Rubbernecker Read online

  3

  HE HAD SEEN a lot of doctors, but it wasn’t until he’d started school at the age of five that Patrick realized there was something wrong with him. He hated the disorder of his classmates and the physicality of the playground – where nobody else was interested in clearing the quad of gravel, then grading it according to size.

  In the classroom there was no task too complex for him to tackle, and few he could not complete. While the other kids rushed out to play, Patrick would wriggle and shriek if the teacher tried to encourage him away from his alphabet or his sums. He was a barnacle for learning.

  He deconstructed his lunchbox and discarded anything red, and was obsessed with parroting any sentence spoken to him, emphasizing each word in turn to taste the changes.

  PUT the chalk down.

  Put the CHALK down.

  Put the chalk DOWN.

  And still he’d be holding the chalk.

  Nobody rejects difference as quickly and brutally as children. Soon Patrick was not invited to houses and parties, and was excluded from groups and games. But he didn’t want to go to parties, hated groups, and didn’t understand the games, so it didn’t bother him. After all, he was fascinated by the rhythm of ants, but it didn’t mean he wanted to be one.

  Until he was seven years old …

  Children weren’t allowed in the bookmaker’s, so while his father watched the horses and dogs on the big screen, Patrick sat under the counter nearest the door, hemmed in by bikes and an old black Labrador, which was either always wet or just smelled that way. Sometimes men would stand in front of Patrick without even knowing he was there. They leaned their elbows on the counter to read the pages of runners and riders that were pinned to the walls, and he looked at their knees and their crotches, and the muddy prints their boots left on the lino. He could hear the scratch of the cheap little biros as they scribbled their selections over his head, and their muttering when they lost, which seemed to be all the time.

  Occasionally they noticed him and bent down and said, ‘Hello, down there’ and ‘All right, boyo?’ But when that happened, Patrick always edged towards the dog for support, and said nothing back. Once a man held a Milky Way out to him and the Labrador snatched it and swallowed it in two gulps – wrapper and all.

  ‘Don’t say much, do he?’ an old man once remarked to Patrick’s father, and his father replied staunchly, ‘He’s thinking.’

  His father always told the truth: Patrick was thinking – about the way air smelled like rubber when it hissed from bicycle tyre valves, about the odds that changed on the screens, making horses’ names jump up and down the list like fleas, and about why dogs had pink gums but black lips.

  Increasingly ignored, Patrick grew to enjoy his post by the door, where he could observe without being observed.

  It was a hot summer day, and Patrick was tracing the Labrador’s slumbering outline on to the lino in biro, when a shocked groan went up from the men in the bookies – followed by a terrible silence.

  Patrick crawled from under the counter and crept forward past the shoes of the men, until he stood up just inches from the giant TV screen.

  Pixellated by proximity, a purple jockey trudged up the emerald grass with a saddle on his arm that should have been on the back of a horse.

  Patrick touched the grass and felt the green buzz warmly around his fingers.

  ‘What’s that kid doing in here?’ somebody called out, and his father got up and held out his hand.

  Patrick drew back. He hated to hold hands; it made his bones itch. But he was perplexed to see that his father had tears in his eyes. For some reason he didn’t understand, it made Patrick take his hand without complaint. He even held it while they crossed the busy road, and then all the way to the lounge bar of the Rorke’s Drift. There his father bought him a Coke in a bottle that looked as though it had been squeezed in the middle, and touched his own pint to it with a dull click.

  ‘To Persian Punch,’ he said huskily, and pinched his nose, which was like wiping it on his sleeve but not as common.

  ‘To Persian Punch,’ agreed Patrick, although it was only later that he would learn that Persian Punch was a horse.

  Had been a horse.

  He never forgot the feeling that it had given him. The curious sense that he was closer to his father at that moment than he’d ever come to anyone. That he could almost share what he was feeling. For the first time, Patrick had an inkling of what it was that the other children seemed to know instinctively – that they were part of something bigger, something mysterious.

