into a turban, she leant in to try out the new mirror. From a distance the mirror looked sleek and caring, but as she leant closer it became apparent that a fluorescent tube had been set into the silver overhang, flooding the glass with unforgiving light. There were no actual spots, but one old scar was refusing to fade, leaving a patch of pigmentation that hollowed out one cheek. Shit, she cursed, reaching for a stick of concealer, and with one foot she slid the bathroom scales towards her. Several months ago she’d given up smoking, assured by everyone that this would help her skin, but instead, for the first time in her life, she’d discovered hunger. She’d always been uninterested in food, turning away, even as a young child, from the pale meals presented by her mother, so that pushing away her plate soon became a game of violent wills between them. And then at boarding school, the food really was disgusting, and by the time she left she’d already developed her passion for smoking, an activity that seemed so much simpler and more satisfying than the endless decisions about what to eat and when. What she hadn’t realised was that her taste buds had been numbed by tar. Now they were emerging, snapping for new sensations, ravenous, so that in the last three months she’d put on more than half a stone. Everything tasted good. Fruit, chips, nougat – the silky vanilla taste of it as you tore it with your teeth – bread dunked into olive oil, chickpeas with cumin, even salad. Now as well as watching for her skin to flare, she had to be on guard against a constant desire to tear open a packet of pistachio nuts or heap cream cheese on to a cracker. Her stomach felt swollen, her skin was blotchy, and in panic she’d agreed to visit the homeopath whose number Nell had found for her. The homeopath, who was plump and mousy-haired, but undeniably serene, attached a wire to one toe, took a strand of hair, and after lengthy and expensive tests told her she was intolerant to wheat, dairy, chocolate, tomatoes, fried food, onions, alcohol, seafood and the orange seasoning on crisps. She typed the foods out in a long stern list.
For two weeks Charlie stuck to this restricted diet, sitting alone at home, eating vegetables and brown rice, until in a rebellious fit that included a bottle of red wine and a row over the phone with Rob, she threw away the list. Now she was smoking again, snacking on chocolate biscuits and chips, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she felt worse.
Charlie and her father sat side by side in the hospital waiting room, leafing through magazines, staring round at optimistic prints of harvest time and sunflowers. They’d arrived too early, as Charlie knew they would, and she tried not to think of the coffee she might have brewed if her father had not already had his coat on when she came downstairs. The clocks, and there were many of them, hovered obstinately at half past eight. ‘She’ll be ready for you in just a little while,’ the receptionist told her father the second time he went to the desk to enquire. ‘Just take a seat and you’ll be called.’ She spoke slowly, patiently, as if he might not understand the language, and Charlie felt the stirrings of humiliation and rage that had dogged her as a child.
Eventually they were directed along a corridor, through swing doors, down a short flight of steps and on to a small, warm ward. Her mother was in a private room, in this private wing, but even so, with her hair brushed back, still obstinately blonde, and with a dab of lipstick on, she wasn’t able to sit up. ‘Dear girl, you don’t look too bad.’ Her father pulled up a chair. ‘Not too bad at all.’
Not too bad! Charlie hung back. Couldn’t he see the life that had gone out of her? The depleted figure, flattened in the bed, who must have been hiding all these years behind the intransigent, battling, obstinately cheerful mother that she thought she knew.
‘Mummy?’ Charlie moved round to her other side. Tentatively she leant down for a kiss. Her mother smiled, surprised, and reached for her hand, and for the rest of the visit they stayed like that, Charlie’s hip pressed against the bed frame, their fingers entwined.
‘She’ll be out in a few days,’ her father told her solemnly as they drove home, and although Charlie knew it was true, her mother’s prognosis was good, the doctor’s had assured them she had every chance of pulling through, Charlie felt herself dissolve. ‘Shhh now.’ But she couldn’t help it, she could feel the sorrow flooding through her, feel it stinging in the sinews of her heart and lungs. ‘Come now, come,’ her father tried again as she stooped, sobbing into her hands, but her head had turned into a spongy mass of loss. Her father pulled into a lay-by where he drew out the white handkerchief he kept folded at all times, and pleased to finally have cause to use it, he pressed it on her. ‘Thank you.’ She blew her nose in a satisfying stream. ‘Thanks,’ and she savoured one last shudder.
Back in London the next day, Charlie rewrote her list. Wheat, dairy, fried food, chocolate, tomatoes, onions . . . What else? Oh yes. She threw the remaining Silk Cut into the bin, and then after a few minutes fished them out again and hid them at the back of a drawer. Alcohol.
She had an interview that afternoon for the part of a headmistress. Ridiculous, she muttered to herself, as she flicked through her wardrobe. She’d said to Maisie that she wasn’t interested, surely she was too young, but Maisie had made her feel somehow that she had to go. There was a tone in her voice, a warning almost, that if she didn’t go up for this, there might not be very much else around. Charlie found a narrow skirt she’d bought cheap on the last day of a TV film. She struggled into it, matching it with a silk shirt and a pair of heels that made her feel like a giraffe, so that after almost falling down the stairs, she kicked them off and swapped them for plimsolls. Now at least she could walk, and then it occurred to her that if she left early enough, she could walk into town. She had nothing else to do, and after checking her bag for make-up and enough money for a taxi in case her strength gave out, she set off for Soho.
