Patrick sat back in his chair and Professor Madoc blew out his cheeks in relief. He wasn’t sure how this conversation had turned from him issuing a formal warning to a student firing awkward philosophical questions at him. He needed to get back on track.
‘You know, Patrick, Dr Spicer tells me that despite these difficulties, you’re a real talent in the dissection room. He says you’re a leading candidate for the Goldman Prize. It would be a shame to give up now, wouldn’t it?’
Patrick remained still for an uncomfortably long time. Finally he nodded silently and rose to his feet, then paused and reached across the desk. The professor withdrew slightly, but Patrick picked up the Rubik’s cube.
Professor Madoc watched as the matching colours spread quickly up the six sides until the puzzle was complete and Patrick laid it back on the desk.
‘It’s not difficult,’ he said. ‘I can show you, if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ said Professor Madoc, and Patrick left.
25
THE ORANGE JUICE has gone to my chest.
Pneumonia. They don’t say it, but I know that’s the fear. People die of pneumonia – even healthy people. But I’m incredibly vulnerable. Phlegm rattles in my throat and my back is agony every time I breathe, so I try not to do that.
It doesn’t work.
Jean and Angie use the vacuum on me almost constantly. It’s disgusting and painful. Two doctors come. I wonder if one of them is the killer. Who knows? I would, if only I’d kept my eyes open that night. Would it be better or worse to know whether a killer was standing over me, taking my pulse, checking my drip? Right now I don’t care if one of them killed the man in the next bed, as long as they help me.
‘Blink twice if it hurts,’ says one, tapping my chest in that creepy way that doctors do – as if they’re trying to find a secret passage in a smuggler’s wall.
I blink lots and they exchange worried looks.
Without warning, tears roll out of my eyes and into my ears. I’m going to die, and I will never have seen Alice or Lexi again. I’ll never have told them how much I love them or why I never came home that day, or where I’ve been since.
‘Aaaaa!’ I say.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ says the younger doctor. ‘It will only hurt.’
He’s right, but I don’t care. I don’t want to slip into unconsciousness and die without doing my best to leave something behind, even if it’s a single word.
‘Aaaaa,’ I say. ‘Duh.’
‘Ssssh,’ says Jean, holding my hand and looking nervous. I reckon she and Tracy will get it in the neck if I die. Leslie will be furious – in a monosyllabic sort of way. All that work wasted. Even now my tongue curls away from where I want it to be, and I have to think of everything he taught me. I make an enormous effort, full of grunts and phlegm.
‘Aaaan. Dee.’
‘What’s that?’ says the older doctor, then turns to Jean. ‘Do you know what he’s saying?’
‘I’ll get the Possum,’ she says, but I don’t want it. I want to hear my own voice.
‘Aaanduh!’ I say as my lungs protest, my back spikes, and sweat and tears pour down my nose and cheeks.
I can’t do the S. ‘Aandee!’
There! I did it!
‘Angie?’ says Jean.
Not Angie, for Christ’s sake! Lexi! But it’s all I can do and it really doesn’t matter whether they understand or not. If it’s just the first word of thousands, or the last one ever to pass my lips, at least I’ve named the most important thing in my life.
‘Well done!’ says Jean, looking as relieved as she does encouraging. ‘I’ll get Angie to come and say hello. You’ll be ordering us all about by lunchtime.’
Another big lie.
Who cares? I don’t even know what’s true any more. If you can’t trust a mirror, what can you believe?
Jean bustles away with the older doctor. The younger doctor takes my notes off the end of my bed. I can’t see it happen – I just see the top of his head – but I know the feeling and the sound like my own breathing. The gritty little metal noise and the tiny vibration it makes in the steel frame and through the mattress. The princess had her pea; I have my notes.
He moves slightly so that I can see him as he reads them intently – I wonder what’s written there: just the injuries from the flying Ford Focus? Or everything from childhood measles onwards? He reads them like they’re instructions for a bomb disposal. Then he comes over, jabs a needle into my hip and I close my eyes, exhausted by the effort and the pain of living.
