Rubbernecker (13 page)

Fuck you, doctors. Fuck you, nurses. Fuck you, wofe. That’s the last time I trust you. The last time I confide.

She comes back over and starts to repeat the lies.

‘Sam, sweetheart, the doctor says—’

‘Ah ah ah ah ah. Ee ee ee ee ee …’ Deep and squeaky.

‘Darling, I’m trying to—’

‘AH AH AH AH AH EE EE EE EE. Guh! Guh! Guh!’ I want my
wife
back. I want my
child
. I want to speak and eat and move my own feet. I want to know what happened to the man in the next bed and I want to know what happened to
me
. If I have to do it all myself, I will; I can’t rely on anyone else – I see that now.

‘
Guh! Guh! Guh!
’ I put everything I can into it, to let her know how angry I am.

‘Sam, please …’

She takes my hand and I close my eyes; I know that hurts her.

She starts to cry and I don’t care.

23

THE MORE PATRICK
scrubbed his bedroom carpet, the more he felt betrayed by the corpse. Number 19 was not a rabbit or a crow; Number 19 had been a man, just like his father, and Patrick felt the cadaver had somehow reneged on a species-specific agreement to give him the answers he sought. Instead of revealing what happened when a person stopped working, Number 19 had only
added
to the confusion with his elusive cause of death. And Meg had only rubbed his nose in it, going on about how ignorant they all were. As if Patrick didn’t know
that
.

He was sick of being confused. About
everything
.

Losing his father had at first seemed to be a kind of confusion – like losing a glove or a sock. Those things didn’t cease to exist just because you couldn’t see them; they were always
somewhere
– under the bed, in the machine, down the back of the sofa – and eventually they turned up.

Sooner than eventually, if you actively looked for them.

So Patrick had actively looked. Ever since the school counsellor had told him about the one-way door, Patrick had tried to find some sign of where it was and how it might be opened. First he’d sought it in the animals and birds he brought home off the Beacons, then in the faces of the dead that he found on macabre postcard collections, or of the dying in African aid stations on the
News at Ten
. Finally he searched the eyes of racehorses as they waited patiently for the bullet on snapped legs, in the only sport
where
death was routinely televised. With every crashing fall, Patrick felt the shock of the inevitable, and then a tingling in his belly – a bubble of anticipation in case
this
was the one,
this
was the horse,
this
was the moment when all would be revealed to him, when the door might open just a chink and allow him to glimpse a deathly Narnia on the other side.

He had never come close.

Upinarms, Malaga, Freezeout, Luckbox. Each now knew the secret he was so desperate to share, but watching them die only left him feeling more empty than before. Still, Patrick wrote their names in quiet pencil lists because who else would mark their passing? His father had remembered Persian Punch with a pint and a bottle of Coke; it seemed only right to do
something
.

The carpet was filthy. He’d already emptied his bucket of dirty water twice, and only properly cleaned a patch a foot square. Under the dark brown it was a vile ginger. Patrick didn’t like it, but he was determined to reveal it anyway.

He emptied more blackened water into the bath, refilled the bucket and added another dollop of bleach.

‘What are you doing?’ said Jackson.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Patrick.

‘Huh?’ he said, and Patrick showed him the scrubbing brush.

‘I’m cleaning.’

‘Ha ha, very funny,’ said Jackson, then followed Patrick back to his bedroom and hung around in the doorway as if cleaning were a spectator sport.

‘Have you seen Pete lately?’

‘What’s lately?’

‘In the last couple of weeks?’

‘No.’ Patrick realized he wasn’t going to be able to do this all in one go, so he mentally divided the visible carpet into squares.

‘I think maybe they broke up,’ Jackson went on.

Patrick didn’t feel that required an answer. Not that he
had
an
answer
. Or an opinion – although he did hope Kim had washed the kimono.

‘Do you think I have a chance?’ said Jackson.

Patrick sat back on his heels and thought about it. He wasn’t quite sure what Jackson was talking about, but horse racing had taught him that
everything
had a chance – of death
and
of glory.

