Rubbernecker (15 page)

Even so, he was wary. He took a step backwards. Maybe he’d done something wrong; something he couldn’t understand. It happened all the time. Once when he was fourteen he’d almost been arrested for walking out of Asda wearing jeans and a blue striped T-shirt so his mother, who was in the car, could approve the purchase. Patrick had tried to explain to the security guard that he had left his own clothes in the fitting room, so how could he be stealing these ones? Especially with the labels still swinging off them.

Maybe this was like that. Somebody not understanding things.

The faint sound of breaking glass drew him and his bike around the side of the house to the back garden. He flinched as glass broke much closer to him this time.

A girl stood in the garden. A girl or a woman; Patrick was never quite sure when one became the other. She was as slim as a girl, but as angry as a woman. She had startling white-blonde spikes of hair, and – despite the late-winter chill – wore a white T-shirt, black leather mini skirt and motorcycle boots.

She drew back her arm and hurled what looked like half a brick through a downstairs window.

‘
I’ve called the police!
’

‘So have I!’ the girl/woman screamed back at the house. ‘You fucking old cow!’ She turned away and Patrick thought she was going to run, but instead she started to look around for something else to throw. It wasn’t easy; the garden was as well-tended as the house – apart from the broken windows. Even the soil in the shrubbery looked stone-free. Patrick couldn’t see where she’d got the half-brick from.

‘Hi,’ said Patrick.

The girl/woman looked at him for the first time. ‘Who are
you
?’

‘Patrick Fort,’ said Patrick. ‘Are you Mrs Galen?’

‘No, I’m fucking
not
,’ she spat vehemently. ‘And neither is
she
.’ She parted the shrubbery. Patrick noticed a smallish stone next to his foot.

‘Here,’ he said, and held it out to her.

The girl looked at him suspiciously, then came over and snatched it from his hand like a wary monkey. ‘Cheers,’ she said, and threw it through an upstairs window. It made a neat black hole and a web of white cracks.

‘The police are coming,’ he pointed out, and she cocked her head at the sound of approaching sirens.

‘Bollocks.’

‘I thought you called them?’

‘Yeah, right,’ she snorted, and walked over to the six-foot wooden fence that surrounded the garden. ‘You going to gimme a leg up or what?’

Patrick wheeled his bike across the lawn and edged his way through the shrubs. He hesitated, then went to put his hands around her waist so he could lift her up.

‘Watch where you’re putting your hands, mate!’ she said, and he took a step backwards. ‘Like
this
.’ She made a stirrup with her fingers.

He flinched as she stepped into his interlaced fingers, and then almost slung her clean over the fence, she was so light, and he was so keen to be rid of her. He wiped his hands hard on the seat of his jeans.

‘You coming?’ she said from the other side.

Was he? Patrick stood for a moment, weighing up his options and objectives. He wanted information. The woman in the house wouldn’t speak to him, whereas the girl in the garden had. She was probably his best bet.

‘OK,’ he said.

He’d never escaped over a fence before and wasn’t quite sure of the procedure. He propped his bike against it, then stepped on the crossbar and lay precariously along the fence, with the planking digging a long line of discomfort from his shoulder to his balls, while he gripped with one hand and his feet. He teetered there, and stretched an arm back down to grip the crossbar. He should have put the bike over the fence first.

‘Come
on
!’

‘I’m getting my bike,’ he explained.

‘There’s no
time
!’

Two uniformed policemen walked briskly round the side of the house and Patrick realized too late that he’d chosen the wrong team. They saw him and started to jog across the lawn.

‘Oi!’ shouted one. ‘Stay right there!’

A rush of adrenaline took Patrick completely by surprise. It fired a stream of white-hot excitement through his body. No video game had ever made him feel this way, and he laughed at the policemen as they speeded up across the grass.

But the bike anchored him on the wrong side of the fence. He should really leave it.

He didn’t. He hauled it up, one-handed – his shoulder burning with effort and his chest and balls shrieking to be allowed off the narrow wooden ridge. He would have overbalanced back into the garden, except that the girl who wasn’t Mrs Galen grabbed two handfuls of him – his jeans and his hoodie – and provided a counterweight as he lifted his bike up to join him, until his weight shifted and they both rolled off the fence and dropped on to the ground, only missing the girl because she jumped out of the way with a shriek.

