‘We have no idea what goes on there.’

  ‘Under the forest floor is a carpet, we don’t know its true size. It’s alive. From time to time it sends a messenger above ground. A mushroom. That mushroom produces millions of spores.’

  ‘Billions,’ said the shy guy who’d forgotten his shyness. ‘When I’m up in the forest, even if I don’t see anyone all day, it’s busy like a city.’

  ‘It’s called symbiosis,’ said the skinny guy.

  ‘The roots of the trees talk to the mushrooms underground. And the mushrooms overground talk to the insects and bees.’

  ‘Without pollinators, our forests will die.’

  ‘Without mycelium, the whole world will die.’

  ‘There will always be mycelium, don’t you worry,’ grinned the skinny guy. ‘I’m not so sure about the overground cities.’

  The shy guy finished his pint and got up, his empty canvas sack ready for the morning, when once again he would steal above Black Mesta and White Mesta, where the underground and the overground cities met out of view, like chords in an alpine symphony that only lovers can hear.

  Alish

  Alish’s sight had started rapidly declining in his early twenties. As a student at the Forestry School, he was already very short-sighted, but while studying physiotherapy in the capital, his sight failed definitively. He returned home and worked for ten years as a masseur in a resort in The Good Place. As darkness closed in, he continued to work with people’s bodies.

  We ate lunch at Feri’s after a busy morning of patients. Alish ordered steaks, stuffed peppers, soups, salads – it was his habit to order too much food. He insisted on paying, no matter how many friends were at the table. He ate little, sipped his beer with relish and listened to you carefully. Because he was a local hero, he had a table by the bar at Feri’s.

  Beers and friends was how he had decompressed from the intensity of working with people in pain almost every day for the last twenty-five years.

  ‘For those in pain there’s no holiday,’ he said. ‘No weekends.’

  He had no weekends either. Even lunch was difficult. His little old phone with buttons kept ringing – patients asking when they could come, telling him they were on their way, asking for advice, or saying: ‘We’re outside, where are you?’

  Some had been coming to him for years – mostly with one of the many types of chronic back pain. Especially in winter, when some muscular-skeletal conditions worsen.

  ‘Drivers, forestry workers, seamstresses, all with severely stressed spines.’

  One way or another, it all came down to the back. Headaches came from the back, he said, and sometimes from an internal organ system. Whenever there’s a headache, somewhere else in the body is out of balance.

  ‘People are used to popping painkillers, but that doesn’t address the root cause. That’s why problems return. Because the root cause is ignored.’

  He saw children with scoliosis, a twisting of the spine, often overweight. It was sometimes possible to free up the fatty tissue around the spine which freed up the nerves. He saw more and more overweight children, he said, with deformed, weak backs. Too much screen time and no exercise.

  ‘They don’t play, they don’t swim, they don’t walk, they don’t look up from their screens. They get old before their time. It’s an epidemic.’

  The average age of his patients was getting dramatically younger – because of this artificial way of life and – ‘And the number one reason: psychological stress. Every problem begins with some form of stress.’

  For Alish, faith in your ability to heal was the single most important factor in recovery.

  ‘The faithless ones have little hope of recovery. I don’t like to talk about things I don’t understand like mushrooms, but if there’s one thing I can say outright it’s this. Belief in your ability to heal opens the path to healing. There’s no other path.’

  He’d had women with large ovarian cysts who were so sure they’d be cured that the cysts dissolved. Alish didn’t take credit for it, but the cysts were in turn related to some muscular-skeletal problem that he’d tackled.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘you must trust that you’ll get better. Second, you must trust the person treating you. And third, trust in a higher power. They’re all related.

  ‘Lots of people are blocked. The blockage occurs in one or more places in the body. And it’s linked to the mind. So I don’t use oil on people’s skin, cos it blocks their pores and nobody needs to be blocked any more than they already are.’

