Rubbernecker Read online

  She straightens up and looks at me and says, ‘Oh!’

  Help me, Tracy! Someone killed the man in the next bed. But my ears hear only ‘Aaaaaaa waaaaa aaaaaaa,’ like an annoying sheep.

  ‘Oh,’ she says again, ‘you’re awake.’ Then she leans down close and looks into my eyes from about six inches away, so that I can see all the little flecks in her blue irises.

  ‘Are you?’ she says, suspiciously.

  All I can do is blink slowly and hope she understands that I need to report a murder right now.

  Instead she bustles away and I get so angry that I fall asleep …

  I open my eyes again to find a woman old enough to be my mother, but who’s not my mother, weeping at my bedside. She wears blue gloves and a surgical mask. Her hair is greying and her eyes are red, and snot from her nose has made a dark patch on the front of the mask.

  Why is she crying? Has something gone wrong?

  For a horrible second I wonder if I’ve gone wrong.

  ‘Maaaaaa!’

  She stops mid-sob and looks up, gasps, then chokes a bit. ‘Doctor!’ she croaks.

  I flinch inside. A doctor is the last person I want to see, but what can I do? I have to show I’m awake and in one piece or they’ll let me just slip away …

  My stomach rolls in fear as a set of blue scrubs walks into my vision and looks down at me over an armful of clipboards. He’s even younger than me.

  ‘You awake again, mate?’ he says – and this time I do cry with happiness – and relief – because that’s such a nice friendly thing to say; not sinister or frightening.

  I hope I’m nodding, but either way he turns and calls across the ward. ‘Hello? Can we have some help?’

  We. Can we have some help. I’m with him now; regardless of the scrubs, we’re on the same side.

  Tracy Evans with the big blue boobs comes over and it’s all bustle bustle bustle with people pinching my fingernails, requests to say my own name, establishing one blink for yes and two for no – while the young doctor announces each positive like a poo in a potty.

  ‘Withdrawal from pain! … No comprehensible language, but that might come … Spontaneous eye opening. Very good!’

  He makes a quick calculation, then tells the weeping woman that my Glasgow score is now ten. I have no idea what he means, but ten sounds pretty perfect to me. Then he gets all serious and lowers his voice – as if I can’t hear him.

  ‘But I need to warn you not to get your hopes up too high. He’s not out of the woods yet. This may be as good as it gets, or he may even regress. We know so little about emergence; it’s never straightforward, and he’s still incredibly vulnerable.’

  The woman nods and catches her mascara on the back of her fingers, her optimism tempered.

  My optimism is sky high! He may or may not be a killer, but the doctor is my new best friend. He gave me a ten, didn’t he? I feel like a traitor, but I’m so grateful to him that I don’t care about the man in the next bed. I’ll worry about him later.

  Or maybe I won’t.

  He’s dead and I’m not, and that’s all that matters right now.

  When Tracy Evans and the doctor finally go away, the woman in the mask lays a rubber-gloved hand on my head.

  ‘I knew you were in there. I knew it!’ she says like a zealot.

  Then she leans down and kisses me dryly through the blue paper mask. ‘I love you, darling.’

  Well, thank you, I think. But who the hell are you?

  13

  PATRICK WAS DISAPPOINTED by the heart. He wasn’t expecting an on-off switch, but he’d hoped they’d find more than a mere pump made of meat and rubbery veins, and felt deceived by popular sentiment. So far people were almost as impenetrable on the inside as he’d always found them on the outside.

  Other students had discovered scars and fused toes and numerous tattoos. Number 4 had one running around his ankle – Diane and Maria, 1966 – that had provoked much speculation. The only vaguely interesting thing so far about Number 19 had been a small puckered hole in his side.

  ‘Feeding tube,’ Dilip had said with confidence. ‘My grandmother had one before she died.’

  ‘He probably died in hospital then,’ said Rob. ‘Unless it’s old.’

  Patrick had pushed his little finger carefully into the dark spot, and felt it travel easily through the skin and flesh. ‘It hasn’t healed.’

