Rubbernecker Read online

  I think it means I’m definitely awake.

  It must be night now. The tiles were off-white before, which is why they looked like bread, but now they’re grey, and in one place there’s a small black triangle where one has slipped or broken.

  There’s a miserable sound somewhere nearby. It’s the sad whine of a puppy left out in the rain. Shivery and cold.

  My head’s not working, so I slide my eyes to the very corners of their sockets, so that the ceiling disappears – at least, the bit over my head does – and I’m looking over there, to my left.

  There’s a water jug and beyond that a bed, so I assume I’m in a bed, too, because I’m lying here on something, which makes that another bed. And two beds in one room indicate a hospital. Or a dorm room. But I have a sense I’ve already graduated from Bristol, where I shared with Artie Rinker, who could whistle through his belly button.

  So, a hospital then.

  The snow-sky passes silently by, and my arm flaps at the window.

  There’s a man in the other bed. And there’s a machine beside him with a soft grey-lit screen. That’s where all the blips are coming from – they sound in time to a point of light jerking across the screen. There are tubes running to the man’s arms and stomach, and somebody stands over him. This person’s back is to me, but even in the dim glow of the screen, I can see he is wearing blue scrubs.

  Two and two equals a doctor.

  This is my moment.

  I call out to let him know I’m awake. Or, at least, I thought I was going to call out, but I can’t hear myself. I try to clear my throat, but my tongue is big and sticky and I can only really make a little whirr. I try again to speak, and realize that my lips are moving but nothing else is. No air is coming up from my lungs to shape itself into words in my mouth. I’ve forgotten what every newborn knows.

  I try to sit up, but that doesn’t work either.

  I nearly panic, but all I can do is look at the ceiling, at the little black triangle, and tell myself to calm down. I have to get pretty stern with myself: calm down, Samuel Galen! This is not an emergency. I have time. I have lots of time. I have been here for a thousand years already; another minute won’t hurt.

  I concentrate on sensible things; on what I know. The man in the bed must be the one who swore and begged; whose wife and children wept when they visited. The mumbling and the crying wasn’t Lexi at all, because Lexi’s almost thirteen, not a baby in a cot. That bit must have been a dream, I think.

  So much of life is.

  Also, if this is a hospital then the man in the next bed must be a patient. Like me? I suppose so, if the crash I dreamed was real. And if we are patients, then the doctor will not ignore me, whether I can shout or not. If I am a patient, then I am here to be cared for, and that’s what doctors do. So I don’t have to shout. I don’t have to wave my arms around to attract attention. All I have to do is calm down and wait until he’s finished helping the patient in the next bed, and then he’ll turn to me and see that I’m awake, and help me too.

  Ding dong bell. Pussy in the well.

  Simple.

  Click.

  The sound of a switch is soft but unmistakable, and is accompanied by the extinction of the grey light.

  The blips have stopped, too.

  I turn my eyes again. The doctor’s hand is on the dark machine and the man in the bed is moving a little. Then a lot. Straining; feet kicking under the covers like he’s having a fit; like he’s gasping for air.

  Like he’s dying.

  My God, he’s dying!

  Now I panic. It seizes me, but I can’t shout or run or wave my arms about to share the feeling, so instead it splashes through my chest like electricity, then shoots down my arms and legs and up the back of my head until every part of me tingles with pointless shock.

  In my mind I am already there beside him, clearing an airway, pinching his nose, breathing into his mouth, the way we all learned that time from the St John Ambulance. In fact, I can’t move a muscle.

  My head screams: Help him! Help him!

  But the doctor doesn’t help him.

  Instead he just leans over the man and watches him suffer. It seems to take a forever of choking and rattling, and when it’s all over, there’s a vast silence filled only by my heart in my head. Then I hear the soft click of the switch again and the dim light returns, making me blink. I wait for the blips, but they don’t come back.

  They never come back.

