Rubbernecker

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.

‘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.

There was a TV in the front room that Jackson had brought from home, and which he controlled jealously – even taking the remote to the toilet with him. So Patrick learned all about the Turner Prize and Hollyoaks, and had to go to the bookies over the road to see any horseracing.

Sometimes they had parties in the house – not him, but Jackson and Kim. At first they’d tried to involve him in the planning and the purchasing, but Patrick had no interest in parties and said he would stay in his room.

Jackson had narrowed his eyes suspiciously. ‘Don’t think you’re going to come downstairs in the middle of it and eat our food and drink our booze then.’

‘I don’t drink,’ said Patrick. ‘And I wouldn’t eat your food in case I got salmonella.’

‘No need to be rude,’ said Jackson.

‘I’m not,’ Patrick told him. ‘You always have meat juice on your shelf; it’s only a matter of time.’

‘Don’t come then,’ Jackson said petulantly.

‘OK,’ said Patrick. ‘Can I put the racing on?’

‘Absolutely not. Cruel sport.’

Patrick was alone on the planet, it seemed, in being without a mobile phone. He’d tried one once but he could actually feel his brain being fried, and still flinched whenever a phone went off nearby. But it did mean that he had what seemed to be exclusive use of the public phone outside the bookies, although he always wore a stolen pair of the bright blue gloves when he called his mother every Thursday night, in case of germs on the receiver. She’d insisted he call once a week and Patrick did, only so that if he died he would be missed before his body started to smell too badly.

‘Are you eating all right?’ was one of the first questions she always asked.

‘Yes,’ he’d say. ‘Monday I had toast and jam, then a cheese sandwich at lunch and pasta for dinner. Tuesday was the same but the sandwich was Marmite. Wednesday was the same but the sandwich was peanut butter. Thursday I ran out of peanut butter. And bread.’

‘Did you get some more?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t forget to eat.’

‘I won’t,’ he’d say, although sometimes he did.

Then, even though he never asked, she would tell him about the garden and the cat. It always went on for a lot longer than either of them deserved.

And then there were the silences. Patrick liked those bits of the conversation – the in-between bits that were so soothing and allowed him to think about things she wouldn’t understand: adjusting the derailleur on his bike because first gear was clipping the spokes; the way fat looked like greasy yellow clots of sweetcorn under the skin; and Custom Lodge and Quinzi, who had died at Wincanton on Wednesday night.

‘You are wearing your bike helmet, aren’t you, Patrick?’

He nodded, his head elsewhere.

‘Patrick?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are wearing your helmet, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I told you already.’

‘Sorry.’

The first death had been too quick, the second hidden from view behind screens, so neither had been useful to him.

‘Well,’ she’d say after a few more moments of silence. ‘Thanks for calling. You take care of yourself and work hard.’

‘OK.’

‘I love you, Patrick.’

‘OK.’

‘Goodbye until next week then.’

‘OK. Bye.’

Then he’d peel off the blue gloves and drop them in the bin on his way back to the house.

The click of disconnection always came so quickly after his last word that Sarah knew he was hanging up even as he said goodbye. Desperate to get away from her.

Could she blame him?

She often did.

Every week she thought of all the things she should ask him. But when Patrick wasn’t around it was all too easy to forget how hard it was to keep a conversation going. As soon as she heard his voice, all the questions she would have asked any normal son died in her mouth.

Are you having fun in the evenings?

Who’s your best mate?

Met any nice girls yet?

Patrick never had fun in the evenings. Not what most boys his age would call fun, anyway. He liked being on the Beacons, watching racing and collecting roadkill. The closest he had to a friend was Weird Nick next door, which said it all. And she could never imagine him even talking to girls, let alone allowing one to touch him or attempting a kiss. Asking Patrick those questions might not have upset him, but they would have upset her, because the answers would have reminded her of just how odd he still was – and possibly why.

And so every week they exchanged the same banalities and, instead of feeling relieved by them, his calls left her feeling guilty and resentful, even after all these years.

Or would it have been the same if Matt were still alive?

She’d never know now, she thought with a bitter dart. She stroked the cat too hard, so that it pushed off her lap with reproachful claws. It made Sarah think of trying to help three-year-old Patrick to unwrap a birthday gift – the way he’d squirmed away from her, and how she’d dug her fingers too deeply into his chubby little arm to keep him by her side.

But she’d lost him anyway.

And every Thursday she lost him again.

11

THE FLIRTING HAD worked. Now, whenever Mr Deal came to visit, he caught Tracy’s eye and gave a little smile – and she always made sure she was looking her best and being her kindest. It was quite an effort.

It was all a little strange, of course, because the flirting usually happened somewhere close to the bed where Mr Deal’s wife was lying comatose. Plus, it was not conventional flirting. Tracy had already resigned herself to the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to flash her boobs or slide her bottom provocatively against the front of Mr Deal’s trousers as he stood at the bar. No, this was secret flirting, using Mrs Deal as an unconscious conduit for their feelings.

‘I’ve been putting extra moisturizer on her hands. I notice they get very dry in here.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Her wedding ring is lovely. Did you choose it?’

‘We went together.’

‘That’s romantic,’ sighed Tracy. ‘Nobody’s romantic any more.’

Mr Deal just nodded, as if he didn’t have an opinion on romance one way or the other, so Tracy changed to a more professional tack.

‘Did you know that the doctor upped her morphine?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I noticed she was frowning a lot. We discussed it and thought it might mean she was in distress.’

Jean had noticed, actually; Tracy hadn’t noticed a thing.

‘Frowning?’

‘Yes. Like now. Look.’

‘Oh yes, I see.’

Mr Deal stared at his wife thoughtfully. ‘Does she ever say anything?’

‘Oh no,’ said Tracy. ‘But when they frown, it can be due to physical discomfort, so we turn her more often and we thought it best to increase the dosage. The doctor did, anyway.’

‘Which doctor?’

Tracy was irritated that Mr Deal wanted to know which doctor, when the point of her story was her own caring and observant nature, coupled with the life-or-death responsibility she bore as a nurse. She couldn’t show the irritation though; irritation was an unattractive trait and to be kept hidden until at least a few weeks into a sexual relationship, along with nagging, and farting in bed.

‘Oh, it begins with a B,’ she giggled. ‘There are so many doctors, and then there’s juniors and students too, and I’m new on this ward, so I haven’t learned them all yet.’

‘Where were you before?’

‘Paediatrics.’

‘Did you like that?’

Did she? What would he want to hear? Tracy could have kicked herself for not checking whether the Deals had children. Even then there was no right answer. If they had children, maybe he’d rather have someone who didn’t have baggage; if they didn’t, then maybe that was Mrs Deal’s fault, and he’d be keen to start a family with somebody new.

‘Oh yes,’ she enthused. ‘But I like this just as much in a different way.’ She hoped that covered both bases. He only nodded, which gave her no clue. But the next night, he brought a small box of chocolates and told her they were just for her. Sadly, they were truffles, but she was gushing in her thanks and promised to keep them a secret. She re-gifted them for her sister’s birthday that very weekend, but took heart from the fact that she and Mr Deal were making progress.

Unlike her patients.

The most annoying bad patient had died and everything was easier without his thrashing and crying. They were all very relieved, particularly Angie, whose crooked finger was the only sign now that he had ever been there.

Still, all Tracy seemed to do was put food and fluids in at one end of the patients and clean up at the other. They were less people than simple flesh tunnels for processing calories into shit. It repulsed her.

The few patients who could communicate were painfully slow at the process. Between all her other tasks, Tracy was often required to sit and interpret their weird stretched moans, or their long-winded attempts to spell out pointless messages on the little Possum spelling gadgets.

‘T… H. Is that an H? Or a G? Can you blink if it’s an H? Was that a blink or a twitch? Try to be accurate, OK? I’m going with H.’

T… H… God, it took for ever and they never said anything interesting. It didn’t help that one of the ward Possums was a bit dodgy and sometimes needed a good shake, or to be turned off and on again to avoid scrambling to gobbledegook.

While she waited for the patient to blink her way through the alphabet, Tracy’s eyes wandered to the TV on the opposite wall. It was Bargain Hunt and the blue team were considering a hideous green vase. Her mother had one just like it, and Tracy made a mental note to admire it next time she was home; maybe her mother would give it to her. When she looked back the patient had laboriously spelled out ‘T… H… I… R… S…’

Tracy smiled. ‘Thursday? Aw, bless! No, it’s Friday today, silly. TGIF! Off to Evolution tonight for a few drinks and a dance. Better get back to work now, though. No rest for the wicked.’

She put the Possum down beside the water jug, then went over to the nurses’ station and slumped in the swivel chair. The coma ward was boring yet difficult. Like golf.

Then Tracy sat up and dug about and found a hazelnut cluster in the lower layer of the latest Terry’s All Gold.

12

I SURGE UP from the depths of the well like a killer whale, with everything going from dark depths to bright white as I break the surface, and open my eyes on a pair of breasts encased in blue with white trim, almost touching my nose. Her enormous name tag says, ‘Tracy Evans, RN’.

She straightens up and looks at me and says, ‘Oh!’

Help me, Tracy! Someone killed the man in the next bed. But my ears hear only ‘Aaaaaaa waaaaa aaaaaaa,’ like an annoying sheep.

‘Oh,’ she says again, ‘you’re awake.’ Then she leans down close and looks into my eyes from about six inches away, so that I can see all the little flecks in her blue irises.

‘Are you?’ she says, suspiciously.

All I can do is blink slowly and hope she understands that I need to report a murder right now.

Instead she bustles away and I get so angry that I fall asleep…

I open my eyes again to find a woman old enough to be my mother, but who’s not my mother, weeping at my bedside. She wears blue gloves and a surgical mask. Her hair is greying and her eyes are red, and snot from her nose has made a dark patch on the front of the mask.

Why is she crying? Has something gone wrong?

For a horrible second I wonder if I’ve gone wrong.

‘Maaaaaa!’

She stops mid-sob and looks up, gasps, then chokes a bit. ‘Doctor!’ she croaks.

I flinch inside. A doctor is the last person I want to see, but what can I do? I have to show I’m awake and in one piece or they’ll let me just slip away…

My stomach rolls in fear as a set of blue scrubs walks into my vision and looks down at me over an armful of clipboards. He’s even younger than me.

‘You awake again, mate?’ he says – and this time I do cry with happiness – and relief – because that’s such a nice friendly thing to say; not sinister or frightening.

I hope I’m nodding, but either way he turns and calls across the ward. ‘Hello? Can we have some help?’

We. Can we have some help. I’m with him now; regardless of the scrubs, we’re on the same side.

Tracy Evans with the big blue boobs comes over and it’s all bustle bustle bustle with people pinching my fingernails, requests to say my own name, establishing one blink for yes and two for no – while the young doctor announces each positive like a poo in a potty.

‘Withdrawal from pain!… No comprehensible language, but that might come… Spontaneous eye opening. Very good!’

He makes a quick calculation, then tells the weeping woman that my Glasgow score is now ten. I have no idea what he means, but ten sounds pretty perfect to me. Then he gets all serious and lowers his voice – as if I can’t hear him.

‘But I need to warn you not to get your hopes up too high. He’s not out of the woods yet. This may be as good as it gets, or he may even regress. We know so little about emergence; it’s never straightforward, and he’s still incredibly vulnerable.’

The woman nods and catches her mascara on the back of her fingers, her optimism tempered.

My optimism is sky high! He may or may not be a killer, but the doctor is my new best friend. He gave me a ten, didn’t he? I feel like a traitor, but I’m so grateful to him that I don’t care about the man in the next bed. I’ll worry about him later.

Or maybe I won’t.

He’s dead and I’m not, and that’s all that matters right now.

When Tracy Evans and the doctor finally go away, the woman in the mask lays a rubber-gloved hand on my head.

‘I knew you were in there. I knew it!’ she says like a zealot.

Then she leans down and kisses me dryly through the blue paper mask. ‘I love you, darling.’

Well, thank you, I think. But who the hell are you?

13

PATRICK WAS DISAPPOINTED by the heart. He wasn’t expecting an on-off switch, but he’d hoped they’d find more than a mere pump made of meat and rubbery veins, and felt deceived by popular sentiment. So far people were almost as impenetrable on the inside as he’d always found them on the outside.

Other students had discovered scars and fused toes and numerous tattoos. Number 4 had one running around his ankle – Diane and Maria, 1966 – that had provoked much speculation. The only vaguely interesting thing so far about Number 19 had been a small puckered hole in his side.

‘Feeding tube,’ Dilip had said with confidence. ‘My grandmother had one before she died.’

‘He probably died in hospital then,’ said Rob. ‘Unless it’s old.’

Patrick had pushed his little finger carefully into the dark spot, and felt it travel easily through the skin and flesh. ‘It hasn’t healed.’

