Rubbernecker Read online

  Or not done …

  She caught sight of her reflection in the window: tight-lipped, no make-up, mousey hair scraped into a utilitarian knot. The face of a woman who has no one to wake up with.

  Through her own ghostly eyes she watched Patrick wheel Matthew’s old bike across the gravel and disappear down the lane. She knew he’d be gone for hours, and felt the relief.

  There were two dusty framed photos on Patrick’s bedside table. The first was a picture of Matt on the Beacons, taken from a child’s angle that only accentuated his stature.

  He’d been such a handsome man, thought Sarah, and they’d shared such dreams. Not grand dreams, but humble ones – of a better couch, a holiday in Scotland, and of going together to watch their son on the rugby field or in the school play. They hadn’t wanted much, but they’d been denied even that.

  The other photo was of her and Patrick standing awkwardly together – not touching – next to the old blue Volkswagen she’d once loved but which she couldn’t bear to look at after Matt’s death. Patrick was only seven or eight in the photo – a thin child with dark-blue eyes and brown hair that was always clipped too short, to save time and money. She’d framed it because it was one of the few pictures she had of him where he was actually looking into the camera. No doubt because Matt was behind it, she thought with an unexpected flicker of the old resentment. Patrick had always been more Matt’s son than hers. Matt would explain things to Patrick in a low, soothing voice, and never cared if Patrick said nothing in return, or got up and left in the middle of it.

  Both of which drove her crazy.

  The least you could do is nod your head, Patrick!

  If you’re not going to sit at the table like a big boy, you can bloody well go hungry.

  It wasn’t often Sarah was able to hold Patrick’s gaze, and now she picked up the photo and thumbed a path through the dust so she could study his eyes. Even though they were ten years out of date, they were still the same – solemn and wary. He didn’t trust her; she knew that. Even as a small boy he would turn and look to Matt for confirmation of anything she’d said – each glance a needle in her heart.

  On a whim, Sarah slid the photo under the hoodie, where Patrick wouldn’t notice it until it was too late. It knocked against something wrapped inside the thick material of the sweatshirt.

  Sarah took out a black hardcover notebook with a red cloth spine, and opened it – expecting that Patrick had already begun making notes for his anatomy classes. He was the most conscientious of students.

  Instead there was page after page of dense pencil lists in his firm block capitals.

  … CHARGER, BELLADONNA, HOSTILITY …

  She frowned at the long columns of random words.

  … EXIT STRATEGY, SLEEPER, COMMON GOOD …

  Sometimes there was a date, or an asterisk next to a word, or a symbol that meant nothing to her. None of it meant anything to her. She doubted it meant anything to anybody apart from Patrick. She flicked through dozens of almost identical pages, increasingly uneasy, yet not knowing why. Partly it was because she’d never seen the book before, which meant Patrick must have kept it hidden. That alone was disturbing. But mostly because its contents just seemed so odd – and she discouraged odd wherever possible. Odd had never done Patrick any favours, and never would.

  As she was about to close the book, it fell open near the back where the pages were still clear, and suddenly she was looking at a black and white photograph of a little girl in a white dress.

  Panic squeezed her throat, and gooseflesh rose down her forearms. What was this? Her mind – always primed to expect the worst – launched like a firework, spinning crazily through a ruined future where the police knocked on the door, where she had to find the money for solicitors, where people spat at them in the street and broke their windows, whether Patrick was found guilty or not.

  Then she realized that the photo was not so much black and white as sepia.

  And that the child was dead.

  She gasped and bent her head over it more intently, with the little bedside alarm clock ticking suddenly loudly in her ears.

  This was beyond odd.

  The little girl in the picture was aged about five. Her face was pinched and workhouse poor, but her flaxen hair had been brushed and a dark ribbon tied into it over one bony temple. She wore a long, carefully arranged dress full of lace frills and impractical flounces. It was a dress worn only for such photos, Sarah guessed – likely to have been provided by the photographer, and probably the only decent dress the little girl would ever have worn.

  The child in the picture was propped on a chair; Sarah could just see the tips of her shiny black shoes dangling below the pristine hem. The girl’s eyes were closed, but that might just have been the taking of the photograph, Sarah knew. Those Victorians had to keep utterly still during long exposures, and children often couldn’t make it. They blinked, they twitched, they yawned … they blurred. So the eyes might have been caught mid-blink.

  No, it was the hands that gave it away.

  A cheap doll had been placed on the girl’s lap and her arms arranged around it, as if she were holding a favourite toy. But this child’s hands were beyond holding. The wrists were curled inwards, and the fingers were slack – and the photographer had failed to notice that the pinkie on the girl’s left hand was bent backwards under the doll, in a way that no living child would have suffered.

  This girl was dead.

  Somewhere Sarah had heard of such photos, but she had never seen one. Pictures taken of the dead for their families to remember them by, in a time when few could afford to spend precious pennies on such fripperies for the living.

  She felt overwhelming relief, then gave a short, nervous laugh at the thought that she could be relieved by finding a picture of a dead child among her son’s possessions.

