Rubbernecker

by Bauer, Belinda

  ‘Look at it go, Daddy!’

  28

  4017.

  The ugly code had its uses.

  Patrick took a while to find the switches, then blinked as the lights shuddered awake to banish shadows from the dissecting room.

  The cadavers were just sickly-sweet leftovers now. Missing limbs, gaping chests, with their skin peeled off them in dirty brown folds, and their pale brains gleaming with wetting solution beside their empty skulls.

  Yet they seemed more alive to Patrick now than they had at the start. More real, now that he understood them better.

  As he passed them, his sense of excitement grew. He knew the cause of death. He was sure of it. The list was wrong; Mick was wrong; Spicer was wrong; his fellow students were wrong; and whatever doctor had signed the death certificate was wrong. None of them knew what he knew – that Lexi Galen had an allergy to peanuts. And Patrick would bet the bicycle he’d inherited from his father that she had inherited that allergy from hers.

  He couldn’t wait to tell them all that he’d solved the puzzle. Especially Scott.

  Patrick looked down at Number 19, whose one remaining eye stared through him dully. He looked away quickly, and hunched down beside the table. Underneath it were the scores of bags they’d slowly filled with the dead man’s lungs, his liver, his small intestines – all pressed against the clear plastic like the cheap mince his mother bought from the wagon at Brecon market. More of Number 19 was now under the table than on it.

  Patrick sorted through it all but couldn’t find the peanut.

  He frowned. That made no sense; he had bagged it and tagged it himself. He was too impatient; it was small; he must have missed it. He went through the process again in slow reverse, sitting on the cold floor, loading the shelf under the table more carefully this time.

  The peanut was not there.

  Patrick sat very still. One of the others had got there first. Scott? Dilip? But how? How had they known about the allergy when he’d only found out by accident? Had he missed something obvious? And if they didn’t know about the allergy, why would they take it?

  The lights went out and he was blind. He quickly squeezed his eyes tightly shut. It was a trick his father had taught him on night walks in the Beacons.

  Too late he registered that the main door of the Biosciences block had been open. He’d not noticed it because he’d never seen it closed, but in the middle of the night it would have been; should have been – unless someone was already inside.

  Idiot!

  He opened his better-adjusted eyes. A black figure was framed in the charcoal doorway.

  Patrick started to get up to leave but, before he could, the man entered the room.

  Strangeness rippled up the back of Patrick’s neck. Turning off the lights before entering a room made no sense. So, instead of standing up and asking why the lights were off, Patrick stayed put on one knee and one spread hand, his stomach knotting with a fear that was all the more fearful because he didn’t understand it.

  The man walked confidently between the bodies, as if he did so in the dark all the time. There was no fumbling, no banged shins or muttered expletives. Between the struts of the tables and the remains of the ruined bodies, the figure walked swiftly towards him, announced only by the small squeak of shoes on polished linoleum.

  He was coming straight for him.

  Without thinking, Patrick crawled silently on to the shelf below Table 19, along with the bags of meat and bone and offal.

  Lexi’s cold father gave a little under his body, and he almost cried out with the idea of the cold flesh cushioning him.

  Only the plastic between them stopped him screaming.

  He bit his own lip as the shadow stopped beside him. In a moment that rushed him back to the bookies and the Labrador, Patrick watched the knees and the thighs of the man’s black trousers turn slowly, as if scanning the room, looking for something.

  Patrick stopped breathing; if he could have stopped his heart pounding, he would have.

  The moment seemed endless. Then the legs walked away and back towards the door.

  For a second Patrick was relieved – then he realized that if the man left the block, the outer door would be locked, trapping him inside.

  He rolled off the bags of cold meat and one of his trainers squealed on the floor. He froze again, then quickly pulled the shoes off his feet and slid swiftly across the floor on his socks to Table 21, and from there to Table 13.

  The man was still ahead of him. He had to catch him up. Or slow him down.

  Patrick wasn’t a spy. He didn’t have a grappling hook or satellite communications, or even a black turtleneck sweater. He had his trainers – that was all – so he hurled one of them into a dim corner of the room, where it landed with a slap and a clatter.

  He almost laughed when the man stopped, turned, and then followed the noise to the back wall like a stupid dog, while Patrick skidded out of the door in his socks.

  He couldn’t ride properly with one trainer, so he walked. Ran. Half walked, half ran, pushing his bike, and with his socks wet and stretching and tripping him up until finally he peeled them off and dropped them in the gutter. His foot was shockingly white under the streetlights.

  A police car passed and Patrick pressed himself into a garden hedge, even though he’d done nothing wrong. Something told him that this was one of those occasions when people might not understand what he’d been doing. And he had no answers tonight – only questions that made his head ache to think of them.

  Before, Patrick had only thought about the peanut in relation to how Number 19 had died, not why. Why was a far tougher puzzle, and now that it was gone, the peanut seemed to be a critical piece of that jigsaw. How did Number 19 ingest a peanut that could kill him? And why would somebody steal it now?

  Cold rain trickled under his T-shirt and down his back, and still he stood there. For the first time that he could ever remember – and he could remember almost everything – Patrick knew he needed help.