  ‘Fucking gross!’ Scott had laughed, and Spicer had given him a look that shut him up.

  Now the hole had disappeared, along with most of the skin from the torso, and the body on the white table lay opened like a butterfly chicken in an Italian restaurant. In late October they had gone through the ribs with saws bearing the brand name TUFF®. They were tentative at first, but increasingly sweaty and workmanlike, with goggles to keep the bone dust and shreds of flesh from going in their eyes. They had allowed Scott to take the lead, and he’d proved as gleeful with a saw as Patrick was devoted to bagging and tagging every tiny fragment of Number 19 spat out by the metal teeth. Theirs was the cleanest dissection area in the whole room.

  Table 22 became the first to establish a cause of death.

  ‘They could hardly miss it,’ said Scott sourly. ‘The guy’s heart is bigger than his head.’

  Five others found signs of cardiac or vascular disease that enabled them to make similar diagnoses, and each was confirmed by Mick, who ticked them off his closely guarded list.

  Patrick was not here for the cause of death, but he was still annoyed that they hadn’t got there first, and now put his money on a brain tumour. He imagined finding the pink lump nestled in the grey matter, like a pearl in an oyster.

  Meg stared down at the still-wrapped head of the dead man, as if she were thinking the very same thing.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘in Thailand medical students bring flowers to their cadavers as a gesture of gratitude and respect.’

  ‘OK,’ said Rob. ‘You call Interflora, we’ll all chip in.’

  ‘I’m not chipping in,’ said Patrick quickly. He only had twenty pounds a week for groceries.

  ‘Duh,’ said Scott.

  Rob hadn’t fainted since the first day, and now he dug the handle of a spoon under one thick cord running from the wrist up the forearm, and levered it up. The cadaver’s fingers curled in towards the palm. ‘Look at that!’

  ‘Flexor digitorum superficialis,’ said Patrick, without looking at Essential Clinical Anatomy, which lay open on the table behind him.

  ‘I think we should give him a name,’ said Meg.

  ‘Who?’ said Dilip.

  ‘Number 19.’

  Patrick frowned. ‘It’s a corpse; it doesn’t have a name.’

  ‘Call him Stinky,’ said Scott. ‘He reeks.’

  ‘You reek,’ said Meg. ‘This whole place reeks.’

  It did. The strange sweetness of the dissecting room hung in the air and clung to their very persons. Patrick could smell a classmate five places away in the cafeteria line; he could smell it on his own T-shirt when he pulled it over his head at night and when he opened his drawer to get clean clothes; he could still smell it on his own skin as he stepped out of the shower every morning, red from scrubbing.

  ‘Formaldehyde,’ said Dilip.

  ‘Nah,’ said Rob. ‘It’s glycerol, I think.’

  ‘It’s dead flowers over shit,’ Patrick informed them.

  They all looked at him, then at each other – and screwed up their faces in fresh disgust.

  Dilip said, ‘You’re right.’

  Patrick didn’t answer obvious statements.

  ‘So Mr Shit it is then,’ said Scott.

  ‘No,’ said Meg firmly. ‘That’s horrible. Table 11 called their lady Faith. That’s nice. Something like that.’

  Patrick sighed. He had solved the problem of the smell for them and wanted to move on. He pointed at a cord of pink muscle. ‘Palmaris longus.’

  ‘That’s a lousy name,’ said Scott, weaving his forceps between the mu
scles and tendons of the other forearm. ‘Even for a corpse.’

  ‘Cadaver,’ corrected Meg. Then, ‘It’s hard to think of a name without seeing his face.’

  ‘So look at his face,’ shrugged Dilip.

  Meg didn’t move. She glanced around: nobody else had yet unwrapped their cadaver’s head. Dr Spicer was several tables away, talking to Dr Clarke.

  Meg looked at the calluses on the palm of Number 19. Soon they’d be gone, along with the rest of the skin there. ‘Maybe he’s a builder.’