  Something he finally wanted, but still didn’t know how to get.

  Discovering that he was missing a critical link turned school into a daily misery for Patrick. Everybody else possessed the key to popularity and happiness, and his clumsy attempts to find his own key always ended with other children looking at him funny, or calling him names. Classmates hid his pencils just to watch him rage, and a group of boys wrapped his winter coat round a rock and threw it on to the roof of the bike shed. The frustration left him confused and angry, and obstinate at home, where he made his parents shout at each other behind closed doors. Patrick would press his cheek to the cool, painted wood and listen to his mother’s voice cracking hysterically: ‘… can’t go on like this! I wish we’d never had him!’

  He liked it when she got like that, because then his father would take him on long walks across the Beacons – just the two of them – while she stayed home and drew the curtains so she could sleep. ‘I need to recover,’ she’d say wearily, and they’d return much later to have tea in a darkened house – silently, so as not to wake her – and his father would put the vodka away somewhere different each time.

  Finally, when Patrick was eight years old, Mark Bennett – a monster of a farmboy – had shouted ‘Twpsyn!’ and punched him in the back as he swung on the monkey bars. Patrick dropped into the dirt and lay gasping at the sky until his breath came back to him. By the time he’d got slowly to his feet, the bigger boy was already high on the swings, laughing. Patrick had stood to one side and waited for the swing to swoop down and past him – then smashed Mark Bennett square in the face with a rounders bat. The combined speed of the swing and the bat knocked him out cold and off the swing, in an impressive somersault that a generation of Brecon children would claim to have seen with their very own eyes.

  The school had called Patrick’s mother, who’d burst into tears and hung up, so they’d called his father, who had left work in the middle of the day to fetch him.

  And had died because of it.

  4

  I’M ASLEEP AND I cannot tell you how hard I try to wake up.

  I dream of Jesus hanging on a cross in his pyjamas, his hands twisting in agony while Mary in a blue uniform tugs on his drubbing feet. Other times it’s a birdman in a black cape and a gas mask, come to plunge its long beak into the jelly of my eyes and drag me off by the sockets – and I scream until my throat hurts, but nobody comes.

  Because it’s a dream – as if that makes it any better.

  Sometimes I’m asleep but I’m aware that I am not awake. Then I swim for the surface in a bottomless well. The water is thick and dirty and I can’t always see the disc of light. Only the fear of what lurks beneath me in the sinuous darkness keeps me fighting, keeps me swimming.

  And yet, whenever I get close to the top, I turn away from the greater horror overhead.

  Up there, beyond the water, somebody screams in pain or in anger – a tortured soul howls obscenities and roars its agony. A hell above me. A holocaust in a foreign tongue. Tears are shed; women and children heartbroken and scared. ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll be all right.’ But the sobbing doesn’t stop – just moves further away.

  Some unseen fish bites the back of my hand and my arm goes cold, and there’s a tugging at my insides like a leech sucking my belly inside out. My shoulders ache, my legs cramp, my neck hurts. Hands run over me like I’m a cow at market and – like a cow – hot shit slides
out of me, unhindered by decency.

  There are voices far above me, as if people are passing by the well with buckets and other things mechanical. I hear them coming and I hear them going: a slow Doppler effect. I don’t recognize them but they seem to know what they’re doing; they’re very busy, very efficient, even though I can’t make out the words.

  The voices drift in and out, and I drift in and out, too – in and out of life and dreams for days, for weeks, for years? But when I’m in I listen all the time for somebody I know. When I hear them, that’s when I’m going to break the surface and shout out, that’s when I’m going to make them know I’m here.

  I’m going to call out: Hey! Hello! I’m down here! And they will look down the well and see me at the bottom, and wave in surprise and go and get help and pull me up in a big wooden bucket, like a kitten that’s been lost for ever.

  Hey! Hello! I’m awake! I can hear you! I’m awake!

  The words are always on the tip of my stagnant tongue. All it will take from me is the air to form them with, the effort of pushing them out, and I’ll be away.