  I asked him about specific cases, but he didn’t discuss individuals – it was unprofessional. And one thing he couldn’t stand was gossip. This town – he meant Yakoruda – is a hotbed of gossip, envy and competition about material things.

  ‘It really gets my goat, all that stuff,’ he pushed the second empty pint glass to one side and called the waitress in a denim jumpsuit, Feri’s daughter. ‘Give us another beverage, luv! And another potato salad for my friend.’

  Overruling my protestations, he went on.

  ‘That’s why I keep myself to myself, even though I know lots of people and lots of people think they know me. But you can’t truly know another. Cheers. Eat up.’

  We clinked glasses. I didn’t want those extra portions, I said. But Alish took pleasure in splashing out on friends and treated me as a friend from the beginning.

  ‘Because you’ve got your marbles about you and your energy is good. It’s a treat to mix with the healthy in body and in mind. I see people with very poor energy. Polluted energy. Energy is all about merit. You get the energy you merit. Not in a moral sense, in a literal sense.’

  And then, he said, ‘You leave that behind you when you’re gone, like a trail.’ I wasn’t sure if he meant gone from the room, or gone from this life. Maybe it was the same trail.

  He felt the vibrational frequency of everyone who crossed his door, he said. Sometimes, he was overwhelmed by people’s emanations and got headaches and disturbed sleep.

  ‘One time,’ he leaned over the table and lowered his voice, ‘I opened the door and I was face to face with vampires.’

  They had been three or four, men and women, but he couldn’t tell which one was the ‘real’ vampire. He didn’t let them in, but they waited for him outside.

  ‘I managed to get away. I fled here. They followed me. Eventually, I managed to get rid of them. After that, I couldn’t sleep for a month. My sugar went up too.’

  I have met vampires like these.

  Those were the vagaries of operating out of his own house – he didn’t know who would turn up. But he was fearless and he liked being his own boss because he was allergic to being told what to do, he said – there’s always a catch when you’re working for somebody. That’s why he quit the resort job – because he didn’t want to become dependent on his boss’s whims, even when the whims were indulgences. Because of his exceptional talent, Alish had been made an offer he almost couldn’t refuse: to be a private masseur to elite sportsmen and women. It was a world of beautiful bods, lucre and celebrity. But he did refuse.

  ‘I could see where it was gonna end up, for me. It was already turning my head. I was starting to think with my dick. When you’re blind, no matter how good you are at what you do, you remain an outsider. There’s no two ways about it. And love is hard to find.’

  Then, in the direction of Feri’s daughter:

  ‘Another beverage, luv! And chocolate cake.’

  We put the uneaten food in boxes and took it back to his place. He couldn’t cook for himself and there was nobody to cook for him. So he ate takeaways and the fruit and vegetables patients brought as gifts from their own gardens.

  ‘So anyway, I somehow found it in myself to walk away from it – the girls, the money. And I returned here and set up an open-door practice.’

  Since that day, his door had never stopped opening. Word spread and people came with problems beyond his expertise.

  ‘I’m an osteopath, not a magician,’ Alish said. ‘I treat lots of things: coxarthrosis; shortened ligaments; neuralgia; sciatica; slipped discs. But some folks come expecting miracles. Maybe they think the blind can do magic.’

  A family came all the way from Istanbul – a young woman in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy. Parents brought autistic children. Infertile women came.

  ‘There was one who came with lower back pain, and after that she conceived. I was chuffed for her, then two of her girlfriends rocked up: “We too want to conceive.” But you’ve come to the wrong door! I’m an osteopath, not an inseminator.’

  He chuckled. His teeth were all gone. That’s why he didn’t eat much. It seemed unfair – he was only in his early fifties and didn’t touch sugar because he was diabetic.

  ‘You have to know the difference between what you can treat and what you can’t. I too want to get my eyes back, but I can’t.’

  Alish lived alone in a single room reached by a flight of outdoor stairs. That was his share of the family house.

  ‘Alone with all my problems, and those of others on top.’

