Rubbernecker (5 page)

I can feel her hand now, squeezing my fingers so hard that it hurts. But I don’t pull away because holding her hand is so special; so precious …

All
that
from the smell of the bacon. All that wonder and joy …

Somebody tells me they love me. It’s not Alice but it warms me anyway. Love is never bad, wherever you find it; Alice taught me that.

I wonder where they are, Alice and Lexi. Do they even know I’m here – waiting for them to come and find me while a stranger holds my hand? Until they’re with me, what am I? Not a husband and not a father.

I’m lost without them.

The only noise is a soft
blip … blip
… and the sound of my own breathing. In and out … and in and out … and in and out … and in and out. My chest rises and falls to the maddening rhythm. It makes me think of Lexi learning to play the piano. ‘Chopsticks’ outrunning the metronome, and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ lagging behind it. But she stuck at it, even though her fingers were never going to be long enough to be good. That’s my fault; I brought the stubby hands to the marital table. Alice brought the even temper, the sense of fun, and all the looks.

And the sad eyes.

When did
that
happen? Is that
my
fault?

In the cot next to the bed, Lexi cries as if her heart is breaking.

So sad.
So sad!

I want to roll over and comfort her, before she wakes Alice. In my head, I do.

’S OK
, I whisper.
’S OK, sweetheart, go to sleep
.

But I’m the one who sleeps, down the dark years.

When I wake again, sliced white bread is laid out in neat squares for buttering. For a party, perhaps? A catered event, and here’s all the bread, waiting for the tuna and the cheese and the coronation chicken. I’m not hungry, but a sandwich would be nice. A sandwich and maybe a sausage roll, and a pint of Brains bitter. My mouth is so dry.

I open my eyes anew and realize that it’s not bread; it’s ceiling tiles!

I’m happy because that is dull enough to be real. No writhing
Jesus
, no giant man-crows, just square tiles suspended in a metal frame like the view at the dentist’s.

I think it means I’m definitely awake.

It must be night now. The tiles were off-white before, which is why they looked like bread, but now they’re grey, and in one place there’s a small black triangle where one has slipped or broken.

There’s a miserable sound somewhere nearby. It’s the sad whine of a puppy left out in the rain. Shivery and cold.

My head’s not working, so I slide my eyes to the very corners of their sockets, so that the ceiling disappears – at least, the bit over my head does – and I’m looking over there, to my left.

There’s a water jug and beyond that a bed, so I assume I’m in a bed, too, because I’m lying here on
something
, which makes that
another
bed. And two beds in one room indicate a hospital. Or a dorm room. But I have a sense I’ve already graduated from Bristol, where I shared with Artie Rinker, who could whistle through his belly button.

So, a hospital then.

The snow-sky passes silently by, and my arm flaps at the window
.

There’s a man in the other bed. And there’s a machine beside him with a soft grey-lit screen. That’s where all the blips are coming from – they sound in time to a point of light jerking across the screen. There are tubes running to the man’s arms and stomach, and somebody stands over him. This person’s back is to me, but even in the dim glow of the screen, I can see he is wearing blue scrubs.

Two and two equals a doctor.

This is my moment.

I call out to let him know I’m awake. Or, at least, I thought I was going to call out, but I can’t hear myself. I try to clear my throat, but my tongue is big and sticky and I can only really make a little
whirr
. I try again to speak, and realize that my lips are moving but nothing else is. No air is coming up from my lungs to shape itself
into
words in my mouth. I’ve forgotten what every newborn knows.

I try to sit up, but that doesn’t work either.

I nearly panic, but all I can do is look at the ceiling, at the little black triangle, and tell myself to calm down. I have to get pretty stern with myself: calm down, Samuel Galen! This is
not
an emergency. I have time. I have lots of time. I have been here for a thousand years already; another minute won’t hurt.