  ‘More like a boxer!’ said Scott, manipulating the tendons so that the hand curled into a fist.

  ‘Flexor digitorum profundis,’ Patrick pointed out.

  Scott repeatedly raised and released the tendons.

  ‘Or a professional lemon squeezer,’ laughed Rob.

  ‘Ssh,’ said Meg softly.

  ‘Ssh yourself,’ said Scott and pulled the right tendons to make Number 19 give Meg the finger.

  They all laughed, apart from Patrick, who had started to unwind the strips of cloth around the cadaver’s head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Meg sharply, although it was obvious, so he said nothing.

  They watched in silence as the man’s head started to emerge, throat first – exposing a short, faded scar – then his chin, badly shaven.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Meg nervously.

  ‘OK,’ said Patrick, and stopped.

  ‘No, go on,’ said Scott, and Meg said nothing else, so he went on.

  The man’s lips were parted over a slightly open mouth, as if the corpse was surprised by its sudden unveiling. The tips of the teeth were visible – reasonably white but a little uneven.

  The nose was straight and short, with narrow nostrils and a few dark hairs.

  Patrick felt suddenly nervous. He’d thought he’d started unwrapping the head of their cadaver because he’d wanted to put an end to the chatter and get on with the dissection. Now he wasn’t sure why he’d done it or what he wanted. He paused, the cotton strip draped over the bridge of the nose, feeling strangely shaky inside.

  ‘Tease!’ said Rob, and Dilip laughed.

  ‘Let’s see his eyes then,’ said Scott and leaned in to push the cloth aside. Patrick knocked his hand away. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Hey, man, if I want to look at his eyes, I will! Don’t fucking hit me!’

  Patrick hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t even realized he was going to until Scott’s hand had been right there over the man’s face.

  ‘Don’t fight. It’s not respectful,’ said Rob.

  ‘Neither is cutting his penis in two, but we did that last week,’ said Dilip mildly.

  ‘He hit me! You all saw it.’ Scott glared at Patrick. ‘Weirdo.’

  Meg said, ‘Shut up, Scott,’ but Patrick ignored him. He’d been called worse.

  Spicer was suddenly among them again.

  ‘Handbags at dawn?’ he joked.

  None of them spoke and then Spicer noticed the partially exposed head. His smile disappeared in an instant.

  ‘Cover that up,’ he snapped.

  Patrick started to wind the cloth slowly around the cadaver’s face again. The others looked at each other uncomfortably.

  ‘It was my idea, Dr Spicer,’ said Meg. ‘I wanted to see his face so we could give him a name.’

  ‘The ID is on the tags. That’s all. And you will proceed with this dissection in the correct order and at the proper pace, under my direction, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Meg, and the others nodded. Except for Patrick.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘If we see his face now or later?’ Patrick shrugged.

  ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘Patrick Fort.’

  ‘Right,’ said Spicer angrily, and walked out of the room.

  The others watched him until he disappeared.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Rob. ‘That’s not like him to go off on one.’

  Patrick said nothing. He carefully slid his scalpel under what he thought was either the pronator teres or the flexor carpi.

  ‘You think we’re in trouble?’ said Dilip.

  ‘No, I think he’s in trouble,’ said Scott, and jabbed a finger at Patrick. ‘You ever touch me again, I’ll take your fucking head off.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be a melodramatic twat,’ snorted Rob.

  Scott slapped his book shut and walked out, ripping off his gloves as he went.

  ‘Too late,’ said Meg quietly, and Rob and Dilip laughed.

  ‘Pronator teres,’ Patrick concluded.

  It was six o’clock and already close to dark when Patrick unlocked his bike from the railings on the ramp outside the dissecting room. Students hurried past in the slow October drizzle, unaware that they were a slim brick wall away from thirty bloated bodies that looked as though bombs had gone off in their chest cavities.

  As he wheeled his bike on to Park Place, Meg fell in beside him.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Scott’s not bad really. I think you just gave him a fright.’