‘Fucking gross!’ Scott had laughed, and Spicer had given him a look that shut him up.

Now the hole had disappeared, along with most of the skin from the torso, and the body on the white table lay opened like a butterfly chicken in an Italian restaurant. In late October they had gone through the ribs with saws bearing the brand name TUFF®. They were tentative at first, but increasingly sweaty and workmanlike, with goggles to keep the bone dust and shreds of flesh from going in their eyes. They had allowed Scott to take the lead, and he’d proved as gleeful with a saw as Patrick was devoted to bagging and tagging every tiny fragment of Number 19 spat out by the metal teeth. Theirs was the cleanest dissection area in the whole room.

Table 22 became the first to establish a cause of death.

‘They could hardly miss it,’ said Scott sourly. ‘The guy’s heart is bigger than his head.’

Five others found signs of cardiac or vascular disease that enabled them to make similar diagnoses, and each was confirmed by Mick, who ticked them off his closely guarded list.

Patrick was not here for the cause of death, but he was still annoyed that they hadn’t got there first, and now put his money on a brain tumour. He imagined finding the pink lump nestled in the grey matter, like a pearl in an oyster.

Meg stared down at the still-wrapped head of the dead man, as if she were thinking the very same thing.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘in Thailand medical students bring flowers to their cadavers as a gesture of gratitude and respect.’

‘OK,’ said Rob. ‘You call Interflora, we’ll all chip in.’

‘I’m not chipping in,’ said Patrick quickly. He only had twenty pounds a week for groceries.

‘Duh,’ said Scott.

Rob hadn’t fainted since the first day, and now he dug the handle of a spoon under one thick cord running from the wrist up the forearm, and levered it up. The cadaver’s fingers curled in towards the palm. ‘Look at that!’

‘Flexor digitorum superficialis,’ said Patrick, without looking at Essential Clinical Anatomy, which lay open on the table behind him.

‘I think we should give him a name,’ said Meg.

‘Who?’ said Dilip.

‘Number 19.’

Patrick frowned. ‘It’s a corpse; it doesn’t have a name.’

‘Call him Stinky,’ said Scott. ‘He reeks.’

‘You reek,’ said Meg. ‘This whole place reeks.’

It did. The strange sweetness of the dissecting room hung in the air and clung to their very persons. Patrick could smell a classmate five places away in the cafeteria line; he could smell it on his own T-shirt when he pulled it over his head at night and when he opened his drawer to get clean clothes; he could still smell it on his own skin as he stepped out of the shower every morning, red from scrubbing.

‘Formaldehyde,’ said Dilip.

‘Nah,’ said Rob. ‘It’s glycerol, I think.’

‘It’s dead flowers over shit,’ Patrick informed them.

They all looked at him, then at each other – and screwed up their faces in fresh disgust.

Dilip said, ‘You’re right.’

Patrick didn’t answer obvious statements.

‘So Mr Shit it is then,’ said Scott.

‘No,’ said Meg firmly. ‘That’s horrible. Table 11 called their lady Faith. That’s nice. Something like that.’

Patrick sighed. He had solved the problem of the smell for them and wanted to move on. He pointed at a cord of pink muscle. ‘Palmaris longus.’

‘That’s a lousy name,’ said Scott, weaving his forceps between the muscles and tendons of the other forearm. ‘Even for a corpse.’

‘Cadaver,’ corrected Meg. Then, ‘It’s hard to think of a name without seeing his face.’

‘So look at his face,’ shrugged Dilip.

Meg didn’t move. She glanced around: nobody else had yet unwrapped their cadaver’s head. Dr Spicer was several tables away, talking to Dr Clarke.

Meg looked at the calluses on the palm of Number 19. Soon they’d be gone, along with the rest of the skin there. ‘Maybe he’s a builder.’

‘More like a boxer!’ said Scott, manipulating the tendons so that the hand curled into a fist.

‘Flexor digitorum profundis,’ Patrick pointed out.

Scott repeatedly raised and released the tendons.

‘Or a professional lemon squeezer,’ laughed Rob.

‘Ssh,’ said Meg softly.

‘Ssh yourself,’ said Scott and pulled the right tendons to make Number 19 give Meg the finger.

They all laughed, apart from Patrick, who had started to unwind the strips of cloth around the cadaver’s head.

‘What are you doing?’ said Meg sharply, although it was obvious, so he said nothing.

They watched in silence as the man’s head started to emerge, throat first – exposing a short, faded scar – then his chin, badly shaven.

‘Don’t,’ said Meg nervously.

‘OK,’ said Patrick, and stopped.

‘No, go on,’ said Scott, and Meg said nothing else, so he went on.

The man’s lips were parted over a slightly open mouth, as if the corpse was surprised by its sudden unveiling. The tips of the teeth were visible – reasonably white but a little uneven.

The nose was straight and short, with narrow nostrils and a few dark hairs.

Patrick felt suddenly nervous. He’d thought he’d started unwrapping the head of their cadaver because he’d wanted to put an end to the chatter and get on with the dissection. Now he wasn’t sure why he’d done it or what he wanted. He paused, the cotton strip draped over the bridge of the nose, feeling strangely shaky inside.

‘Tease!’ said Rob, and Dilip laughed.

‘Let’s see his eyes then,’ said Scott and leaned in to push the cloth aside. Patrick knocked his hand away. ‘Don’t!’

‘Hey, man, if I want to look at his eyes, I will! Don’t fucking hit me!’

Patrick hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t even realized he was going to until Scott’s hand had been right there over the man’s face.

‘Don’t fight. It’s not respectful,’ said Rob.

‘Neither is cutting his penis in two, but we did that last week,’ said Dilip mildly.

‘He hit me! You all saw it.’ Scott glared at Patrick. ‘Weirdo.’

Meg said, ‘Shut up, Scott,’ but Patrick ignored him. He’d been called worse.

Spicer was suddenly among them again.

‘Handbags at dawn?’ he joked.

None of them spoke and then Spicer noticed the partially exposed head. His smile disappeared in an instant.

‘Cover that up,’ he snapped.

Patrick started to wind the cloth slowly around the cadaver’s face again. The others looked at each other uncomfortably.

‘It was my idea, Dr Spicer,’ said Meg. ‘I wanted to see his face so we could give him a name.’

‘The ID is on the tags. That’s all. And you will proceed with this dissection in the correct order and at the proper pace, under my direction, do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Meg, and the others nodded. Except for Patrick.

‘What’s the difference?’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘If we see his face now or later?’ Patrick shrugged.

‘What’s your name again?’

‘Patrick Fort.’

‘Right,’ said Spicer angrily, and walked out of the room.

The others watched him until he disappeared.

‘Jesus,’ said Rob. ‘That’s not like him to go off on one.’

Patrick said nothing. He carefully slid his scalpel under what he thought was either the pronator teres or the flexor carpi.

‘You think we’re in trouble?’ said Dilip.

‘No, I think he’s in trouble,’ said Scott, and jabbed a finger at Patrick. ‘You ever touch me again, I’ll take your fucking head off.’

‘Oh, don’t be a melodramatic twat,’ snorted Rob.

Scott slapped his book shut and walked out, ripping off his gloves as he went.

‘Too late,’ said Meg quietly, and Rob and Dilip laughed.

‘Pronator teres,’ Patrick concluded.

It was six o’clock and already close to dark when Patrick unlocked his bike from the railings on the ramp outside the dissecting room. Students hurried past in the slow October drizzle, unaware that they were a slim brick wall away from thirty bloated bodies that looked as though bombs had gone off in their chest cavities.

As he wheeled his bike on to Park Place, Meg fell in beside him.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Scott’s not bad really. I think you just gave him a fright.’

Patrick was puzzled. Why was she walking with him? Why was she saying anything to him? Maybe she was just talking for her, not for him – the way his mother did.

His silence was no deterrent.

‘So, why don’t you want to be a doctor?’

Patrick had often noticed that the less he said, the more people wanted him to speak. But he had no idea what she wanted him to say. Meg wasn’t his mother or the med school interviewing panel, so why was she interested in what he did or did not do?

‘I’m just curious,’ she said, as if she had read his mind. ‘I mean, you’re clever enough, so why not?’

She kept asking; he was going to have to answer her.

‘Not interested,’ he said.

‘Not interested in what?’

Patrick was taken aback that she had a follow-up question – and so fast!

‘What aren’t you interested in?’ said Meg, as if he hadn’t understood her the first time.

‘In making people better,’ he said, and put a foot in his toeclip to show he was finished talking.

Meg wasn’t finished. ‘So what’s the point of just doing anatomy?’

She frowned and Patrick thought she was angry but wasn’t sure. He’d never been able to understand what people meant just from their faces. It was hard enough guessing from their words. She obviously wasn’t going to leave him alone until he answered, so finally he did.

‘I want to see what makes people work,’ he said.

Meg wrinkled her forehead some more. ‘But you don’t want to fix them or help them work better?’

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But you have such a great bedside manner.’

‘No I don’t,’ Patrick said, and then saw she was grinning. ‘Oh, you’re joking.’

‘You’re allowed to laugh.’

‘Maybe later,’ he said.

‘There’s a party tonight. You want to come?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on. You’ll have fun.’

‘I won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know I don’t like parties.’

‘What do you like then?’

He stopped talking and looked up the street to the traffic lights, wishing he was already there and that she was behind him.

‘Do you like anything?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like some things.’

‘Name your top five.’

He said nothing. He couldn’t. He only had three.

Meg sighed theatrically, then held an invisible microphone under his nose. ‘How does it feel to be a man of mystery?’

Patrick stared blankly at her fist. ‘I don’t know.’

She smiled. ‘If you change your mind, here’s my number.’

She took out a pen and lowered it towards his knuckles, so he tucked his hands into his pockets so she couldn’t write on his skin.

She went red. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s 07734113117.’

‘OK.’

She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘See you at Number 19, Patrick.’

‘OK,’ he said, and swung his leg over the crossbar.

As he rode home he replayed the conversation in his head. It was the longest one he’d had with a stranger in ages. Now he tried to analyse it, the way his mother always nagged him to.

People say things for a reason, Patrick. If you listen carefully, you’ll understand not only what they’re saying, but why.

But while people were talking, he was always so busy wishing they would leave him alone that he found it difficult to think his own thoughts, let alone decipher theirs. Patrick didn’t know what more he could have told Meg. Animals and photographs were two of the things he liked – and he didn’t have to say why. But if he’d told her two things, she might have asked about the third – and the third was secret.

The third was his quest.

Patrick was not a liar by nature, but he had lied to Meg, just as he had lied to his mother and to the admissions interview panel.

He didn’t care what made people work.

He was only interested in what happened when they stopped…

14

WHAT HAVE I done to deserve this? It seems like a logical question but the holes in my memory make it a pointless one too, because the answer is I don’t know.

I keep looking for clues, but until I come up with something that justifies what’s happening to me, I can’t help feeling pretty short-changed in the karma stakes.

There’s a photo next to my bed. I don’t know the people in it and it hurts my eyes to keep them swivelled to the left for that long, so unless I’m on my left side, I only see it in snatches. A middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman. The man looks a bit like my father, but the woman is not my mother, that’s for sure, even though she acts like it when she comes to visit me every day – stroking my hand, kissing my hair, massaging my feet the way the therapist told her to, and arranging bluebells and anemones in a jug she brought with her. I think I recognize the jug, but from where?

I don’t know. Again.

The woman who’s not my mother has stopped wearing the surgical mask, but she still wears the blue gloves.

‘Apparently you can get the most dreadful infections if you don’t take precautions,’ she tells me conspiratorially. ‘Upset tummy, you know.’

Sure I know, I think, and shit into my nappy some more, which makes her nose wrinkle. I don’t care. It annoys me that she is here and Alice and Lexi are not. Why don’t they come? It makes me sad – but also angry and suspicious. I hope they’re all right, of course, but if they are then what would keep them from coming to see me?

Maybe they’ve been lied to. Maybe they’ve been told I’m already dead, and are even now getting over me, while I am here, hidden away, waiting for a fate that someone has designed especially for me. Sometimes I even wonder about the crash. Did I really hit ice while fiddling with the radio? Or did somebody run me off the road? Did somebody plan all this, to get me here, away from the people I love, where I can be experimented on – murdered! – without anybody knowing, anybody caring? It happened to the man in the next bed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just next in line.

Or maybe they don’t come because of the same elusive reason why Alice has sad eyes. That fear is so great that sometimes it makes me cry, which is my only outlet for any emotion.

The nurses make up their own reasons for my tears. I’m crying for my old life is their favourite. They mean well, I suppose, but I still hate them for not bothering to understand.

When my eyes are open, I try to watch everything – not just the top of the TV. When I’m on my back, I can only see the top third of the screen anyway before my own cheeks get in the way, and that has to be the worst third of all. The top of Bargain Hunt is all squinting through jewellers’ glasses at unseen treasures; the top of the rugby is only the stands and the occasional up-and-under, and the top of Top Gear is basically Jeremy Clarkson’s head.