The idea invigorated him, and suddenly he felt his determination surface again from the mud of betrayal. He was employed in solving a far bigger mystery than Number 19’s cause of death, so he shouldn’t let something as simple as that get the better of him! Patrick knew exactly where to get the information he was entitled to.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’

Jackson said, ‘Thanks!’ Then – in a rare burst of generosity – he added, ‘Your carpet looks great.’

Not yet
, thought Patrick, but it would. He got to his feet and dropped the brush into the bucket with a plop. He was newly filled with hope, and his head and nose felt suddenly clear again. He wondered briefly whether it was the bleach.

He lifted his bicycle off the wall and started down the stairs.

He wasn’t going to be beaten by a carpet
or
a corpse.

4017.

Patrick prickled at the need for the offensively random code.

The door of the anatomy wing clicked shut behind him, damming the flow of other students and leaving him alone in the quiet corridor creek that led to the dissection room and, beyond that, the stairs leading down to the embalming room, where Mick spent most of his time.

His Pumas made a low squeak on the scuffed tiled floor.

The white double doors of the DR were not locked. It wasn’t a dissection day, and so the cadavers lay patiently on their tables, looking lost without their attending students. Patrick picked out
Number
19’s domed form from across the room. He felt a sense of adversity that had not been there before.

You can’t keep secrets from me
.

Mick was not in his office and a note on the half-glazed door told Patrick that he would be back at three thirty p.m. Patrick looked at his watch; it was only eleven a.m. but he was on a roll and had no interest in coming back at three thirty. Three thirty was light years away.

He tried the door handle and it opened, so he went inside.

Mick ran a tight ship. There were uncluttered shelves, a well-swept floor, a single pot-plant on a filing cabinet. The desk was clear, but for a tidy with two pens in it and a three-tier letter tray that held only a few donation and cremation forms. Patrick approved of the tidiness, even if it meant the clipboard which held the Cause of Death checklist was not just lying around.

There were two pale-grey filing cabinets beside the desk. Patrick tried the drawers of both, but they were locked. He rattled them, but this time it didn’t work.

His determination became frustration in a heartbeat. The cadaver was still trying to cheat him. Still guarding its mysteries, even though it was dead and had no use for them itself.

But Patrick had waited so long, and worked so hard. He
deserved
to know the answers. It wouldn’t be wrong; he was
entitled
.

He had seen TV shows and films where people did things like sneaking into villains’ headquarters to uncover top-secret information, so he knew it was possible, but the movies made it look like a major operation that was unlikely to be achieved without satellite communications and a grappling hook. A black turtleneck sweater, at the very least. He had none of those. He looked around the bare little office, then went back out to the dissecting room and selected a robust carving fork from the white tray near the door.

He inserted the tines into the metal drawer to lever it open. As
he
did, he noticed that the plant on top of the cabinet was tilted at a slight angle. He couldn’t leave it like that – he knew that the moment he saw it. He couldn’t even concentrate on the task at hand until it was righted.

He put down the fork.

Under the pot was a saucer, and under the saucer was the key to the filing cabinet.

Inside the top drawer of the first cabinet he opened was the clipboard.

Easy.

On the board was the form he’d only glimpsed before as Mick walked among them, wishing them ill. Patrick’s eyes were drawn directly to the last column, labelled ‘COD’. Cause of Death.

Number 19 had died of heart failure.

That couldn’t be right.

Patrick had held that heart in his hands. There had been no stenosis, no clots, no aneurysm. He had come in here to uncover a secret, only to find that the secret was a lie. He glared at the form, feeling cheated, wanting
more
, and noticed that the very first column was headed ‘NAME’. He ran his eyes down the list.

‘What are you doing here?’

He turned; Mick was in the doorway.

Patrick looked at his watch. ‘What are
you
doing here? The note said you’d be back at three thirty.’

Mick opened his mouth and raised his eyebrows so high that they almost touched the place where his hair would have been if he’d had any. He closed the couple of paces between them and snatched the clipboard from Patrick’s hand. ‘That’s confidential information.’