  But for some reason, I’m frightened to try it.

  If I can’t force myself to wake from my own dreams, what if I also can’t shout out when I need to? Or if I can shout out, but nobody hears me? What if they pass right by the lip of the deep, dark well, and never look down, however hard I’m screaming?

  That would no longer be a dream.

  That would be a nightmare.

  Tracy Evans noticed that coma patients were not visited with Get Well cards and grapes; coma patients were attended by those who loved them, or by those who felt a sense of duty. It was easy to tell the difference. Those who loved stayed for hours, touching, washing, talking, playing favourite music through iPod earphones, bringing in childhood toys and adult knickknacks, holding scented flowers under breathless noses, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ with tears in their eyes and croaks in their throats.

  Those who loved hoped for recovery.

  Those who came out of duty hoped only for an end, one way or the other. They sat and read or brought their laptops to catch up on their emails – and asked endlessly for the password for the free Wifi. They bit their nails and tapped their feet and read any old magazine they could find, even the gardening ones. They stared out of the window, down across the roof of the car park and the city beyond it – as if even that were preferable to looking at the person in the bed who wouldn’t make up their mind whether to live or whether to die.

  Tracy Evans liked those visitors better. They never asked for vases or for the blinds to be opened, or thought they’d seen a twitch or a blink, or a finger tapping out SOS in Morse on the lemon-coloured blankets.

  The ones who were there for love were a bit of a pain. She’d only been here a few weeks but already she’d had a girlfriend leave a boyfriend a life-sized stuffed leopard, a woman bring in an electric frying pan to cook bacon by her husband’s bedside, and four karate club members performing some kind of routine, complete with loud yells, in the hope that the sound would kickstart a brain that no longer worked. She couldn’t even tell them off for waking the other patients, because waking the patients on the coma ward was sort of the whole point.

  It was all mildly diverting, but in no way did it replace or facilitate Tracy’s obsession with the progress of Rose Mackenzie’s life.

  The one bright spot was Mr Deal.

  Mr Deal came every night after work to see his wife, whose notes told Tracy that she had been here for nearly a year, after suffering a brain haemorrhage following a fall downstairs. Mrs Deal was forty, which meant Mr Deal was old enough to seem far more exotic to Tracy than the young men she routinely met in Evolution on a Friday night. Those young men hunted in packs and vomited in gutters; she couldn’t imagine Mr Deal doing either of those things.

  There was something authoritarian and brooding about him – something of the Raft Ankers, if Tracy were honest – and every time his visits coincided with her shifts, she got a little thrill.

  He never came at weekends, and seemed just uninterested enough in his wife during week-night visits to make Tracy think that a bit of mild flirtation might not be such a sinful thing – or a wasted one. She hadn’t done it yet – not properly – but she knew she would quite soon, unless Mrs Deal died or got better. Actually, only if she got better. If Mrs Deal died, Tracy thought she would still be in with a chance. Men hated living alone and were no good at it; Tracy knew this because her father had tried leaving her mother once, and had been so thoroughly hopeless that he’d returned home just two weeks later with his tail tucked between his legs, right where his balls should have been.

  Mr Deal wasn’t a pilot or a doctor, but he was obviously rich and important. Tracy guessed the former because he had a set of keys on a Mercedes fob, which he often twirled on his finger while he looked at the car park with his back to his wife. She guessed he was important because when he spoke on his BlackBerry about work, he sounded as if he were giving orders, not taking them, and frowned and sighed as if he were running the United Nations.

  Rich and important, and just a little bit dangerous.

  Tracy Evans pulled a fresh sheet tight over Mrs Deal’s slowly curling body, tucked it in hard, and hoped she wouldn’t get better too soon.

  5

  IT WAS ONLY the first week of August, but Patrick had already packed his bags for college.

  Bag, singular.

  Sarah Fort stared down into the battered old suitcase, open on his bed in the room under the eaves that looked out across the smooth green hills of the Brecon Beacons.

