Rubbernecker Read online

  It was just the start. Flattery was everything with men. Nice cars, large biceps, money and – of course – big cocks. Those were the things you had to play to – had to admire – if you wanted them to remember you, to choose you. Tracy didn’t know whether Mrs Deal had captured her husband that way, but she was certainly in no position to keep him that way.

  Now that she had leaned into Mr Deal’s kiss and started the seduction of flattery, Tracy knew that – finally – she had the edge on the woman in the hospital bed who was slowly twisting towards oblivion.

  Sarah apologized for a chicken instead of a turkey.

  ‘As there’s just the two of us,’ she explained, in case he’d neglected to notice that his father was dead.

  Again.

  At least chicken meant they could have trifle for afters without Patrick getting all alphabetical on her.

  She gave him a book about the Cheltenham Gold Cup. He gave her nothing; he had no concept that giving might be reciprocal.

  As they ate, Sarah asked Patrick how his studies were going and, to her surprise, he told her – haltingly at first, but then warming to his subject. He told her how difficult it was to scrape fat off muscle, of the way blood turned black and granular in embalmed arteries, and how some stomachs gave up gems such as the smooth, diminished carrot found in Number 11 or the gritty pips in Number 25 that turned out to be grape seeds.

  ‘There was nothing in ours,’ he added a little wistfully.

  She tried not to listen, and wanted a drink. Christmas was always difficult. Christmas and New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day and Easter, and her birthday and Matt’s birthday and their anniversary. Saturday nights and all day Sunday. Days with a Y in them.

  It had started when Patrick was three. Her parents hardly drank – just a sherry on special occasions. If her father had a whisky, her mother started to mutter. So at first a glass of vodka and orange at critical moments had made Sarah feel independent and in control. By the time Patrick was five, she’d dispensed with the orange juice. By the time he was six, she didn’t even need the glass. But after Matt had … died, she’d stopped. Just like that. People said it was easier that way, but she couldn’t imagine it being any harder.

  Now she watched her son talk – his meticulous hands describing his work of the past three months, his eyes focused on the remains of the chicken. She thought of its cold, pimpled skin, and of how she’d slid her own hand into its cavity this morning and withdrawn the giblets in a juicy plastic bag. Her stomach felt uneasy and she burped quietly – and was punished by tasting the dead bird again.

  When she became aware of his words once more, Patrick was explaining how Dilip had pierced the bowels, and how the smell seemed to be the most recognizably human thing they had yet found in the stiffened cadaver.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Patrick!’ Sarah slapped the table, making the knives shiver. ‘We’re eating!’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’ve finished.’

  Sarah wanted to smack him. She could almost taste the vodka.

  She stood up and banged the table again, less successfully this time – sending a fork clattering to the floor.

  ‘It’s not all about you. Dinner’s not over, so we’re still eating, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And another thing. When someone gives you a present, the least you could do is say thank you! I don’t expect anything in return from you, Patrick, but I do expect manners.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  It wasn’t enough. ‘You’re just so selfish. All you ever do is take, take, take!’ She glared at him as if demanding an epiphany.

  None came. He picked the fork up off the floor and placed it back on her plate, nudging it repeatedly until it was parallel with her knife.

  Sarah gave up. What was the point? Nothing ever changed. Nothing ever would.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  He looked at the fridge. ‘What’s for pudding?’

  She sighed. That was the thing about Patrick – he didn’t understand the sacrifices she made, but he also didn’t understand the anger and the resentment. It was good in a way, she supposed; maybe for both of them.

  ‘Trifle,’ she said, and cleared the table while he read his book. He only looked up when she put the bowl in front of him and sat down.

  ‘So,’ she started again over the hundreds and thousands, ‘this Scott and Meg and …?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Who are the other students you work with?’

  ‘Oh. Rob and Dilip.’

  ‘And Rob and Dilip. Are they your friends?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said through a mouthful of custard.

  Sarah was glad she’d asked. This was new. Patrick had never openly acknowledged friends before – either his or those of other people – and it gave her that most resilient of emotions: hope.

  Carefully she asked, ‘What’s Meg like?’

  ‘Nervous with a scalpel.’

  ‘I mean as a person.’

  Patrick frowned hard and finally managed, ‘Sentimental.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She wants to give it a name.’

  ‘Give what a name?’

  ‘The cadaver.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sarah, surprised they hadn’t done that on the very first day. ‘Is she pretty?’

  ‘It’s a man.’

  ‘No, I mean is Meg pretty?’

  Patrick screwed up his face again and looked as if she’d asked him to summarize string theory.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he finally managed.

  She swallowed the urge to snap at him and said brightly, ‘Well, it’s nice to hear you have friends. What do you do when you all get together? Go to parties? Or to the pub?’

  Patrick shrugged and ran a finger around his bowl to capture all lingering traces of raspberry jelly.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We just cut up the dead guy.’

  18

  WHARE IS MY wofe?

  Tracy Evans is an idiot. God knows how she passed her nursing exams, but she has the literacy skills and attention span of a toddler on Tartrazine. How can she mistake ‘wife’ for ‘wofe’? What’s a wofe when it’s at home?

