Rubbernecker Read online

Through my haze I feel vaguely angry for the man who wouldn’t know anything about it. How would they know? Maybe he’d know all about it; maybe he’d be scared, or in pain, down at the bottom of his own personal well.

  ‘Is that what happened to the gentleman who used to be in that bed?’

  ‘Mr Attridge? No, he died quite suddenly overnight. It happens like that sometimes.’

  Oh, he is dead. Shit. His name was Mr Attridge and I watched him die.

  ‘But what did he actually die of?’

  I’m all ears.

  There’s a long hesitation and I can hear the doctor being careful.

  ‘Sadly, coma patients die very easily. They succumb to infections, or have strokes, or asphyxiate on food or their own spittle, or sometimes the heart fails due to cumulative factors.’

  Cumulative factors like being murdered!

  ‘The longer someone is in a coma, the less likely they are to regain full consciousness. Such deaths may be sudden, but they are rarely unexpected or unexplained.’

  ‘It’s been two months now,’ says the other woman, and someone touches my forehead with something that smells of rubber. ‘But there’s still a chance he’ll …?’

  ‘Emerge.’

  ‘Yes. There’s still a good chance he’ll emerge, isn’t there?’

  And all of a sudden I realize they’re talking about me! Me, Sam Galen. Talking about me emerging – and talking about me dying!

  I snap out of the cloud and get a bit frantic, which is difficult to do when you can’t move or make a sound. I try to open my eyes. No lying doggo now! But they won’t open. They won’t bloody well open! I strain my brows upwards until it feels like my forehead will peel back like banana skin, but still my lids are dark maroon.

  Maybe this is how it was for the man in the next bed – maybe somebody thought he should just ‘slip away’ while he tried to open his eyes.

  ‘Every case is different,’ the doctor hedges.

  ‘All I want is an educated guess,’ says the other woman. ‘I understand it’s not a diagnosis. Please.’

  ‘In that case …’

  Long silence. I can almost see the doctor tapping her teeth with the end of her pen as she takes an educated guess at my future existence. I stop straining to open my eyes and instead listen so hard that I feel the empty air swirl in my ears, while a smooth rubber finger drags over my cheek.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ says the doctor, her voice heavy with practised sorrow, ‘it’s getting to the point where if he emerges, it may not be in one piece.’

  The finger leaves my cheek and there’s no answer for a long time, and then only the sound of quiet sobbing.

  I’m in one piece! I scream soundlessly. Here I am! I’m in one piece!

  Aren’t I?

  10

  EVEN WHEN THE streeets had been washed clean by rain, the malt rising from the Brains brewery made all of early-morning Cardiff smell like late-night Horlicks.

  Patrick rode through the dawn, listening to the sound of his tyres hissing on the damp tarmac as he made a loop through the city.

  In the Hayes, pigeons purred softly from the roof of the snack bar, and made him think of home.

  It was an old city, despite the veneer of new wealth that made it shine in the wet Welsh sun. The buildings over the glittering shop fronts were all curled stone and soot, and the castle walls dominated the city centre, guarded by a strange collection of beasts, furred and feathered in stone. Victorian arcades linked the thoroughfares like secret tunnels, filled with shops that sold old violins, shoes, and sweets by the quarter from giant jars.

  Cardiff was also a small city, and was easy to leave for the hills and forests and beaches that cupped it all round with nature. Sometimes Patrick rode west to Penarth and sat on the pier, which smelled faintly of fish, and which bore the scars of a thousand anglers who’d cut their bait on the salted wood. Sometimes he cycled beyond the narrow suburbs to the fairy-tale castle that guarded the city’s northern approach; sometimes east across the flat, reclaimed land that bordered the sea so closely that only a grid of ditches kept it dry.

  Ish.

  Wherever he went, his route was guided by Welsh and by English – each road sign to ildiwch a reminder that the old oppressor had finally given way, after failing to beat the language out of the nation’s schoolchildren.

