Rubbernecker (23 page)

‘I’ll do it on one condition.’

‘OK,’ he said.

‘You have to go and read to Mrs Deal.’

‘Who’s Mrs Deal?’

‘She’s a woman in a coma. There’s nothing to it.’

‘What do I have to do?’ he said warily.

‘Only read to her.’

He frowned. ‘Out loud?’

She smiled. ‘If you want her to hear you, yes, you have to read out loud.’

‘Read what?’

‘A book.’

‘Does it have to be a
long
book?’

It flitted through Meg’s mind to say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ but then thought of poor Mrs Deal at the mercy of Patrick’s choice of reading matter.

‘It has to be over two hundred pages. It must be fiction and it must be popular. Off the bestseller lists or a classic. But it can’t be about war or some boy-rubbish like that. Or sci-fi.’

‘No war, no sci-fi.’ Patrick nodded sombrely, and Meg realized she could give him specific instructions and he would carry them out with the precision of a computer. For a cruel second she almost demanded
Pride and Prejudice
from him, but pushed it aside with an inner giggle.

‘If I do that, you’ll take the photographs?’

‘I will take the photographs.’

‘OK then,’ he said reluctantly.

‘Do your best,’ said Meg.

‘I always do my best,’ he said seriously.

She laughed and stuck her tongue out at him and he blinked.

38

‘I’M PREGNANT,’ SAID
Tracy, and Mr Deal finished chewing a mouthful of steak, leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Tracy felt her smile falter and worked at it harder, despite the shaking inside her.

Mr Deal –
Raymond
– was a meticulous man, who felt no need to gush or to pander. She found him hard to read, but she also knew that if she pushed, he would take even longer to give. It was annoying, but strangely exciting, too.

He cleared his throat and sipped his red wine. ‘How far along are you?’

‘Far enough.’

‘Are you going to keep it?’

Of course I’m going to keep it! This is the plan!

‘If that’s OK with you?’ she said carefully.

He cut another piece of steak. He ate his meat blackened and bloodless. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

Why are you checking?
she asked herself.
Why are you giving him another chance to say no?

Mr Deal finished that mouthful, then dabbed his mouth with his napkin and leaned across the table to kiss her cheek. ‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘It’ll give us something to put on the kiddy toilet.’

Tracy felt a giddy rush. Suddenly she couldn’t have stopped smiling if she’d tried.

They went to his bed after
Newsnight
and she did things to him she’d never done before. Not only because she thought she should, but because she
wanted
to.

Later – back at the house she still shared with less fortunate girls, she lay awake half the night with excitement. And when she went to work the next day, she was astonished to find that it did not seem quite so repulsive to wipe old Mr Cutler’s pooey bottom, or so arduous to tip cold soup between Mrs Aldridge’s drawstring lips.

Of course, she couldn’t wait to give it all up and never work another day in her life, but in the meantime, it felt almost
rewarding
.

When a buzzer sounded just as a few of them had sat down with a cup of tea, Tracy surprised herself by bouncing up and saying, ‘I’ll get it.’

Sally, who was the voice of the ward, said, ‘What’s with
you
today? You in love or something?’

Yes
, thought Tracy with a thrill at the realization. Somehow, somewhere, she had fallen in love with Mr Deal, and in the blink of an eye, everything had changed.

She
had changed – and it felt wonderful.

39

IT HAD TAKEN
Sarah an hour to find the matches. She didn’t smoke and she didn’t have a gas cooker and she didn’t even know why she
had
matches, but she knew they were here
somewhere
, and got through most of the second bottle of Vladivar looking for them.

Now here she was, under the gibbous moon as frost formed on the roof of the Fiesta, trying to burn down the shed.

It was a lot harder than she’d expected it to be.

When she’d stumbled out into the frigid night air, she’d thought that a single match held close to the rotting timber would be enough to see the whole thing burst into flames.

Not so.

She’d gone through half the box, squatting beside the corner of the shed in her nightdress and wellingtons, turning slivers of pale wood into scorched twiglets. Once she’d dozed off, mid-arson, and burned her fingers.