  She stares at the little screen and moves her lips almost silently. ‘Whare … Ismy …’ Then she makes an unhappy face. ‘What’s a wofe?’

  Exactly.

  ‘Do you mean wife?’

  I blink.

  ‘Oh. She’ll be in later.’

  She says it breezily, as though my wofe comes to see me all the time, but my heart just about jumps out of my chest with excitement. Alice is coming! Alice is coming to see me! Will she bring Lexi? It’s been so long! At least, it feels so long! I hope Lexi isn’t wearing make-up or anything tacky. Kids start so young nowadays – and change so fast. Has she changed? Has Alice?

  Have I?

  I blink rapidly to get Tracy Evans’s attention and spell out MIROR. Except I do it with two Rs and she ignores one of them.

  ‘You want a mirror?’ she says.

  Sarcasm is so hard to do in blinks, so I play it straight.

  She disappears. While I wait, I watch two nurses lift the woman opposite on to a special bed that can be tilted upright. I know now that Jesus on the cross in his pj’s was just another patient. God knows what else I hallucinated back then! I’ve been on the tilt table myself now, and it’s like a very low-grade funfair ride – the kind you could put a small child on without fear they’d be hurt. The ride my heart’s on now is far more exciting. A rollercoaster of hope and fear and anticipation. I’ll probably need a shave. Alice says facial hair makes everyone look shifty, and Lexi says it scratches when I kiss her goodnight.

  Tracy Evans comes back with a mirror.

  ‘There,’ she says, and holds it so badly that I can only see a shaky image of half my face.

  It’s enough. My stomach cramps with horror.

  That’s not me. That’s not me!

  The face in the mirror is of a mu
ch older man. Ten or twenty years older! I am the man in the photo beside my bed.

  That’s impossible. I’m not old! I’m thirty-five and Alice is thirty-three and Lexi is twelve and Patch is seven and the goldfish – well, they’re rolling stock – but I know how old I am. I know I haven’t been asleep that long. I’m sure of it. The woman who smells of rubber said I had been in a coma for two months. Not two decades.

  This is impossible.

  The shaky old man blurs as my eyes overflow, and I blink like a stutterer.

  ‘All right?’ says Tracy cheerfully.

  Yes. No. I don’t know. Call the police! Call the police! Someone has stolen great lumps of my life, and I feel the shock of its loss like an amputee.

  Tracy lowers the mirror. ‘You get some sleep now,’ she says, ‘and she’ll be in later.’

  I want to howl. I want to howl and scream and pound my fists on to tables and smash someone in the face. What’s happened to me? Someone must be to blame. Someone has to take responsibility. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I’ve been changed; I’ve been cheated, and nobody seems to understand or to care.

  In my head I’m a vengeful dervish, an angry Hulk; Godzilla tearing down civilization.

  In reality I lie there like meat.

  ‘Aaaaaaa! Aaaaaaa! Aaaaaaa!’ That’s not the sound of me crying, because I am not me.

  And I don’t know where I’ve gone.

  19

  IT WAS A cold January, and the light in the dissecting room was flat and grey when they finally exposed the face of Number 19.

  Hips and knuckles and stomachs were only 3D versions of Essential Clinical Anatomy. Once they’d overcome their natural aversion to cutting into a human being, those things were routine, even boring. But this was very different, and there was a long silence while they looked at the face of the person whose body they knew more intimately than a mother or a lover ever had.

  He was the middle-aged man they’d long expected. Mick had shaved his head before embalming, but his straight nose had greying hairs in it, and his crows’ feet were deep enough to have survived the swell of formalin and glycerol.

  Patrick noticed with relief that his eyes were closed – and that Scott made no attempt to open them. He also noticed that Meg’s lower lip trembled, and he watched with interest the way it pulled her chin out of shape.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘There are tears in your eyes,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, Patrick,’ said Rob firmly.

  Patrick glanced around the table and realized that everyone felt something that he didn’t. The students looked … angry? No, that wasn’t right.

  He suddenly thought of his father’s face on the day Persian Punch had died, and his heart jolted at the sudden connection. Sad! The other students looked sad. Even Dr Spicer was pale and uncharacteristically quiet, and – for the first time he could ever remember – Patrick thought he knew the feelings of strangers. He was sure he was right. The excitement almost overwhelmed him. All he wanted to do was to drink in the clues on their faces so that he would know Sad if he ever saw it again.

  ‘He looks like a Bill,’ said Meg, adding snot to the sleeve of her paper coat, which was already disgusting with yellow fat and brick-brown blood.

  ‘Yeah, he does,’ said Scott, and was rewarded with a tiny smile from her.

  Spicer stood at the head with his scalpel, and they joined him there with more than a touch of what felt like first-day nerves. Nobody looked as if they wanted to start. For all the incisions they’d made so far, there was something quite different about slicing into the throat with the face exposed; something executional.

  Spicer was about to make the first cut, then changed his mind.

  ‘Patrick can do the honours, I think.’