  Her brief illusion of normality popped like a soap bubble and she looked out across the Beacons, where sunlight illuminated the very top of Penyfan, throwing its swooping drop into ominous shadow. She remembered the day Patrick had been suspended from school – how she’d swayed on that crest, staring into the abyss, while fingers of mist caressed her calves and encouraged her to take a closer look.

  She hadn’t been back since. This was close enough.

  She heard again the smooth, cultured voice of Professor Madoc on the phone a few days after Patrick’s interview – talking in careful circles, tying her up in condescending knots about empathic response and special requirements – and her registering none of it but the single word ‘quota’. Patrick had got into college because of their disability quota. That was the bottom line. Not because he had smashed national academic records in A-level biology and zoology, but because of his Asperger’s Syndrome.

  Professor Madoc could patronize her till the cows came home, but she wasn’t stupid; she’d had an education once; she’d had a life! And no amount of politically correct verbal acrobatics could hide the fact that, although they were letting him take anatomy, Professor Madoc thought there might be something badly amiss with Patrick.

  At the time she’d felt killing tears scorch her eyes. Now – sitting on her son’s bed, with his cryptic notebook in one hand and a photograph of a dead child in the other – she wasn’t sure he was wrong.

  6

  PATRICK LAY ON his back and watched the clouds obey the breeze. The sheep-shorn grass was warm under him, and the smell of hay drifted over him from the farm in the valley below. Good enough to eat.

  On late-summer days like this, with his eyes starting to close, it was easy to imagine his father was still alive – lying beside him in a silence that had only ever been broken by a quiet word or a gentle snore.

  But even in this warm cocoon, he could never remember his father without thinking of that day …

  He’d followed him out of the school gates, staring at the back of his blue overalls, and at the Doc Martens with the steel toecaps that felt like lead when he stepped into them at home to p
lay Deep Sea Diver.

  His father rarely walked so fast, so Patrick guessed he had forgotten he was behind him. Every few paces, Patrick had to break into a jog just to keep up.

  He was glad to be out of school. Everybody looking at him, and all the loud words. Nobody had seen Mark Bennett punch him in the back. No adult, at least. But they had all come running to pick the bigger boy off the ground, and they had all seen the blood. Mr Jenkins had shouted and asked him if he understood how wrong he’d been, but Patrick didn’t feel wrong, and couldn’t lie about it, which made Mr Jenkins even louder. Then, when his father had arrived, Mr Jenkins had been loud with him, as if he were eight years old, too.

  ‘Follow me,’ his father had said as he left, without looking at him, and so that’s what Patrick had done – followed him out of the school gates and down towards the town.

  The garage was at the other end of Brecon. Patrick knew he would sit and wait in Mr Harris’s broken chair in the grimy little office, which was always covered with pink invoices and black fingerprints, with Miss February forever on the calendar. Her name was Justine, she liked beach volleyball and kittens, and her nipples were dark brown.

  Near the bookies, his father turned and took Patrick’s hand and started to pull him across the quiet road. Patrick stiffened. His father never just grabbed his hand without warning! The feeling of it made him want to scream. He twisted free and stepped back towards the kerb. His father spun on his heel.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Patrick! Take my hand!’

  The car hit him so hard that it knocked him out of his shoes. One moment his father was coming towards him with his hand outstretched; the next there was a space, with only the Doc Marten boots to show where he’d been – one lying on its side, the other rolling awkwardly down the road, like a dumped dog trying to find its way home.

  The car never stopped.

  Patrick breathed hard into that space for a long, deafening moment, then slowly started to follow the second boot. Further up the road, people were running. Running from shops and cars, and out of the bookies. Running away from him.

  Patrick reached the second boot, which now stood on the white line, upright and obedient, the way his father left it in the hallway every night.

  All the running people had stopped in a bundle further up the road. Between their legs, Patrick could see something blue lying on the tarmac. Blue and jumbled, and with angles that made no sense.

  ‘Don’t let him come here!’ shouted the Milky Way man. ‘Keep him there!’

  A young man in a striped shirt blocked his way, and Patrick stopped before he could be touched.

  ‘What’s his name?’ said Stripy over his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Milky Way. ‘Just keep him there.’

  ‘What’s your name, boyo?’ said Stripey.

  Patrick ignored the question and craned around him, desperate to see what everyone was looking at. Then someone moved and – just for a second – Patrick saw his father’s eyes.

  Looking nowhere.

  Patrick waited at the police station until nearly midnight, when they finally contacted his mother. She couldn’t come to fetch him and when they drove him home he understood why. She had been recovering and could barely stand. The older policeman had tried to explain things to her, but she kept losing focus on him. Eventually he had made them both hot, sweet tea, and then had cooked Patrick beans on toast, before driving away under the fullest of moons.

  ‘What happened to Daddy?’ Patrick asked his mother.

  ‘Daddy’s dead,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of you,’ she said, and her voice broke in half. ‘Because of you!’

  Then Patrick watched her howl, and slap her own head, and crawl about the kitchen floor – and thought that she hadn’t really answered his question.