  Under the stairs was his bathroom. On the ground floor lived relatives, and across the street, his brother’s family, who owned the little shop with sugary snacks that ruined people’s teeth and where men gathered at dusk. Alish had had some chickens and rabbits in his garden, for company, but his relatives had taken them, claiming that he couldn’t look after them. When you are blind, you are not only at the mercy of strangers, but of your own family. The strangers leave, but your family don’t.

  Inside Alish’s room there was a sink, a kitchen table on which he kept a few personal items, a bottle of vegetable oil and a transistor radio. A bed for him at one end and a massage bed for his patients at the other. You lay face down with your head in the hole. There was a small pillow that was infrequently changed and I put it to one side. Alish’s hands were small, warm, kind – and as strong as a vice. How many bodies had passed through this room?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alish said, ‘I don’t keep count.’

  You had to ascend the stairs to reach his door, leave your shoes outside as if entering a temple and step into the tiny hallway filled with bottles of wine, whisky, rakia, ouzo and champagne, all gifts. But he only drank beer. The first time I went to see him, he shook my hand and said to Feri who’d brought me: ‘Nice energy, very warm. Feri, give her the finest bottle of wine’ – and I ended up with a vintage French red, which kind Feri kept in his restaurant and brought out glasses filled to the brim whenever I came. The ouzo was from Greeks married to Bulgarians who tried to translate. He cut them off: ‘Lie down and I’ll find it.’

  And he did. He also remembered every detail about every returning patient and their circumstances and family relations. I sat in on his appointments one morning. A mother and daughter came. The girl was wearing silky lingerie. She was engaged and glowing.

  ‘Excellent,’ Alish gently manipulated her tailbone and lower spine. ‘It’s feeling so much better, eh!’

  Just a year ago, she couldn’t sit or lie down, or have sex, because of crippling lumbar and pelvic pain. She had spent her teens in pain. The GP had said she’d need painkillers for life. The gynaecologist had informed her that she’d be infertile. She came to Alish several times. The pain was now gone.

  ‘Of course you’ll have a baby, twins even. But there’s no rush, you’re young. You can get up now.’

  Next was a lorry driver who could barely stand. His wife helped him up the stairs. He laughed at his own pain.

  ‘Because if you laugh, it hurts less,’ his wife said. She was a seamstress and had been cured of her own bad back by Alish.

  People came as a last resort after they’d been written off by doctors, or misdiagnosed, or sent round a labyrinthine health care system until they despaired, or ran out of money.

  Alish was on good terms with conventional medicine. But there are doctors out there, he said, you show them the place that hurts and they look at some other place that’s fine, as if to spite you. Because they can; they have power over you. Or they’re incompetent. There are also lots of charlatans that style themselves as healers and people go to them out of despair. The real healers are few and far between, he said. It was true.

  His manner was brusque but never unkind. He just didn’t do niceties.

  ‘A government minister came to me once, actually lots of bigwigs come, but that one wanted to jump the queue. “Do you know who I am?” No, and I don’t care. He waited his turn.’

  While we lunched, Ibrahim sat down with us and ordered drinks and a salad. He asked Alish to fast-track some friends that afternoon, because ‘they’re special people.’

  ‘Mate,’ Alish said, ‘All people are the same to me. They’ll wait.’

  Ibrahim raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I’ve known him since we were kids fishing in the river. Fair to a fault.’

  ‘Mate,’ Alish said, he was getting tipsy after four pints. ‘There are certain laws of nature. Do good if you can. If you can’t, try not to do harm. Don’t discuss others, look at yourself instead. There’s a few more, but these are the basic ones.’

  There really was something of the scales of justice about Alish. He had in fact wanted to study law, but realising that law was one of the elite professions reserved for Party members’ children at the time, and that he was a boy from a Pomak community that only a few years previously had been targeted with army lorries, recognising that he was a second-class citizen, Alish went for physiotherapy instead. He had worldly ambitions back then and wanted to be a masseur to footballers – football was his passion. He still enjoyed matches on television and walked around in red T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Manchester United’.

