Rubbernecker (12 page)

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.