If I wake up dead, so be it.
26
THERE WERE ONLY two Galens in the Cardiff phone book, and only one with the initial S.
The house was up Penylan Road – a large red-brick home set towards the back of a broad, unimaginative garden, where the only flowers were snowdrops and primroses in a narrow stripe either side of the wide gravel driveway. Everything else was shrubbery made of laurels and conifers. Patrick was allergic to conifers and regarded them all with suspicion. If he lived here, he’d dig them all out and have a bonfire.
He wheeled his bike past a late-registration BMW. This was how Number 19 had lived: well. It was a start, but to find out how he had died, Patrick guessed he needed more than he could gather from noting what kind of car the man had driven. He wasn’t sure what he needed, or how he was going to get it, but Patrick also knew that there were too many variables for him to have formulated a watertight plan of action. The front door might be opened by anyone – a wife, a mother, a son, a cleaner – and each of them would require a different strategy.
But he only had one strategy.
Therefore the only concrete opening he had prepared was My name is Patrick Fort and I want some information about Mr Samuel Galen. He assumed everything would fall into place from there.
Patrick put down the kickstand on his bike and knocked on the door. He could see his silhouette in the glossy black paint, and his face in the chrome letterbox.
‘Go away! I’ve called the police!’
Patrick blinked in surprise. It was a woman’s voice, high and screechy. And illogical. Why would she have called the police before he’d even knocked? She didn’t know why he was there.
Even so, he was wary. He took a step backwards. Maybe he’d done something wrong; something he couldn’t understand. It happened all the time. Once when he was fourteen he’d almost been arrested for walking out of Asda wearing jeans and a blue striped T-shirt so his mother, who was in the car, could approve the purchase. Patrick had tried to explain to the security guard that he had left his own clothes in the fitting room, so how could he be stealing these ones? Especially with the labels still swinging off them.
Maybe this was like that. Somebody not understanding things.
The faint sound of breaking glass drew him and his bike around the side of the house to the back garden. He flinched as glass broke much closer to him this time.
A girl stood in the garden. A girl or a woman; Patrick was never quite sure when one became the other. She was as slim as a girl, but as angry as a woman. She had startling white-blonde spikes of hair, and – despite the late-winter chill – wore a white T-shirt, black leather mini skirt and motorcycle boots.
She drew back her arm and hurled what looked like half a brick through a downstairs window.
‘I’ve called the police!’
‘So have I!’ the girl/woman screamed back at the house. ‘You fucking old cow!’ She turned away and Patrick thought she was going to run, but instead she started to look around for something else to throw. It wasn’t easy; the garden was as well-tended as the house – apart from the broken windows. Even the soil in the shrubbery looked stone-free. Patrick couldn’t see where she’d got the half-brick from.
‘Hi,’ said Patrick.
The girl/woman looked at him for the first time. ‘Who are you?’
‘Patrick Fort,’ said Patrick. ‘Are you Mrs Galen?’
‘No, I’m fucking not,’ s
he spat vehemently. ‘And neither is she.’ She parted the shrubbery. Patrick noticed a smallish stone next to his foot.
‘Here,’ he said, and held it out to her.
The girl looked at him suspiciously, then came over and snatched it from his hand like a wary monkey. ‘Cheers,’ she said, and threw it through an upstairs window. It made a neat black hole and a web of white cracks.
‘The police are coming,’ he pointed out, and she cocked her head at the sound of approaching sirens.
‘Bollocks.’
‘I thought you called them?’
‘Yeah, right,’ she snorted, and walked over to the six-foot wooden fence that surrounded the garden. ‘You going to gimme a leg up or what?’
Patrick wheeled his bike across the lawn and edged his way through the shrubs. He hesitated, then went to put his hands around her waist so he could lift her up.
‘Watch where you’re putting your hands, mate!’ she said, and he took a step backwards. ‘Like this.’ She made a stirrup with her fingers.
