Rubbernecker (6 page)

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Everybody, meet Number 19.’

‘I don’t want a man,’ said a short Asian boy with thick glasses.
‘I’m
going to be an obstetrician. Can I swap with someone else?’

‘No,’ said Spicer.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m an uptight arsehole who wants you to fail.’

The Asian boy pursed his lips and looked sulky.

‘You’ll all get proper access to a female cadaver and the relevant prosections as the need arises during the course,’ Spicer reassured him. ‘Plus you will be doing various clinical rotations in a range of medical departments, so that you get plenty of exposure to a variety of real patients and conditions, OK?’

The boy nodded and Spicer went back to reading. ‘Let’s see … Number 19 here is a Caucasian male who died aged forty-seven.’

‘Of what?’ said Patrick.

‘That would be spoiling the fun.’ Spicer smiled. ‘You should be able to diagnose cause of death during the dissection, but if you’re really stumped and you don’t mind being a
big fat failure
, you can go and ask Mick in the office.’ He inclined his head towards a glass-walled cubicle beside the entrance door. Inside Patrick could see the tops of filing cabinets and an appropriately cadaverous middle-aged man glaring out at them. Mick, he assumed.

He wouldn’t need to ask Mick or anybody else; he’d find out for himself.

‘What’s his name?’ said the girl, nodding at the cadaver.

‘That’s confidential,’ said Spicer. ‘The important thing to remember is that he’s Number 19.’ He flicked a rectangular metal tag that was attached to the cadaver’s wrist by a black zip-tie. In one corner was stamped the number.

‘Anything and everything you take off or out of this cadaver gets bagged and tagged so it can be put back together again at the end of the course for burial or cremation. The fat and skin – what we call “fascia” – goes in the yellow bin marked nineteen in that
refrigerator
over there.’ They all turned to follow his pointing blue finger to one of two big white doors in the far wall. ‘And that fascia will also be reunited with Number 19 at the end of the course for burial or cremation.’

Patrick nodded. That all made sense, and followed nice strict rules.

Spicer clapped his hands and rubbed them together like a TV presenter. ‘OK. We’re all going to be meeting here around this gentleman twice a week for the next six months, so we might as well get acquainted.’

Introductions. Patrick hated this kind of thing, but the other students looked eager to be friendly.

The would-be obstetrician was Dilip, and the tall, beefy-looking boy with ruddy cheeks and thinning blond hair was Rob, who was considering surgery.

‘Depending on how this goes,’ he added, pointing at the cadaver with a wry smile.

The dark-haired girl’s name was Meg and she was considering paediatrics.

Then there was Scott, who wanted to be a plastic surgeon.

‘Boob jobs and tummy tucks,’ he said, rubbing his finger and thumb together to denote money. ‘You can all call me Scotty,’ he added. ‘Like in
Star Trek
.’

Patrick was confused. Scotty fixed starships, not breasts.

He noticed that Scott had the kind of uncommitted Mohawk made of gel and therefore easy to brush out for formal occasions. Then he realized that everyone was looking at him.

‘You’re up,’ said Spicer, but Patrick felt himself closing
down
. Like an anemone snatching back its tentacles when touched.

‘Patrick Fort. Anatomy.’

‘Paddy,’ said Scott.

‘Patrick,’ said Patrick.

‘Just anatomy?’ said Meg.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not going to be a doctor?’ said Rob.

‘No.’

‘How about Pat?’ said Scott.

‘Patrick,’ said Patrick.

‘What are you going to be then?’ said Meg.

He frowned in confusion. ‘A graduate.’

They all waited for more, but he stared down at the corpse. He’d told them all he had to.

‘Didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition, did you, Patrick?’ said Spicer.

‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘I don’t even
speak
Spanish.’

Dilip and Scott laughed.

‘Neither do I,’ said Spicer. ‘Anyway, you anatomists have lots of free time and you won’t be joining us on hospital rounds, but the work you do here will be exactly the same as the med students, OK?’

Patrick nodded. The work here was all he wanted; the thought of being around real, live patients made him shiver.