  Patrick was puzzled. Why was she walking with him? Why was she saying anything to him? Maybe she was just talking for her, not for him – the way his mother did.

  His silence was no deterrent.

  ‘So, why don’t you want to be a doctor?’

  Patrick had often noticed that the less he said, the more people wanted him to speak. But he had no idea what she wanted him to say. Meg wasn’t his mother or the med school interviewing panel, so why was she interested in what he did or did not do?

  ‘I’m just curious,’ she said, as if she had read his mind. ‘I mean, you’re clever enough, so why not?’

  She kept asking; he was going to have to answer her.

  ‘Not interested,’ he said.

  ‘Not interested in what?’

  Patrick was taken aback that she had a follow-up question – and so fast!

  ‘What aren’t you interested in?’ said Meg, as if he hadn’t understood her the first time.

  ‘In making people better,’ he said, and put a foot in his toeclip to show he was finished talking.

  Meg wasn’t finished. ‘So what’s the point of just doing anatomy?’

  She frowned and Patrick thought she was angry but wasn’t sure. He’d never been able to understand what people meant just from their faces. It was hard enough guessing from their words. She obviously wasn’t going to leave him alone until he answered, so finally he did.

  ‘I want to see what makes people work,’ he said.

  Meg wrinkled her forehead some more. ‘But you don’t want to fix them or help them work better?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But you have such a great bedside manner.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ Patrick said, and then saw she was grinning. ‘Oh, you’re joking.’

  ‘You’re allowed to laugh.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ he said.

  ‘There’s a party tonight. You want to come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You’ll have fun.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know I don’t like parties.’

  ‘What do you like then?’

  He stopped talking and looked up the street to the traffic lights, wishing he was already there and that she was behind him.

  ‘Do you like anything?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like some things.’

  ‘Name your top five.’

  He said nothing. He couldn’t. He only had three.

  Meg sighed theatrically, then held an invisible microphone under his nose. ‘How does it feel to be a man of mystery?’

  Patrick stared blankly at her fist. ‘I don’t know.’

  She smiled. ‘If you change your mind, here’s my number.’

  She took out a pen and lowered it towards his knuckles, so he tucked his hands into his pockets so she couldn’t write on his skin.

 
She went red. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s 07734113117.’

  ‘OK.’

  She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You got that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘See you at Number 19, Patrick.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, and swung his leg over the crossbar.

  As he rode home he replayed the conversation in his head. It was the longest one he’d had with a stranger in ages. Now he tried to analyse it, the way his mother always nagged him to.

  People say things for a reason, Patrick. If you listen carefully, you’ll understand not only what they’re saying, but why.

  But while people were talking, he was always so busy wishing they would leave him alone that he found it difficult to think his own thoughts, let alone decipher theirs. Patrick didn’t know what more he could have told Meg. Animals and photographs were two of the things he liked – and he didn’t have to say why. But if he’d told her two things, she might have asked about the third – and the third was secret.

  The third was his quest.

  Patrick was not a liar by nature, but he had lied to Meg, just as he had lied to his mother and to the admissions interview panel.

  He didn’t care what made people work.

  He was only interested in what happened when they stopped …

  14

  WHAT HAVE I done to deserve this? It seems like a logical question but the holes in my memory make it a pointless one too, because the answer is I don’t know.

  I keep looking for clues, but until I come up with something that justifies what’s happening to me, I can’t help feeling pretty short-changed in the karma stakes.

  There’s a photo next to my bed. I don’t know the people in it and it hurts my eyes to keep them swivelled to the left for that long, so unless I’m on my left side, I only see it in snatches. A middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman. The man looks a bit like my father, but the woman is not my mother, that’s for sure, even though she acts like it when she comes to visit me every day – stroking my hand, kissing my hair, massaging my feet the way the therapist told her to, and arranging bluebells and anemones in a jug she brought with her. I think I recognize the jug, but from where?

  I don’t know. Again.

  The woman who’s not my mother has stopped wearing the surgical mask, but she still wears the blue gloves.