20
TODAY I CLOSED my mouth until my teeth touched. I strained and sweated and groaned and grimaced, and when I felt enamel on enamel, I cried with joy. Cried like I haven’t since Lexi was born. Cried so hard that Jean had to come over and suck the snot out of my nose with a turkey baster – or something very like it.
‘Well done!’ she said, dabbing at my eyes and cheeks, and smiling like she meant it.
It means so much. If I’m to find out what’s happened to me, I have to be able to speak. I have to understand how long I have been here, and what has happened since the accident. Maybe what happened before the accident. Or even during it. Can I even trust my memory of that?
The woman who says she’s my wife keeps coming to see me, and keeps being a stranger. Alice and Lexi keep not coming to see me. Maybe because of something I did wrong? I keep feeling that I’ve done something wrong, but I just don’t know.
And I’m not going to find out by blinking.
The more I can do, the more I realize I need to do. Opening my eyes was the first thing, but that got old quickly. Then sticking out my tongue took precedence. Now closing my mouth to help to form words has become critical too, and the touching of teeth leaves me euphoric.
I don’t even feel embarrassed by my tears; that’s how happy I am.
Leslie was unimpressed by my joy, of course.
‘Big babby,’ he snorted, then tossed a bean bag at my heart.
Patrick rode down Park Place with his head full. It had been a red-letter day.
He had recognized sadness in his fellow students – actually understood something about people instead of feeling only disinterest and confusion. It was a strange progression – tinged with unease by the memory of his father – but he could not shake the feeling that it had been a special moment.
He also felt that although they still didn’t know the cause of death, they must be getting closer, simply by a process of elimination. The brain tumour was looking more and more likely, and the prospect of being right was always good. More than that, he had been allowed to make the difficult first incisions in the throat, which meant Dr Spicer must think he was the most capable of the group – better than Scott. The idea of winning the prize for the best dissection student was an attractive one.
Then Rob had touched him and he hadn’t panicked, even though his shoulder had crawled from the contact. And he’d ascertained that there was no more vomit in the cadaver’s mouth. Patrick wasn’t sure why he’d done that, but he’d felt compelled to check.
Finally – unexpectedly – he had made Meg laugh. That had surprised him and, more than that, it had given him another interesting feeling that he took a while to identify as pleasure.
He was too excited by it all to go home. He cycled round the city aimlessly for hours as the shops and offices dimmed, before turning into the castle grounds and racing along the dark paths between dormant roses, until all he could think about was the burning in his lungs and limbs. Then he leaned his bike against an oak and sat on the grass beside it. Once his breathing had slowed, he rested his back against the trunk and enjoyed cooling down.
He closed his eyes and listened to the sway of branches and the rustle of small animals all around him. In the darkness, and with the smell of grass and earth in the air, he almost expected the polite cough of a sheep. Quickly he fell asleep, cross-legged, with his head tilted backwards and his hands upturned in his lap, as if seeking enlightenment from the rising moon.
He woke shivering, just before the grey malt dawn, to find a young man in a white tracksuit sitting facing him in an almost identical position, but with a long screwdriver in his upturned hands.
‘I could have killed you while you slept,’ he said, not unpleasantly.
Patrick stood slowly and got on his bike and rode away. When he looked back, the young man was nothing but a pale blob facing the empty trunk.
Back at the house, he’d missed a party. Someone was passed out behind the front door and Patrick took five minutes to force his way in, and another two to ascertain that the girl on the floor was not dead.
The hallway was strewn with plastic cups and empty bottles, and halfway up the stairs there was a bowl of popcorn with a shoe in it.
Kim was on the living-room sofa, eating toast with a man in his forties who was wearing nothing but her short kimono.
‘Hi, Patrick,’ she giggled. ‘This is my boyfriend, Pete.’
Patrick was confused. ‘I thought you were a lesbian.’
Kim giggled again and Pete winked at Patrick. ‘So did she.’
‘OK,’ said Patrick. This morning was starting to be the weirdest one he could remember.
Pete leaned in and licked butter off Kim’s cheek, and Patrick looked at the television.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ said Kim.
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ said Patrick. ‘But I can see Pete’s bollocks.’
He left his bike in the hallway and went upstairs to shower. At the top of the stairs, Jackson accosted him.
‘Have you seen him?’ he demanded in a stage whisper.
‘Seen who?’
‘Pete.’
‘Yes, all of him,’ said Patrick.
‘She’s supposed to be a lesbian!’ hissed Jackson. ‘If she was going to chop and change, she could have told me.’
Patrick didn’t see why Kim should tell anyone anything. Personally, he’d rather not have known about her lesbianism, her vegetarianism, her lumpy art or her hairy-balled boyfriend. It was all just mental clutter to him.
‘Why do you need to know?’ he asked.
In answer, Jackson just huffed and flapped a slender hand at Patrick. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
They were words Patrick had heard a thousand times throughout his short life, and he’d always believed them. But suddenly, for the first time, he felt they might not always be true. Perhaps he didn’t understand now, but what if he might at some future point? He’d understood sadness, hadn’t he? He’d made Meg laugh. What if understanding living people was something that could be learned, like anatomy or the alphabet?