  Is this another dream? I hope so. I beg the grey tiles, Please let it be a dream. Please don’t let this be real.

  I hear quiet footsteps squeak towards me and quickly close my eyes. I don’t want to see the doctor, and I don’t want him to see me.

  I no longer want him to know that I’m awake.

  PART TWO

  8

  PATRICK ENTERED A large space filled with dead people and thought of an art gallery.

  The Cardiff University dissection room was brighter, whiter, lighter than he had ever imagined; films like Flatliners and Frankenstein had apparently misled him. This was more a hangar than a lab, white and airy under a lofty ceiling filled with skylights, but with no windows in the walls. There were no views out on to the tree-lined bustle of Park Place, and definitely no views in.

  It was only after his eyes had lingered on the pale-blue October sky that Patrick looked at the bodies.

  Cadavers. He would have to get used to calling them that now.

  They were the artworks in this exhibition. Thirty still-lifes – bloated by embalming fluids, and a curious shade of orange – lay on their tables waiting patiently to be deconstructed and analysed more thoroughly than any Mona Lisa, any Turin Shroud.

  Each body lay in a cocoon of its own cotton swaddling, like a tender chrysalis. Each head was wound in lengths of unbleached cloth. To preserve moisture, Patrick knew from their anatomy prep sessions – to keep the face from desiccating, the eyes from wrinkling to raisins, and the students from being freaked out.

  It was warm, and the smell was … strange. Patrick had been expecting formalin, but this was sweeter than that, although with an odd undernote that was not entirely pleasant.

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ somebody whispered faintly from behind him.

  ‘No you’re not,’ said another student encouragingly.

  A dark-haired girl beside Patrick nudged his arm. ‘You OK?’ she said. ‘You’re very pale.’

  He nodded and removed his arm from her orbit. He could have told her that pale came from excitement, not nausea. He could have told her that this dissecting room was where his quest would succeed or fail. A quest for answers he’d been seeking since he was eight years old, and which nobody had ever seemed willing or able to give him, so that eventually he’d simply stopped asking out loud.

  Patrick didn’t tell the girl that, because it wasn’t in his nature to tell anybody anything.

  They were each carrying Essential Clinical Anatomy and wearing one of the twenty white paper lab coats they’d been issued in what looked like a gift bag – poor imitations of the thick white cotton coats doctors used to wear. Each had been given a four-figure code to allow them into the dissecting room via a key pad on the door. Patrick’s was 4017 and he hated it on sight. There were no patterns, no progressions, and the number had no shape other than spiky. He wondered whether it was worth engaging with another student to see if he could swap.

  Just inside the entrance were three large bins filled with bright blue latex gloves. Small, medium and large. There were a few nervous giggles as they struggled into them. Patrick took a large left and had to pick up six more before finding a large right. He toyed with calculating the odds, but the boxes held an unknown number of gloves.

  The blue latex seemed irreverently jolly here in the dissecting room, like bunting at a funeral.

  Next to the gloves were white plastic boxes full of the tools of their new trade. Saws, hooks, scalpels, forceps, scissors – even spoons – all tossed in together. They
were tools a handyman might use; a common labourer with calluses on his palms and dirt under his nails. It was a stark reminder that these – their first patients – were already past saving.

  Clutching their gift bags and textbooks, the students shuffled forward gingerly towards Professor Madoc. The 150 students barely looked at the cadavers as they filed past them – as if to do so before they were given the green light to start cutting might be rude. They kept their eyes averted and fixed on Professor Madoc as he started to speak.

  He was a tall, elegant man in his sixties, with neat white hair and a sailor’s tan. He welcomed them, giving them a brief overview of the anatomy syllabus and stressing the fundamental nature of the work they would learn in this room and how it would inform their studies and their rotations on the wards of the teaching hospital. He thanked the retired professors and junior doctors who had returned to guide the students through what he called the ‘infinite intricacies of the human body’. He nodded at the assorted men and women in white coats at the back of the room.

