Rubbernecker Page 7

  ‘Apparently you can get the most dreadful infections if you don’t take precautions,’ she tells me conspiratorially. ‘Upset tummy, you know.’

  Sure I know, I think, and shit into my nappy some more, which makes her nose wrinkle. I don’t care. It annoys me that she is here and Alice and Lexi are not. Why don’t they come? It makes me sad – but also angry and suspicious. I hope they’re all right, of course, but if they are then what would keep them from coming to see me?

  Maybe they’ve been lied to. Maybe they’ve been told I’m already dead, and are even now getting over me, while I am here, hidden away, waiting for a fate that someone has designed especially for me. Sometimes I even wonder about the crash. Did I really hit ice while fiddling with the radio? Or did somebody run me off the road? Did somebody plan all this, to get me here, away from the people I love, where I can be experimented on – murdered! – without anybody knowing, anybody caring? It happened to the man in the next bed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just next in line.

  Or maybe they don’t come because of the same elusive reason why Alice has sad eyes. That fear is so great that sometimes it makes me cry, which is my only outlet for any emotion.

  The nurses make up their own reasons for my tears. I’m crying for my old life is their favourite. They mean well, I suppose, but I still hate them for not bothering to understand.

  When my eyes are open, I try to watch everything – not just the top of the TV. When I’m on my back, I can only see the top third of the screen anyway before my own cheeks get in the way, and that has to be the worst third of all. The top of Bargain Hunt is all squinting through jewellers’ glasses at unseen treasures; the top of the rugby is only the stands and the occasional up-and-under, and the top of Top Gear is basically Jeremy Clarkson’s head.

  Every other day they turn me from my back on to one of my sides. On my left side I get a much better view of the ward. I watch the nurses eating chocolates at the station outside the door, and Tracy Evans making eyes at that tall, well-dressed man who comes in at night to ignore his wife. I follow the cleaner halfway round the room with my eyes. He’s slow as treacle and misses loads, but the floor is still smooth and shiny enough to make me want to skid about it in my socks. I can see the fancy little white stereo I’m attached to by white wires. There are maybe fifty tracks that I used to love, and it takes about three hours to run through them. And start again. Three hours into twenty-four is eight. I listen to each track eight times every twenty-four hours, fifty-six times every week, two hundred and twenty-four times a month, until I feel I’m going mad.

  When they turn me the other way – towards the window – I can’t see anything but sky and wall, and it makes me so frightened I shake.

  He’s still incredibly vulnerable.

  The doctor’s words run through my head on a loop. Incredibly vulnerable. That’s how I feel every second I spend on my right side. With my back to the room, the world sneaks around behind me. Anything could happen. A mad axeman could be slaughtering the other patients; a wolf might slink into the room and pad silently towards me; a nurse could inject something into my saline drip: insulin, or rat poison, and I would never know. Not until the agony started.

  Incredibly vulnerable.

  I stare at the wall and long for Jeremy Clarkson’s repulsive head.

  The only good thing about the right side is seeing the sky. Summer must be coming, and I count the days when the sky is blue instead of grey or white, or spitting rain. Once I get to three. Three whole days of blue! People at work would be making crap jokes about it by now. Hot enough for you? They’ll be banning hosepipes next. Did you enjoy the summer?

  Yeah, this is one hell of a summer – lying in my own shit, aching with stillness, fed through a cold tube in my side.

  Sometimes Tracy Evans brings me a little alphabet screen called a Possum, so that I can write a novel. Ha ha – it takes me a week of blinking in time to her random pointing to ask her to turn off the fucking music. Then I feel bad because I should have been using that energy to tell her to call 999 and report a suspicious death, but now I’m exhausted, and she’s gone all tight-lipped.

  At least she turned the music off. And now that the babbling, crying man has been murdered, there’s often a soft and wonderful silence like big powder puffs over my ears, so I can think of anything that floats into my head. Like the time Alice bought that slinky little green dress for the works Christmas party, and how I got a payrise a month later that she always claimed was hers. Or Lexi’s fourth birthday party, when Cerys Jones from next door wet herself so badly during pass-the-parcel that three other kids had to go home in borrowed knickers. I remember bringing Patch home – so tiny that Lexi thought he was a hamster, and the time she ran inside shouting that there was a toucan in the garden, which turned out to be a magpie holding a cream cracker. The stuffy ward recedes for hours as I think of the Gower wind in my hair; laughing until we cried, and the pink kite’s farewell tug.