‘Maybe I could,’ he said carefully; he didn’t want to commit himself to anything too drastic.
‘Yeah,’ snorted Jackson. ‘Maybe you could.’
Patrick’s spirits lifted even further. Jackson agreed with him! Maybe he could learn! And if something could be learned, then Patrick knew he could learn it.
All it took was motivation.
21
PATRICK DIDN’T GO in the day they did the eyes, but when he came back for the next session, it was to find that the top had been sawn off every cadaver’s skull.
Thirty brains were exposed like giant walnuts, and the smell of fresh bone dust hung in the air. The circular saw was sitting where Mick had left it on the counter by the door, like a horror film prop, with skin and frayed flesh still clinging to its jagged teeth.
The final stage of dissection was under way and Patrick felt giddy with anticipation. He was suddenly acutely aware of his own head, and imagined all the things going on inside it. All the electricity and connections and creativity. Something from nothing, bursting out of the darkness and lighting the way to the universe.
How did all that just end?
Where did it all go?
And once it was switched off, could it ever be switched back on?
So far, Number 19 had been thoroughly dead. But if any spark remained – or any promise of more than a mere spark – then it would be found in this most tantalizing of organs.
Over the course of a morning, they prised the brain out with spoons, and it flopped into Patrick’s hands like a water-filled balloon. He shook a little as he turned it, his eyes and his fingers probing the jelly-mould mind for clues, while the others peered over his shoulders and prodded at it with their blue fingers.
Patrick felt his excitement morph seamlessly into disappointment. Not the disappointment of a child denied a treat, but the kind of disappointment that makes the
chest ache and the belly roll with nausea at the loss of all hope.
There was nothing.
The tightly packed convolutions were wrapped in dura, decorated with a network of nerves, and fed by thick arterial passages like mineworkings in blancmange. The pink-grey folds taunted Patrick with their perfect mystery. Whatever had made Number 19 the person he had once been was now lying right here in his hands, and yet there was no trace of him left, nor any clue as to how he had disappeared. No pearl, no tumour, no secret passageway to the beyond.
Patrick felt hope desert him.
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.
Patrick felt his face grow hot, and he stared stupidly down at the perfect practical joke overflowing in his palms.
If there were no answers here, then he no longer knew where to look for them.
He fumbled the brain to Dilip and walked out of the dissecting room in a blur.
Patrick was in the cafeteria, not eating chocolate pudding, crisps and a tuna sandwich, in that order.
Outside the window he always faced was the rack where he always locked his bike. He could get on it and ride away. There was nothing here for him now; now that he knew a dead man was no better than a dead bird. A dead father.
If he had kept hold of his hand, would that have anchored him to life?
Would the car have missed him?
Or hit them both – and revealed the truth to two instead of one?
‘Can I sit here?’ said Meg, and then sat there anyway before he could do anything about it.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Penny for your thoughts.’
Patrick stared at her blankly and she went a little pink.
‘My grandma used to say it. I’ll give you a penny, and you give me your thoughts.’
Patrick didn’t like the sound of this game. ‘Do I have to?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘You haven’t even given me a penny.’
‘It’s just a silly saying. You don’t take it literally.’
But Patrick was still perturbed by the whole concept. ‘And a penny is nothing. You can’t get anything for a penny. You’d have to pay a lot more than that.’
Meg sighed. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’
‘I know I don’t.’
‘I just wondered if you were OK, that’s all.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Patrick.
‘What’s wrong?’
Patrick stirred his chocolate pudding mechanically, the spoon grating on the china.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s just meat. Meat and shit.’
‘Oh,’ she said carefully. ‘What did you expect?’
‘Something else. Something more.’ He felt weirdly like crying, and his stomach knotted and ached the way it had that day. The day of the punch in the back, the bat in the face. He knew now what Sad looked like; was this how it felt? He didn’t like it.
‘But there is more,’ she said, grabbing the salt cellar for emphasis. ‘Just because we don’t know doesn’t make it any less … amazing. Can’t you feel it?’
‘No, I can’t,’ he said. ‘If someone dies and you don’t see it, how do you know what really happened?’
‘See what?’
‘That thing that changes between here and there. Between life and death. I can’t feel it; I want to see it. I want to know what it is.’
‘We’ll all know that one day.’
‘I want to know it now!’ he snapped.
There was a long silence while Meg stared into the crusted hole where the salt lived.
She cleared her throat. ‘You’re different, you know.’
‘Only different from you,’ he said. ‘Not different from me.’
‘That’s true.’ She smiled. Then she poured a careful little pyramid of salt on to the table.
‘What’s it like to be you?’ she said.
Patrick was surprised. Nobody had ever asked him what it was like to be him, not even his mother.
What was it like? He’d never even examined it himself before. Never been asked to come to a conclusion about it and share it with another. But Meg hadn’t called him names, and she wasn’t rushing him, and so, for the first time in his life, he reached into himself in the hope of finding something to tell her – something to show her – in the same way that Number 19 had submitted to being opened and deconstructed.
