Rubbernecker

by Bauer, Belinda

  ‘I don’t care,’ she declared. ‘He was an arse anyway. Arse isn’t swearing, is it? I mean, it’s what he was.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, then remembered about working backwards and added, ‘Why? Was he an … arse?’

  Lexi gave an exaggerated shrug and toyed with her glass.

  Patrick noticed that the dorsal metacarpal arteries showed sky blue up the backs of her pale hands. He wondered whether she and her father would be identifiable as relatives if they were laid out side by side and peeled of skin. He knew that he himself had a strange twist to his thumbs that his mother had given him, and that when he shaved he could see his father’s mouth and eyes in the bathroom mirror like a ghost in the glass. How deep did such bonds go? Was it all about eyebrows and lips? Or were there veins and kidneys that had similar familial quirks?

  ‘He didn’t give a shit about me,’ said Lexi. ‘I fucking hated him.’

  Then – before Patrick could ask her why – she put her glass down firmly and said, ‘You got a couch?’

  Once she was on the couch, Lexi was impossible to dislodge. She watched Hollyoaks and EastEnders with Kim and Jackson, while Patrick went upstairs and cleaned another three squares of carpet.

  When he came down at ten o’clock she was still there, watching something full of guns and noise, with the remote control in her hand.

  Jackson and Kim cornered him in the kitchen.

  ‘She has to go!’ hissed Kim.

  ‘Kim’s right,’ hissed Jackson. ‘She has to go.’

  ‘OK,’ said Patrick, and started to make a peanut-butter sandwich while they both watched him.

  Kim said, ‘You brought her here. You have to tell her!’

  ‘OK,’ he said, and cleaned up after himself. Then he put the sandwich on a plate that had a cartoon zebra in the middle and the alphabet around the outside. It was a child’s plate but the alphabet had always calmed him so he’d brought it with him from home and Kim had dubbed it ‘retro-hip’. He took it through to the living room, where Lexi had now spread herself down the length of the sofa.

  ‘You have to go,’ he informed her.

  ‘What are you eating?’ she said. ‘I’m quite hungry.’

  ‘Peanut-butter sandwich.’

  She made a face. ‘Have you got some cheese?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Kim and Jackson say you have to go.’

  ‘Can I have a cheese sandwich?’

  He stood for a moment, uncertain of what to do next. He had told her she had to go and she’d ignored that and asked for a cheese sandwich. He didn’t understand how the two were connected. But he didn’t mind giving her a cheese sandwich; maybe she’d go after that. Things wouldn’t happen in the expected order, but they’d happen.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Has she gone?’ said Jackson.

  ‘No. She wants a cheese sandwich.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Kim. ‘Jackson, tell her she has to go!’

  Jackson looked unsure, but left the kitchen. Patrick was considering whether to cut the sandwich square or on the diagonal when he came back.

  ‘Has she gone?’ demanded Kim.

  ‘She wants a blanket.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Jackson!’ Kim stormed out and Patrick went for square because he always had his sandwiches cut square, so if Kim made Lexi leave now, he could take this one with him for lunch tomorrow.

  ‘She just ignored me,’ said Jackson, biting his nails.

  ‘Me too,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Now Kim thinks I’m a wuss.’

  Patrick nodded his agreement.

  ‘Shit,’ said Jackson softly.

  They listened to the low voices from the front room, and then heard footsteps ascending the stairs and coming down again. Then more low voices.

  Then Kim came back into the kitchen and didn’t look at them. She opened the fridge and pushed things around her shelf for a long time.

  ‘Has she gone?’ said Jackson.

  ‘Did someone eat my yoghurt?’ said Kim.

  ‘No,’ said Jackson and Patrick together.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kim and shut the fridge door and went upstairs. Jackson followed her.

  When Patrick took the sandwich through to the front room, Lexi was wrapped in a red blanket on the couch.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said as she took a bite. ‘Have you got anything to drink?’