  I don’t like Tracy Evans, but I get used to her and the other nurses, and to the therapist, Leslie, who tortures me grimly. The doctors don’t have name tags and I hardly see the same one twice, so it’s hard to keep track, but the nurses all have tags – as if they’re domestic pets. Jean, Tracy and Angie. Fido, Rover and Tiddles. There are others, but not every day.

  Jean is the best of them. Older, and thin and wrinkled with work. Angie is the shy, pretty one, who has two of her fingers taped from some old injury, but who never uses it as an excuse. Tracy is the worst. She cares – but only when the doctors are around. When they’re not, she’s lazy and slack. She never wipes the inside of my sticky mouth with water – even when I stare constantly at the jug. She does her nails at the nurses’ station while call buttons buzz. She hides the chocolates they keep there. I see her. I know her. At school we had half a dozen Tracys every year – loud, orange, stupid. Flirts and bullies.

  You got a girlfriend, sir? Is she pretty, sir? My friend fancies you, sir.

  Then they were just a mild irritation.

  Now a Tracy holds my life in her hands.

  15

  MEG STILL HADN’T named their body, although several other groups had. Number 4 was Rufus, due to his red chest hair; Number 7 – the cadaver whose leg Patrick had touched on the first day – was called Dolly, because of her residual pink nail polish; and Number 2 had been christened Woody for his post-mortem tumescence.

  ‘There’s always a Woody,’ Spicer told them with a rolling eye. He seemed to have forgotten Patrick’s transgression and had reverted to his usual good humour.

  The students had slowly become more casual about their work. The dissecting room was no longer nervously silent, but more like a factory where they all worked on a strange disassembly line.

  There was also an air of competition now – to see who could make the finest incision, the most efficient dissection of the foot, the fastest removal of a hand. Every time they came into the lab, there was still a low buzz of anticipation about cause of death. Now and then, Mick – the cadaverous lab technician – emerged from his glass box of an office to taunt them about it. At least, that’s what it felt like, as he walked among them like the Grim Reaper, raising a bushy eyebrow here, tutting quietly there. He carried with him a sheet on a clipboard, and every time someone established a cause of death, he was openly disappointed – as if a secret that had once been his alone was diminished by being shared.

  Table 22 had opened the floodgates. It seemed that suddenly everyone was finding tumours and clots and fluid-filled lungs. Cancers and blocked arteries were the order of the day.

  ‘Had a suicide once,’ Mick said suddenly one day as he stared down at Number 19. His eyes took on the misty look of a man remembering a romantic beach holiday.

  ‘Hanging. Neck wasn’t broken though, so we accepted the donation. Just some bruising and blood in the eyes.’

  He sighed as if to say, Those were the days.

  ‘Was it a woman?’ said Patrick.

  ‘
Yes.’

  ‘Is that why the neck wasn’t broken?’

  Mick nodded and looked at Patrick as if seeing him for the first time. ‘She only weighed eighty-two pounds. So she strangled really.’

  Meg grimaced. ‘Poor girl.’

  Mick shrugged. ‘There are worse things than dying.’

  ‘Really?’ said Meg.

  ‘Of course,’ said the tech. ‘Living badly.’

  Patrick didn’t actually care what their cadaver had died of, but he hated to give up on any puzzle. He’d always been that way – always insisted on working things through to their logical conclusion. He hated having help in these endeavours, and was as bent on solving the mystery of Number 19 as he had been about debunking the amateur magician at a school fête.

  I can see the rabbit’s ears sticking out!

  Shut up, boyo.

  Every time another organ was given the all-clear, Patrick’s frustration grew. He dropped the perfect liver into a plastic bag, pulled the zip-tie tight with a loud buzz, and slung it under the table to join the rest of Number 19’s innards.