Every other day they turn me from my back on to one of my sides. On my left side I get a much better view of the ward. I watch the nurses eating chocolates at the station outside the door, and Tracy Evans making eyes at that tall, well-dressed man who comes in at night to ignore his wife. I follow the cleaner halfway round the room with my eyes. He’s slow as treacle and misses loads, but the floor is still smooth and shiny enough to make me want to skid about it in my socks. I can see the fancy little white stereo I’m attached to by white wires. There are maybe fifty tracks that I used to love, and it takes about three hours to run through them. And start again. Three hours into twenty-four is eight. I listen to each track eight times every twenty-four hours, fifty-six times every week, two hundred and twenty-four times a month, until I feel I’m going mad.

When they turn me the other way – towards the window – I can’t see anything but sky and wall, and it makes me so frightened I shake.

He’s still incredibly vulnerable.

The doctor’s words run through my head on a loop. Incredibly vulnerable. That’s how I feel every second I spend on my right side. With my back to the room, the world sneaks around behind me. Anything could happen. A mad axeman could be slaughtering the other patients; a wolf might slink into the room and pad silently towards me; a nurse could inject something into my saline drip: insulin, or rat poison, and I would never know. Not until the agony started.

Incredibly vulnerable.

I stare at the wall and long for Jeremy Clarkson’s repulsive head.

The only good thing about the right side is seeing the sky. Summer must be coming, and I count the days when the sky is blue instead of grey or white, or spitting rain. Once I get to three. Three whole days of blue! People at work would be making crap jokes about it by now. Hot enough for you? They’ll be banning hosepipes next. Did you enjoy the summer?

Yeah, this is one hell of a summer – lying in my own shit, aching with stillness, fed through a cold tube in my side.

Sometimes Tracy Evans brings me a little alphabet screen called a Possum, so that I can write a novel. Ha ha – it takes me a week of blinking in time to her random pointing to ask her to turn off the fucking music. Then I feel bad because I should have been using that energy to tell her to call 999 and report a suspicious death, but now I’m exhausted, and she’s gone all tight-lipped.

At least she turned the music off. And now that the babbling, crying man has been murdered, there’s often a soft and wonderful silence like big powder puffs over my ears, so I can think of anything that floats into my head. Like the time Alice bought that slinky little green dress for the works Christmas party, and how I got a payrise a month later that she always claimed was hers. Or Lexi’s fourth birthday party, when Cerys Jones from next door wet herself so badly during pass-the-parcel that three other kids had to go home in borrowed knickers. I remember bringing Patch home – so tiny that Lexi thought he was a hamster, and the time she ran inside shouting that there was a toucan in the garden, which turned out to be a magpie holding a cream cracker. The stuffy ward recedes for hours as I think of the Gower wind in my hair; laughing until we cried, and the pink kite’s farewell tug.

I don’t like Tracy Evans, but I get used to her and the other nurses, and to the therapist, Leslie, who tortures me grimly. The doctors don’t have name tags and I hardly see the same one twice, so it’s hard to keep track, but the nurses all have tags – as if they’re domestic pets. Jean, Tracy and Angie. Fido, Rover and Tiddles. There are others, but not every day.

Jean is the best of them. Older, and thin and wrinkled with work. Angie is the shy, pretty one, who has two of her fingers taped from some old injury, but who never uses it as an excuse. Tracy is the worst. She cares – but only when the doctors are around. When they’re not, she’s lazy and slack. She never wipes the inside of my sticky mouth with water – even when I stare constantly at the jug. She does her nails at the nurses’ station while call buttons buzz. She hides the chocolates they keep there. I see her. I know her. At school we had half a dozen Tracys every year – loud, orange, stupid. Flirts and bullies.

You got a girlfriend, sir? Is she pretty, sir? My friend fancies you, sir.

Then they were just a mild irritation.

Now a Tracy holds my life in her hands.

15

MEG STILL HADN’T named their body, although several other groups had. Number 4 was Rufus, due to his red chest hair; Number 7 – the cadaver whose leg Patrick had touched on the first day – was called Dolly, because of her residual pink nail polish; and Number 2 had been christened Woody for his post-mortem tumescence.

‘There’s always a Woody,’ Spicer told them with a rolling eye. He seemed to have forgotten Patrick’s transgression and had reverted to his usual good humour.

The students had slowly become more casual about their work. The dissecting room was no longer nervously silent, but more like a factory where they all worked on a strange disassembly line.

There was also an air of competition now – to see who could make the finest incision, the most efficient dissection of the foot, the fastest removal of a hand. Every time they came into the lab, there was still a low buzz of anticipation about cause of death. Now and then, Mick – the cadaverous lab technician – emerged from his glass box of an office to taunt them about it. At least, that’s what it felt like, as he walked among them like the Grim Reaper, raising a bushy eyebrow here, tutting quietly there. He carried with him a sheet on a clipboard, and every time someone established a cause of death, he was openly disappointed – as if a secret that had once been his alone was diminished by being shared.

Table 22 had opened the floodgates. It seemed that suddenly everyone was finding tumours and clots and fluid-filled lungs. Cancers and blocked arteries were the order of the day.

‘Had a suicide once,’ Mick said suddenly one day as he stared down at Number 19. His eyes took on the misty look of a man remembering a romantic beach holiday.

‘Hanging. Neck wasn’t broken though, so we accepted the donation. Just some bruising and blood in the eyes.’

He sighed as if to say, Those were the days.

‘Was it a woman?’ said Patrick.

‘Yes.’

‘Is that why the neck wasn’t broken?’

Mick nodded and looked at Patrick as if seeing him for the first time. ‘She only weighed eighty-two pounds. So she strangled really.’

Meg grimaced. ‘Poor girl.’

Mick shrugged. ‘There are worse things than dying.’

‘Really?’ said Meg.

‘Of course,’ said the tech. ‘Living badly.’

Patrick didn’t actually care what their cadaver had died of, but he hated to give up on any puzzle. He’d always been that way – always insisted on working things through to their logical conclusion. He hated having help in these endeavours, and was as bent on solving the mystery of Number 19 as he had been about debunking the amateur magician at a school fête.

I can see the rabbit’s ears sticking out!

Shut up, boyo.

Every time another organ was given the all-clear, Patrick’s frustration grew. He dropped the perfect liver into a plastic bag, pulled the zip-tie tight with a loud buzz, and slung it under the table to join the rest of Number 19’s innards.

Spicer winked at him. ‘It’s only a bit of fun,’ he said.

Patrick frowned. He didn’t answer pointless statements.

Turning Number 19 over was a messy business, with bits of him falling out of the chest cavity and on to the floor. At one point Patrick got his left hand caught in the sharp remains of the ribs, and almost panicked at the thought that the bone might tear his rubber glove and pierce his own skin the way they’d been invading the corpse’s flesh for the past three months.

Payback.

He gritted his teeth and breathed hard and it didn’t happen, and he was proud of himself for getting through the moment. He pulled his hands free quickly, though, and immediately scraped all the bits off the floor and into a clear plastic bag with yet another black zip-tie and yet another flat metal numbered tag. Patrick always cleaned up so diligently that he had used more than double the number of bags and tags of his nearest rivals. Mick had had to order more Number 19 tags specially. He had told Patrick this with a look on his face that Patrick felt sure must be approval for a job well done.

Months of lying prone without the benefit of circulation had left the body flattened on the bottom like a bag of sand. Now inverted, the buttocks remained oddly two-dimensional.

Rob started on the dissection, making long, assured incisions that showed how much they’d all learned.

‘It’s my birthday on Saturday,’ said Meg. ‘You’re all invited.’

‘Ace,’ said Scott.

‘Thanks,’ said Rob.

‘Cheers,’ said Dilip.

‘Coming, Patrick?’ Meg asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Again.’

He had told Meg his feelings on parties before and thought she must have a very poor memory. He wondered how she was going to pass her exams with a memory like that. Dr Spicer had an endless supply of mnemonics – most of them dirty – to help stupid people. The bones of the wrist were the Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate and Hamate. Spicer’s aide was ‘Slowly lower Tilly’s panties to the curly hairs.’ Scott had laughed long and hard, and kept repeating it, until Rob had told him to shut up. There were others much dirtier – especially between the forearm and the fingers, with all those flexors in between – but Patrick only found them confusing.

16

‘AH AH AH ah ah ah,’ in a deep voice.

‘Ee ee ee ee ee ee,’ in a squeaky one.

This is what I’m reduced to. Ee-ing and Ah-ing like a crazed Northern mule, tended by strangers. It’s not how I planned my life.

Leslie the therapist makes me do it. He’s a thin, taciturn Scotsman without discernible humour, but with a grim determination to train my tongue as if it were a contender for the Olympic one hundred metres. Of course, he manhandles me too. Hangs me from the cross and pulls my legs. Pushes my head and holds it there, like a sadistic barber. Rolls tennis balls down my arms and tosses sudden bean bags at me, saying, ‘Catch!’ They flop on my chest or tumble off my legs on to the floor, and he just shrugs and picks them up and says, ‘Better luck next time.’

But really, he’s the tonguemeister.

Talking and eating are his goals in life – for me, anyway; I’m not sure he does much of either himself. Every few days he comes in and makes me stick my tongue out and waggle it, or puff up my cheeks, or blow through a straw, or struggle through an endless rota of farmyard noises.

‘Aug!’ as in August. ‘Guh!’ as in gun. I try so hard I fart, but he doesn’t laugh.

What kind of man doesn’t laugh at a fart?

‘Ah ah ah—’

‘Deeper,’ he says.

‘Ah ah ah—’

‘Deeper. Dig down for it.’

‘Ho ho ho,’ I try for a joke. Dig. Hoe. You know.

But he just glances up from twisting my fingers and frowns. ‘Not ho. Ah.’

Nobody gets a joke. Must be the way I tell ’em.

The bluer the sky gets, the harder I work. Nothing means more to me now than being able to talk and to eat. There are words I need to speak; questions I need answered. If my tongue works, then I have a future beyond the infuriating Possum screens and the coded blinks and the taste-free food, so I devote my half-life to its recovery. Even when Leslie’s not here, I practise the exercises he gives me over and over and over, pursing my lips, straining my jaw. The nurses have stopped being impressed by me sticking my tongue out at them, although Angie will still sometimes stick hers out in return as she passes with a bedpan, or pushing a drip. Other patients’ visitors see me gurning and grunting and avert their eyes.

I like the exercises. They exhaust me and so I sleep better. And when the doctors poke and prod me, or bring their baby-faced students to stand in a horseshoe around my bed and stare at the horror life can hold, I suck and blow like a whale in labour, to take my mind off the reason I am here and the people I have lost.

To take my mind off murder.

Christmas was coming, and someone hung the head of a laughing plastic Santa on the dissection room door, and his severed limbs around the room.

‘Idiots,’ said Rob.

‘Yes,’ said Patrick. ‘They didn’t put the tags on. How is anyone supposed to know they all belong together?’

Meg gave each of them a card with glitter on it. Number 19 gave them nothing but an empty stomach, full bowels and perspiration.

For the last week of term they worked on the back like navvies – stripping away the layers of muscle like old wallpaper, scoring either side of the vertebral column using handsaws, and finally breaking through to the shining river of the spinal column with hammers and chisels.

Patrick wiped sweat from his brow with the crook of his elbow and thought, How can a human being die so easily when they’re so hard to break?

17

PATRICK MADE THE long ride home to the cottage outside Brecon that stood with a handful of others in a place too small for a name of its own. It was forty-five miles and rained all the uphill way, but it still felt good to be going somewhere real on his bike instead of making pointless circuits of the city.

December soon slid from sleet to bitter snow, but Patrick went out most days anyway. He preferred it to staying in the cottage with his mother.

Sometimes he went next door to Weird Nick’s and they played Grand Theft Auto. Mostly he headed off alone across the Beacons, following the narrow impressions that marked sheep trails under the snow. Sometimes he went as far as Penyfan’s flat peak. His favourite days were those where the sky was almost as white as the hillsides, so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. In that dreamscape Patrick’s world narrowed to the exchange of warm air for cold in his nostrils, the crunch of crystals under his hiking boots, and the sting of his fingers and ear-tips. With a kind of nostalgia, he thought of all the dead things that would be revealed by the thaw. He didn’t need them any more; he had something much better now.

Once he stood aside to let a small band of soldiers jog past him, laden with packs that would have bent donkeys.

‘Lost?’ said the last man, without stopping.

‘No,’ said Patrick. He had never been lost on the Beacons, and never expected to be. The soldiers jogged on and Patrick watched them until they disappeared over a rise and left him alone in his white world.