  He brought her a glass of water and she said, ‘Have you got anything else?’

  He knew what she meant. He also knew there was a half-bottle of white wine on Kim’s shelf in the fridge.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Not very good students, are you?’

  ‘I’m the best in dissection. Jackson says Kim’s good, but I don’t know about art. It just looks lumpy to me.’

  She fidgeted and ate half her sandwich while he watched, then asked where the toilet was.

  She was gone for ten minutes and came back with the wine.

  ‘I found this in the fridge. I’ll replace it tomorrow.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘You want some?’

  He shook his head. Lexi poured her water into the puny rubber plant, and filled the tumbler with wine instead. She drank it the way she had the rum and Coke, in rapid, repeated draughts – as if she was impatient to see the bottom of the glass – then she refilled it.

  ‘You drink too much,’ said Patrick.

  ‘You talk too much,’ she snapped back.

  They watched something about driving trucks on icy roads. Every time a truck skidded off, Lexi giggled and glanced at him.

  She checked the empty bottle twice. Patrick knew it wouldn’t be the last time and couldn’t bear to watch.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, Patrick,’ she said. ‘I know when I’ve had too much. I’ve been drinking since I was, like, fourteen or something. So I think I know what I’m doing by now.’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘Everybody’s so judgemental. Gets on my fucking tits.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Oh I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to swear. Sorry.’

  Sorry. The word meant nothing to him. It was like static, and he’d learned to ignore it.

  ‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ she said. ‘See you in the morning.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, and went upstairs.

  Around one a.m., he woke to find Lexi worming her way on to his narrow bed alongside him.

  ‘That couch is made for midgets,’ she said, all elbows and bottom. She was still wrapped in the blanket and he was in his sleeping bag, but the thought of her body pressed along the entire length of his galvanized him. He stood up and stepped over her as if crossing an electric fence, and picked up his sleeping bag.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she said.

  ‘Downstairs. Don’t bang your head on the bicycle.’

  ‘What?’ she said, but he didn’t answer her.

  The couch was made for midgets, so he settled down on the carpet, on his side, and with his knees tucked up just enough to avoid touching the water tank that wasn’t there, and thought about Lexi.

  There was so much to think about. She was like a tornado that had picked him up, whirled him high and dumped him, dazed, in a foreign field. It was scary, but it was also exciting.

  It was hard to separate her from the information she’d given him. The gold-digger in the big house, the half-brick through the window, the frozen inheritance, the rum and Coke. Those things told him lots about Lexi, but all they told him about Samuel Galen was that he was rich, mean and dead.

  Patrick frowned into the darkness and felt the familiar itch of an unsolved puzzle. Maybe he should have stuck with the gold-digger; maybe she’d have been more … coherent. Almost certainly she wouldn’t have followed him home and demanded a couch, a blanket and a cheese sandwich; almost certainly he’d be asleep in his own bed now.

  Patrick sighed and blinked against the crook of his elbow pillow. His eyes grew used to th
e night until he was able to see a pale curve under the couch. He tried to work out what it was but finally had to touch it to discover the plate on which he’d brought Lexi the sandwich. She had left her crusts, even though he’d put the cheese right up to the edges. Patrick made a good sandwich; he liked them because their structure meant he could put almost anything in them that didn’t start with A. Bread was always on the outside, then Butter. Then, as long as the fillings continued from the outside to the inside in strict alphabetical order, the world was his oyster. Peanut butter was his favourite filling, but he had a soft spot for cheese and chutney – as much for their economy of alphabetical progression as for the taste. He wondered floatily whether Lexi would have eaten her crusts if he’d put chutney on her sandwich. But she hadn’t asked for chutney, and had made a face at peanut butter, and he had been too flustered to offer her Marmite or—

  Patrick rolled on to his back, his breath suddenly shallow and his stomach fluttering with tension. He held his twisted thumbs up to the dark ceiling and thought again of the delicate blue veins in the backs of Lexi’s hands. Her skin was so fine and pale – nothing like Number 19’s tough orange dermis. Making an H-incision in her throat would be completely different. There would be no scrape of old stubble against his knuckles, no Adam’s apple to teeter up and down again, no smell of lilies and shit. Only the pliable tracheal rings, dipping gently into the jugular notch at the base of her smooth neck. Nothing about it would be the same as the cadaver’s, even if her veins and kidneys did give away the family connection.