  Patrick didn’t have his blue gloves with him, but he stopped at the payphone outside the bookies and dialled with a wet sleeve pulled over his shivering index finger.

  It took thirteen rings before the mechanical rhythm was halted by the sound of sleepy mouth-breathing and a croak that might have been hello.

  ‘If there was something that proved how someone had died,’ he said, ‘why would you want to hide that?’

  There was a long silence and then his mother said shakily, ‘Who is this?’

  Why is he asking? What’s happened?

  Sarah Fort’s head asked the questions her heart didn’t want answered. She had been expecting the worst for years – ever since Patrick was a small boy – and yet time hadn’t dulled the sharp panic she felt pricking her chest and starting to turn her stomach.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked him. Anyone but Patrick would have noticed her voice shaking.

  ‘Say someone dies,’ he said again. ‘And then, if someone else – not the dead person – someone else—’

  He was obviously getting muddled, but she didn’t help him out. She was in no hurry to hear what he wanted to say. She would wait all night – all her life – rather than help him to reach the point where everything she had done for both of them would fall apart.

  But he persisted. He was always so bloody persistent.

  ‘If that someone hides something that might show why the other person died.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said faintly.

  ‘Well, what does that mean?’

  Sarah paused. ‘I don’t understand the question.’

  She knew she was being obtuse. Things would be so much simpler if she’d just said, What are you trying to tell me, Patrick? She didn’t ask because he would tell her – and she didn’t want to deal with whatever might happen after that. She would rather play this precarious game of denial.

  ‘Why are you calling tonight? It’s not Thursday.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. �
��I need help.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ She was surprised to hear a sharp note of concern in her voice, despite everything.

  ‘I lost one of my trainers and I need help to understand the actions.’

  ‘What actions?’

  ‘Hiding the thing,’ he said in a tone that revealed his frustration, ‘that might show why something happened. What does that action mean?’

  She thought carefully of the best way to answer him, and then did.

  ‘People hide things because they don’t want anyone to know about them.’

  ‘Why?’

  You tell me, Patrick! Rotting animals under your pillow, and pictures of dead children and crazy lists of weird words! YOU tell ME!

  Instead she said, ‘I suppose … because they feel guilty.’

  ‘About what?’

  Sarah felt sick. ‘Doing something bad.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know, Patrick! Something bad! Something very, very bad!’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So what must I do about it?’

  What indeed? She felt emotion start to clog her throat.

  ‘Do whatever you think best,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘Best for who?’

  Sarah could barely whisper. ‘For you.’

  There was a long silence and then Patrick said an abrupt ‘OK’ in a tone she knew meant that, for him, the conversation was over.

  She didn’t press him, even though it was three in the morning and any other mother would have done. Should have done. Any mother of a different son.

  But she was only relieved that he’d stopped asking questions that made her fear him, even as she feared for him.

  ‘Good,’ she said, and then ‘Goodbye.’

  She sat in the kitchen with the phone in her lap long after Patrick had rung off. It was a harsh February and the kitchen fire had long since gone out, but she shivered for other reasons too. The cold from the stone floor seeped through her socks and crept achingly up her ankles and her shins, and still she sat there, thinking about her strange son calling her on a strange night to ask a strange question.

  The splinter of progress she thought she’d seen at Christmas – away from the obsessive past and into a more normal future – now seemed like a cruel deception. She wasn’t a religious woman, but she wanted a sign. A single, solid indicator that Matt’s life – and hers – had not been wasted.

  She couldn’t think of one.

  Not one.

  On another night – a warmer night; or if the fire had not gone out; or if the cat had been sitting on her lap – habit alone might have been enough to keep her going.

  But this night was cold and this night was dark, and the cat was outside killing small things.

  So there was nothing to stop her standing up and staring out of the kitchen window at the Fiesta outside the old wooden shed. Nothing to stop her pulling cold rubber boots on to her bare feet and crunching across the gravel under the slitted moon in her towelling robe; nothing to stop her driving six miles to the twenty-four-hour service station and buying two bottles of Vladivar.

  One for now and one for just in case.

  29

  WHEN PATRICK GOT home it was four a.m., so he was surprised to see the lights were on. The minute he opened the door and pushed his bike inside, Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs in fake silk pyjamas. Patrick knew they must be fake because silk was expensive, but Jackson’s TV was a piece of junk.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Jackson yelled at him.

  WHERE the fuck have you been?

  Where the FUCK have you been?

  Where the fuck have you BEEN?

  Patrick said nothing. He wiped his bike down with a towel he kept in the hall, then carried it upstairs and hung it on its hooks, while Jackson harangued him from the doorway.

  ‘I told you she had to go, didn’t I? She’s your fucking guest and you should have kicked her out. Then none of this would have happened!’

  ‘None of what?’

  ‘Oh Jackson, shut up!’ Kim shouted from her room, and Jackson stomped down the short corridor to her door, and they yelled at each other for a bit, using words like ‘whore’ and ‘slag’ and ‘control freak’ and ‘arsehole’.