  She had told him to take everything he’d need for the twelve-week term, so he’d packed his laptop, his textbooks and his hoodie with the word HOODIE on it.

  Nothing else.

  With a sigh, she opened Patrick’s drawers and started to fill the suitcase with sensible things. Sweaters, shorts, socks. His washbag held only toothbrush and paste, cheap shampoo, and a razor with innumerable blades, each one supposedly more efficient than the last. Sarah smiled at the razor. Patrick got so angry about the lies advertisers told: the best ever, the longest lasting and eight out of ten cats outraged his logic. But he’d bought the razor anyway – prey to the power of advertising, just like any normal person.

  Normal.

  It was all she wanted for him – to be normal. Of course, she wanted him to have a job and a wife and a family, too – but she’d settle for normal. Normal would be a relief.

  Down below, next to the ramshackle wooden shed, on the patch of weed-strewn gravel they called the driveway, Patrick was leaning over the engine of her little Fiesta. What could be more normal than a boy fixing a car on a sunny day? The scene gave Sarah hope. He’d got that from Matt – that obsession with mechanical things, even though Patrick had never learned to drive. The Fiesta was twenty years old now, and still ran like a dream, thanks to him.

  She watched him tinker. From this distance she could see the boy and the man; the way he was changed but still changing. Big hands on the end of wiry arms, wide shoulders but narrow hips, and cropped hair that came to a childlike curl at his nape as he bent to read the oil level.

  Sarah sighed. Patrick had been such a sweet baby; a boisterous toddler. But then – increasingly – a strange little boy. He’d started to stiffen when they tried to hug him, to look away when they spoke. His teachers said he was the cleverest in the class at sums, but then looked down at their hands while they mumbled about everything else: his fixation on detail and routine, his isolation and his lack of eye contact.

  After Matt had … died, Patrick had got worse. He shrieked if Sarah reached out to him, and barely spoke – except to ask obsessively, ‘What happened to Daddy?’

  The doctor said it was understandable.

  When it went on for a year, the doctor turned his palms up more cautiously, and said it was an understandable obsession.

  Sarah hated the word ‘obsession’. She preferred to call it a ‘phase’.


  But it had gone on so long …

  Patrick had started to bring home dead animals. Birds, squirrels, rabbits. He sat and stared at them for hours, rolling them gently back and forth with a stick, or spreading a dead wing to watch the feathers move into place. After a while he’d begun to slice them open, peering into cavities and unravelling intestines. Making his bed one day, Sarah found a peeled shrew under the pillow. After that, dead things weren’t allowed in the house. She had caught him testing the padlock on the shed door instead, and warmed his backside for him.

  No means no, Patrick!

  The dead-animal phase had lasted years, and then Patrick had become more focused on mechanical things. When he wasn’t fine-tuning his bicycle gears, he was peering at the engine of her car, or those of neighbours, coaxing dead and dirty metal back to life with a spanner he wielded like a wand. Now his hands often reminded her of Matt’s, with the whorls on his fingers mapped in oily isobars.

  Sarah frowned. This sudden desire to go to college – to learn anatomy – seemed like an unwelcome return to that earlier obse—that earlier phase. No good could come of it.

  She watched her son tighten the spark plugs, then put each of the old ones back inside little cardboard tubes for disposal and line them up neatly on the ground, making sure each one was parallel with the last. She knew that when the time came to throw them away, he would take them out of the tubes one last time and check each one again before dropping it into the bin.

  What went on inside his head?

  Sarah had been asking herself the same question for eighteen years and knew she probably would for another fifty, if she lived that long. What was it that made Patrick panic if his T-shirt was too tight? What hitch in his brain made him arrange his books by publication date, and eat his food in alphabetical order?

  Sarah never asked him. They talked – but never about the things that mattered. It was all Bring down your laundry and Don’t forget your coat. Part of her yearned for more; another part shied away from anything deeper or more difficult. The truth was, she didn’t want to know why he was the way he was, or whether there was anything she could have done about it.