She wove back to the house and got the letter, then came out and tried again, but striking the matches
and
holding the letter was close to impossible. Three things and only two hands. She swayed and cursed softly and dropped the box, then the letter, then the box again – before finally finding herself with the letter in one hand and a lighted match in the other, and bringing the two together.

The corner of the paper caught and for a moment Sarah could re-read it by an orange glow.

Dear Mrs Fort, I very much regret to inform you that I have had to ask Patrick to leave the School of Biosciences …

She squatted again and fed the paper under a splintered edge. The flame curled languidly around the wood, warming it slowly, as Professor Madoc’s words turned into black flakes that floated upwards as if by magic.

‘Come on. Come
on
,’ she muttered and rested the side of her face against the rough planking. ‘Come on, shed, you can do it.’ She giggled and opened her eyes. ‘
Yes!
’

The orange tendrils were feeling their tentative way up first one panel, then the next.

She stood up and backed away. She shivered. She wasn’t even wearing a coat. Or socks. Inside the rubber boots, her feet were numb.

The fire had a grip now. It found the vulnerable corner and clawed its way upwards.

Sarah released a long, emptying sigh. Why hadn’t she done this years ago? All she’d needed was Dutch courage and half a box of matches.

The corner of the shed was properly alight. Crackling. It would not go out now. It started to throw out heat, and she enjoyed that until sparks spat at her and she took a wavering step backwards.

I very much regret …

Patrick would be coming home soon and they would have to start again. Almost from the beginning. All the progress halted. Maybe reversed. She was exhausted by it. Exhausted by
him
. She didn’t want it. She wasn’t sure what she
did
want, but she knew that forwards was better than backwards, even if the destination was unknown.

‘Out of the way!’

Something pushed her aside and she stumbled to one knee, her palms in the gravel; the gravel in her palms.

An animal hiss made her look up to see that the dancing flames
had
been transformed into ugly grey smoke and cinders, which billowed across the gravel and made her cough.

Weird Nick turned towards her, water still spurting from the garden hose in his hand. ‘I got here just in time,’ he said, and stood, flushed and panting, waiting for his plaudits.

‘Yes,’ she said dully, and wobbled to her feet.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh,’ he said.

He was Patrick’s age but looked older, slightly chubby, and wearing the kind of tinted spectacles she always imagined perverts did.

Sarah brushed the grit from her hands and was suddenly very cold. She noticed his gaze drop briefly to her breasts and folded her arms across them.

‘Well then,’ said Weird Nick, gesturing with the hose so that it made an arc of broken silver droplets in the air. ‘I’d better go and turn this off. We’re on a meter.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Any time.’

Any time my shed burns down
. She only had two neighbours – Weird Nick and his mother; why did both of them have to be so bloody helpful?

‘Night, Mrs Fort.’

She waved a vague hand and watched him follow the hose back towards his mother’s house like a slim green umbilical cord.

She thought she might be sick. The smoke and the vodka and the disappointment.

Ollie was on the back step, barring her way so she couldn’t fail to pet him. She stepped over him into the kitchen, and retched over the sink. Nothing came up. She laid her forehead on the cold steel of the draining board and cried a little, then went to bed.

When she got up the next morning, she left behind a ghost of grey ashes on the sheets.

40

FROM THE CORNER
of her eye, Meg watched Mrs Deal’s finger drub mechanically on the bedspread.

‘Can you
stop
that!’ Meg said sharply, then added, ‘
Please
. It’s driving me mad.’

Immediately she felt a rush of guilt. Mrs Deal’s lashes did not flicker over her white crescent eyes. There was no forgiveness and no reproach. The finger paused – and then started again. Tap and stop, tap and stop.

Shit
.

Meg closed the book.

‘We’ll go on next time, Mrs Deal. We’re almost at the end. After that my friend Patrick’s going to come and read a new book to you. I bet it will be nice for you to hear another voice. I don’t know what he’ll be reading, but I’ve told him no war and no sci-fi.’

She stood up and wound her scarf around her neck.

‘Anyway, I’ll bring him in and introduce you. And check on the book he’s chosen in case it’s crap. You know what men are like.’