‘I wanted the cause of death. That’s not confidential. Dr Spicer said we could ask any time, and this is any time and you weren’t here to ask, so I looked.’

‘You broke into a locked filing cabinet.’

‘I used the key.’

‘The hidden key.’

‘If it was hidden, I wouldn’t have found it, because I wasn’t looking.’

Mick brushed past him and put the clipboard back in the drawer, then slammed the drawer and locked it. He dropped the key into his pocket.

‘What’s your name?’

Why did everyone always want to know what his
name
was?

‘Patrick Fort.’

‘You’re in a lot of trouble,’ said Mick.

‘What for?’

‘I just told you what for.’

‘Why?’ Patrick was confused; he had explained everything.

‘Don’t play stupid games with me. I’m going to speak to Professor Madoc about this.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick.

Mick seemed disappointed that he wasn’t more worried by the prospect. ‘All right, you can get out now.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick, but didn’t go. ‘I think the cause of death is wrong.’

‘What cause of death?’

‘Number 19. You’ve got heart failure but the heart is not diseased.’

‘If that’s what’s on the death certificate, that’s what it is. I’m not a doctor, and neither are
you
, by a very long way.’

‘I know that. But—’

‘No buts. This conversation is over.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick, so started a different conversation. ‘When the people die, you embalm the bodies, right?’

Mick looked at him but didn’t answer, so Patrick went on, ‘Where do they go afterwards?’

‘They come up here,’ said Mick. ‘Then when you lot have
finished
with them I put all the bits in a bag and they go back to the families for funerals.’

‘Not the bodies. The people.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Is there an exit?’

‘A
what
?’

‘An exit. In their heads. Like a door they go through.’

‘Like the one I should have kept locked?’

‘Yes,’ said Patrick, ‘like that. Some kind of
barrier
that people go through when they die.’

Mick squinted at Patrick; he shook his head; he made a face. ‘No,’ he finally said.

‘Then what happens to them? Where do they
go
? Can they come back?’

Mick stood and stared at Patrick for a long moment, then reached down and lifted up the phone. ‘Hold on a second,’ he said, ‘I’ll see if the police know.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick, and waited to see if the police knew.

Mick stabbed the first two nines with a flourish and a glare, but then sighed and hung up.

‘Just get out, will you?’

‘OK,’ said Patrick.

In his excitement he’d forgotten his gloves, and by the time he’d cycled back to the house, his fingers were red and numb. He ran hot water into the kitchen sink and held them under, then stared out of the window that faced next door’s fence and let his mind drift like kelp on a turning tide. The window was dirty; he would have to wash it. He was hungry and he was out of bread. Once his hands had warmed up he would put on his gloves and go over the road and get chips. His mouth tingled in anticipation of vinegar, and he thought of all the twists and turns the chips would have to take as they dropped into his stomach. All the places they’d have
to
avoid; all the choices his body would make for them, all the chemistry it would employ to break them down; how his peristaltic muscles would guide them along the conveyor belt of his guts until he passed them some time tomorrow morning.

Patrick took his hands from the water and dried them on the tea towel, while his brain turned its inevitable wheel to what had killed Number 19.

The list on the clipboard was almost as disappointing as the brain had been. He had gleaned only one piece of additional information, and that felt like a very minor victory in a failed war of secrets.

The corpse’s name was Samuel Galen.

24

‘NOT BAD, SAM,’
Leslie tells me, filled with gloom. But it’s praise indeed from him, and I redouble my efforts to retrain my tongue – stretching, sucking, blowing and braying.

‘Have you eating and drinking soon,’ he adds grudgingly.

This turns out to be a big fat lie, but I
do
make progress. The tongue is a magnificent thing. I think about it a lot, now that all my hopes and dreams depend upon it, and less than a week after my wofe betrayed me to a possible killer, Jean and Tracy prop me up in bed and spoon orange juice down my throat.