When he was in the house, Patrick spent most of his time in his room. When the TV reception wavered – as it often did up here in the mountains – Patrick cycled the five miles to Brecon, carving a deep scar in the snow behind him.

The bookies put memories into his head that he’d rather weren’t there, but he didn’t want to miss anything. Every time he wheeled his bicycle into the shop, he glanced under the counter. He knew the Labrador must be long dead, but he couldn’t help himself. The same men were here though. Ten years older; fatter, greyer, poorer – just the way his father might have been. The Milky Way man always said hello, and Patrick always said hello back. That was all. He never joined in their coarse, friendly banter and never bet on anything, even when the woman behind the counter winked at him and called him ‘Big Spender’. Patrick was no fool: the lino at the Bet window was worn through to the concrete, while at Payout it was as clean and shiny as the day it had been laid.

So he just sat down with his black notebook on his lap and watched, and waited for a glimpse of death.

Mr Deal kissed Tracy Evans. It was supposed to be a thank-you-for-looking-after-my-wife kiss, but his hand lingered on her arm and his lips on her cheek just long enough for her to know that it was actually an are-you-up-for-it? kiss.

While Tracy barely had the interest or patience to interpret even the letters of the alphabet for her locked-in patients, every fibre of her being was minutely attuned to any hint of sexual intent, and it was all she could do to stop herself from grabbing Mr Deal’s crotch to let him know she was, indeed, up for it. That was for the clubs, and this was work, so she had to be smarter than that. So instead she asked him what aftershave he was wearing, and when he said ‘None’ – as she’d known he would – she fluttered her lashes and said, ‘Oh, you smell like Armani,’ even though she’d never smelled real Armani, only the knock-off stuff she used to buy at Splott market for Father’s Day.

It was just the start. Flattery was everything with men. Nice cars, large biceps, money and – of course – big cocks. Those were the things you had to play to – had to admire – if you wanted them to remember you, to choose you. Tracy didn’t know whether Mrs Deal had captured her husband that way, but she was certainly in no position to keep him that way.

Now that she had leaned into Mr Deal’s kiss and started the seduction of flattery, Tracy knew that – finally – she had the edge on the woman in the hospital bed who was slowly twisting towards oblivion.

Sarah apologized for a chicken instead of a turkey.

‘As there’s just the two of us,’ she explained, in case he’d neglected to notice that his father was dead.

Again.

At least chicken meant they could have trifle for afters without Patrick getting all alphabetical on her.

She gave him a book about the Cheltenham Gold Cup. He gave her nothing; he had no concept that giving might be reciprocal.

As they ate, Sarah asked Patrick how his studies were going and, to her surprise, he told her – haltingly at first, but then warming to his subject. He told her how difficult it was to scrape fat off muscle, of the way blood turned black and granular in embalmed arteries, and how some stomachs gave up gems such as the smooth, diminished carrot found in Number 11 or the gritty pips in Number 25 that turned out to be grape seeds.

‘There was nothing in ours,’ he added a little wistfully.

She tried not to listen, and wanted a drink. Christmas was always difficult. Christmas and New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day and Easter, and her birthday and Matt’s birthday and their anniversary. Saturday nights and all day Sunday. Days with a Y in them.

It had started when Patrick was three. Her parents hardly drank – just a sherry on special occasions. If her father had a whisky, her mother started to mutter. So at first a glass of vodka and orange at critical moments had made Sarah feel independent and in control. By the time Patrick was five, she’d dispensed with the orange juice. By the time he was six, she didn’t even need the glass. But after Matt had… died, she’d stopped. Just like that. People said it was easier that way, but she couldn’t imagine it being any harder.

Now she watched her son talk – his meticulous hands describing his work of the past three months, his eyes focused on the remains of the chicken. She thought of its cold, pimpled skin, and of how she’d slid her own hand into its cavity this morning and withdrawn the giblets in a juicy plastic bag. Her stomach felt uneasy and she burped quietly – and was punished by tasting the dead bird again.

When she became aware of his words once more, Patrick was explaining how Dilip had pierced the bowels, and how the smell seemed to be the most recognizably human thing they had yet found in the stiffened cadaver.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Patrick!’ Sarah slapped the table, making the knives shiver. ‘We’re eating!’

‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’ve finished.’

Sarah wanted to smack him. She could almost taste the vodka.

She stood up and banged the table again, less successfully this time – sending a fork clattering to the floor.

‘It’s not all about you. Dinner’s not over, so we’re still eating, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘And another thing. When someone gives you a present, the least you could do is say thank you! I don’t expect anything in return from you, Patrick, but I do expect manners.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

It wasn’t enough. ‘You’re just so selfish. All you ever do is take, take, take!’ She glared at him as if demanding an epiphany.

None came. He picked the fork up off the floor and placed it back on her plate, nudging it repeatedly until it was parallel with her knife.

Sarah gave up. What was the point? Nothing ever changed. Nothing ever would.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

He looked at the fridge. ‘What’s for pudding?’

She sighed. That was the thing about Patrick – he didn’t understand the sacrifices she made, but he also didn’t understand the anger and the resentment. It was good in a way, she supposed; maybe for both of them.

‘Trifle,’ she said, and cleared the table while he read his book. He only looked up when she put the bowl in front of him and sat down.

‘So,’ she started again over the hundreds and thousands, ‘this Scott and Meg and…?’

‘And what?’

‘Who are the other students you work with?’

‘Oh. Rob and Dilip.’

‘And Rob and Dilip. Are they your friends?’

‘Yes,’ he said through a mouthful of custard.

Sarah was glad she’d asked. This was new. Patrick had never openly acknowledged friends before – either his or those of other people – and it gave her that most resilient of emotions: hope.

Carefully she asked, ‘What’s Meg like?’

‘Nervous with a scalpel.’

‘I mean as a person.’

Patrick frowned hard and finally managed, ‘Sentimental.’

‘About what?’

‘She wants to give it a name.’

‘Give what a name?’

‘The cadaver.’

‘Oh,’ said Sarah, surprised they hadn’t done that on the very first day. ‘Is she pretty?’

‘It’s a man.’

‘No, I mean is Meg pretty?’

Patrick screwed up his face again and looked as if she’d asked him to summarize string theory.

‘I don’t know,’ he finally managed.

She swallowed the urge to snap at him and said brightly, ‘Well, it’s nice to hear you have friends. What do you do when you all get together? Go to parties? Or to the pub?’

Patrick shrugged and ran a finger around his bowl to capture all lingering traces of raspberry jelly.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We just cut up the dead guy.’

18

WHARE IS MY wofe?

Tracy Evans is an idiot. God knows how she passed her nursing exams, but she has the literacy skills and attention span of a toddler on Tartrazine. How can she mistake ‘wife’ for ‘wofe’? What’s a wofe when it’s at home?

She stares at the little screen and moves her lips almost silently. ‘Whare… Ismy…’ Then she makes an unhappy face. ‘What’s a wofe?’

Exactly.

‘Do you mean wife?’

I blink.

‘Oh. She’ll be in later.’

She says it breezily, as though my wofe comes to see me all the time, but my heart just about jumps out of my chest with excitement. Alice is coming! Alice is coming to see me! Will she bring Lexi? It’s been so long! At least, it feels so long! I hope Lexi isn’t wearing make-up or anything tacky. Kids start so young nowadays – and change so fast. Has she changed? Has Alice?

Have I?

I blink rapidly to get Tracy Evans’s attention and spell out MIROR. Except I do it with two Rs and she ignores one of them.

‘You want a mirror?’ she says.

Sarcasm is so hard to do in blinks, so I play it straight.

She disappears. While I wait, I watch two nurses lift the woman opposite on to a special bed that can be tilted upright. I know now that Jesus on the cross in his pj’s was just another patient. God knows what else I hallucinated back then! I’ve been on the tilt table myself now, and it’s like a very low-grade funfair ride – the kind you could put a small child on without fear they’d be hurt. The ride my heart’s on now is far more exciting. A rollercoaster of hope and fear and anticipation. I’ll probably need a shave. Alice says facial hair makes everyone look shifty, and Lexi says it scratches when I kiss her goodnight.

Tracy Evans comes back with a mirror.

‘There,’ she says, and holds it so badly that I can only see a shaky image of half my face.

It’s enough. My stomach cramps with horror.

That’s not me. That’s not me!

The face in the mirror is of a much older man. Ten or twenty years older! I am the man in the photo beside my bed.

That’s impossible. I’m not old! I’m thirty-five and Alice is thirty-three and Lexi is twelve and Patch is seven and the goldfish – well, they’re rolling stock – but I know how old I am. I know I haven’t been asleep that long. I’m sure of it. The woman who smells of rubber said I had been in a coma for two months. Not two decades.

This is impossible.

The shaky old man blurs as my eyes overflow, and I blink like a stutterer.

‘All right?’ says Tracy cheerfully.

Yes. No. I don’t know. Call the police! Call the police! Someone has stolen great lumps of my life, and I feel the shock of its loss like an amputee.

Tracy lowers the mirror. ‘You get some sleep now,’ she says, ‘and she’ll be in later.’

I want to howl. I want to howl and scream and pound my fists on to tables and smash someone in the face. What’s happened to me? Someone must be to blame. Someone has to take responsibility. This is wrong. This is all wrong. I’ve been changed; I’ve been cheated, and nobody seems to understand or to care.

In my head I’m a vengeful dervish, an angry Hulk; Godzilla tearing down civilization.

In reality I lie there like meat.

‘Aaaaaaa! Aaaaaaa! Aaaaaaa!’ That’s not the sound of me crying, because I am not me.

And I don’t know where I’ve gone.

19

IT WAS A cold January, and the light in the dissecting room was flat and grey when they finally exposed the face of Number 19.

Hips and knuckles and stomachs were only 3D versions of Essential Clinical Anatomy. Once they’d overcome their natural aversion to cutting into a human being, those things were routine, even boring. But this was very different, and there was a long silence while they looked at the face of the person whose body they knew more intimately than a mother or a lover ever had.

He was the middle-aged man they’d long expected. Mick had shaved his head before embalming, but his straight nose had greying hairs in it, and his crows’ feet were deep enough to have survived the swell of formalin and glycerol.

Patrick noticed with relief that his eyes were closed – and that Scott made no attempt to open them. He also noticed that Meg’s lower lip trembled, and he watched with interest the way it pulled her chin out of shape.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Shut up.’

‘There are tears in your eyes,’ he said.

‘Shut up, Patrick,’ said Rob firmly.

Patrick glanced around the table and realized that everyone felt something that he didn’t. The students looked… angry? No, that wasn’t right.

He suddenly thought of his father’s face on the day Persian Punch had died, and his heart jolted at the sudden connection. Sad! The other students looked sad. Even Dr Spicer was pale and uncharacteristically quiet, and – for the first time he could ever remember – Patrick thought he knew the feelings of strangers. He was sure he was right. The excitement almost overwhelmed him. All he wanted to do was to drink in the clues on their faces so that he would know Sad if he ever saw it again.

‘He looks like a Bill,’ said Meg, adding snot to the sleeve of her paper coat, which was already disgusting with yellow fat and brick-brown blood.

‘Yeah, he does,’ said Scott, and was rewarded with a tiny smile from her.

Spicer stood at the head with his scalpel, and they joined him there with more than a touch of what felt like first-day nerves. Nobody looked as if they wanted to start. For all the incisions they’d made so far, there was something quite different about slicing into the throat with the face exposed; something executional.

Spicer was about to make the first cut, then changed his mind.

‘Patrick can do the honours, I think.’

The others sighed with relief and glanced at each other. If this was Patrick’s punishment for his previous infraction, they were in full support.

As Patrick took the scalpel from Spicer he noticed a slight tremble in the man’s hand, and wondered if he was a drinker. Lots of doctors were, he’d heard – although his mother was a shop assistant.

He followed Spicer’s finger to the starting place below the hyoid bone, and traced a murderous line across the throat, and then slid the blade boldly over the bumpy thyroid cartilage, through the old pale scar, down to the base of the neck.

‘Well done, mate,’ said Rob and patted him on the back. The touch was over before Patrick could flinch.

Under Spicer’s guidance they all took turns at cutting and cleaning and scraping, peeling back flat layers of neck muscle until Bill’s throat was spread about him like the flaps of a startled basilisk.

‘There’s something in the oesophagus,’ said Dilip, and they all watched as he sliced and clipped back a six-inch gash in the tube of muscle. The pink membranes inside were thickly freckled with dark fragments.

‘Pharyngeal debris is quite common,’ said Spicer. ‘Usually it’s blood or vomit. Just clean it up using the swabs.’

‘Is it relevant to the cause of death?’ said Scott.

‘Might be.’

‘Ace,’ said Scott. ‘So he might have choked or had internal bleeding or something?’

Spicer smiled faintly; he was giving nothing away. Patrick hoped it was not the case; he was trying to be faithful to his pearl of a tumour.