It was May, and London was alive with sunshine. Windows gleamed, and tired men smiled, and the grime of Ladbroke Grove felt glamorous as she walked under the bridge. Even the black enamel of the funeral director’s looked classic as a film. On the corner, by the pub, the flower stall was blazing. Roses in veils of spray, tulips, tightly bundled, sophisticated in burgundy and white, their more lurid, ragged cousins razor-edged in orange. Charlie stopped to admire the twists of daffodils in bud, breathe in the perfumed frills of the narcissi. ‘Can I help you, love?’ the woman asked her, and Charlie sighed – she had no one to send flowers to. ‘No, that’s all right,’ and she walked on.
Why was she even going for this interview? she thought as she marched up the hill. She’d read the script and seen immediately there were only three decent parts – for girls, and she, of course, was grouped now with the older generation – the women. Charlie tugged down her skirt, and smoothed the already smooth surface of her chemically relaxed hair. It was five years since she’d worked with this director, and she braced herself against the shocked look in his eyes when he saw how much she’d changed. But when she arrived at the production office she was told she’d have to wait. ‘If you’d like to take a seat . . .’ the receptionist said, ‘we’re running late today,’ and she handed Charlie a flimsy page of script. Charlie found a seat and bent her head to the lines: ‘If I ever have to listen to such impertinence again . . .’ she read, but before she’d got any further a voice echoed back at her through the plasterboard partition. ‘If I Ever have to listen to Such Impertinence again . . .’ The vowels were long, the rich tone, round, and then after a muffled interjection, they were offered again, longer, rounder, regal in their swoop.
Charlie stood up. ‘How long is it likely to be before I’m seen?’
‘Twenty minutes . . . at the least. I’m sorry.’
‘If I EVER . . .’ The words were booming now ‘. . . have to LISTEN . . .’ and as if to get away from the cascade of the next line Charlie nodded to the receptionist, mouthing that she’d be back, and set off at a sprint. She was still running when she reached Old Compton Street and only slowed to navigate the crush of people spilling over on to the road. She could stop for a coffee at Bar Italia, or at Patisserie Valerie for an éclair, but then she remembered the limitations of her diet, and walked on, crossing into Covent Garden, past the cheese shop with its great gourds of cheddar, and the dance studio where, before the idea of drama school occurred to her, she had once auditioned to be part of a dance troupe, entertaining passengers on a cruise. There was a health food shop at Neal’s Yard she’d walked past a thousand times. Now she went in and bought herself a seed bar that looked unnervingly like dung, but which she had to admit, in her famished state, she found oddly delicious. As she chewed, she looked at her watch. If she turned round now she’d arrive back within the bounds of punctuality, but instead she found herself back inside the shop, buying a packet of dried fruit, and slowly, chewing on the hard heel of a pear, she walked on down Neal Street, passing the theatre on the corner, looking dreamily into clothes shops and hat shops and at the window display of crystals suspended on their threads of silk, splashing rainbows from their chiselled points. ‘Coming in?’ A man stood in the doorway, shuffling cards, and Charlie smiled in what she hoped was a mysterious way and asked the price of an amethyst.
‘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.’
Charlie rushed to the kitchen, her cheeks burning, her hands suddenly cold. She filled a basin with water, threw in a cloth, stuck a roll of kitchen towel under one arm. ‘I’ll do it,’ her father insisted, and for a moment they wrestled dangerously over the plastic bowl. Charlie gave in. She sat back on her chair and took a bitter sip of tea.
‘It shouldn’t stain,’ her father said a few minutes later, paws planted, for all the world like a large, grizzled dog. ‘Now you two, surely it’s time to sleep. Go on up. Please. I’ll finish off down here.’
Mortified, in her single bed, Charlie looked round at the shapes of the old furniture, at the bedraggled posters of actors and pop stars that had comforted her so much when she came home in the holidays from school. It surprised her that her parents, usually so pristine, had never got around to taking them down. Maybe for them, in their late sixties, time went so fast now, it was as if she’d just moved out.
She was tempted to ring Bram and admonish him for what had happened, but she didn’t relish the sound of her voice, audible in the silent house as she recounted the story of her mother’s mishap. She wanted to tell him too about the extraordinary feeling that had surged through her. Ask if it was appropriate. Allowed. The sensation of joy before it all went wrong.
The next morning Charlie slept late, and when she finally came downstairs her mother was in the kitchen, wrapped like a parcel in her pinstriped apron. ‘Darling,’ she drew a plate of bacon from the oven, her hair perfectly arranged, her make-up on, ‘it’s the oddest thing, but I do feel rather better today.’
‘Really?’ Charlie doubted it was anything to do with her, but she moved towards her mother and held her perfumed, toast and bacon-smelling body in her arms. Later, she decided, she’d go out and buy flowers, and she smiled to think how easy it was going to be to surprise her.