  The room Patrick was renting was the smallest in a small house that was distinguishable from its neighbours only by the white plastic ‘7’ screwed to the front door. The back of it looked over the railway line where trains took passengers to and from the South Wales Valleys. One of them would have taken him halfway to Brecon if he’d caught it, but he had his bike, so he didn’t need to.

  His bed was squeezed between the wall at its head and the hot-water tank at its foot. He measured it and found it was six feet long – exactly one inch longer than he was. It took him a week to get used to sleeping on his side, with his knees bent, so that he wouldn’t touch at either end. Even so, he was woken every morning by five thirty, when his feet grew warm as the heating kicked in. He slept in his sleeping bag because it smelled of grass and earth, and often he woke thinking he was on the Beacons.

  A strip of chipboard under the windowsill served as a desk so small that he could only open one textbook at a time and still use his laptop. His books and disks had to go on top of the wardrobe. He had found a photo in his bag that he had not packed, and he left it there. The walls were woodchip, painted magnolia, and the carpet was brown, although Patrick wasn’t convinced it had always been so.

  The window had been modified so that it only opened about six inches. A deterrent to burglars, he guessed, although he doubted any burglar would brave the railway line, climb the tall garden wall and risk a drop into the thick brambles below, when it was plain from any angle that this grimy little terraced house must contain little worth stealing, and that easier pickings would surely be found almost anywhere else along the row. Even so, Patrick carried his bike upstairs to his room every night to protect it. It was a ten-speed Peugeot racer that was older than he was, but it was the only thing he’d inherited from his father, so he screwed two stout hooks into the wall and, while he slept, the bike hung over him like a sparkling blue talisman.

  Two other students shared the house. Jackson and Kim were both doing art degrees. Kim was a staunch lesbian – an elfin blonde who made lumpy ogres from plaster of Paris, with nuts and bolts sprouting at their genitals. Jackson made tedious video art that, to Patrick, looked like scenes where the cameraman had been killed and left the camera pointing at a dark corner of a dull room. Jackson had long, pale hands that flapped on slender wrists, and dyed black hair, so short at the back and so long at the front that Patrick itched to reach out and realign it with his head. He wore eyeliner, cowboy boots and a Yasser Arafat scarf, even when he was making toast.

  They had all agreed to clean up after themselves, but Jackson was a slob, Kim not much better, and Patrick too nervous of germs to leave anything unwashed for as long as it might take either of his housemates to fulfil their promise. He simply got up earlier or stayed up later to clean the kitchen and bathroom. Kim occasionally left a dish of tasteless vegetarian food on his shelf in the fridge by way of thanks, but Jackson never mentioned the mess or the sparkling kitchen that was its mysterious corollary.

  There was a TV in the front room that Jackson had brought from home, and which he controlled jealously – even taking the remote to the toilet with him. So Patrick learned all about the Turner Prize and Hollyoaks, and had to go to the bookies over the road to see any horseracing.

  Sometimes they had parties in the house – not him, but Jackson and Kim. At first they’d tried to involve him in the planning and the purchasing, but Patrick had no interest in parties and said he would stay in his room.

  Jackson had narrowed his eyes suspiciously. ‘Don’t think you’re going to come downstairs in the middle of it and eat our food and drink our booze then.’

  ‘I don’t drink,
’ said Patrick. ‘And I wouldn’t eat your food in case I got salmonella.’

  ‘No need to be rude,’ said Jackson.

  ‘I’m not,’ Patrick told him. ‘You always have meat juice on your shelf; it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Don’t come then,’ Jackson said petulantly.

  ‘OK,’ said Patrick. ‘Can I put the racing on?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Cruel sport.’

  Patrick was alone on the planet, it seemed, in being without a mobile phone. He’d tried one once but he could actually feel his brain being fried, and still flinched whenever a phone went off nearby. But it did mean that he had what seemed to be exclusive use of the public phone outside the bookies, although he always wore a stolen pair of the bright blue gloves when he called his mother every Thursday night, in case of germs on the receiver. She’d insisted he call once a week and Patrick did, only so that if he died he would be missed before his body started to smell too badly.