Meg started to wipe away the debris to reveal the multiple folds of the throat. Unlike the flesh, which was made strangely orange by the embalming fluids, the membranes and organs remained pink and lifelike.

There were several nicks and cuts in the soft palate and back of the throat where Patrick could see Dilip had been clumsy with the scalpel, and a fragment of blue latex made him check his gloves feverishly. They were not infallible – especially around the sharp edges of ribs and teeth. Patrick was relieved to find his intact on this occasion, but he peeled them off and got a new pair anyway.

When he returned, Meg had finished clearing the throat, which was gleaming and alien. The root of the tongue was lumpy with tastebuds and larger papillae.

‘What’s that?’ said Patrick.

‘What’s what?’ said Meg.

Patrick was so focused that he brushed against her shoulder without even noticing, as he leaned in and touched a particularly large, discoloured lump. It moved a little, so he plucked it out with his forceps and held it up to the light.

‘What’s that?’ said Dilip.

‘You pulled his tonsils out, idiot!’ said Scott.

‘No I didn’t. It wasn’t attached.’

Patrick turned the lump slightly in the afternoon light. It was pale tan and about half the size of his smallest fingernail, domed on one side, flat on the other, with a single groove running down its length.

‘You think it’s a tumour?’ said Meg, looking as concerned as if the corpse would have to be told the bad news.

‘Looks more like a cyst,’ said Scott.

‘Or a nodule,’ helped Rob. ‘You get them on the vocal cords.’

‘It’s a peanut,’ said Patrick.

They all laughed, even though he was serious.

Dr Spicer came over and confirmed Patrick’s diagnosis. ‘Probably brought up from the stomach with the rest of the debris.’

‘There was nothing in the stomach,’ Patrick reminded him.

‘Maybe that’s why,’ said Rob.

‘I bet he choked on it,’ Scott insisted.

‘It’s too small, isn’t it?’ said Dilip. ‘Something that size couldn’t block the airway. It would just be sucked into the lungs, wouldn’t it?’

‘What are the post-mortem symptoms of choking?’ said Spicer.

‘Blood in the eyes?’ said Meg.

Scott leaned over the face and Patrick looked away as he checked the sunken eyes.

‘Nada,’ said Scott. ‘Shit. I give up. I’m asking Mick.’

He walked away and Patrick dropped the peanut into a fresh bag.

‘I don’t really think that’s necessary,’ laughed Spicer.

‘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,’ said Patrick, and Spicer looked stunned to hear himself quoted verbatim.

‘Are you being funny?’ he said carefully.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Patrick, and fastened the bag, tagged it, and then put it under the dissection table along with Bill’s left arm, both feet, and that day’s skin and fat. Spicer shook his head and turned his attention to the table again.

Scott came back from the office, frowning, and they all looked at him expectantly. ‘It’s not choking, but he wouldn’t say what it was. That bastard likes watching us suffer.’

They all turned towards the glass-walled office. The bald lab tech gave them a wave, looking as cheerful as they had ever seen him.

When five o’clock came round the students started to peel off their gloves and leave.

‘See you tomorrow, Bill,’ said Meg.

Patrick didn’t go.

Instead he slid his fingers into the cadaver’s mouth and ran them around the inside of the stiff lips and under the leathery tongue. Then he checked from the other end too, wiggling his index finger up behind the soft palate and into the nasal cavity.

‘What are you doing?’ said Meg, wandering back to the table.

‘Looking for vomit.’

‘Any luck?’

Patrick glanced at her over the corpse. ‘Would it be lucky or unlucky to find vomit with my finger in the mouth of a dead man?’

She paused and then smiled. ‘You’re joking.’

‘You can laugh,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘Maybe later.’

Patrick checked thoroughly, then held up a clean blue finger.

‘Luck,’ he said, and she laughed.

20

TODAY I CLOSED my mouth until my teeth touched. I strained and sweated and groaned and grimaced, and when I felt enamel on enamel, I cried with joy. Cried like I haven’t since Lexi was born. Cried so hard that Jean had to come over and suck the snot out of my nose with a turkey baster – or something very like it.

‘Well done!’ she said, dabbing at my eyes and cheeks, and smiling like she meant it.

It means so much. If I’m to find out what’s happened to me, I have to be able to speak. I have to understand how long I have been here, and what has happened since the accident. Maybe what happened before the accident. Or even during it. Can I even trust my memory of that?

The woman who says she’s my wife keeps coming to see me, and keeps being a stranger. Alice and Lexi keep not coming to see me. Maybe because of something I did wrong? I keep feeling that I’ve done something wrong, but I just don’t know.

And I’m not going to find out by blinking.

The more I can do, the more I realize I need to do. Opening my eyes was the first thing, but that got old quickly. Then sticking out my tongue took precedence. Now closing my mouth to help to form words has become critical too, and the touching of teeth leaves me euphoric.

I don’t even feel embarrassed by my tears; that’s how happy I am.

Leslie was unimpressed by my joy, of course.

‘Big babby,’ he snorted, then tossed a bean bag at my heart.

Patrick rode down Park Place with his head full. It had been a red-letter day.

He had recognized sadness in his fellow students – actually understood something about people instead of feeling only disinterest and confusion. It was a strange progression – tinged with unease by the memory of his father – but he could not shake the feeling that it had been a special moment.

He also felt that although they still didn’t know the cause of death, they must be getting closer, simply by a process of elimination. The brain tumour was looking more and more likely, and the prospect of being right was always good. More than that, he had been allowed to make the difficult first incisions in the throat, which meant Dr Spicer must think he was the most capable of the group – better than Scott. The idea of winning the prize for the best dissection student was an attractive one.

Then Rob had touched him and he hadn’t panicked, even though his shoulder had crawled from the contact. And he’d ascertained that there was no more vomit in the cadaver’s mouth. Patrick wasn’t sure why he’d done that, but he’d felt compelled to check.

Finally – unexpectedly – he had made Meg laugh. That had surprised him and, more than that, it had given him another interesting feeling that he took a while to identify as pleasure.

He was too excited by it all to go home. He cycled round the city aimlessly for hours as the shops and offices dimmed, before turning into the castle grounds and racing along the dark paths between dormant roses, until all he could think about was the burning in his lungs and limbs. Then he leaned his bike against an oak and sat on the grass beside it. Once his breathing had slowed, he rested his back against the trunk and enjoyed cooling down.

He closed his eyes and listened to the sway of branches and the rustle of small animals all around him. In the darkness, and with the smell of grass and earth in the air, he almost expected the polite cough of a sheep. Quickly he fell asleep, cross-legged, with his head tilted backwards and his hands upturned in his lap, as if seeking enlightenment from the rising moon.

He woke shivering, just before the grey malt dawn, to find a young man in a white tracksuit sitting facing him in an almost identical position, but with a long screwdriver in his upturned hands.

‘I could have killed you while you slept,’ he said, not unpleasantly.

Patrick stood slowly and got on his bike and rode away. When he looked back, the young man was nothing but a pale blob facing the empty trunk.

Back at the house, he’d missed a party. Someone was passed out behind the front door and Patrick took five minutes to force his way in, and another two to ascertain that the girl on the floor was not dead.

The hallway was strewn with plastic cups and empty bottles, and halfway up the stairs there was a bowl of popcorn with a shoe in it.

Kim was on the living-room sofa, eating toast with a man in his forties who was wearing nothing but her short kimono.

‘Hi, Patrick,’ she giggled. ‘This is my boyfriend, Pete.’

Patrick was confused. ‘I thought you were a lesbian.’

Kim giggled again and Pete winked at Patrick. ‘So did she.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick. This morning was starting to be the weirdest one he could remember.

Pete leaned in and licked butter off Kim’s cheek, and Patrick looked at the television.

‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ said Kim.

‘I’m not embarrassed,’ said Patrick. ‘But I can see Pete’s bollocks.’

He left his bike in the hallway and went upstairs to shower. At the top of the stairs, Jackson accosted him.

‘Have you seen him?’ he demanded in a stage whisper.

‘Seen who?’

‘Pete.’

‘Yes, all of him,’ said Patrick.

‘She’s supposed to be a lesbian!’ hissed Jackson. ‘If she was going to chop and change, she could have told me.’

Patrick didn’t see why Kim should tell anyone anything. Personally, he’d rather not have known about her lesbianism, her vegetarianism, her lumpy art or her hairy-balled boyfriend. It was all just mental clutter to him.

‘Why do you need to know?’ he asked.

In answer, Jackson just huffed and flapped a slender hand at Patrick. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

They were words Patrick had heard a thousand times throughout his short life, and he’d always believed them. But suddenly, for the first time, he felt they might not always be true. Perhaps he didn’t understand now, but what if he might at some future point? He’d understood sadness, hadn’t he? He’d made Meg laugh. What if understanding living people was something that could be learned, like anatomy or the alphabet?

‘Maybe I could,’ he said carefully; he didn’t want to commit himself to anything too drastic.

‘Yeah,’ snorted Jackson. ‘Maybe you could.’

Patrick’s spirits lifted even further. Jackson agreed with him! Maybe he could learn! And if something could be learned, then Patrick knew he could learn it.

All it took was motivation.

21

PATRICK DIDN’T GO in the day they did the eyes, but when he came back for the next session, it was to find that the top had been sawn off every cadaver’s skull.

Thirty brains were exposed like giant walnuts, and the smell of fresh bone dust hung in the air. The circular saw was sitting where Mick had left it on the counter by the door, like a horror film prop, with skin and frayed flesh still clinging to its jagged teeth.

The final stage of dissection was under way and Patrick felt giddy with anticipation. He was suddenly acutely aware of his own head, and imagined all the things going on inside it. All the electricity and connections and creativity. Something from nothing, bursting out of the darkness and lighting the way to the universe.

How did all that just end?

Where did it all go?

And once it was switched off, could it ever be switched back on?

So far, Number 19 had been thoroughly dead. But if any spark remained – or any promise of more than a mere spark – then it would be found in this most tantalizing of organs.

Over the course of a morning, they prised the brain out with spoons, and it flopped into Patrick’s hands like a water-filled balloon. He shook a little as he turned it, his eyes and his fingers probing the jelly-mould mind for clues, while the others peered over his shoulders and prodded at it with their blue fingers.

Patrick felt his excitement morph seamlessly into disappointment. Not the disappointment of a child denied a treat, but the kind of disappointment that makes the chest ache and the belly roll with nausea at the loss of all hope.

There was nothing.

The tightly packed convolutions were wrapped in dura, decorated with a network of nerves, and fed by thick arterial passages like mineworkings in blancmange. The pink-grey folds taunted Patrick with their perfect mystery. Whatever had made Number 19 the person he had once been was now lying right here in his hands, and yet there was no trace of him left, nor any clue as to how he had disappeared. No pearl, no tumour, no secret passageway to the beyond.

Patrick felt hope desert him.

Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.

Patrick felt his face grow hot, and he stared stupidly down at the perfect practical joke overflowing in his palms.

If there were no answers here, then he no longer knew where to look for them.

He fumbled the brain to Dilip and walked out of the dissecting room in a blur.

Patrick was in the cafeteria, not eating chocolate pudding, crisps and a tuna sandwich, in that order.

Outside the window he always faced was the rack where he always locked his bike. He could get on it and ride away. There was nothing here for him now; now that he knew a dead man was no better than a dead bird. A dead father.

If he had kept hold of his hand, would that have anchored him to life?

Would the car have missed him?

Or hit them both – and revealed the truth to two instead of one?

‘Can I sit here?’ said Meg, and then sat there anyway before he could do anything about it.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Penny for your thoughts.’

Patrick stared at her blankly and she went a little pink.

‘My grandma used to say it. I’ll give you a penny, and you give me your thoughts.’

Patrick didn’t like the sound of this game. ‘Do I have to?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You haven’t even given me a penny.’

‘It’s just a silly saying. You don’t take it literally.’

But Patrick was still perturbed by the whole concept. ‘And a penny is nothing. You can’t get anything for a penny. You’d have to pay a lot more than that.’

Meg sighed. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’

‘I know I don’t.’

‘I just wondered if you were OK, that’s all.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Patrick.

‘What’s wrong?’

Patrick stirred his chocolate pudding mechanically, the spoon grating on the china.

‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s just meat. Meat and shit.’

‘Oh,’ she said carefully. ‘What did you expect?’

‘Something else. Something more.’ He felt weirdly like crying, and his stomach knotted and ached the way it had that day. The day of the punch in the back, the bat in the face. He knew now what Sad looked like; was this how it felt? He didn’t like it.

‘But there is more,’ she said, grabbing the salt cellar for emphasis. ‘Just because we don’t know doesn’t make it any less… amazing. Can’t you feel it?’

‘No, I can’t,’ he said. ‘If someone dies and you don’t see it, how do you know what really happened?’