  Spicer winked at him. ‘It’s only a bit of fun,’ he said.

  Patrick frowned. He didn’t answer pointless statements.

  Turning Number 19 over was a messy business, with bits of him falling out of the chest cavity and on to the floor. At one point Patrick got his left hand caught in the sharp remains of the ribs, and almost panicked at the thought that the bone might tear his rubber glove and pierce his own skin the way they’d been invading the corpse’s flesh for the past three months.

  Payback.

  He gritted his teeth and breathed hard and it didn’t happen, and he was proud of himself for getting through the moment. He pulled his hands free quickly, though, and immediately scraped all the bits off the floor and into a clear plastic bag with yet another black zip-tie and yet another flat metal numbered tag. Patrick always cleaned up so diligently that he had used more than double the number of bags and tags of his nearest rivals. Mick had had to order more Number 19 tags specially. He had told Patrick this with a look on his face that Patrick felt sure must be approval for a job well done.

  Months of lying prone without the benefit of circulation had left the body flattened on the bottom like a bag of sand. Now inverted, the buttocks remained oddly two-dimensional.

  Rob started on the dissection, making long, assured incisions that showed how much they’d all learned.

  ‘It’s my birthday on Saturday,’ said Meg. ‘You’re all invited.’

  ‘Ace,’ said Scott.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rob.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Dilip.

  ‘Coming, Patrick?’ Meg asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Again.’

  He had told Meg his feelings on parties before and thought she must have a very poor memory. He wondered how she was going to pass her exams with a memory like that. Dr Spicer had an endless supply of mnemonics – most of them dirty – to help stupid people. The bones of the wrist were the Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate and Hamate. Spicer’s aide was ‘Slowly lower Tilly’s panties to the curly hairs.’ Scott had laughed long and hard, and kept repeating it, until Rob had told him to shut up. There were others much dirtier – especially between the forearm and the fingers, with all those flexors in between – but Patrick only found them confusing.

  16

  ‘AH AH AH ah ah ah,’ in a deep voice.

  ‘Ee ee ee ee ee ee,’ in a squeaky one.

  This is what I’m reduced to. Ee-ing and Ah-ing like a crazed Northern mule, tended by strangers. It’s not how I planned my life.

  Leslie the therapist makes me do it. He’s a thin, taciturn Scotsman without discernible humour, but with a grim determination to train my tongue as if it were a contender for the Olympic one hundred metres. Of course, he manhandles me too. Hangs me from the cross and pulls my legs. Pushes my head and holds it there, like a sadistic barber. Rolls tennis balls down my arms and tosses sudden bean bags at me, saying, ‘Catch!’ They flop on my chest or tumble off my legs on to the floor, and he just shrugs and picks them up and says, ‘Better luck next time.’

  But really, he’s the tonguemeister.

  Talking and eating are his goals in life – for me, anyway; I’m not sure he does much of either himself. Every few days he comes in and makes me stick my tongue out and waggle it, or puff up my cheeks, or blow through a straw, or struggle through an endless rota of farmyard noises.

  ‘Aug!’ as in August. ‘Guh!’ as in gun. I try so hard I fart, but he doesn’t laugh.

  What kind of man doesn’t laugh at a fart?

  ‘Ah ah ah—’

  ‘Deeper,’ he says.

  ‘Ah ah ah—’

  ‘Deeper. Dig down for it.’

  ‘Ho ho ho,’ I try for a joke. Dig. Hoe. You know.

  But he just glances up from twisting my fingers and frowns. ‘Not ho. Ah.’

  Nobody gets a joke. Must be the way I tell ’em.

  The bluer the sky gets, the harder I work. Nothing means more to me now than being able to talk and to eat. There are words I need to speak; questions I need answered. If my tongue works, then I have a future beyond the infuriating Possum screens and the coded blinks and the taste-free food, so I devote my half-life to its recovery. Even when Leslie’s not here, I practise the exercises he gives me over and over and over, pursing my lips, straining my jaw. The nurses have stopped being impressed by me sticking my tongue out at them, although Angie will still sometimes stick hers out in return as she passes with a bedpan, or pushing a drip. Other patients’ visitors see me gurning and grunting and avert their eyes.