  ‘Are you eating all right?’ was one of the first questions she always asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he’d say. ‘Monday I had toast and jam, then a cheese sandwich at lunch and pasta for dinner. Tuesday was the same but the sandwich was Marmite. Wednesday was the same but the sandwich was peanut butter. Thursday I ran out of peanut butter. And bread.’

  ‘Did you get some more?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t forget to eat.’

  ‘I won’t,’ he’d say, although sometimes he did.

  Then, even though he never asked, she would tell him about the garden and the cat. It always went on for a lot longer than either of them deserved.

  And then there were the silences. Patrick liked those bits of the conversation – the in-between bits that were so soothing and allowed him to think about things she wouldn’t understand: adjusting the derailleur on his bike because first gear was clipping the spokes; the way fat looked like greasy yellow clots of sweetcorn under the skin; and Custom Lodge and Quinzi, who had died at Wincanton on Wednesday night.

  ‘You are wearing your bike helmet, aren’t you, Patrick?’

  He nodded, his head elsewhere.

  ‘Patrick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are wearing your helmet, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I told you already.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  The first death had been too quick, the second hidden from view behind screens, so neither had been useful to him.

  ‘Well,’ she’d say after a few more moments of silence. ‘Thanks for calling. You take care of yourself and work hard.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I love you, Patrick.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Goodbye until next week then.’

  ‘OK. Bye.’

  Then he’d peel off the blue gloves and drop them in the bin on his way back to the house.

  The click of disconnection always came so quickly after his last word that Sarah knew he was hanging up even as he said goodbye. Desperate to get away from her.

  Could she blame him?

  She often did.

  Every week she thought of all the things she should ask him. But when Patrick wasn’t around it was all too easy to forget how hard it was to keep a conversation going. As soon as she heard his voice, all the questions she would have asked any normal son died in her mouth.

  Are you having fun in the evenings?

  Who’s your best mate?

  Met any nice girls yet?

  Patrick never had fun in the evenings. Not what most boys his age would call fun, anyway. He liked being on the Beacons, watching racing and collecting roadkill. The closest he had to a friend was Weird Nick next door, which said it all. And she could never imagine him even talking to girls, let alone allowing one to touch him or attempting a kiss. Asking Patrick those questions might not have upset him, but they would have upset her, because the answers would have reminded her of just how odd he still was – and possibly why.

  And so every week they exchanged the same banalities and, instead of feeling relieved by them, his calls left her feeling guilty and resentful, even after all these years.

  Or would it have been the same if Matt were still alive?

  She’d never know now, she thought with a bitter dart. She stroked the cat too hard, so that it pushed off her lap with reproachful claws. It made Sarah think of trying to help three-year-old Patrick to unwrap a birthday gift – the way he’d squirmed away from her, and how she’d dug her fingers too deeply into his chubby little arm to keep him by her side.

  But she’d lost him anyway.

  And every Thursday she lost him again.

  11

  THE FLIRTING HAD worked. Now, whenever Mr Deal came to visit, he caught Tracy’s eye and gave a little smile – and she always made sure she was looking her best and being her kindest. It was quite an effort.

  It was all a little strange, of course, because the flirting usually happened somewhere close to the bed where Mr Deal’s wife was lying comatose. Plus, it was not conventional flirting. Tracy had already resigned herself to the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to flash her boobs or slide her bottom provocatively against the front of Mr Deal’s trousers as he stood at the bar. No, this was secret flirting, using Mrs Deal as an unconscious conduit for their feelings.

  ‘I’ve been putting extra moisturizer on her hands. I notice they get very dry in here.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Her wedding ring is lovely. Did you choose it?’

  ‘We went together.’

  ‘That’s romantic,’ sighed Tracy. ‘Nobody’s romantic any more.’