  But what if …

  What if family was about more than a visual match? What if it was also about the speed at which her neurons fired, or the rate at which her glands excreted, or the way her blood responded to chemical changes?

  Patrick stood up and kicked himself free of his bag, his own blood squirting powerfully through his heart, and a light sheen of sweat making his skin prickle in the cold room.

  He went upstairs and turned on his bedroom light with a bright click. Lexi was asleep on her back, with her hands clenched loosely on the pillow beside her head, the way a baby sleeps. She stirred at the light but didn’t open her eyes.

  Patrick put out a tentative hand, then withdrew it.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he said clearly.

  Her forehead creased. ‘What?’

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must be or you couldn’t say “No.”’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Are you allergic to nuts?’

  She squinted one eye open, then shielded it from the light. ‘What?’

  ‘Are you allergic to peanuts?’

  ‘Yes. If I have one I could die.’

  ‘Was your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK,’ said Patrick. He opened his wardrobe and put on his T-shirt and hoodie.

  Lexi sat up, hair awry, and hugged her knees through the red blanket. ‘Why? What’s going on?’

  He didn’t tell her because he didn’t hear her. He was overwhelmed by a looped image of his own blue finger dipping into Samuel Galen’s puckered flesh, like Doubting Thomas peering into the side of Christ, while a question buzzed through his being.

  If Number 19 was being fed through a tube, what was he doing with a peanut – that might kill him – in his throat?

  Lexi watched him pull on his jeans, then flinched as he reached over her head and took his bike from the hooks on the wall.

  ‘You’re nuts,’ she said.

  He hoisted the bike on to his shoulder and hurried down the stairs; she scrambled off the bed and hung over the banisters to call after him, ‘And your room stinks of bleach!’

  27

  I WAKE WITH a start in the dark, and the shadow beside my bed flinches too. I gave us both a fright, and if I could laugh, I would.

  It’s the doctor who gave me a perfect ten, come to tap my chest. He does that with warm fingers, then breathes on the stethoscope. It’s the little things that show they care. You’d never know, otherwise.

  He listens to my lungs, staring past me at my pillow to avoid embarrassingly close eye-contact.

  I wonder drowsily what he hears in there; whether my lungs have passed their orange-juice crisis. My breathing still hurts, but nothing like it did a week ago. I’m on the mend.

  He stares intently at the linen beside my ear. Then he straightens up and looks in the direction of the nurses’ station. I turn my head with a little surge of athletic achievement and follow his gaze.

  There is nobody there.

  It was going to happen.

  Tracy Evans could feel it in the air. She was on three nights in a row. She’d got a spray tan, her eyebrows threaded, her legs waxed, and her pubic hair ripped agonizingly into a dark little heart. It didn’t match her blonde hair, but nobody had ever complained. She was wearing underwear that matched and wasn’t grey, and she’d bought that perfume by Britney – not fat, bald Britney, but slutty Britney in school tie and knee socks. Now she wore her ugly blue tunic with new sensuality – her smooth new wonders sliding beneath its utilitarian starch.

  On the first night, Mr Deal had sniffed the air around her, but hadn’t gone for it immediately, which was slightly annoying. But at least it had given the pimples on her pubis time to calm down.

  This was the second night. Angie had swapped shifts with Monica, who was new and easily bossed about, and even more easily deceived. Tracy had already been through the Quality Street and eaten all the big purple ones while Monica was helping someone with a bedpan.