  ‘And now … with the blindness, and then with the heart attack that made me die and come back – when that sort of thing happens, you don’t care about little things like status and money.’

  He’d been a large man, then, but after the heart failure and the surgery he’d melted away. I could not recognise him in earlier photos.

  He was content in his one-room home and didn’t go anywhere.

  ‘I would, if I had my beloved next to me, but she is not here,’ he said, not revealing more, ‘because even I have the right to a private life,’ he said. ‘You asked me what is my medicine. Apart from Black Mesta where I go to wash when I can, wash it all away. I love this river. Like a person.’

  But at the end of a busy day, he was too tired to ask someone to take him down to the river and just lay down on his bed after a quick shower, closed his eyes, and hoped the phone wouldn’t ring.

  ‘His medicine is to help people,’ Ibrahim answered for his friend.

  ‘No,’ said Alish.

  Alish was public property and that made people speak on his behalf, as if his sightlessness incurred other deficiencies. This annoyed him no end.

  ‘I’ve known him all my life, I know everything about him,’ Ibrahim said.

  ‘No you don’t,’ Alish said sharply. ‘You haven’t a clue.’

  We all went quiet. There was something utterly naked about Alish’s face with its eyeless and toothless surface, always paying attention, picking up signals, refracting them back at you. His face was like a mirror. His whole being was like a mirror. You looked at him and measured your own soul’s integrity. That’s why it was sometimes difficult to look at him.

  ‘You’re in good nick,’ he said to me on that first day, when I lay face down on his patient bed.

  My neck pain came from the lower back, he said, causing the odd twinge.

  ‘It’s the tailbone, it has a slight kink,’ he said. This was in fact a long-standing problem.

  ‘Walking is recommended. You can get up now.’

  Some women flirted with him and acted out their dramas. The more privileged, the more self-absorbed. A TV presenter came and said: ‘Should I take off everything?’

  Alish cackled. ‘I said to her: You can take off anything you like. I don’t care. I’ve seen it all before, so to speak.’

  She proceeded to do just that, and when he finished with ‘You can get up now,’ she made a show of losing her bra. ‘Alish, where is my bra?’

  ‘I dunno, I said, “I’m blind, aren’t I. You’re supposed to be the seeing one.” People like that drain me. And those with negative attitudes. Negativity sucks you dry.’

  But he never stepped over the line with people. He waited for them to find their bra, list their complaints and saw them off at the door where they put on their shoes and drove off in a cloud of dust, re-crossing the railway and taking care not to be mowed down by the speeding train.

  ‘Next!’ he’d shout down the stairs. ‘Tell them to come up!’

  Payment was voluntary and there was no fixed rate. And anyway he could not see the banknotes left on his table. People were giving and never took advantage of his blindness.

  With his earnings, Alish was putting his nephew through a physiotherapy degree. The boy had wanted to follow in his footsteps.

  ‘What matters most to me is love,’ Alish said at the lunch table. ‘Love is the only elixir, my friend.’

  Ibrahim and I were quiet.

  ‘But there’s less and less love to be had,’ Alish said. ‘Less love for animals. Less love for people. Less love for nature. It’s all related. Cos there’s only one love.’

  Ibrahim had lived passionately and had many lovers and friends but, he said to me another time, ‘I always end up alone.’

  ‘Without love, nothing works,’ Alish said. ‘You can do nothing if you have no love in you. Love for what you do. Love for someone in this world. That’s all there is.’

  He squeezed my hand over the table with his vice-like fingers, then his phone went off. It was time to return to Black Mesta. Ibrahim’s eyes filled with tears, the seeing brown one and the milky-blue one blinded in an industrial accident. My tears fell on my notebook, blurring words. Alish paid the large bill, overruling our protestations and we walked to my car, slowly, with Ibrahim on the other side of Alish, although it was Alish propping him up, not the other way around.