Rubbernecker (16 page)

‘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 the 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.