He flinched as she stepped into his interlaced fingers, and then almost slung her clean over the fence, she was so light, and he was so keen to be rid of her. He wiped his hands hard on the seat of his jeans.
‘You coming?’ she said from the other side.
Was he? Patrick stood for a moment, weighing up his options and objectives. He wanted information. The woman in the house wouldn’t speak to him, whereas the girl in the garden had. She was probably his best bet.
‘OK,’ he said.
He’d never escaped over a fence before and wasn’t quite sure of the procedure. He propped his bike against it, then stepped on the crossbar and lay precariously along the fence, with the planking digging a long line of discomfort from his shoulder to his balls, while he gripped with one hand and his feet. He teetered there, and stretched an arm back down to grip the crossbar. He should have put the bike over the fence first.
‘Come on!’
‘I’m getting my bike,’ he explained.
‘There’s no time!’
Two uniformed policemen walked briskly round the side of the house and Patrick realized too late that he’d chosen the wrong team. They saw him and started to jog across the lawn.
‘Oi!’ shouted one. ‘Stay right there!’
A rush of adrenaline took Patrick completely by surprise. It fired a stream of white-hot excitement through his body. No video game had ever made him feel this way, and he laughed at the policemen as they speeded up across the grass.
But the bike anchored him on the wrong side of the fence. He should really leave it.
He didn’t. He hauled it up, one-handed – his shoulder burning with effort and his chest and balls shrieking to be allowed off the narrow wooden ridge. He would have overbalanced back into the garden, except that the girl who wasn’t Mrs Galen grabbed two handfuls of him – his jeans and his hoodie – and provided a counterweight as he lifted his bike up to join him, until his weight shifted and they both rolled off the fence and dropped on to the ground, only missing the girl because she jumped out of the way with a shriek.
He lay in the alleyway, winded and staring at the same sky that had been there the day of the monkey bars and the swing.
The first of the policemen hit the other side of the wooden fence with a grunt. The girl yelled, ‘Run! Run!’ then took her own advice and disappeared from his field of vision.
Patrick was on his feet in an instant, running alongside his bike until he had the presence of mind to jump into the saddle, like a Dodge City bank robber on to a getaway pony.
He heard the police shouting something behind him, but never looked back, and very soon his pedalling took him to a calmer, quieter place – as it so often had.
He caught up with the girl in the park down at the bottom of the hill. She was walking now, not running, and staying close to the shadows of the rhododendrons.
He slowed his bike beside her and said, ‘Hi.’
She put a hand to her chest. ‘Shit! You nearly gave me a heart attack!’
But she started laughing then, and didn’t stop until she was crying.
‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘That bitch!’ She wiped her eyes, leaving dark streaks from her eyes to her temples. Patrick waited until she’d finished.
‘You want to get a drink?’ she said.
‘I don’t drink,’ Patrick told her.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.
They went into the Claude on Albany Road. ‘You got any money?’ she said, so Patrick bought her a rum and Coke, and himself a Coke without the rum.
‘You really don’t drink,’ said the girl. ‘Why?’
‘No reason,’ he said.
‘Liar.’
He wondered how she’d known, but said nothing else. They sat at a table near the door and she clinked his glass with hers. ‘Bottoms up,’ she said.
She drank half her rum and Coke in one go. ‘What was your name again?’
He was practised at the answer now and told her with barely a pause.
‘Thanks for the leg up over the fence.’
He nodded. ‘What’s yours?’
‘My what?’
‘Name.’
She said, ‘Lexi,’ and drained her glass. ‘Want another one?’
‘I haven’t finished this one.’
She hid a burp behind her fist, then reached over, took his Coke from his hand and swallowed it in three swift gulps.
‘Want another one now?’
He bought her another one, and a coffee for himself, because he thought it would be cheaper, but it wasn’t.
‘You’re not Samuel Galen’s wife?’ Patrick said as he sat down with the drinks.
She took a gulp and shook her head. ‘He was my dad.’
‘But she’s not his wife either?’