  For a long time after that day, Patrick had searched for his father. He roamed the Beacons, he peered through the doors of Harris’s garage, he was chased out of the Rorke’s Drift, and he crept into the bookies to huddle beside the Labrador, waiting for his father’s blue legs to pass him. At night he lay awake, restless and alert, sure that he’d hear the key in the lock and catch his father creeping in by moonlight; in the mornings he stood breathless at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hallway, expecting to see the Doc Martens in their proper place.

  His father had been there one moment and gone the next. It was like a magic trick that he might expose, if only he looked up the right sleeve.

  In his dreams he always took his father’s outstretched hand, and they crossed the road together.

  His mother didn’t go to work in the card shop, and Patrick didn’t go to school. His mother slept and slept and slept. He barely saw her, and found that calming. He made his own meals. Every day was sandwiches: breakfast, lunch and dinner. He stopped bothering to put the lid back on the jam.

  Two weeks after the accident, a woman and a man came to the cottage and spoke to his mother with files on their laps, while Patrick watched through the crack in the door. They said the car had not been found, that the driver had not been traced. They said someone had seen a number plate but that someone had got it wrong. They said they would keep trying but that the trail was going cold. His mother sat on the couch as limp as a rag doll, and nodded her head now and then. When she looked up, her eyes were almost as empty as his father’s had been.

  A doctor came and gave her an injection. Patrick slipped out the back way and ran across the Beacons, scattering sheep.

  After that, he went back to school. For the first few days, he got a lift with Weird Nick and his mother. Then one day when he got home, they had the Fiesta instead of the blue Volkswagen and a new jar of jam, and life returned to some kind of normality – on the outside, at least.

  The school counsellor asked him how he felt and he didn’t understand the question, so she told him.

  ‘You feel sad,’ she said. ‘That’s normal. You’ve lost someone you loved very much and if you want to cry, that’s not being a baby.’

  Patrick didn’t want to cry; he only wanted to find out what had happened to his father.

  The counsellor sighed. ‘You see, Patrick, when somebody dies, it’s like going through a door. Once that door closes behind them, they can’t come back.’

  Patrick had never heard of a door you could only go through one way. He hadn’t seen a door opening or closing – or even his father moving towards it. He’d simply been there and then not there. But the counsellor seemed very sure.

  ‘Then I can just find the door and open it and find out what happened,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh, Patrick,’ said the counsellor with tears in her eyes, and reached out to give him a big hug.

  He’d had to hit her to keep her at bay.

  7

  I CAN SMELL bacon! Frying bacon. I can even hear it sizzle – and the waves of memory crash saltily into my mouth.

  Sunny mornings outside the caravan down on the Gower.

  Why don’t we sell the house and live like this? That’s what Alice and I always say to each other, sitting in our old stripy deckchairs, after the breakfast and before the washing up, while Lexi and Patch chase each other through the tufted dunes, squealing and yapping.

  Flying the pink plastic box kite I bought Lexi in the little shop festooned with beach balls and buckets; feeling it dance and tug at the end of the line. And then suddenly we’re holding nothing but falling string, as the kite breaks free and soars into the Wedgwood sky like something that knows where it’s going, and can’t wait to get there. As it disappears into a dot, Lexi slips her little hand into mine and says, ‘Look at it go, Daddy!’ – and my heart is overwhelmed with joy, because watching it go is better than holding it back, even if we’ll never see it again.

  I can feel her hand now, squeezing my fingers so hard that it hurts. But I don’t pull away because holding her hand is so special; so precious …

  All that from the smell of the b
acon. All that wonder and joy …

  Somebody tells me they love me. It’s not Alice but it warms me anyway. Love is never bad, wherever you find it; Alice taught me that.

  I wonder where they are, Alice and Lexi. Do they even know I’m here – waiting for them to come and find me while a stranger holds my hand? Until they’re with me, what am I? Not a husband and not a father.

  I’m lost without them.

  The only noise is a soft blip … blip … and the sound of my own breathing. In and out … and in and out … and in and out … and in and out. My chest rises and falls to the maddening rhythm. It makes me think of Lexi learning to play the piano. ‘Chopsticks’ outrunning the metronome, and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ lagging behind it. But she stuck at it, even though her fingers were never going to be long enough to be good. That’s my fault; I brought the stubby hands to the marital table. Alice brought the even temper, the sense of fun, and all the looks.

  And the sad eyes.

  When did that happen? Is that my fault?

  In the cot next to the bed, Lexi cries as if her heart is breaking.

  So sad. So sad!

  I want to roll over and comfort her, before she wakes Alice. In my head, I do.

  ’S OK, I whisper. ’S OK, sweetheart, go to sleep.

  But I’m the one who sleeps, down the dark years.

  When I wake again, sliced white bread is laid out in neat squares for buttering. For a party, perhaps? A catered event, and here’s all the bread, waiting for the tuna and the cheese and the coronation chicken. I’m not hungry, but a sandwich would be nice. A sandwich and maybe a sausage roll, and a pint of Brains bitter. My mouth is so dry.

  I open my eyes anew and realize that it’s not bread; it’s ceiling tiles!

  I’m happy because that is dull enough to be real. No writhing Jesus, no giant man-crows, just square tiles suspended in a metal frame like the view at the dentist’s.