Rubbernecker (33 page)

Then she’d realized it was a joke, and laughed.

Still, he didn’t want it or like it.

‘Will you call me?’ she said, as the train squealed in.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered.

‘OK,’ she said, with a strange look on her face.

Now Patrick read the manual, just for something to do.

Outside, the glittering Taff wound under the tracks, and the city dissolved quickly to green. Castell Coch came and went in the morning sunlight, and then the Valleys started for real – the rows of grey and brown stone cottages, set into the sides of the mountains that were sometimes rock and sometimes coal and all coated in careful grass and dotted with sheep.

‘Is it a BlackBerry?’ said one of the two twelve-year-olds who’d got on at Taffs Well.

‘No, it’s a phone,’ said Patrick and the boys grinned at each other.

One twisted his head sideways and peered at the picture on the front of the manual. ‘It’s not even a smartphone,’ he said.

‘It’s fucking shit,’ said the other.

Patrick put down the manual and said, ‘Three weeks ago, I sawed off a man’s head.’

The boys said nothing else, and got off at the next stop.

Patrick was at Quakers Yard before the stupidly complex manual told him how to make a call, and close to Troedyrhiw before he found out how to use the loudspeaker facility so that the phone didn’t fry his brain.

He dialled Meg’s beautiful number.

‘I’m calling you,’ he shouted from a safe distance.

‘I can hear that,’ she laughed. ‘Thank you.’

‘OK!’ he yelled. ‘Goodbye!’

His mother was not at the station to meet him, so he waited on the wooden bench outside for an hour.

Still she didn’t come, so he used his new phone to call the house, but there was still no answer, and this time it didn’t even switch to the machine, so he couldn’t leave another message.

He waited for another hour and went across the road to buy himself a burger, then ate it and waited some more. Not having a bicycle was like not having legs.

Around three p.m. he got a bus to Brecon and then a taxi home.

Not quite home. The meter clocked up the exact amount Patrick had left in his jeans when they were three-quarters of a mile from the house, so he asked the driver to drop him off, then walked the rest of the way. His suitcase was no fuller than when he’d left home, but that was full enough to be awkward, so he left it inside a field gate, up against the hedge, and walked on without it.

The Fiesta was not in the driveway and the back door was locked.

Patrick walked around the house, peering into the windows, and
then
fetched the spare key from the hook on the apple tree and let himself in.

It was April, but the old stone house still felt cold.

The cat ran into the kitchen to greet him, then stopped when it saw who it was, and sat down to lick its own arse instead.

Patrick noticed that the cat’s bowl was full to the brim with food, as was the one next to it – and the one next to
that
, and the water bowl was also full to overflowing.

He went upstairs to check her bedroom. There was no sign of her. No indication of where she was.

Back in the hallway he noticed the answerphone was unplugged from the wall. He plugged it back in. There were no new messages, even though he had left one just this morning. That meant his mother had listened to his message after he’d called from the station. She’d known he’d be arriving at midday. Had he missed her at the station somehow? He didn’t see how that could have happened.

He made a fire in the kitchen, and then a sandwich. The bread was stale, so he took the sandwich apart and toasted it instead. That meant he had to eat the cheese and chutney by itself and search through the cupboard for something that started with a late ‘T’ instead of anything after ‘B’. There was a can of tuna, and he forked that between the two slices.

Then he made a cup of tea. When he picked up the kettle to fill it, he realized it was still lukewarm.

It was only when he sat down at the table to eat that Patrick noticed the letter propped between the salt and pepper.

It had his name on the envelope, so he opened it and read it.

Patrick
,

Welcome home. I am sorry I am not there but things have been very difficult for me and I cannot go on like this
.

My will is at the offices of JMP Legal in Church Street. The
house
is not paid off but the mortgage is not big because of your father’s life insurance, and if you get a job you should be able to stay there if you want
.

I hope you can forgive me, as I have forgiven you, but I cannot face the future if it is to be the same as the past
.