‘See what?’

‘That thing that changes between here and there. Between life and death. I can’t feel it; I want to see it. I want to know what it is.’

‘We’ll all know that one day.’

‘I want to know it now!’ he snapped.

There was a long silence while Meg stared into the crusted hole where the salt lived.

She cleared her throat. ‘You’re different, you know.’

‘Only different from you,’ he said. ‘Not different from me.’

‘That’s true.’ She smiled. Then she poured a careful little pyramid of salt on to the table.

‘What’s it like to be you?’ she said.

Patrick was surprised. Nobody had ever asked him what it was like to be him, not even his mother.

What was it like? He’d never even examined it himself before. Never been asked to come to a conclusion about it and share it with another. But Meg hadn’t called him names, and she wasn’t rushing him, and so, for the first time in his life, he reached into himself in the hope of finding something to tell her – something to show her – in the same way that Number 19 had submitted to being opened and deconstructed.

‘It’s…’

He scraped slow chocolate patterns in the bottom of the bowl while he struggled to corral his feelings and put them into words.

Meg waited for him.

‘It’s very…’

He gritted his teeth. This was crazy. There was so much in there – he could feel a million things coursing through him, and yet he kept coming up empty. It was like putting his hand into a tank filled with goldfish and trying to grab one. He’d done that in a pet shop once and it hadn’t worked, and his mother had slapped his legs.

Still Meg waited, and suddenly Patrick was filled with a tight, burning frustration at his inability to explain what it was like.

‘It’s very,’ he said forcefully. ‘Very very.’

‘Very what?’ she asked quietly.

But he had nothing to give her, even when he tried.

He dug his spoon so hard into the bowl that it rang, and spewed chocolate across the table.

‘Very,’ said Patrick.

People looked at them in a sudden hush. Then the faces turned away and the low drown of voices and echoes and cutlery resumed.

Meg simply nodded. ‘It must be.’

22

THEY’RE TRYING TO kill me.

I don’t think it’s my imagination, although that’s what the doctor is telling the woman who says she’s my wife. My wofe is how I think of her now – not the same thing.

‘Paranoia is common… emerging coma…’ he whispers, trying to keep me from hearing, but I get the gist. ‘A normal response… situation.’

They both glance at me with the same expression – concern and pity, and the need to keep things from me for my own good.

Maybe I wouldn’t be paranoid if they weren’t out to get me. The idiot Tracy Evans who regularly unplugs my heart monitor so she can plug in the electric razor; the cleaner who bumps my bed with her mop and glares if I wake; and the doctors who stand over me – too close, too watchful – and make covetous notes that they hang on my bed for everyone to see but me. Every time one of them stands over me, the sweat runs into my eyes and stings a warning.

Even my wofe. She’s supposed to be on my side. She doesn’t seem to notice that I’m an old man now. She says she loves me; calls me Darling.

‘SOMEONE KILLED THE MAN IN THAT BED.’

She’d looked at the Possum screen, then looked at the bed, frowning – as if the fact that the man was no longer there somehow cast doubt on my claim.

Secret, I’d begged her with my eyelids. Secret.

Doesn’t she understand English?

Now the doctor looks at me but whispers to her, ‘… infection… several days. Sometimes… sudden cardiac episode… vulnerable.’

There it is again. Vulnerable.

The thing that makes me feel most vulnerable is you bastards whispering in a corner about me! That doctor might even be the one! He might be the killer! Now he knows I saw something. Now he knows! And what will he do about it?

Anything

he

likes.

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.

Elixir of the gods. I know everything is relative, but it tastes so good to me that I actually start to cry.

‘Ahhh, look how happy!’ says Jean.

‘Ahhh,’ parrots Tracy Evans, but I can see she’s not interested. She barely looks at me and keeps clattering the teaspoon against my teeth. She’s looking for the man she’s trying to… well, seduce is too elegant a word. She thinks we don’t see. I suppose she thinks we’re all vegetables, but I see; I know what she’s up to. I knew girls like her at Hot Stuff in Merthyr. All the lads knew them – sometimes twice a night.

She puts the juice in too fast and I feel the strange and horrible sensation of it going down the wrong way.

‘Ah!’

Jean notices – bless her. She jumps up and rushes to get a machine I’ve seen them use on other patients. It’s like a vacuum cleaner and she feeds it down my throat and sucks stuff out of my airway with a nasty rattling sound, while Tracy stands there with her arms crossed, as if I’m making a fuss about nothing and had better not blame her. But in Jean’s eyes I can see how serious this could be.

She puts the horrible tube into me twice more, and collects watery orange mucus in a kidney bowl while my eyes stream with something similar, and I fight to keep breathing.

Finally she stops and takes Tracy away. For a bollocking, I hope.

I lie there panting, feel as if I’ve been punched on the inside, all my fresh hope scrunched into a stupid ball and tossed away.

Even if they’re not trying to kill me, they might yet succeed.

And all I can do is lie here and wait for it.

‘Patrick Fort!’ said Professor Madoc, as if he were a long-lost friend. ‘Have a seat.’

Patrick sat down and looked around. Professor Madoc fiddled with a Rubik’s cube behind the vast wooden desk that held two silver-framed photographs – one of a smiling young woman, and the other of a boat. There was another photo of the same boat on the wall behind him, with the professor himself looking tanned and rich, waving from the puffy red depths of a life-jacket. Patrick could read the name painted on the prow: Sharp End.

‘Damn thing,’ said Professor Madoc at the cube. ‘You ever done one of these?’

‘Yes,’ said Patrick.

The professor put it down and cleared his throat. ‘I hear you’ve had a few run-ins, Patrick. A few problems.’

‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘No problems.’

‘That’s not what people have told me.’

‘OK.’

Professor Madoc looked at a piece of paper in front of him.

‘Inappropriate attitude to staff, a near-physical altercation with a fellow student over a cadaver, ignoring procedure during dissection, and unauthorized access to confidential donation details.’

‘I wanted to know the cause of death; that’s not confidential.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Professor Madoc. His hand strayed towards the cube but he caught it in time and drummed his fingers on the desktop instead. ‘You broke into a locked filing cabinet.’

‘I used the key.’

‘It was locked for a good reason.’

‘What reason?’

‘For reasons of confidentiality.’

‘But the cause of death isn’t confidential.’ How many times did he have to say it?

‘But the identity of the donor is.’

‘But I don’t care about the identity of the donor. I only wanted to know the cause of death.’

‘Listen,’ said Professor Madoc more sharply. ‘This is a medical school, not a kindergarten. We won’t tolerate this kind of disruption from our students, even ones with issues.’

‘What issues?’ said Patrick.

Professor Madoc took a moment to adjust to frankness. ‘We understand about your Asperger’s, Patrick, and we certainly have made allowances for it, but I have formally to advise you that we cannot make endless allowances. If I have further reports of incidents of this nature, I will be forced to suspend your studies here at Cardiff. Do you understand?’

Patrick pursed his lips.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m trying to decide whether I care.’

Professor Madoc raised his eyebrows the way Mick had. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I might not care. I might have finished here. I don’t know if there’s any point in going on.’

‘No point in going on? What does that mean?’ The professor’s hand twitched again towards the cube.

Patrick thought that Professor Madoc might have a touch of Asperger’s himself, because he didn’t seem to comprehend anything he was saying.

‘I think the cause of death on the sheet is wrong. What’s the point of going on if I’m basing judgements on bad information?’

‘Cause of death is certified by a doctor.’

‘Doctors get it wrong all the time. You see it on TV.’

Professor Madoc’s hand flinched, and this time he followed through with a pick-up and started to twist the cube’s little coloured blocks – frowning at them disapprovingly as he went on.

‘The DR technician told me you asked him about a… doorway in the brain? Does that have anything to do with all of this?’

‘Yes,’ said Patrick, and stared at the cube turning in the man’s long, elegant fingers. ‘I want to know what happens.’

The professor sighed deeply and put down the cube. ‘You know, Patrick, all we see in the dissecting room is the physical aftermath of a life. A medical student starts his journey with the dead and works backwards.’

Patrick pursed his lips. ‘But I want to start with the dead and work forwards.’

Professor Madoc gave a small laugh. ‘The dead can’t speak to us, Patrick, although our lives would be immeasurably simpler if they could. While doctors might discover the mechanics of how someone died, they are privy to neither why they died nor to what happens to them after they die. To solve those puzzles I think you’d need to consult a detective… and a priest.’

He smiled, but Patrick didn’t.

‘And how do they solve those puzzles?’ said Patrick, leaning forward.

Professor Madoc looked a little taken aback by the sudden interest in a throwaway remark. He spread his hands in new uncertainty. ‘Well, I imagine a priest doesn’t actually know. That’s a matter of faith.’

‘Superstition,’ Patrick corrected him. ‘How does the detective know?’

The professor gave it serious thought. ‘Well,’ he finally said, ‘I suppose that to find out why somebody died, a detective would have to consult the living.’

‘What kind of living?’

‘Friends and family. Witnesses. Attending medical professionals. People like that, I suppose.’

Patrick sat back in his chair and Professor Madoc blew out his cheeks in relief. He wasn’t sure how this conversation had turned from him issuing a formal warning to a student firing awkward philosophical questions at him. He needed to get back on track.

‘You know, Patrick, Dr Spicer tells me that despite these difficulties, you’re a real talent in the dissection room. He says you’re a leading candidate for the Goldman Prize. It would be a shame to give up now, wouldn’t it?’

Patrick remained still for an uncomfortably long time. Finally he nodded silently and rose to his feet, then paused and reached across the desk. The professor withdrew slightly, but Patrick picked up the Rubik’s cube.

Professor Madoc watched as the matching colours spread quickly up the six sides until the puzzle was complete and Patrick laid it back on the desk.

‘It’s not difficult,’ he said. ‘I can show you, if you like.’

‘Thank you,’ said Professor Madoc, and Patrick left.

25

THE ORANGE JUICE has gone to my chest.

Pneumonia. They don’t say it, but I know that’s the fear. People die of pneumonia – even healthy people. But I’m incredibly vulnerable. Phlegm rattles in my throat and my back is agony every time I breathe, so I try not to do that.

It doesn’t work.

Jean and Angie use the vacuum on me almost constantly. It’s disgusting and painful. Two doctors come. I wonder if one of them is the killer. Who knows? I would, if only I’d kept my eyes open that night. Would it be better or worse to know whether a killer was standing over me, taking my pulse, checking my drip? Right now I don’t care if one of them killed the man in the next bed, as long as they help me.

‘Blink twice if it hurts,’ says one, tapping my chest in that creepy way that doctors do – as if they’re trying to find a secret passage in a smuggler’s wall.

I blink lots and they exchange worried looks.

Without warning, tears roll out of my eyes and into my ears. I’m going to die, and I will never have seen Alice or Lexi again. I’ll never have told them how much I love them or why I never came home that day, or where I’ve been since.

‘Aaaaa!’ I say.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ says the younger doctor. ‘It will only hurt.’

He’s right, but I don’t care. I don’t want to slip into unconsciousness and die without doing my best to leave something behind, even if it’s a single word.

‘Aaaaa,’ I say. ‘Duh.’

‘Ssssh,’ says Jean, holding my hand and looking nervous. I reckon she and Tracy will get it in the neck if I die. Leslie will be furious – in a monosyllabic sort of way. All that work wasted. Even now my tongue curls away from where I want it to be, and I have to think of everything he taught me. I make an enormous effort, full of grunts and phlegm.

‘Aaaan. Dee.’

‘What’s that?’ says the older doctor, then turns to Jean. ‘Do you know what he’s saying?’

‘I’ll get the Possum,’ she says, but I don’t want it. I want to hear my own voice.

‘Aaanduh!’ I say as my lungs protest, my back spikes, and sweat and tears pour down my nose and cheeks.

I can’t do the S. ‘Aandee!’

There! I did it!

‘Angie?’ says Jean.

Not Angie, for Christ’s sake! Lexi! But it’s all I can do and it really doesn’t matter whether they understand or not. If it’s just the first word of thousands, or the last one ever to pass my lips, at least I’ve named the most important thing in my life.

‘Well done!’ says Jean, looking as relieved as she does encouraging. ‘I’ll get Angie to come and say hello. You’ll be ordering us all about by lunchtime.’

Another big lie.

Who cares? I don’t even know what’s true any more. If you can’t trust a mirror, what can you believe?

Jean bustles away with the older doctor. The younger doctor takes my notes off the end of my bed. I can’t see it happen – I just see the top of his head – but I know the feeling and the sound like my own breathing. The gritty little metal noise and the tiny vibration it makes in the steel frame and through the mattress. The princess had her pea; I have my notes.