She put the book back on the table and looked down at the thing that used to be Mrs Deal. She was only marginally better than dead. It was easy to imagine her as a cadaver in the dissection room. She would be more swollen, more orange, but essentially the same.

Apart from that finger.

Angie came in and smiled at Meg, then checked the drip on the
young
man in the next bed. His name was Robert and he was only twenty-five, but his hands were becoming claws, the wrists turning at weird angles and his short brown fingers pulling inwards, despite the efforts of the physiotherapist Meg had seen working on him. She never saw anyone else at his bedside, although there was a huge dusty leopard lying under it, so someone must have cared once.

‘You’re doing a great job,’ said Angie, and came over.

‘Am I?’ said Meg. ‘Sometimes it feels pointless.’

‘Never,’ said Angie firmly. ‘It’s never pointless. And Mrs Deal deserves it; she’s such a good patient.’ She leaned down and stroked the woman’s brow.

‘I imagine they all are,’ said Meg, looking around.

‘Oh, you’d be surprised!’ said Angie, with a quick roll of her eyes. ‘Some of them emerge stark staring crazy.’ She held out her left hand to show a crooked finger. ‘One of them broke that. It’s still swollen.’

‘Really?’ said Meg in surprise, and looked around. ‘Which one?’

‘He died,’ said Angie. Then she lowered her voice. ‘I wasn’t sorry.’

Meg said nothing. It seemed like a terrible thing for a nurse to say.

Angie read her face. ‘I know it sounds awful, but Mr Attridge was in a shocking state. Really distressed. And he wasn’t going to get much better. Sometimes dying is the easiest thing.’

Meg nodded slowly. ‘I’d never thought of it like that.’

‘Not Mrs Deal though,’ said Angie brightly – and for her patient’s ears. ‘We love Mrs Deal and hope for the best, don’t we, Mrs Deal?’

Mrs Deal’s finger tapped mechanically.

Angie touched Meg’s shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming.’

When she’d gone, Meg sat down again, all bundled up. She took Mrs Deal’s hand and stroked it. It was cold and so she sandwiched it between her own to warm it up a little.

‘I’m so sorry I snapped at you,’ she said. She sighed and then went on, almost to herself, ‘I’m a bit stressed out at the moment. It’s all Patrick’s fault. He wants me to take pictures of something important. But I only got my camera for Christmas and I’m totally
shit
at photos.’

It was true. For every in-focus, in-frame photograph she’d lucked into over Christmas, there were two dozen that required immediate deletion. Two dozen shots of huge white faces, giant thumbs, the backs of heads and her own feet. How she was supposed to take clinically reliable close-ups of mucous membranes, precise enough to indicate whether the wounds might have been made post- or ante-mortem, she had no idea.

‘And I have to take them in secret too,’ she sighed. ‘In a place where cameras aren’t allowed. If I get caught, I could be expelled and my dad would go effing
bonkers
. So I’m sorry I was rude.’

Mrs Deal just lay there, and Meg blushed at the thought of telling the woman her puny problems, before leaving her here in her bed and rushing off to live her life.

She placed the hand gently back on the cover. Immediately the finger started twitching.

‘I’ll see you next week,’ Meg said, and hurried away.

41

PATRICK WASN’T SURE
what to do with his time now that he had been expelled, so spent much of the following week pedalling slowly around the city. The glasshouse at Roath Park was a warm haven – dripping with tropical fronds – while outside the sunshine tried to break through the cloud cover of a Welsh spring. At the lake, he loaded his bike into a rowing boat and drifted slowly around the islands that were home to swans and ducks and old crisp packets. There were even hardy little red-eared terrapins that had survived being dumped after the Mutant Ninja craze, and which now basked on logs, surprising natives.

When it rained, Patrick went to the bookies. The third time he went, two horses died, but it happened away from the cameras. Patrick wrote them in his book anyway – Starbright and Mighty Acorn – and made the little marks next to their names which denoted that they had not helped his cause. Afterwards he went to the museum and bought a Coke for supper.