He lay in the alleyway, winded and staring at the same sky that had been there the day of the monkey bars and the swing.

The first of the policemen hit the other side of the wooden fence
with
a grunt. The girl yelled, ‘Run! Run!’ then took her own advice and disappeared from his field of vision.

Patrick was on his feet in an instant, running alongside his bike until he had the presence of mind to jump into the saddle, like a Dodge City bank robber on to a getaway pony.

He heard the police shouting something behind him, but never looked back, and very soon his pedalling took him to a calmer, quieter place – as it so often had.

He caught up with the girl in the park down at the bottom of the hill. She was walking now, not running, and staying close to the shadows of the rhododendrons.

He slowed his bike beside her and said, ‘Hi.’

She put a hand to her chest. ‘Shit! You nearly gave me a heart attack!’

But she started laughing then, and didn’t stop until she was crying.

‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘That
bitch
!’ She wiped her eyes, leaving dark streaks from her eyes to her temples. Patrick waited until she’d finished.

‘You want to get a drink?’ she said.

‘I don’t drink,’ Patrick told her.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

They went into the Claude on Albany Road. ‘You got any money?’ she said, so Patrick bought her a rum and Coke, and himself a Coke without the rum.

‘You really don’t drink,’ said the girl. ‘Why?’

‘No reason,’ he said.

‘Liar.’

He wondered how she’d known, but said nothing else. They sat at a table near the door and she clinked his glass with hers. ‘Bottoms up,’ she said.

She drank half her rum and Coke in one go. ‘What was your name again?’

He was practised at the answer now and told her with barely a pause.

‘Thanks for the leg up over the fence.’

He nodded. ‘What’s yours?’

‘My what?’

‘Name.’

She said, ‘Lexi,’ and drained her glass. ‘Want another one?’

‘I haven’t finished this one.’

She hid a burp behind her fist, then reached over, took his Coke from his hand and swallowed it in three swift gulps.

‘Want another one now?’

He bought her another one, and a coffee for himself, because he thought it would be cheaper, but it wasn’t.

‘You’re not Samuel Galen’s wife?’ Patrick said as he sat down with the drinks.

She took a gulp and shook her head. ‘He was my dad.’

‘But she’s not his wife either?’

‘She’s just a fucking gold-digger,’ she said. ‘You got a fag?’

‘No.’

Lexi took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled her own.

‘Sitting there in a bloody
mansion
with bloody great Beemers out the front, while I’m kipping on a mate’s
couch
above a fucking
pet shop
. Got a light?’

‘No.’

Lexi went to the bar to ask for one and the barman told her there was no smoking in the pub.

‘Jesus
Christ
!’ she said, and yanked the roll-up from her lips and stormed back to her seat.

‘Bastard says there’s no smoking! In a fucking
pub
!’

‘It’s the law,’ Patrick pointed out.

‘I
know
it’s the law.’

‘Because of passive smoking.’

‘Thank you, Chancellor of the Exchequer.’

‘I’m not the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’

‘You don’t say.’

Patrick was confused because he plainly
had
said.

‘Stupid fucking rules,’ she said and poked the roll-up into her cleavage. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’

Patrick looked at his knuckles, which were red, with long yellow blisters already coming.

The shrubbery.

‘Conifers,’ he said. ‘I’m allergic.’

‘Allergies fucking
blow
,’ said Lexi enthusiastically. ‘I have a million of them. Fish, cats, eggs – you name it. Not trees though. Does it hurt?’

‘It itches.’

Patrick was finding it hard to keep up with Lexi’s flood of words and emotions and expletives. She seemed to say anything and everything that popped into her mind. All Patrick had to do was try to sift the gold from the grit. But he wasn’t sure which was which, and so let her stream of consciousness wash over him in the hope that he could sort it out later.

‘What was going on at the house?’

‘Oh,
that
,’ she said with a scowl. ‘All I did was ask for my own money, and she goes bonkers.’

‘What money?’

‘That my dad left me in his will. I need it
now
, not when I’m twenty fucking five.’