He moves slightly so that I can see him as he reads them intently – I wonder what’s written there: just the injuries from the flying Ford Focus? Or everything from childhood measles onwards? He reads them like they’re instructions for a bomb disposal. Then he comes over, jabs a needle into my hip and I close my eyes, exhausted by the effort and the pain of living.

If I wake up dead, so be it.

26

THERE WERE ONLY two Galens in the Cardiff phone book, and only one with the initial S.

The house was up Penylan Road – a large red-brick home set towards the back of a broad, unimaginative garden, where the only flowers were snowdrops and primroses in a narrow stripe either side of the wide gravel driveway. Everything else was shrubbery made of laurels and conifers. Patrick was allergic to conifers and regarded them all with suspicion. If he lived here, he’d dig them all out and have a bonfire.

He wheeled his bike past a late-registration BMW. This was how Number 19 had lived: well. It was a start, but to find out how he had died, Patrick guessed he needed more than he could gather from noting what kind of car the man had driven. He wasn’t sure what he needed, or how he was going to get it, but Patrick also knew that there were too many variables for him to have formulated a watertight plan of action. The front door might be opened by anyone – a wife, a mother, a son, a cleaner – and each of them would require a different strategy.

But he only had one strategy.

Therefore the only concrete opening he had prepared was My name is Patrick Fort and I want some information about Mr Samuel Galen. He assumed everything would fall into place from there.

Patrick put down the kickstand on his bike and knocked on the door. He could see his silhouette in the glossy black paint, and his face in the chrome letterbox.

‘Go away! I’ve called the police!’

Patrick blinked in surprise. It was a woman’s voice, high and screechy. And illogical. Why would she have called the police before he’d even knocked? She didn’t know why he was there.

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.

‘You have to go,’ he informed her.

‘What are you eating?’ she said. ‘I’m quite hungry.’

‘Peanut-butter sandwich.’

She made a face. ‘Have you got some cheese?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Kim and Jackson say you have to go.’

‘Can I have a cheese sandwich?’

He stood for a moment, uncertain of what to do next. He had told her she had to go and she’d ignored that and asked for a cheese sandwich. He didn’t understand how the two were connected. But he didn’t mind giving her a cheese sandwich; maybe she’d go after that. Things wouldn’t happen in the expected order, but they’d happen.

‘OK,’ he said, and went back to the kitchen.

‘Has she gone?’ said Jackson.

‘No. She wants a cheese sandwich.’

‘Shit,’ said Kim. ‘Jackson, tell her she has to go!’

Jackson looked unsure, but left the kitchen. Patrick was considering whether to cut the sandwich square or on the diagonal when he came back.

‘Has she gone?’ demanded Kim.

‘She wants a blanket.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Jackson!’ Kim stormed out and Patrick went for square because he always had his sandwiches cut square, so if Kim made Lexi leave now, he could take this one with him for lunch tomorrow.

‘She just ignored me,’ said Jackson, biting his nails.

‘Me too,’ said Patrick.

‘Now Kim thinks I’m a wuss.’

Patrick nodded his agreement.

‘Shit,’ said Jackson softly.

They listened to the low voices from the front room, and then heard footsteps ascending the stairs and coming down again. Then more low voices.

Then Kim came back into the kitchen and didn’t look at them. She opened the fridge and pushed things around her shelf for a long time.

‘Has she gone?’ said Jackson.

‘Did someone eat my yoghurt?’ said Kim.

‘No,’ said Jackson and Patrick together.

‘Oh,’ said Kim and shut the fridge door and went upstairs. Jackson followed her.

When Patrick took the sandwich through to the front room, Lexi was wrapped in a red blanket on the couch.

‘Thanks,’ she said as she took a bite. ‘Have you got anything to drink?’

He brought her a glass of water and she said, ‘Have you got anything else?’

He knew what she meant. He also knew there was a half-bottle of white wine on Kim’s shelf in the fridge.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Not very good students, are you?’

‘I’m the best in dissection. Jackson says Kim’s good, but I don’t know about art. It just looks lumpy to me.’

She fidgeted and ate half her sandwich while he watched, then asked where the toilet was.

She was gone for ten minutes and came back with the wine.

‘I found this in the fridge. I’ll replace it tomorrow.’

He said nothing.

‘You want some?’

He shook his head. Lexi poured her water into the puny rubber plant, and filled the tumbler with wine instead. She drank it the way she had the rum and Coke, in rapid, repeated draughts – as if she was impatient to see the bottom of the glass – then she refilled it.

‘You drink too much,’ said Patrick.

‘You talk too much,’ she snapped back.

They watched something about driving trucks on icy roads. Every time a truck skidded off, Lexi giggled and glanced at him.

She checked the empty bottle twice. Patrick knew it wouldn’t be the last time and couldn’t bear to watch.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said.

‘Hey, Patrick,’ she said. ‘I know when I’ve had too much. I’ve been drinking since I was, like, fourteen or something. So I think I know what I’m doing by now.’

‘OK,’ he said.

‘Everybody’s so judgemental. Gets on my fucking tits.’

‘OK.’

‘Oh I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to swear. Sorry.’

Sorry. The word meant nothing to him. It was like static, and he’d learned to ignore it.

‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ she said. ‘See you in the morning.’

‘OK,’ he said, and went upstairs.

Around one a.m., he woke to find Lexi worming her way on to his narrow bed alongside him.

‘That couch is made for midgets,’ she said, all elbows and bottom. She was still wrapped in the blanket and he was in his sleeping bag, but the thought of her body pressed along the entire length of his galvanized him. He stood up and stepped over her as if crossing an electric fence, and picked up his sleeping bag.

‘Where are you going?’ she said.

‘Downstairs. Don’t bang your head on the bicycle.’

‘What?’ she said, but he didn’t answer her.

The couch was made for midgets, so he settled down on the carpet, on his side, and with his knees tucked up just enough to avoid touching the water tank that wasn’t there, and thought about Lexi.

There was so much to think about. She was like a tornado that had picked him up, whirled him high and dumped him, dazed, in a foreign field. It was scary, but it was also exciting.

It was hard to separate her from the information she’d given him. The gold-digger in the big house, the half-brick through the window, the frozen inheritance, the rum and Coke. Those things told him lots about Lexi, but all they told him about Samuel Galen was that he was rich, mean and dead.

Patrick frowned into the darkness and felt the familiar itch of an unsolved puzzle. Maybe he should have stuck with the gold-digger; maybe she’d have been more… coherent. Almost certainly she wouldn’t have followed him home and demanded a couch, a blanket and a cheese sandwich; almost certainly he’d be asleep in his own bed now.

Patrick sighed and blinked against the crook of his elbow pillow. His eyes grew used to the night until he was able to see a pale curve under the couch. He tried to work out what it was but finally had to touch it to discover the plate on which he’d brought Lexi the sandwich. She had left her crusts, even though he’d put the cheese right up to the edges. Patrick made a good sandwich; he liked them because their structure meant he could put almost anything in them that didn’t start with A. Bread was always on the outside, then Butter. Then, as long as the fillings continued from the outside to the inside in strict alphabetical order, the world was his oyster. Peanut butter was his favourite filling, but he had a soft spot for cheese and chutney – as much for their economy of alphabetical progression as for the taste. He wondered floatily whether Lexi would have eaten her crusts if he’d put chutney on her sandwich. But she hadn’t asked for chutney, and had made a face at peanut butter, and he had been too flustered to offer her Marmite or—

Patrick rolled on to his back, his breath suddenly shallow and his stomach fluttering with tension. He held his twisted thumbs up to the dark ceiling and thought again of the delicate blue veins in the backs of Lexi’s hands. Her skin was so fine and pale – nothing like Number 19’s tough orange dermis. Making an H-incision in her throat would be completely different. There would be no scrape of old stubble against his knuckles, no Adam’s apple to teeter up and down again, no smell of lilies and shit. Only the pliable tracheal rings, dipping gently into the jugular notch at the base of her smooth neck. Nothing about it would be the same as the cadaver’s, even if her veins and kidneys did give away the family connection.

But what if…

What if family was about more than a visual match? What if it was also about the speed at which her neurons fired, or the rate at which her glands excreted, or the way her blood responded to chemical changes?

Patrick stood up and kicked himself free of his bag, his own blood squirting powerfully through his heart, and a light sheen of sweat making his skin prickle in the cold room.

He went upstairs and turned on his bedroom light with a bright click. Lexi was asleep on her back, with her hands clenched loosely on the pillow beside her head, the way a baby sleeps. She stirred at the light but didn’t open her eyes.

Patrick put out a tentative hand, then withdrew it.

‘Are you awake?’ he said clearly.

Her forehead creased. ‘What?’

‘Are you awake?’

‘No.’

‘You must be or you couldn’t say “No.”’

‘What do you want?’

‘Are you allergic to nuts?’

She squinted one eye open, then shielded it from the light. ‘What?’

‘Are you allergic to peanuts?’

‘Yes. If I have one I could die.’

‘Was your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ said Patrick. He opened his wardrobe and put on his T-shirt and hoodie.

Lexi sat up, hair awry, and hugged her knees through the red blanket. ‘Why? What’s going on?’

He didn’t tell her because he didn’t hear her. He was overwhelmed by a looped image of his own blue finger dipping into Samuel Galen’s puckered flesh, like Doubting Thomas peering into the side of Christ, while a question buzzed through his being.

If Number 19 was being fed through a tube, what was he doing with a peanut – that might kill him – in his throat?

Lexi watched him pull on his jeans, then flinched as he reached over her head and took his bike from the hooks on the wall.

‘You’re nuts,’ she said.

He hoisted the bike on to his shoulder and hurried down the stairs; she scrambled off the bed and hung over the banisters to call after him, ‘And your room stinks of bleach!’

27

I WAKE WITH a start in the dark, and the shadow beside my bed flinches too. I gave us both a fright, and if I could laugh, I would.

It’s the doctor who gave me a perfect ten, come to tap my chest. He does that with warm fingers, then breathes on the stethoscope. It’s the little things that show they care. You’d never know, otherwise.

He listens to my lungs, staring past me at my pillow to avoid embarrassingly close eye-contact.

I wonder drowsily what he hears in there; whether my lungs have passed their orange-juice crisis. My breathing still hurts, but nothing like it did a week ago. I’m on the mend.

He stares intently at the linen beside my ear. Then he straightens up and looks in the direction of the nurses’ station. I turn my head with a little surge of athletic achievement and follow his gaze.

There is nobody there.

It was going to happen.

Tracy Evans could feel it in the air. She was on three nights in a row. She’d got a spray tan, her eyebrows threaded, her legs waxed, and her pubic hair ripped agonizingly into a dark little heart. It didn’t match her blonde hair, but nobody had ever complained. She was wearing underwear that matched and wasn’t grey, and she’d bought that perfume by Britney – not fat, bald Britney, but slutty Britney in school tie and knee socks. Now she wore her ugly blue tunic with new sensuality – her smooth new wonders sliding beneath its utilitarian starch.

On the first night, Mr Deal had sniffed the air around her, but hadn’t gone for it immediately, which was slightly annoying. But at least it had given the pimples on her pubis time to calm down.

This was the second night. Angie had swapped shifts with Monica, who was new and easily bossed about, and even more easily deceived. Tracy had already been through the Quality Street and eaten all the big purple ones while Monica was helping someone with a bedpan.

She heard the lift doors open and felt a delicious twitch as Mr Deal came round the corner, silhouetted against the harsh fluorescents.

Tracy hid Rose Budding, which she was re-reading, then picked up a sheaf of random paperwork, pushed out her chest, sucked in her tummy, and composed her form and her features into their most flattering aspect.

‘Hello, Tracy,’ he said quietly, and she turned as if surprised and gave him the demure but promising smile she’d practised so long in the mirror. Slutty Nun, she called it. She was rewarded by seeing his brooding face soften into a look of being pleased to see her.

Men were so easy!

But he’d better make his move before she had to go through the hell of waxing again, or she’d make him suffer.

For an hour Mr Deal stood with his back to his wife with a cup of machine coffee. At nine p.m. he had another. Tracy knew that nobody chose to have two cups, so he was obviously killing time. She went into the ladies’ bathroom and threw away the cardboard bedpans that she routinely left stinking on the windowsill. Made the place a bit nice.

At ten thirty p.m. Mr Deal put another pound into the coffee machine and Tracy Evans’s nipples responded.

Just after eleven, she told Monica to go out for a cigarette. As they were on the fourth floor, Tracy knew that that entailed a fifteen-minute round-trip for a two-minute smoke, and so Monica usually had a couple while she was outside the ambulance-bay doors. Which took it up to twenty minutes.

Plenty of time, in her experience.

‘You sure?’ said Monica.

‘Course,’ said Tracy. ‘You go. I’ll be fine.’

The lift doors closed and Tracy got up and hitched up her bra straps.

The dance had been slow and frustrating but she knew that the end of it would be as familiar to her as her own reflection.