Whatever you do, please take care of the cat
.

Love

Mum
.

Patrick sat and thought about the letter while he chewed slowly on his sandwich. He didn’t like it. Something bad came off it in waves, like a smell. There was definitely a message in it. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded as if she wasn’t coming back. And all that stuff about the will made it seem like she was dead, but that couldn’t be true because nobody knew when they were going to die.

It irked him that he couldn’t quite work it out, but at the same time he felt a strange urgency. So he left the second half of his sandwich, and took the letter round to Weird Nick.

Weird Nick shook his head and said, ‘Shit, Patrick! This is a
suicide
note!’

‘Is it?’ said Patrick doubtfully.

‘Yes it
is
,’ said Weird Nick. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, mate, but your mother’s been behaving like a total
nutter
. A few weeks back she tried to burn down the shed! I had to put the fire out with the garden hose, and we’re on a meter.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Who knows?’ said Weird Nick, shaking the note like a farewell handkerchief. ‘But
this
is
serious
, Patrick. She’s going to
kill
herself.’

‘She told me she tried to do that once before.’

‘When?’

‘The day my dad died.’

‘Yeah? Well, that proves it. How did she try then?’

‘She said she was going to jump off Penyfan,’ said Patrick. ‘And the Fiesta is gone.’

‘We need to get to Penyfan
right now
!’ said Weird Nick decisively. Then he said, ‘Shit! I’m not allowed to drive my mum’s car.’

‘I don’t understand
why
she wants to kill herself,’ said Patrick.

‘It doesn’t matter
why
, does it?’

Patrick looked Weird Nick in the eye for the first time in his life. ‘Why is
all
that matters,’ he said.

Patrick’s mind started to bubble – battling once more with the implications of everything he knew. How the puzzle pieces fitted together. He turned suddenly and walked briskly back towards his own garden.

‘Hold on!’ said Weird Nick. ‘Patrick! Where are you going? I’ve only got slippers on.’

Patrick didn’t wait for him.

He only knew three things for sure that had changed since he was last home. His mother had written a suicide note. He had told her he was coming home. She had tried to burn down the shed. He could see no correlation between the three things, but he felt that somehow they must be connected.

He could see the scorched wood at the corner of the shed as he crossed the gravel – a dark scar that must tell a story, just as surely as a blocked artery, swollen meninges, a bitten finger.

He touched the burnt wood, feeling how it crumbled and flaked under his fingers, leaving them black as coal.

Behind him he heard someone coming across the gravel and assumed it was Weird Nick.

The fire had taken a good bite out of the bottom of the shed before being extinguished with Weird Nick’s mother’s very expensive water. Patrick knelt in the weed-cushioned gravel and looked through the hole it had made. In the warm spring afternoon, his eyes took a while to adjust to the dark cavern that was the inside of the shed.

There wasn’t much to see. The weeds continued from the outside to the inside, across the cracked concrete floor of the shed, as if there had never been a barrier there. Against the far wall he could see cobwebs draped like curtains.

He lay down to get a better view. Between the burnt wood and the cobwebs, Patrick could just make out a wheel of a car.

He stood up. ‘There’s a car in there.’

‘Fuck,’ said Weird Nick softly. ‘Is it her?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Patrick. His voice sounded the same, but the urgency inside him was growing with every breath he took.

He jogged to the ruined greenhouse. Among the debris were things he remembered from his childhood; things that had
always
been there, between the glass and the grass and the cement gone hard in its bags.

One of them was an old, rusted hatchet.

He grabbed it and ran back across the gravel, and didn’t even slow down before driving the hatchet into the wooden door.

‘Shit, Patrick!’ said Weird Nick, shielding his head from the splinters, but Patrick ignored him, using the hatchet like a hammer, and when he’d made a hole that was big enough, tearing at the planks with his bare hands. The wood was old and rotten and soon he tore off the latch itself, and one door creaked crookedly open just a few inches on a rusted hinge.

‘Patrick,
wait
!’