  I like the exercises. They exhaust me and so I sleep better. And when the doctors poke and prod me, or bring their baby-faced students to stand in a horseshoe around my bed and stare at the horror life can hold, I suck and blow like a whale in labour, to take my mind off the reason I am here and the people I have lost.

  To take my mind off murder.

  Christmas was coming, and someone hung the head of a laughing plastic Santa on the dissection room door, and his severed limbs around the room.

  ‘Idiots,’ said Rob.

  ‘Yes,’ said Patrick. ‘They didn’t put the tags on. How is anyone supposed to know they all belong together?’

  Meg gave each of them a card with glitter on it. Number 19 gave them nothing but an empty stomach, full bowels and perspiration.

  For the last week of term they worked on the back like navvies – stripping away the layers of muscle like old wallpaper, scoring either side of the vertebral column using handsaws, and finally breaking through to the shining river of the spinal column with hammers and chisels.

  Patrick wiped sweat from his brow with the crook of his elbow and thought, How can a human being die so easily when they’re so hard to break?

  17

  PATRICK MADE THE long ride home to the cottage outside Brecon that stood with a handful of others in a place too small for a name of its own. It was forty-five miles and rained all the uphill way, but it still felt good to be going somewhere real on his bike instead of making pointless circuits of the city.

  December soon slid from sleet to bitter snow, but Patrick went out most days anyway. He preferred it to staying in the cottage with his mother.

  Sometimes he went next door to Weird Nick’s and they played Grand Theft Auto. Mostly he headed off alone across the Beacons, following the narrow impressions that marked sheep trails under the snow. Sometimes he went as far as Penyfan’s flat peak. His favourite days were those where the sky was almost as white as the hillsides, so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. In that dreamscape Patrick’s world narrowed to the exchange of warm air for cold in his nostrils, the crunch of crystals under his hiking boots, and the sting of his fingers and ear-tips. With a kind of nostalgia, he thought of all the dead things that would be revealed by the thaw. He didn’t need them any more; he had something much better now.

>   Once he stood aside to let a small band of soldiers jog past him, laden with packs that would have bent donkeys.

  ‘Lost?’ said the last man, without stopping.

  ‘No,’ said Patrick. He had never been lost on the Beacons, and never expected to be. The soldiers jogged on and Patrick watched them until they disappeared over a rise and left him alone in his white world.

  When he was in the house, Patrick spent most of his time in his room. When the TV reception wavered – as it often did up here in the mountains – Patrick cycled the five miles to Brecon, carving a deep scar in the snow behind him.

  The bookies put memories into his head that he’d rather weren’t there, but he didn’t want to miss anything. Every time he wheeled his bicycle into the shop, he glanced under the counter. He knew the Labrador must be long dead, but he couldn’t help himself. The same men were here though. Ten years older; fatter, greyer, poorer – just the way his father might have been. The Milky Way man always said hello, and Patrick always said hello back. That was all. He never joined in their coarse, friendly banter and never bet on anything, even when the woman behind the counter winked at him and called him ‘Big Spender’. Patrick was no fool: the lino at the Bet window was worn through to the concrete, while at Payout it was as clean and shiny as the day it had been laid.

  So he just sat down with his black notebook on his lap and watched, and waited for a glimpse of death.

  Mr Deal kissed Tracy Evans. It was supposed to be a thank-you-for-looking-after-my-wife kiss, but his hand lingered on her arm and his lips on her cheek just long enough for her to know that it was actually an are-you-up-for-it? kiss.

  While Tracy barely had the interest or patience to interpret even the letters of the alphabet for her locked-in patients, every fibre of her being was minutely attuned to any hint of sexual intent, and it was all she could do to stop herself from grabbing Mr Deal’s crotch to let him know she was, indeed, up for it. That was for the clubs, and this was work, so she had to be smarter than that. So instead she asked him what aftershave he was wearing, and when he said ‘None’ – as she’d known he would – she fluttered her lashes and said, ‘Oh, you smell like Armani,’ even though she’d never smelled real Armani, only the knock-off stuff she used to buy at Splott market for Father’s Day.