At pay-school Mary soon got a reputation and her locker bore a big sign saying THIS IS A ‘PROHIBITED PLACE’ AS DEFINED BY THE 1989 OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT.

Teachers avoided Mary and other kids were scared of her but secretly loved her. No one knew what went on in Mary’s head.

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Let us now change the subject.

At Mary’s pay-school there was also a boy of the species called Maguiness whose hair was long and eyes roving (etc etc). Maguiness was so dumb he didn’t even know he was alive. One day he got his hair caught in a new piece of experimental woodwork machinery (or something) and his head was damn near ripped off its moorings.

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While Maguiness nearly died all the teachers and guards were in a panic and none knew what to do except switch on the school alarm bell and the sprinklers too and shout for help. Maguiness was rolling on the floor like a fish in quick lime, blood everywhere.

The crowd that gathered was as clueless as it was voyeuristic and desensitised to violence. Mary walked thru the crowd, and it seemed (at least to those who were there) as if the crowd parted for her.

*

What next?

Mary knelt by Maguiness and took his head in her hands, fitting it back on where the neck was, cradling him against her and singing softly an old rebel song from the Spanish Civil War.

Maguiness swooned, and drifted and smiled, caught up in the rhythm of her voice, and Mary smiled, a calm smile that most people only experience a few times in their lives.

When the doctors finally arrived Maguiness was already better.

*

When summer came Eve and Tarzan got jobs in another town and Mary had to stay home in a borstal. It wasn’t ideal but her parents wrote letters every month which said the place they went to was cold as hell and ice froze over all the trees, cars and climbing frames in the parks. There were tigers there, and mammoths and plenty of idiots too so there was a lot of work for stripagrams and tarzanograms.

Eve and her husband got rich, slowly but surely and joined the middle class.

*

Back home Mary did a few more cures and was soon pursued by journos and various cults. Everyone wanted to press the story of her miracle working into a story of their own devising but Mary wouldn’t let them.

When a kid phoned up sick from a phone box or when an astronaut panicked on the long climb back down from space, when a train crashed and a passenger was caught, when a bingo-caller got cancer of the throat or when one of the lads on her estate got a hangover Mary was always there to help. People soon called her Gods Doctor tho Mary herself never believed in anything.

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