‘Right then,’ continued Spicer. ‘Pleasantries over. I’m going to show you how to handle a scalpel.’ He touched the chest of the cadaver, where the curling, dark hair was going slightly grey towards the throat. As grey as it was ever going to get.

‘We’re going to make an H-incision here on the pectoral muscle to start with. When you do, imagine tracing rather than cutting, because these bastards are
sharp
, and if you get a bit Zorro you’ll be down to the spine before you know it.’

As the blade touched the skin and a narrow door of blood opened in the chest, Patrick felt an unaccustomed buzz of pure optimism. This was the beginning of the end. Finally he could find his answers. Here was the place where his quest might reach its conclusion – in this very room, this cathedral to science, this white gallery of death—

Something heavy hit the back of his legs and he staggered slightly, then looked round to see Rob crumpled on the floor behind him.

‘Shit,’ said Spicer cheerfully. ‘So much for surgery.’

9

I FLOAT, CALM
and disconnected. I feel as though I’m on drugs and I wonder why I’ve never tried them before if they’re all this good. Mark Williams at work tried them all the time and had a ball. Until the college had to fire him, of course; then it wasn’t such fun. But this is nice. This is like drifting on musical clouds. Maybe I
am
on drugs! This is a hospital, after all.

‘He would just slip away,’ says a woman very quietly.

‘Would he be in pain?’ That’s another woman, also somewhere off to my left. They’re discussing the man in the next bed. That means he’s not dead, which is good and right. It was just a bad dream, like the giant crow and the masonry that fell on me from a crumbling building somewhere in Japan. Or Mauritius. Dreams are rarely geographically sound.

‘Oh no.’ The first woman again. ‘We monitor his medication very carefully. He wouldn’t know anything about it.’ She must be a doctor.

Through my haze I feel vaguely angry for the man who wouldn’t know anything about it. How would
they
know? Maybe he’d know
all
about it; maybe he’d be scared, or in pain, down at the bottom of his own personal well.

‘Is that what happened to the gentleman who used to be in that bed?’

‘Mr Attridge? No, he died quite suddenly overnight. It happens like that sometimes.’

Oh, he
is
dead. Shit. His name was Mr Attridge and I watched him die.

‘But what did he actually die of?’

I’m all ears.

There’s a long hesitation and I can hear the doctor being careful.

‘Sadly, coma patients die very easily. They succumb to infections, or have strokes, or asphyxiate on food or their own spittle, or sometimes the heart fails due to cumulative factors.’

Cumulative factors like being
murdered
!

‘The longer someone is in a coma, the less likely they are to regain full consciousness. Such deaths may be sudden, but they are rarely unexpected or unexplained.’

‘It’s been two months now,’ says the other woman, and someone touches my forehead with something that smells of rubber. ‘But there’s still a chance he’ll …?’

‘Emerge.’

‘Yes. There’s still a good chance he’ll
emerge
, isn’t there?’

And all of a sudden I realize they’re talking about
me
! Me, Sam Galen. Talking about
me
emerging – and talking about me
dying
!

I snap out of the cloud and get a bit frantic, which is difficult to do when you can’t move or make a sound. I try to open my eyes. No lying doggo now! But they won’t open. They won’t bloody well
open
! I strain my brows upwards until it feels like my forehead will peel back like banana skin, but still my lids are dark maroon.

Maybe this is how it was for the man in the next bed – maybe somebody thought
he
should just ‘slip away’ while he tried to open his eyes.

‘Every case is different,’ the doctor hedges.

‘All I want is an educated guess,’ says the other woman. ‘I understand it’s not a diagnosis.
Please
.’

‘In that case …’

Long silence. I can almost see the doctor tapping her teeth with the end of her pen as she takes an educated guess at my future
existence
. I stop straining to open my eyes and instead listen so hard that I feel the empty air swirl in my ears, while a smooth rubber finger drags over my cheek.

‘I’m afraid,’ says the doctor, her voice heavy with practised sorrow, ‘it’s getting to the point where
if
he emerges, it may not be in one piece.’

The finger leaves my cheek and there’s no answer for a long time, and then only the sound of quiet sobbing.

I’m in one piece!
I scream soundlessly.
Here I am! I’m in one piece!