I concentrate on sensible things; on what I know. The man in the bed must be the one who swore and begged; whose wife and children wept when they visited. The mumbling and the crying wasn’t Lexi at all, because Lexi’s almost thirteen, not a baby in a cot. That bit must have been a dream, I think.

So much of life is.

Also, if this is a hospital then the man in the next bed must be a patient. Like me? I suppose so, if the crash I dreamed was real. And if we are patients, then the doctor will not ignore me, whether I can shout or not. If I am a patient, then I am here to be cared for, and that’s what doctors do. So I don’t
have
to shout. I don’t
have
to wave my arms around to attract attention. All I have to do is calm down and wait until he’s finished helping the patient in the next bed, and then he’ll turn to me and see that I’m awake, and help me too.

Ding dong bell. Pussy in the well
.

Simple.

Click
.

The sound of a switch is soft but unmistakable, and is accompanied by the extinction of the grey light.

The blips have stopped, too.

I turn my eyes again. The doctor’s hand is on the dark machine and the man in the bed is moving a little. Then a lot. Straining; feet kicking under the covers like he’s having a fit; like he’s gasping for air.

Like he’s dying.

My God, he’s
dying
!

Now
I panic. It seizes me, but I can’t shout or run or wave my arms about to share the feeling, so instead it splashes through my chest like electricity, then shoots down my arms and legs and up the back of my head until every part of me tingles with pointless shock.

In my mind I am already there beside him, clearing an airway, pinching his nose, breathing into his mouth, the way we all learned that time from the St John Ambulance. In fact, I can’t move a muscle.

My head screams:
Help him! Help him!

But the doctor doesn’t help him.

Instead he just leans over the man and watches him suffer. It seems to take a forever of choking and rattling, and when it’s all over, there’s a vast silence filled only by my heart in my head. Then I hear the soft click of the switch again and the dim light returns, making me blink. I wait for the blips, but they don’t come back.

They never come back.

Is this another dream? I hope so. I beg the grey tiles,
Please let it be a dream. Please don’t let this be real
.

I hear quiet footsteps squeak towards me and quickly close my eyes. I don’t want to see the doctor, and I don’t want
him
to see
me
.

I no longer want him to know that I’m awake.

PART TWO

8

PATRICK ENTERED A
large space filled with dead people and thought of an art gallery.

The Cardiff University dissection room was brighter, whiter, lighter than he had ever imagined; films like
Flatliners
and
Frankenstein
had apparently misled him. This was more a hangar than a lab, white and airy under a lofty ceiling filled with skylights, but with no windows in the walls. There were no views out on to the tree-lined bustle of Park Place, and definitely no views in.

It was only after his eyes had lingered on the pale-blue October sky that Patrick looked at the bodies.

Cadavers
. He would have to get used to calling them that now.

They were the artworks in this exhibition. Thirty still-lifes – bloated by embalming fluids, and a curious shade of orange – lay on their tables waiting patiently to be deconstructed and analysed more thoroughly than any Mona Lisa, any Turin Shroud.

Each body lay in a cocoon of its own cotton swaddling, like a tender chrysalis. Each head was wound in lengths of unbleached cloth. To preserve moisture, Patrick knew from their anatomy prep sessions – to keep the face from desiccating, the eyes from wrinkling to raisins, and the students from being freaked out.

It was warm, and the smell was … strange. Patrick had been expecting formalin, but this was sweeter than that, although with an odd undernote that was not entirely pleasant.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ somebody whispered faintly from behind him.

‘No you’re not,’ said another student encouragingly.

A dark-haired girl beside Patrick nudged his arm. ‘You OK?’ she said. ‘You’re very pale.’

He nodded and removed his arm from her orbit. He could have told her that pale came from excitement, not nausea. He could have told her that this dissecting room was where his quest would succeed or fail. A quest for answers he’d been seeking since he was eight years old, and which nobody had ever seemed willing or able to give him, so that eventually he’d simply stopped asking out loud.