Patrick did, panting and suddenly frightened, while Weird Nick stepped gingerly forward and opened the door.

‘It’s OK, Patrick,’ he said. ‘It’s not her.’

‘What
is
it then?’ Patrick stepped forward to look into the shed – and stared in disbelief. ‘It’s our old car.’

It was.

Under a thick layer of dust was the old blue Volkswagen. In an instant, Patrick remembered how deep the back seat was – so deep
that
he’d have to kneel if he wanted to see out of the windows, and covered with a comforting velour. A back seat for sleeping, as he loved to do. He remembered how his mother had seemed so small in the plush driver’s seat, and how his father would laugh at her and pat her on the head and make her laugh too. He remembered his father opening the bonnet and showing him the plugs and the air filter and where to top up the radiator. He could do it right now; it was so fresh in his head.

But he didn’t remember the damage.

The front edge of the bonnet was crumpled, the radiator grille smashed, the VW badge popped out, leaving only a black circle in its place. And in the middle of the bonnet was another dent – a shallow pan impressed in the metal, as if someone had taken a medicine ball and dropped it there.

Patrick stared at it.

For no reason at all, he thought of his mother’s stinging hand on his backside when she’d caught him testing the lock on the shed door.

No means no, Patrick!

Was the car in here then?

Why would she hide it?

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

His mother’s words. Telling him something as surely as the dead man had. In a slow fog, Patrick reached out and touched the distorted metal – ran his thumb along the steel creases, with their seams of rust.

‘It’s been in a crash,’ said Weird Nick.

And that was all it took – to hear the truth spoken aloud.

With a lurch of his insides that actually made him sway, Patrick saw his father’s hips crush the front edge, his legs smash the radiator grille, his head bounce off the place that looked as though it had been punched by a monster fist.

A strangled shout escaped him and he clapped his hand over his mouth in surprise.

His mother had killed his father.

But
why
?

Because Weird Nick’s mother was out, they took her car, even though they weren’t allowed, and even though neither of them had ever driven on the roads.

Patrick drove because Weird Nick said that it was
his
emergency and that his mother would therefore be more likely to forgive Patrick if anything happened to her car.

Patrick didn’t follow the logic but assumed his neighbour must be right. He was more concerned that the word ‘emergency’ had made him realize he’d left Meg’s phone on the kitchen table next to his tuna sandwich. He wished he had them both.

Driving Weird Nick’s mother’s car was nothing like Grand Theft Auto. Patrick steered and braked and pressed the clutch whenever Weird Nick said so, and Weird Nick changed gears, looked both ways at junctions, and kept an eye out for small children running into the road in the villages, and sheep thereafter.

At times they reached speeds of thirty miles an hour.

‘I hope we’re not too late,’ said Weird Nick.

Patrick remembered, ‘The kettle was still a bit warm. She can’t have been gone for long.’

They lurched to a halt beside the Fiesta, which was parked opposite the Storey Arms at the base of Penyfan. It was only then that Weird Nick realized he was still wearing slippers, and was therefore ill equipped to climb the highest peak in South Wales.

‘I’m such an idiot!’ he wailed.

Patrick didn’t answer pointless statements. Instead he just got out of the car, jogged across the road and started up the slope alone.

56

AT A SHADE
under three thousand feet, Penyfan was little more than a very steep hill, really, but it still took some climbing. It was also deceptive. It started broad and shallow, with an inviting footpath passing through gentle fields, bathed in sunshine. A family might ascend, with small children; maybe Nana in a wheelchair!

But soon there was a stile, and then a mean descent into a cheating valley, before the real rise began again from below the original starting point.

By halfway up, the slope was a proper incline that required the bowing of the head, the lifting of the knees and the sending back of children and the elderly, while the drop on either side of the stony footpath grew closer and closer, until it seemed that to stray too far from the path might be a rash thing to do.

Here the winds gusted hard, cooling any sun and blowing one briefly raised leg across the other in an effort to trip the unwary walker.