The Cure of Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

long lakes in the northern sky. To the south, a plane tracked across the starscape like a slow pulse on a monitor.
    In the middle distance was a round tower, like some story-book castle, except that the tip of its conical hat was oddly skewed. There was a window-glow visible in the tower, unsteady like lantern light. Lol was stilled by the unreality of the moment, half feeling that if he were to climb over the farm gate and walk towards that tower, the entire edifice would begin to dissolve magically into the grey-black woodland behind.
    It was, he concluded, one of those nights for nothing being entirely real.
    From the shadowed field beyond the gate, he heard the slow, seismic night-breathing of cattle, so loud and full and resonant that it might have been the respiration system of the whole valley. The air was dense with pollen and sweet with warm manure, and Lol experienced a long moment of calm and the nearness of something that was vast and enfolding and brought him close to weeping.
    At which point he cut the fantasy. The fairy-tale castle hardened into a not-so-ancient hop kiln. There were dozens of them around the valley, most of them converted into homes.
    Sad. Not some rich, mystical experience, just another bogstandard memory of the womb.
    …
Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we’re the priests
.
    Lol gripped the top rail of the gate until his hands hurt. Prof was exaggerating, of course. His material wasn’t that strong.
    Anyway, Lol was too long out of it. The most he’d done in years had been occasional demos, for the purpose of flogging a few songs to better-known artists – makeweight stuff for albums, nothing special. It was an income-trickle but it wasn’t a career, it wasn’t a life, and he thought he’d accepted the reality of that a long time ago.
    Back in January, he’d enrolled on this course for trainee psychotherapists, the only one he could find still with any available places, up in Wolverhampton. It made a surreal kind of sense to Lol, though he didn’t share the irony of it with any of the other students, certainly not with the tutors.
    Without actually saying
therapy, shmerapy
, Prof had managed to convey a scepticism well over the threshold of contempt.
    ‘I can’t believe you waste your time on this! You want to take money for persuading the gullible to remember how they were abused by their daddies, then they go home and slash their wrists? It’s like I say to Simon: you’re just being a vicar for
you
, not for them. Who gets married any more? Who wants to hear a sermon, sip lemonade at the vicarage fête? If you want to reach people, cure people, calm people, and you have it in you to give them beautiful music, from the heart… then, Jesus,
this
is the real therapy, the real spirituality. Forget this counselling bullshit! Who’re you really gonna change?’
    Of course, Prof knew all about Lol’s history on the other side of psychiatry, brought about by early exposure to the music business – the blurred fairground ride ending in half-lit caverns with drifting, white-coated ghosts and gliding trolleys, syringes, pills.
    Medication: the stripped-down NHS was a sick system, drug-dependent. It made sense to Lol that he should be using his own experience to help keep other vulnerable people
out
of the system. Otherwise, the medication years were just a damp, rotten hole in his life.
    Prof knew all about this, just didn’t accept the logic.
    ‘Listen to me, boy, I have strong contacts these days… people who trust me, who tend to act on what I say, and I’m telling you, you gotta take these songs into the market place.’
    ‘Well, sure,’ Lol said obligingly. ‘Anybody who wants one—’
    ‘No! They’ll want
you
! Listen to me. I can get you a good tour—’
    Lol had been backing away into the booth at this point, the guitar held in front of him like a riot shield, Prof pursuing him, hands spread wide.
    ‘Laurence, you’re older