  Then he mentioned the Goldman Prize, given to the best anatomy student every year, causing looks and smiles to be exchanged in silent challenge. The professor ended by saying that he was sure he didn’t have to tell them to respect those who had donated their bodies to medical science – and then told them anyway.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may have heard stories of eyeballs in Martini glasses and skipping the Double Dutch with intestines, but those days are gone, thank God. The thirty cadavers you see before you now are the mortal remains of people who donated their bodies because they wanted to help you through your studies and into a noble and caring profession. They wanted to do that even though they didn’t know you. And even though you didn’t know them, and never will, please show your appreciation of their gift by according them the same respect that you will one day show to your living patients.’

  Patrick heard little to nothing of the professor’s speech. Alone among the students, he stared openly at the cadaver closest to him – an elderly woman with withered breasts, an apron of stomach fat and neatly manicured fingernails – still with a layer of chipped varnish on them. He was eighteen, but had never seen a live woman naked, and couldn’t reconcile this one with the images he had browsed on the internet. They didn’t even look like the same species.

  He reached out and pressed a finger against the upper thigh. The consistency was that of a raw roast – cold and yielding, yet solid underneath. He thought of the way his mother stabbed the lamb on special occasions, and then pushed garlic and sprigs of rosemary into the gashed flesh.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to look inside a woman.

  The noise from Professor Madoc stopped, and the silence brought Patrick back to the here and now. Names were read out, and he was relieved to find himself soon standing at a table that held the body of what looked like a middle-aged man. It was hard to tell the age with the head wound in cotton strips, but even in death this body looked tighter than the old lady’s had – more muscular, the skin less folded, and the abdomen swollen by embalming fluids rather than by fat.

  Four other students joined him, including the dark-haired girl, who smiled at him as if they already shared common ground.

  Their table mentor was a junior doctor – a young man only a few years older than they were, and in a real white coat – who introduced himself as David Spicer. He picked up the clipboard hanging at the dead man’s feet in an incongruous echo of a patient’s hospital notes.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Everybody, meet Number 19.’

  ‘I don’t want a man,’ said a short Asian boy with thick glasses. ‘I’m going to be an obstetrician. Can I swap with someone else?’

  ‘No,’ said Spicer.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m an uptight arsehole who wants you to fail.’

  The Asian boy pursed his lips and looked sulky.

  ‘You’ll all get proper access to a female cadaver and the relevant prosections as the need arises during the course,’ Spicer reassured him. ‘Plus you will be doing various clinical rotations in a range of medical departments, so that you get plenty of exposure to a variety of real patients and conditions, OK?’

  The boy nodded and Spicer went back to reading. ‘Let’s see … Number 19 here is a Caucasian male who died aged forty-seven.’

  ‘Of what?’ said Patrick.

  ‘That would be spoiling the fun.’ Spicer smiled. ‘You should be able to diagnose cause of death during the dissection, but if you’re really stumped and you don’t mind being a big fat failure, you can go and ask Mick in the office.’ He inclined his head towards a glass-walled cubicle beside the entrance door. Inside Patrick could see the tops of filing cabinets and an appropriately cadaverous middle-aged man glaring out at them. Mick, he assumed.

  He wouldn’t need to ask Mick or anybody else; he’d find out for himself.

  ‘What’s his name?’ said the girl, nodding at the cadaver.

  ‘That’s confidential,’ said Spicer. ‘The important thing to remember is that he’s Number 19.’ He flicked a rectangular metal tag that was attached to the cadaver’s wrist by a black zip-tie. In one corner was stamped the number.

  ‘Anything and everything you take off or out of this cadaver gets bagged and tagged so it can be put back together again at the end of the course for burial or cremation. The fat and skin – what we call “fascia” – goes in the yellow bin marked nineteen in that refrigerator over there.’ They all turned to follow his pointing blue finger to one of two big white doors in the far wall. ‘And that fascia will also be reunited with Number 19 at the end of the course for burial or cremation.’

