Healer Read Online Free

all a flash fraud.
    Harmony! Once …
    Like one of the iron filings leaping to the pull of the magnet, Barry’s memory leaped to a morning three and a half years ago, the corridor outside the secretary’s office at Marsden Ash Junior School.

2
    Why did he have to have one today? Why today? Barry was used to his headaches. Mum called them migraines. She had them, too. You realised you were going to have one while you were still asleep—in your last dream it was there—and then you woke up with a dry, sick mouth and a pulsing, stodgy ache filling your skull, and the moment you moved, it rose to a whine of pain. On a good day it would ease off around teatime, but sometimes it would carry on into next day. If you still had it when you went to bed, you knew you’d wake up with it the next morning. Aspirin just made it a bit duller.
    Mum’s answer was to draw the curtains and lie on the sofa and moan, but if you did that, it was worse because you had only your headache to think about, so Barry had invented a sort of cupboard in his mind and learned how to stuff most of the pain into it and get the door almost shut, which left the rest of his mind free to try and think about other things. Trouble was the cupboard door didn’t lock, so you had to keep your foot against it all the time, which messed you up when it came to doing your best at anything important …
    Such as the first football game. Today. This afternoon. Why did he have to have one today? He’d felt fine yesterday, barging around, letting the other kids know he’d been in the first team two years at his old school and got a record number of goals last year. But now …
    Wouldn’t have mattered back in Thursley. He could just have said he’d got one of his headaches, and they’d still have kept him a place. But here, in filthy, rotten Marsden Ash, they’d reckon he was scared after his boasting. Why did it …
    Around and around and around in his skull. Bear in his pit, around and around and around.
    The bench was a shiny old varnished thing, the corridor outside the secretary’s office was green tiles below and dirty whitewashed brick above. It was typical of everything in this grotty old school, with its beat-up old books and its soap smells and cabbage smells and echoes. And the school was typical of dirty, drab Marsden Ash, which wasn’t much more than a lot of run-down mills and factories crammed into a valley because a canal had once been there. At Thursley there’d been farms, and a new house with a lawn big enough to kick a ball around on, and he hadn’t had to share a bedroom with Don; and at school there’d been Jeff and Paul and Gavin and the others, whereas here there were just a lot of roughs who picked on you because of the way you talked and put in a swear every third word to prove how tough they were. No wonder he’d shot his mouth off a bit over the football.
    If the secretary would give him a couple of aspirin. He hadn’t had any so far because if he’d told Mum about the headache, she’d have kept him at home … Oh, come on! The secretary had another kid with her, a Pakistani girl (far more of them here than at Thursley) who’d fallen and gravelled her knee and was snivelling while the secretary dabbed it with cream. He’d seen that when he’d put his head around the door and the secretary had snapped at him to wait. Most of the staff snapped at you here. Come on! Doesn’t take hours to put cream on a knee!
    Barry stirred with impatience and, doing so, knocked the back of his head against a sort of brick ledge that jutted out above the bench. His brain yelped with the flood of pain. The world went red-black. He leaned his face forward into the palms of his hands, drowned in pain, struggling not to vomit. Whew! That had done it! He’d have to go home now after all …
    â€œYou’ve got a nasty head.”
    A cold, small,