‘It’s …’
He scraped slow chocolate patterns in the bottom of the bowl while he struggled to corral his feelings and put them into words.
Meg waited for him.
‘It’s very …’
He gritted his teeth. This was crazy. There was so much in there – he could feel a million things coursing through him, and yet he kept coming up empty. It was like putting his hand into a tank filled with goldfish and trying to grab one. He’d done that in a pet shop once and it hadn’t worked, and his mother had slapped his legs.
Still Meg waited, and suddenly Patrick was filled with a tight, burning frustration at his inability to explain what it was like.
‘It’s very,’ he said forcefully. ‘Very very.’
‘Very what?’ she asked quietly.
But he had nothing to give her, even when he tried.
He dug his spoon so hard into the bowl that it rang, and spewed chocolate across the table.
‘Very,’ said Patrick.
People looked at them in a sudden hush. Then the faces turned away and the low drown of voices and echoes and cutlery resumed.
Meg simply nodded. ‘It must be.’
22
THEY’RE TRYING TO kill me.
I don’t think it’s my imagination, although that’s what the doctor is telling the woman who says she’s my wife. My wofe is how I think of her now – not the same thing.
‘Paranoia is common … emerging coma …’ he whispers, trying to keep me from hearing, but I get the gist. ‘A normal response … situation.’
They both glance at me with the same expression – concern and pity, and the need to keep things from me for my own good.
Maybe I wouldn’t be paranoid if they weren’t out to get me. The idiot Tracy Evans who regularly unplugs my heart monitor so she can plug in the electric razor; the cleaner who bumps my bed with her mop and glares if I wake; and the doctors who stand over me – too close, too watchful – and make covetous notes that they hang on my bed for everyone to see but me. Every time one of them stands over me, the sweat runs into my eyes and stings a warning.
Even my wofe. She’s supposed to be on my side. She doesn’t seem to notice that I’m an old man now. She says she loves me; calls me Darling.
‘SOMEONE KILLED THE MAN IN THAT BED.’
She’d looked at the Possum screen, then looked at the bed, frowning – as if the fact that the man was no longer there somehow cast doubt on my claim.
Secret, I’d begged her with my eyelids. Secret.
Doesn’t she understand English?
Now the doctor looks at me but whispers to her, ‘… infection … several days. Sometimes … sudden cardiac episode … vulnerable.’
There it is again. Vulnerable.
The thing that makes me feel most vulnerable is you bastards whispering in a corner about me! That doctor might even be the one! He might be the killer! Now he knows I saw something. Now he knows! And what will he do about it?
Anything
he
likes.
Fuck you, doctors. Fuck you, nurses. Fuck you, wofe. That’s the last time I trust you. The last time I confide.
She comes back over and starts to repeat the lies.
‘Sam, sweetheart, the doctor says—’
‘Ah ah ah ah ah. Ee
ee ee ee ee …’ Deep and squeaky.
‘Darling, I’m trying to—’
‘AH AH AH AH AH EE EE EE EE. Guh! Guh! Guh!’ I want my wife back. I want my child. I want to speak and eat and move my own feet. I want to know what happened to the man in the next bed and I want to know what happened to me. If I have to do it all myself, I will; I can’t rely on anyone else – I see that now.
‘Guh! Guh! Guh!’ I put everything I can into it, to let her know how angry I am.
‘Sam, please …’
She takes my hand and I close my eyes; I know that hurts her.
She starts to cry and I don’t care.
23
THE MORE PATRICK scrubbed his bedroom carpet, the more he felt betrayed by the corpse. Number 19 was not a rabbit or a crow; Number 19 had been a man, just like his father, and Patrick felt the cadaver had somehow reneged on a species-specific agreement to give him the answers he sought. Instead of revealing what happened when a person stopped working, Number 19 had only added to the confusion with his elusive cause of death. And Meg had only rubbed his nose in it, going on about how ignorant they all were. As if Patrick didn’t know that.
He was sick of being confused. About everything.
Losing his father had at first seemed to be a kind of confusion – like losing a glove or a sock. Those things didn’t cease to exist just because you couldn’t see them; they were always somewhere – under the bed, in the machine, down the back of the sofa – and eventually they turned up.
Sooner than eventually, if you actively looked for them.
So Patrick had actively looked. Ever since the school counsellor had told him about the one-way door, Patrick had tried to find some sign of where it was and how it might be opened. First he’d sought it in the animals and birds he brought home off the Beacons, then in the faces of the dead that he found on macabre postcard collections, or of the dying in African aid stations on the News at Ten. Finally he searched the eyes of racehorses as they waited patiently for the bullet on snapped legs, in the only sport where death was routinely televised. With every crashing fall, Patrick felt the shock of the inevitable, and then a tingling in his belly – a bubble of anticipation in case this was the one, this was the horse, this was the moment when all would be revealed to him, when the door might open just a chink and allow him to glimpse a deathly Narnia on the other side.
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