  She heard the lift doors open and felt a delicious twitch as Mr Deal came round the corner, silhouetted against the harsh fluorescents.

  Tracy hid Rose Budding, which she was re-reading, then picked up a sheaf of random paperwork, pushed out her chest, sucked in her tummy, and composed her form and her features into their most flattering aspect.

  ‘Hello, Tracy,’ he said quietly, and she turned as if surprised and gave him the demure but promising smile she’d practised so long in the mirror. Slutty Nun, she called it. She was rewarded by seeing his brooding face soften into a look of being pleased to see her.

  Men were so easy!

  But he’d better make his move before she had to go through the hell of waxing again, or she’d make him suffer.

  For an hour Mr Deal stood with his back to his wife with a cup of machine coffee. At nine p.m. he had another. Tracy knew that nobody chose to have two cups, so he was obviously killing time. She went into the ladies’ bathroom and threw away the cardboard bedpans that she routinely left stinking on the windowsill. Made the place a bit nice.

  At ten thirty p.m. Mr Deal put another pound into the coffee machine and Tracy Evans’s nipples responded.

  Just after eleven, she told Monica to go out for a cigarette. As they were on the fourth floor, Tracy knew that that entailed a fifteen-minute round-trip for a two-minute smoke, and so Monica usually had a couple while she was outside the ambulance-bay doors. Which took it up to twenty minutes.

  Plenty of time, in her experience.

  ‘You sure?’ said Monica.

  ‘Course,’ said Tracy. ‘You go. I’ll be fine.’

  The lift doors closed and Tracy got up and hitched up her bra straps.

  The dance had been slow and frustrating but she knew that the end of it would be as familiar to her as her own reflection.

  The doctor looks back down at me and clears his throat.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Galen,’ he says softly.

  My mind turns slowly around the pivot of his words. He does sound very sorry. What for? I start to worry. Maybe he heard something in my lungs. Maybe I’m not as on the mend as I thought I was. Maybe—

  Then he leans over me again and I see that in his right hand he holds a pair of tweezers.

  And that between their glittering points is a peanut.

  My heart spasms with electric terror and in an instant I understand everything.

  He’s t
he one! He’s the killer!

  And he knows how incredibly vulnerable I am …

  My panicked hand flaps like a fish on a bedspread beach as my memory detonates: I’m four years old and my throat tightens and my eyes swell shut, even while the traitorous treat still seasons the inside of my mouth. My mother screams somewhere, and my head bounces on my father’s arm as he runs from the stalled car into the hospital, shouting, ‘He can’t breathe! He can’t breathe!’ I’m jostled and tossed and snatched from my father’s arms by other arms in white sleeves, and the lights jiggle overhead as the doctor runs down the corridor to save my life with a scalpel and a tube in my throat, so that I can grow up to bring the stubby hands to the marital table. The stubby hands and the allergies listed on my medical notes for everyone to see …

  The doctor lowers the peanut towards my lips.

  ‘Guh!’ I cry. ‘Guh!’

  I’m more scared now than when I was a child. No one is going to help me this time.

  I feel a knuckle against my chin, the nut nudging my lip – and I jab out my well-trained tongue, my only defence. It knocks the peanut from the grip of the tweezers and for a split second I’m triumphant.

  And then I feel it drop instead into the back of my throat …

  Dying is far easier than it looks in the movies.

  There are no flashy cuts, no explosions, no speeches – just a clumsy doctor, swearing and fumbling between my teeth, digging the sharp tweezers into my palate and tongue, even as my throat swells jealously around the evidence he wants back.

  The terror. The panic.

  The sorrow for all I’m leaving behind.

  I can’t die! I have people to hold, to love; to make it up to—

  Too late. Too late. Pain cleaves me. My jaw clamps in agony and I slither back down the well. There’s no tunnel, no light, no return.

  Darkness snaps shut and truth spills from my dead heart – I love you I love you I love you—

  A small hand takes mine.