  The others sighed with relief and glanced at each other. If this was Patrick’s punishment for his previous infraction, they were in full support.

  As Patrick took the scalpel from Spicer he noticed a slight tremble in the man’s hand, and wondered if he was a drinker. Lots of doctors were, he’d heard – although his mother was a shop assistant.

  He followed Spicer’s finger to the starting place below the hyoid bone, and traced a murderous line across the throat, and then slid the blade boldly over the bumpy thyroid cartilage, through the old pale scar, down to the base of the neck.

  ‘Well done, mate,’ said Rob and patted him on the back. The touch was over before Patrick could flinch.

  Under Spicer’s guidance they all took turns at cutting and cleaning and scraping, peeling back flat layers of neck muscle until Bill’s throat was spread about him like the flaps of a startled basilisk.

  ‘There’s something in the oesophagus,’ said Dilip, and they all watched as he sliced and clipped back a six-inch gash in the tube of muscle. The pink membranes inside were thickly freckled with dark fragments.

  ‘Pharyngeal debris is quite common,’ said Spicer. ‘Usually it’s blood or vomit. Just clean it up using the swabs.’

  ‘Is it relevant to the cause of death?’ said Scott.

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘Ace,’ said Scott. ‘So he might have choked or had internal bleeding or something?’

  Spicer smiled faintly; he was giving nothing away. Patrick hoped it was not the case; he was trying to be faithful to his pearl of a tumour.

  Meg started to wipe away the debris to reveal the multiple folds of the throat. Unlike the flesh, which was made strangely orange by the embalming fluids, the membranes and organs remained pink and lifelike.

  There were several nicks and cuts in the soft palate and back of the throat where Patrick could see Dilip had been clumsy with the scalpel, and a fragment of blue latex made him check his gloves feverishly. They were not infallible – especially around the sharp edges of ribs and teeth. Patrick was relieved to find his intact on this occasion, but he peeled them off and got a new pair anyway.

  When he returned, Meg had finished clearing the throat, which was gleaming and alien. The root of the tongue was lumpy with tastebuds and larger papillae.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Patrick.

  ‘What’s what?’ said Meg.

  Patrick was so focused that he brushed against her shoulder without even noticing, as he leaned in and touched a particularly large, discoloured lump. It moved a little, so he plucked it out with his forceps and held it up to the light.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Dilip.

  ‘You pulled his tonsils out, idiot!’ said Scott.

  ‘No I didn’t. It wasn’t attached.’

  Patrick turned the lump slightly in the afternoon light. It was pale tan and about half the size of his smallest fingernail, domed on one side, flat on the other, with a single groove running down its length.

  ‘You think it’s a tumour?’ said Meg, looking as concerned as if the corpse would have to be told the bad news.

  ‘Looks more like a cyst,’ said Scott.

  ‘Or a nodule,’ helped Rob. ‘You get them on the vocal cords.’

  ‘It’s a peanut,’ said Patrick.

  They all laughed, even though he was serious.

  Dr Spicer came over and confirmed Patrick’s diagnosis. ‘Probably brought up from the stomach with the rest of the debris.’

  ‘There was nothing in the stomach,’ Patrick reminded him.

  ‘Maybe that’s why,’ said Rob.

  ‘I bet he choked on it,’ Scott insisted.

  ‘It’s too small, isn’t it?’ said Dilip. ‘Something that size couldn’t block the airway. It would just be sucked into the lungs, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘What are the post-mortem symptoms of choking?’ said Spicer.

  ‘Blood in the eyes?’ said Meg.

  Scott leaned over the face and Patrick looked away as he checked the sunken eyes.

  ‘Nada,’ said Scott. ‘Shit. I give up. I’m asking Mick.’

  He walked away and Patrick dropped the peanut in
to a fresh bag.

  ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary,’ laughed Spicer.

  ‘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,’ said Patrick, and Spicer looked stunned to hear himself quoted verbatim.

  ‘Are you being funny?’ he said carefully.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Patrick, and fastened the bag, tagged it, and then put it under the dissection table along with Bill’s left arm, both feet, and that day’s skin and fat. Spicer shook his head and turned his attention to the table again.

  Scott came back from the office, frowning, and they all looked at him expectantly. ‘It’s not choking, but he wouldn’t say what it was. That bastard likes watching us suffer.’

  They all turned towards the glass-walled office. The bald lab tech gave them a wave, looking as cheerful as they had ever seen him.

  When five o’clock came round the students started to peel off their gloves and leave.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Bill,’ said Meg.

  Patrick didn’t go.

  Instead he slid his fingers into the cadaver’s mouth and ran them around the inside of the stiff lips and under the leathery tongue. Then he checked from the other end too, wiggling his index finger up behind the soft palate and into the nasal cavity.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Meg, wandering back to the table.

  ‘Looking for vomit.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  Patrick glanced at her over the corpse. ‘Would it be lucky or unlucky to find vomit with my finger in the mouth of a dead man?’

  She paused and then smiled. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘You can laugh,’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe later.’

  Patrick checked thoroughly, then held up a clean blue finger.

  ‘Luck,’ he said, and she laughed.