  Patrick nodded. That all made sense, and followed nice strict rules.

  Spicer clapped his hands and rubbed them together like a TV presenter. ‘OK. We’re all going to be meeting here around this gentleman twice a week for the next six months, so we might as well get acquainted.’

  Introductions. Patrick hated this kind of thing, but the other students looked eager to be friendly.

  The would-be obstetrician was Dilip, and the tall, beefy-looking boy with ruddy cheeks and thinning blond hair was Rob, who was considering surgery.

  ‘Depending on how this goes,’ he added, pointing at the cadaver with a wry smile.

  The dark-haired girl’s name was Meg and she was considering paediatrics.

  Then there was Scott, who wanted to be a plastic surgeon.

  ‘Boob jobs and tummy tucks,’ he said, rubbing his finger and thumb together to denote money. ‘You can all call me Scotty,’ he added. ‘Like in Star Trek.’

  Patrick was confused. Scotty fixed starships, not breasts.

  He noticed that Scott had the kind of uncommitted Mohawk made of gel and therefore easy to brush out for formal occasions. Then he realized that everyone was looking at him.

  ‘You’re up,’ said Spicer, but Patrick felt himself closing down. Like an anemone snatching back its tentacles when touched.

  ‘Patrick Fort. Anatomy.’

  ‘Paddy,’ said Scott.

  ‘Patrick,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Just anatomy?’ said Meg.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not going to be a doctor?’ said Rob.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about Pat?’ said Scott.

  ‘Patrick,’ said Patrick.

  ‘What are you going to be then?’ said Meg.

  He frowned in confusion. ‘A graduate.’

  They all waited for more, but he stared down at the corpse. He’d told them all he had to.

  ‘Didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition, did you, Patrick?’ said Spicer.

  ‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘I don’t even speak Spanish.’

  Dilip and Scott laughed.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Spicer. ‘Anyway, you anatomists have lots of free time and you won’t be joining us on hospital rounds, but the work you do here will be exactly the same as the med students, OK?’

  Patrick nodd
ed. The work here was all he wanted; the thought of being around real, live patients made him shiver.

  ‘Right then,’ continued Spicer. ‘Pleasantries over. I’m going to show you how to handle a scalpel.’ He touched the chest of the cadaver, where the curling, dark hair was going slightly grey towards the throat. As grey as it was ever going to get.

  ‘We’re going to make an H-incision here on the pectoral muscle to start with. When you do, imagine tracing rather than cutting, because these bastards are sharp, and if you get a bit Zorro you’ll be down to the spine before you know it.’

  As the blade touched the skin and a narrow door of blood opened in the chest, Patrick felt an unaccustomed buzz of pure optimism. This was the beginning of the end. Finally he could find his answers. Here was the place where his quest might reach its conclusion – in this very room, this cathedral to science, this white gallery of death—

  Something heavy hit the back of his legs and he staggered slightly, then looked round to see Rob crumpled on the floor behind him.

  ‘Shit,’ said Spicer cheerfully. ‘So much for surgery.’

  9

  I FLOAT, CALM and disconnected. I feel as though I’m on drugs and I wonder why I’ve never tried them before if they’re all this good. Mark Williams at work tried them all the time and had a ball. Until the college had to fire him, of course; then it wasn’t such fun. But this is nice. This is like drifting on musical clouds. Maybe I am on drugs! This is a hospital, after all.

  ‘He would just slip away,’ says a woman very quietly.

  ‘Would he be in pain?’ That’s another woman, also somewhere off to my left. They’re discussing the man in the next bed. That means he’s not dead, which is good and right. It was just a bad dream, like the giant crow and the masonry that fell on me from a crumbling building somewhere in Japan. Or Mauritius. Dreams are rarely geographically sound.

  ‘Oh no.’ The first woman again. ‘We monitor his medication very carefully. He wouldn’t know anything about it.’ She must be a doctor.