  Mr Deal just nodded, as if he didn’t have an opinion on romance one way or the other, so Tracy changed to a more professional tack.

  ‘Did you know that the doctor upped her morphine?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I noticed she was frowning a lot. We discussed it and thought it might mean she was in distress.’

  Jean had noticed, actually; Tracy hadn’t noticed a thing.

  ‘Frowning?’

  ‘Yes. Like now. Look.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see.’

  Mr Deal stared at his wife thoughtfully. ‘Does she ever say anything?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Tracy. ‘But when they frown, it can be due to physical discomfort, so we turn her more often and we thought it best to increase the dosage. The doctor did, anyway.’

  ‘Which doctor?’

  Tracy was irritated that Mr Deal wanted to know which doctor, when the point of her story was her own caring and observant nature, coupled with the life-or-death responsibility she bore as a nurse. She couldn’t show the irritation though; irritation was an unattractive trait and to be kept hidden until at least a few weeks into a sexual relationship, along with nagging, and farting in bed.

  ‘Oh, it begins with a B,’ she giggled. ‘There are so many doctors, and then there’s juniors and students too, and I’m new on this ward, so I haven’t learned them all yet.’

  ‘Where were you before?’

  ‘Paediatrics.’

  ‘Did you like that?’

  Did she? What would he want to hear? Tracy could have kicked herself for not checking whether the Deals had children. Even then there was no right answer. If they had children, maybe he’d rather have someone who didn’t have baggage; if they didn’t, then maybe that was Mrs Deal’s fault, and he’d be keen to start a family with somebody new.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she enthused. ‘But I like this just as much in a different way.’ She hoped that covered both bases. He only nodded, which gave her no clue. But the next night, he brought a small box of chocolates and told her they were just for her. Sadly, they were truffles, but she was gushing in her thanks and promised to keep them a secret. She re-gifted them for her sister’s birthday that very weekend, but took heart from the fact that she and Mr Deal were making progress.

  Unlike her patients.

  The most annoying bad patient had died and everything was
easier without his thrashing and crying. They were all very relieved, particularly Angie, whose crooked finger was the only sign now that he had ever been there.

  Still, all Tracy seemed to do was put food and fluids in at one end of the patients and clean up at the other. They were less people than simple flesh tunnels for processing calories into shit. It repulsed her.

  The few patients who could communicate were painfully slow at the process. Between all her other tasks, Tracy was often required to sit and interpret their weird stretched moans, or their long-winded attempts to spell out pointless messages on the little Possum spelling gadgets.

  ‘T … H. Is that an H? Or a G? Can you blink if it’s an H? Was that a blink or a twitch? Try to be accurate, OK? I’m going with H.’

  T … H … God, it took for ever and they never said anything interesting. It didn’t help that one of the ward Possums was a bit dodgy and sometimes needed a good shake, or to be turned off and on again to avoid scrambling to gobbledegook.

  While she waited for the patient to blink her way through the alphabet, Tracy’s eyes wandered to the TV on the opposite wall. It was Bargain Hunt and the blue team were considering a hideous green vase. Her mother had one just like it, and Tracy made a mental note to admire it next time she was home; maybe her mother would give it to her. When she looked back the patient had laboriously spelled out ‘T … H … I … R … S …’

  Tracy smiled. ‘Thursday? Aw, bless! No, it’s Friday today, silly. TGIF! Off to Evolution tonight for a few drinks and a dance. Better get back to work now, though. No rest for the wicked.’

  She put the Possum down beside the water jug, then went over to the nurses’ station and slumped in the swivel chair. The coma ward was boring yet difficult. Like golf.

  Then Tracy sat up and dug about and found a hazelnut cluster in the lower layer of the latest Terry’s All Gold.

  12

  I SURGE UP from the depths of the well like a killer whale, with everything going from dark depths to bright white as I break the surface, and open my eyes on a pair of breasts encased in blue with white trim, almost touching my nose. Her enormous name tag says, ‘Tracy Evans, RN’.