  Patrick almost said something, but then reserved judgement on whether or not there was a need to swear. He used the time alone to strip off his sodden clothing, wring it out of the window and pile it on top of the hot-water tank. He stared at his single trainer and wished he’d had something else to throw. He only had one pair of shoes with him at college; now he only had half a pair.

  ‘Don’t pretend you give a shit!’ yelled Kim.

  ‘I won’t!’ Jackson shouted back. ‘I don’t!’

  Patrick pulled on dry shorts and a T-shirt, turned out his light and got into his sleeping bag, shivering with delayed cold, and feeling again the paintwork of the old door, pressed against his cheek as his parents fought behind it. Over him. This felt just like that.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ said a voice he recognized as Lexi’s. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep!’

  A dull thumping on the wall beside Patrick’s head told him that some of the people trying to sleep lived next door.

  Kim’s door slammed like a gun.

  ‘Fuck you, too!’ Jackson yelled, then came back to Patrick’s room and stood in the doorway.

  ‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘Fucking bitch.’ And then he walked in, sat heavily on Patrick’s legs and burst into tears.

  Patrick stared at the ceiling. He hoped that soon Jackson would tire of crying, get off his legs and go back to his own room. But when none of those things happened, he asked him what was wrong.

  Apparently what was wrong was that after Patrick had left, Lexi had crawled out of his bed and into Kim’s bed instead – where it turned out that Kim was a lesbian, after all.

  A loud one.

  ‘If you hadn’t brought her home, none of this would ever have happened,’ sobbed Jackson.

  That was self-evident, thought Patrick. But then, if he hadn’t brought Lexi home, he would also never have found out about the allergies. He would still have two trainers, he wouldn’t have called his mother without gloves and on the wrong night of the week, and he would not now understand that the missing peanut might mean that someone was hiding something bad.

  Cause and effect was a funny thing.

  For the first time since he had come to the city, Patrick felt his need to complete his quest vying for space in his head with this new mystery. He had spent more than half his young life seeking answers about what had happened to his father, but suddenly it was Lexi’s rich, mean, mummified parent that excited his mind.

  And the new mystery did not involve the intricacies of reaching out to a life beyond this one, only the simple question of who was guilty, and why.

  PART THREE

  30

  JEAN BOTTI HAD worked on the neurological ward for seven years, so she’d seen it all. Miracles and murders.

  Oh, they happened – both of them – although neither was ever acknowledged by the hospital.

  Since starting work on what was commonly known as the coma ward, she knew of three reliable miracles and two less reliable murders. The miracles were not of the walking-on-water, feeding-the-five-thousand variety. That would be silly, even to a staunch Catholic like Jean. But, in Jean’s eyes, they were events of such startling recovery that they would have challenged the story of Lazarus.

  There was sixteen-year-old Amy Russett, who spent a year frozen in a coma and then, one chilly March night, got up, walked down the corridor and took herself to the toilet – marking the start of a rapid and unexplained recovery.

  Then there was Gwilym Thomas, a sixty-six-year-old farmer, who had never been beyond the Welsh border but who, after being gored by his own prize bull, awoke speaking only French. Even more bizarrely, the only English he seemed to remember was the name of the bull. Jean could recall it even now: Bar
leyfield Ianto.

  Mrs Thomas had proved to be a stoic, and hadn’t taken it personally. After a brief flurry of confusion, she had armed herself with a Linguaphone course and started a new, more Gallic life.

  Jean’s personal favourite was Mark Strickland, who crashed his car as a drunken lout, and emerged from his coma six weeks later quoting a Bible he’d never read, and humbly asking the Lord for help as he sweated through the agony of physiotherapy.

  Miracles all, in Jean’s eyes.

  Then there were the murders.

  Jean couldn’t help thinking of them that way, even though she knew they were not malicious. She would have preferred to think of them as ‘mercy killings’, but in her heart she knew that God didn’t agree with her.

  Of course, just as the miracles were never official, neither were the murders.

  Just a few months after she’d first started work on the ward, a boy named Gavin Richards had come in after being mugged. He had been hit so hard in the head that the shape of the claw hammer was clearly outlined in his shaven skull.

  At first his family hoped for a miracle. They all did; it was only natural. But, as the days started to pass into weeks, and the weeks into months, it became apparent to everyone that seventeen-year-old Gavin was never going to make it. Everyone except his mother, that is. Gavin’s mother came in every day and spent hours holding his hand, clipping his nails, putting cream on his raw bottom, and singing childhood songs to him in a gentle, quavery voice barely above a whisper, while her other children – a boy of nine and a girl of fourteen – suffered the twin loss of a brother and a mother. Tragedy upon tragedy.

  Despite the best care, Gavin slid slowly downhill towards death. Soon the doctors would start to speak to his family about withdrawing life support and allowing him to slip away.

  But then, one terrible day, Gavin inexplicably opened his eyes and said, ‘Mummy.’

  Immediately he’d sunk back into the hinterland of unconsciousness, but the damage was done. His mother redoubled her efforts – and her neglect. She started to bring in a sleeping roll and spend nights under his bed. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she told Jean as she crawled out every shivery morning. ‘I just want to be here when he wakes up.’