‘She’s just a fucking gold-digger,’ she said. ‘You got a fag?’
‘No.’
Lexi took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled her own.
‘Sitting there in a bloody mansion with bloody great Beemers out the front, while I’m kipping on a mate’s couch above a fucking pet shop. Got a light?’
‘No.’
Lexi went to the bar to ask for one and the barman told her there was no smoking in the pub.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she said, and yanked the roll-up from her lips and stormed back to her seat.
‘Bastard says there’s no smoking! In a fucking pub!’
‘It’s the law,’ Patrick pointed out.
‘I know it’s the law.’
‘Because of passive smoking.’
‘Thank you, Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
‘I’m not the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’
‘You don’t say.’
Patrick was confused because he plainly had said.
‘Stupid fucking rules,’ she said and poked the roll-up into her cleavage. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’
Patrick looked at his knuckles, which were red, with long yellow blisters already coming.
The shrubbery.
‘Conifers,’ he said. ‘I’m allergic.’
‘Allergies fucking blow,’ said Lexi enthusiastically. ‘I have a million of them. Fish, cats, eggs – you name it. Not trees though. Does it hurt?’
‘It itches.’
Patrick was finding it hard to keep up with Lexi’s flood of words and emotions and expletives. She seemed to say anything and everything that popped into her mind. All Patrick had to do was try to sift the gold from the grit. But he wasn’t sure which was which, and so let her stream of consciousness wash over him in the hope that he could sort it out later.
‘What was going on at the house?’
‘Oh, that,’ she said with a scowl. ‘All I did was ask for my own money, and she goes bonkers.’
‘What money?’
‘That my dad left me in his will. I need it now, not when I’m twenty fucking five.’
‘No need to swear,’ said Patrick.
‘Of co
urse there’s a need to swear!’ she said, slapping the table and making him flinch. ‘Swearing’s the only thing that keeps me going! What kind of world do you live in where there’s no need to fucking swear? A world where you don’t drink and don’t smoke and nothing ever pisses you off? I bet there’s no sex either. Fan-fucking-tastic.’
Patrick felt his face growing hot and he stared into his coffee cup. He had never thought much about sex, but all of a sudden not having had it seemed like a very stupid oversight for someone of his intellect.
There was a long gap in the conversation while the scratchy pub speakers played ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis. 1995, thought Patrick. Before everything went wrong.
He finished his coffee.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lexi said. ‘I’m such a fucking big mouth. I just get so grrrrr! You know? And then I say all kinds of stupid shit.’
‘OK,’ he nodded.
‘Seriously,’ said Lexi, ducking her head to try to meet his eyes. ‘I’m an idiot.’
She reached for his hand across the table. He saw it coming and fought his instincts. What had his mother said? I don’t expect anything back from you, Patrick, but I do expect manners. That meant she did expect something back. She’d given him a gift and Patrick was apparently supposed to say ‘Thank you.’ Gifts came with strings attached, even if they weren’t always obvious. Lexi’s father had allowed five strangers to cut him to pieces and put him into yellow bins and plastic bags. The string attached to that gift was right here, right now, coming at him across the scar-and-varnish pub table.
He couldn’t do it; he moved his hand and sat on it. ‘How did your father die?’
Lexi picked up her glass instead. She didn’t seem surprised by the question. ‘He was in an accident, and then a coma for a few months, and then he just died. They said he might. They said it happens all the time.’
‘Who said?’
‘I dunno. The doctors, I suppose.’
‘Were you there?’
She shook her head and knocked back what was left of her drink, even though it was mostly ice now. ‘I only went to see him once. It was shit. He was crying. I held his hand but he didn’t even know it was me.’
Patrick nodded. ‘Altered states,’ he said. ‘You know, there have been cases where people woke from comas with previously unknown skills. Thinking they’re Abraham Lincoln, or with an Italian accent. Things like that.’ He’d always found those accounts fascinating, but Lexi stared across the pub as if he hadn’t spoken.
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