Rubbernecker (10 page)

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.

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.’