‘No need to swear,’ said Patrick.

‘Of
course
there’s a need to swear!’ she said, slapping the table and making him flinch. ‘Swearing’s the only thing that keeps me going! What kind of world do
you
live in where there’s no need to fucking swear? A world where you don’t drink and don’t smoke and nothing ever pisses you off? I bet there’s no sex either. Fan-fucking-tastic.’

Patrick felt his face growing hot and he stared into his coffee
cup
. He had never thought much about sex, but all of a sudden not having had it seemed like a very stupid oversight for someone of his intellect.

There was a long gap in the conversation while the scratchy pub speakers played ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis.
1995
, thought Patrick.
Before everything went wrong
.

He finished his coffee.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lexi said. ‘I’m such a fucking big mouth. I just get so
grrrrr
! You know? And then I say all kinds of stupid shit.’

‘OK,’ he nodded.

‘Seriously,’ said Lexi, ducking her head to try to meet his eyes. ‘I’m an idiot.’

She reached for his hand across the table. He saw it coming and fought his instincts. What had his mother said?
I don’t expect anything back from you, Patrick, but I do expect manners
. That meant she
did
expect something back. She’d given him a gift and Patrick was apparently supposed to say ‘Thank you.’ Gifts came with strings attached, even if they weren’t always obvious. Lexi’s father had allowed five strangers to cut him to pieces and put him into yellow bins and plastic bags. The string attached to that gift was right here, right now, coming at him across the scar-and-varnish pub table.

He couldn’t do it; he moved his hand and sat on it. ‘How did your father die?’

Lexi picked up her glass instead. She didn’t seem surprised by the question. ‘He was in an accident, and then a coma for a few months, and then he just died. They said he might. They said it happens all the time.’

‘Who said?’

‘I dunno. The doctors, I suppose.’

‘Were you there?’

She shook her head and knocked back what was left of her drink, even though it was mostly ice now. ‘I only went to see him
once
. It was shit. He was crying. I held his hand but he didn’t even know it was me.’

Patrick nodded. ‘Altered states,’ he said. ‘You know, there have been cases where people woke from comas with previously unknown skills. Thinking they’re Abraham Lincoln, or with an Italian accent. Things like that.’ He’d always found those accounts fascinating, but Lexi stared across the pub as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘I don’t care,’ she declared. ‘He was an arse anyway. Arse isn’t swearing, is it? I mean, it’s what he was.’

‘OK,’ he said, then remembered about working backwards and added, ‘Why? Was he an … arse?’

Lexi gave an exaggerated shrug and toyed with her glass.

Patrick noticed that the dorsal metacarpal arteries showed sky blue up the backs of her pale hands. He wondered whether she and her father would be identifiable as relatives if they were laid out side by side and peeled of skin. He knew that he himself had a strange twist to his thumbs that his mother had given him, and that when he shaved he could see his father’s mouth and eyes in the bathroom mirror like a ghost in the glass. How deep did such bonds go? Was it all about eyebrows and lips? Or were there veins and kidneys that had similar familial quirks?

‘He didn’t give a shit about me,’ said Lexi. ‘I fucking hated him.’

Then – before Patrick could ask her why – she put her glass down firmly and said, ‘You got a couch?’

Once she was on the couch, Lexi was impossible to dislodge. She watched
Hollyoaks
and
EastEnders
with Kim and Jackson, while Patrick went upstairs and cleaned another three squares of carpet.

When he came down at ten o’clock she was still there, watching something full of guns and noise, with the remote control in her hand.

Jackson and Kim cornered him in the kitchen.

‘She has to go!’ hissed Kim.

‘Kim’s right,’ hissed Jackson. ‘She has to go.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick, and started to make a peanut-butter sandwich while they both watched him.

Kim said, ‘
You
brought her here.
You
have to tell her!’

‘OK,’ he said, and cleaned up after himself. Then he put the sandwich on a plate that had a cartoon zebra in the middle and the alphabet around the outside. It was a child’s plate but the alphabet had always calmed him so he’d brought it with him from home and Kim had dubbed it ‘retro-hip’. He took it through to the living room, where Lexi had now spread herself down the length of the sofa.