Patrick didn’t tell the girl that, because it wasn’t in his nature to tell anybody anything.

They were each carrying
Essential Clinical Anatomy
and wearing one of the twenty white paper lab coats they’d been issued in what looked like a gift bag – poor imitations of the thick white cotton coats doctors used to wear. Each had been given a four-figure code to allow them into the dissecting room via a key pad on the door. Patrick’s was 4017 and he hated it on sight. There were no patterns, no progressions, and the number had no shape other than spiky. He wondered whether it was worth engaging with another student to see if he could swap.

Just inside the entrance were three large bins filled with bright blue latex gloves. Small, medium and large. There were a few nervous giggles as they struggled into them. Patrick took a large left and had to pick up six more before finding a large right. He toyed with calculating the odds, but the boxes held an unknown number of gloves.

The blue latex seemed irreverently jolly here in the dissecting room, like bunting at a funeral.

Next to the gloves were white plastic boxes full of the tools of their new trade. Saws, hooks, scalpels, forceps, scissors – even
spoons
– all tossed in together. They were tools a handyman might use; a common labourer with calluses on his palms and dirt under his nails. It was a stark reminder that these – their first patients – were already past saving.

Clutching their gift bags and textbooks, the students shuffled forward gingerly towards Professor Madoc. The 150 students barely looked at the cadavers as they filed past them – as if to do so before they were given the green light to start cutting might be rude. They kept their eyes averted and fixed on Professor Madoc as he started to speak.

He was a tall, elegant man in his sixties, with neat white hair and a sailor’s tan. He welcomed them, giving them a brief overview of the anatomy syllabus and stressing the fundamental nature of the work they would learn in this room and how it would inform their studies and their rotations on the wards of the teaching hospital. He thanked the retired professors and junior doctors who had returned to guide the students through what he called the ‘infinite intricacies of the human body’. He nodded at the assorted men and women in white coats at the back of the room.

Then he mentioned the Goldman Prize, given to the best anatomy student every year, causing looks and smiles to be exchanged in silent challenge. The professor ended by saying that he was sure he didn’t have to tell them to respect those who had donated their bodies to medical science – and then told them anyway.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you may have heard stories of eyeballs in Martini glasses and skipping the Double Dutch with intestines, but those days are gone, thank God. The thirty cadavers you see before you now are the mortal remains of people who donated their bodies because they wanted to help you through your studies and into a noble and caring profession. They wanted to do that even though they didn’t know you. And even though
you
didn’t know
them
, and never will, please show your appreciation of their gift by
according
them the same respect that you will one day show to your living patients.’

Patrick heard little to nothing of the professor’s speech. Alone among the students, he stared openly at the cadaver closest to him – an elderly woman with withered breasts, an apron of stomach fat and neatly manicured fingernails – still with a layer of chipped varnish on them. He was eighteen, but had never seen a live woman naked, and couldn’t reconcile this one with the images he had browsed on the internet. They didn’t even look like the same species.

He reached out and pressed a finger against the upper thigh. The consistency was that of a raw roast – cold and yielding, yet solid underneath. He thought of the way his mother stabbed the lamb on special occasions, and then pushed garlic and sprigs of rosemary into the gashed flesh.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to look inside a woman.

The noise from Professor Madoc stopped, and the silence brought Patrick back to the here and now. Names were read out, and he was relieved to find himself soon standing at a table that held the body of what looked like a middle-aged man. It was hard to tell the age with the head wound in cotton strips, but even in death this body looked tighter than the old lady’s had – more muscular, the skin less folded, and the abdomen swollen by embalming fluids rather than by fat.

Four other students joined him, including the dark-haired girl, who smiled at him as if they already shared common ground.

Their table mentor was a junior doctor – a young man only a few years older than they were, and in a
real
white coat – who introduced himself as David Spicer. He picked up the clipboard hanging at the dead man’s feet in an incongruous echo of a patient’s hospital notes.