Aren’t I?

10

EVEN WHEN THE
streeets had been washed clean by rain, the malt rising from the Brains brewery made all of early-morning Cardiff smell like late-night Horlicks.

Patrick rode through the dawn, listening to the sound of his tyres hissing on the damp tarmac as he made a loop through the city.

In the Hayes, pigeons purred softly from the roof of the snack bar, and made him think of home.

It was an old city, despite the veneer of new wealth that made it shine in the wet Welsh sun. The buildings over the glittering shop fronts were all curled stone and soot, and the castle walls dominated the city centre, guarded by a strange collection of beasts, furred and feathered in stone. Victorian arcades linked the thoroughfares like secret tunnels, filled with shops that sold old violins, shoes, and sweets by the quarter from giant jars.

Cardiff was also a small city, and was easy to leave for the hills and forests and beaches that cupped it all round with nature. Sometimes Patrick rode west to Penarth and sat on the pier, which smelled faintly of fish, and which bore the scars of a thousand anglers who’d cut their bait on the salted wood. Sometimes he cycled beyond the narrow suburbs to the fairy-tale castle that guarded the city’s northern approach; sometimes east across the flat, reclaimed land that bordered the sea so closely that only a grid of ditches kept it dry.

Ish.

Wherever he went, his route was guided by Welsh and by English – each road sign to
ildiwch
a reminder that the old oppressor had finally given way, after failing to beat the language out of the nation’s schoolchildren.

The room Patrick was renting was the smallest in a small house that was distinguishable from its neighbours only by the white plastic ‘7’ screwed to the front door. The back of it looked over the railway line where trains took passengers to and from the South Wales Valleys. One of them would have taken him halfway to Brecon if he’d caught it, but he had his bike, so he didn’t need to.

His bed was squeezed between the wall at its head and the hot-water tank at its foot. He measured it and found it was six feet long – exactly one inch longer than he was. It took him a week to get used to sleeping on his side, with his knees bent, so that he wouldn’t touch at either end. Even so, he was woken every morning by five thirty, when his feet grew warm as the heating kicked in. He slept in his sleeping bag because it smelled of grass and earth, and often he woke thinking he was on the Beacons.

A strip of chipboard under the windowsill served as a desk so small that he could only open one textbook at a time and still use his laptop. His books and disks had to go on top of the wardrobe. He had found a photo in his bag that he had not packed, and he left it there. The walls were woodchip, painted magnolia, and the carpet was brown, although Patrick wasn’t convinced it had always been so.

The window had been modified so that it only opened about six inches. A deterrent to burglars, he guessed, although he doubted any burglar would brave the railway line, climb the tall garden wall and risk a drop into the thick brambles below, when it was plain from any angle that this grimy little terraced house must contain little worth stealing, and that easier pickings would surely be found almost anywhere else along the row. Even so, Patrick carried his
bike
upstairs to his room every night to protect it. It was a ten-speed Peugeot racer that was older than he was, but it was the only thing he’d inherited from his father, so he screwed two stout hooks into the wall and, while he slept, the bike hung over him like a sparkling blue talisman.

Two other students shared the house. Jackson and Kim were both doing art degrees. Kim was a staunch lesbian – an elfin blonde who made lumpy ogres from plaster of Paris, with nuts and bolts sprouting at their genitals. Jackson made tedious video art that, to Patrick, looked like scenes where the cameraman had been killed and left the camera pointing at a dark corner of a dull room. Jackson had long, pale hands that flapped on slender wrists, and dyed black hair, so short at the back and so long at the front that Patrick itched to reach out and realign it with his head. He wore eyeliner, cowboy boots and a Yasser Arafat scarf, even when he was making toast.

They had all agreed to clean up after themselves, but Jackson was a slob, Kim not much better, and Patrick too nervous of germs to leave anything unwashed for as long as it might take either of his housemates to fulfil their promise. He simply got up earlier or stayed up later to clean the kitchen and bathroom. Kim occasionally left a dish of tasteless vegetarian food on his shelf in the fridge by way of thanks, but Jackson never mentioned the mess
or
the sparkling kitchen that was its mysterious corollary.