The doctor looks back down at me and clears his throat.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Galen,’ he says softly.

My mind turns slowly around the pivot of his words. He does sound very sorry. What for? I start to worry. Maybe he heard something in my lungs. Maybe I’m not as on the mend as I thought I was. Maybe—

Then he leans over me again and I see that in his right hand he holds a pair of tweezers.

And that between their glittering points is a peanut.

My heart spasms with electric terror and in an instant I understand everything.

He’s the one! He’s the killer!

And he knows how incredibly vulnerable I am…

My panicked hand flaps like a fish on a bedspread beach as my memory detonates: I’m four years old and my throat tightens and my eyes swell shut, even while the traitorous treat still seasons the inside of my mouth. My mother screams somewhere, and my head bounces on my father’s arm as he runs from the stalled car into the hospital, shouting, ‘He can’t breathe! He can’t breathe!’ I’m jostled and tossed and snatched from my father’s arms by other arms in white sleeves, and the lights jiggle overhead as the doctor runs down the corridor to save my life with a scalpel and a tube in my throat, so that I can grow up to bring the stubby hands to the marital table. The stubby hands and the allergies listed on my medical notes for everyone to see…

The doctor lowers the peanut towards my lips.

‘Guh!’ I cry. ‘Guh!’

I’m more scared now than when I was a child. No one is going to help me this time.

I feel a knuckle against my chin, the nut nudging my lip – and I jab out my well-trained tongue, my only defence. It knocks the peanut from the grip of the tweezers and for a split second I’m triumphant.

And then I feel it drop instead into the back of my throat…

Dying is far easier than it looks in the movies.

There are no flashy cuts, no explosions, no speeches – just a clumsy doctor, swearing and fumbling between my teeth, digging the sharp tweezers into my palate and tongue, even as my throat swells jealously around the evidence he wants back.

The terror. The panic.

The sorrow for all I’m leaving behind.

I can’t die! I have people to hold, to love; to make it up to—

Too late. Too late. Pain cleaves me. My jaw clamps in agony and I slither back down the well. There’s no tunnel, no light, no return.

Darkness snaps shut and truth spills from my dead heart – I love you I love you I love you—

A small hand takes mine.

‘Look at it go, Daddy!’

28

4017.

The ugly code had its uses.

Patrick took a while to find the switches, then blinked as the lights shuddered awake to banish shadows from the dissecting room.

The cadavers were just sickly-sweet leftovers now. Missing limbs, gaping chests, with their skin peeled off them in dirty brown folds, and their pale brains gleaming with wetting solution beside their empty skulls.

Yet they seemed more alive to Patrick now than they had at the start. More real, now that he understood them better.

As he passed them, his sense of excitement grew. He knew the cause of death. He was sure of it. The list was wrong; Mick was wrong; Spicer was wrong; his fellow students were wrong; and whatever doctor had signed the death certificate was wrong. None of them knew what he knew – that Lexi Galen had an allergy to peanuts. And Patrick would bet the bicycle he’d inherited from his father that she had inherited that allergy from hers.

He couldn’t wait to tell them all that he’d solved the puzzle. Especially Scott.

Patrick looked down at Number 19, whose one remaining eye stared through him dully. He looked away quickly, and hunched down beside the table. Underneath it were the scores of bags they’d slowly filled with the dead man’s lungs, his liver, his small intestines – all pressed against the clear plastic like the cheap mince his mother bought from the wagon at Brecon market. More of Number 19 was now under the table than on it.

Patrick sorted through it all but couldn’t find the peanut.

He frowned. That made no sense; he had bagged it and tagged it himself. He was too impatient; it was small; he must have missed it. He went through the process again in slow reverse, sitting on the cold floor, loading the shelf under the table more carefully this time.

The peanut was not there.

Patrick sat very still. One of the others had got there first. Scott? Dilip? But how? How had they known about the allergy when he’d only found out by accident? Had he missed something obvious? And if they didn’t know about the allergy, why would they take it?

The lights went out and he was blind. He quickly squeezed his eyes tightly shut. It was a trick his father had taught him on night walks in the Beacons.

Too late he registered that the main door of the Biosciences block had been open. He’d not noticed it because he’d never seen it closed, but in the middle of the night it would have been; should have been – unless someone was already inside.

Idiot!

He opened his better-adjusted eyes. A black figure was framed in the charcoal doorway.

Patrick started to get up to leave but, before he could, the man entered the room.

Strangeness rippled up the back of Patrick’s neck. Turning off the lights before entering a room made no sense. So, instead of standing up and asking why the lights were off, Patrick stayed put on one knee and one spread hand, his stomach knotting with a fear that was all the more fearful because he didn’t understand it.

The man walked confidently between the bodies, as if he did so in the dark all the time. There was no fumbling, no banged shins or muttered expletives. Between the struts of the tables and the remains of the ruined bodies, the figure walked swiftly towards him, announced only by the small squeak of shoes on polished linoleum.

He was coming straight for him.

Without thinking, Patrick crawled silently on to the shelf below Table 19, along with the bags of meat and bone and offal.

Lexi’s cold father gave a little under his body, and he almost cried out with the idea of the cold flesh cushioning him.

Only the plastic between them stopped him screaming.

He bit his own lip as the shadow stopped beside him. In a moment that rushed him back to the bookies and the Labrador, Patrick watched the knees and the thighs of the man’s black trousers turn slowly, as if scanning the room, looking for something.

Patrick stopped breathing; if he could have stopped his heart pounding, he would have.

The moment seemed endless. Then the legs walked away and back towards the door.

For a second Patrick was relieved – then he realized that if the man left the block, the outer door would be locked, trapping him inside.

He rolled off the bags of cold meat and one of his trainers squealed on the floor. He froze again, then quickly pulled the shoes off his feet and slid swiftly across the floor on his socks to Table 21, and from there to Table 13.

The man was still ahead of him. He had to catch him up. Or slow him down.

Patrick wasn’t a spy. He didn’t have a grappling hook or satellite communications, or even a black turtleneck sweater. He had his trainers – that was all – so he hurled one of them into a dim corner of the room, where it landed with a slap and a clatter.

He almost laughed when the man stopped, turned, and then followed the noise to the back wall like a stupid dog, while Patrick skidded out of the door in his socks.

He couldn’t ride properly with one trainer, so he walked. Ran. Half walked, half ran, pushing his bike, and with his socks wet and stretching and tripping him up until finally he peeled them off and dropped them in the gutter. His foot was shockingly white under the streetlights.

A police car passed and Patrick pressed himself into a garden hedge, even though he’d done nothing wrong. Something told him that this was one of those occasions when people might not understand what he’d been doing. And he had no answers tonight – only questions that made his head ache to think of them.

Before, Patrick had only thought about the peanut in relation to how Number 19 had died, not why. Why was a far tougher puzzle, and now that it was gone, the peanut seemed to be a critical piece of that jigsaw. How did Number 19 ingest a peanut that could kill him? And why would somebody steal it now?

Cold rain trickled under his T-shirt and down his back, and still he stood there. For the first time that he could ever remember – and he could remember almost everything – Patrick knew he needed help.

Patrick didn’t have his blue gloves with him, but he stopped at the payphone outside the bookies and dialled with a wet sleeve pulled over his shivering index finger.

It took thirteen rings before the mechanical rhythm was halted by the sound of sleepy mouth-breathing and a croak that might have been hello.

‘If there was something that proved how someone had died,’ he said, ‘why would you want to hide that?’

There was a long silence and then his mother said shakily, ‘Who is this?’

Why is he asking? What’s happened?

Sarah Fort’s head asked the questions her heart didn’t want answered. She had been expecting the worst for years – ever since Patrick was a small boy – and yet time hadn’t dulled the sharp panic she felt pricking her chest and starting to turn her stomach.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked him. Anyone but Patrick would have noticed her voice shaking.

‘Say someone dies,’ he said again. ‘And then, if someone else – not the dead person – someone else—’

He was obviously getting muddled, but she didn’t help him out. She was in no hurry to hear what he wanted to say. She would wait all night – all her life – rather than help him to reach the point where everything she had done for both of them would fall apart.

But he persisted. He was always so bloody persistent.

‘If that someone hides something that might show why the other person died.’

‘Yes?’ she said faintly.

‘Well, what does that mean?’

Sarah paused. ‘I don’t understand the question.’

She knew she was being obtuse. Things would be so much simpler if she’d just said, What are you trying to tell me, Patrick? She didn’t ask because he would tell her – and she didn’t want to deal with whatever might happen after that. She would rather play this precarious game of denial.

‘Why are you calling tonight? It’s not Thursday.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need help.’

‘Are you all right?’ She was surprised to hear a sharp note of concern in her voice, despite everything.

‘I lost one of my trainers and I need help to understand the actions.’

‘What actions?’

‘Hiding the thing,’ he said in a tone that revealed his frustration, ‘that might show why something happened. What does that action mean?’

She thought carefully of the best way to answer him, and then did.

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

‘Why?’

You tell me, Patrick! Rotting animals under your pillow, and pictures of dead children and crazy lists of weird words! YOU tell ME!

Instead she said, ‘I suppose… because they feel guilty.’

‘About what?’

Sarah felt sick. ‘Doing something bad.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, Patrick! Something bad! Something very, very bad!’

There was a pause.

‘So what must I do about it?’

What indeed? She felt emotion start to clog her throat.

‘Do whatever you think best,’ she said hoarsely.

‘Best for who?’

Sarah could barely whisper. ‘For you.’

There was a long silence and then Patrick said an abrupt ‘OK’ in a tone she knew meant that, for him, the conversation was over.

She didn’t press him, even though it was three in the morning and any other mother would have done. Should have done. Any mother of a different son.

But she was only relieved that he’d stopped asking questions that made her fear him, even as she feared for him.

‘Good,’ she said, and then ‘Goodbye.’

She sat in the kitchen with the phone in her lap long after Patrick had rung off. It was a harsh February and the kitchen fire had long since gone out, but she shivered for other reasons too. The cold from the stone floor seeped through her socks and crept achingly up her ankles and her shins, and still she sat there, thinking about her strange son calling her on a strange night to ask a strange question.

The splinter of progress she thought she’d seen at Christmas – away from the obsessive past and into a more normal future – now seemed like a cruel deception. She wasn’t a religious woman, but she wanted a sign. A single, solid indicator that Matt’s life – and hers – had not been wasted.

She couldn’t think of one.

Not one.

On another night – a warmer night; or if the fire had not gone out; or if the cat had been sitting on her lap – habit alone might have been enough to keep her going.

But this night was cold and this night was dark, and the cat was outside killing small things.

So there was nothing to stop her standing up and staring out of the kitchen window at the Fiesta outside the old wooden shed. Nothing to stop her pulling cold rubber boots on to her bare feet and crunching across the gravel under the slitted moon in her towelling robe; nothing to stop her driving six miles to the twenty-four-hour service station and buying two bottles of Vladivar.

One for now and one for just in case.

29

WHEN PATRICK GOT home it was four a.m., so he was surprised to see the lights were on. The minute he opened the door and pushed his bike inside, Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs in fake silk pyjamas. Patrick knew they must be fake because silk was expensive, but Jackson’s TV was a piece of junk.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Jackson yelled at him.

WHERE the fuck have you been?

Where the FUCK have you been?

Where the fuck have you BEEN?

Patrick said nothing. He wiped his bike down with a towel he kept in the hall, then carried it upstairs and hung it on its hooks, while Jackson harangued him from the doorway.

‘I told you she had to go, didn’t I? She’s your fucking guest and you should have kicked her out. Then none of this would have happened!’

‘None of what?’

‘Oh Jackson, shut up!’ Kim shouted from her room, and Jackson stomped down the short corridor to her door, and they yelled at each other for a bit, using words like ‘whore’ and ‘slag’ and ‘control freak’ and ‘arsehole’.

Patrick almost said something, but then reserved judgement on whether or not there was a need to swear. He used the time alone to strip off his sodden clothing, wring it out of the window and pile it on top of the hot-water tank. He stared at his single trainer and wished he’d had something else to throw. He only had one pair of shoes with him at college; now he only had half a pair.

‘Don’t pretend you give a shit!’ yelled Kim.

‘I won’t!’ Jackson shouted back. ‘I don’t!’

Patrick pulled on dry shorts and a T-shirt, turned out his light and got into his sleeping bag, shivering with delayed cold, and feeling again the paintwork of the old door, pressed against his cheek as his parents fought behind it. Over him. This felt just like that.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ said a voice he recognized as Lexi’s. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep!’

A dull thumping on the wall beside Patrick’s head told him that some of the people trying to sleep lived next door.

Kim’s door slammed like a gun.

‘Fuck you, too!’ Jackson yelled, then came back to Patrick’s room and stood in the doorway.

‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘Fucking bitch.’ And then he walked in, sat heavily on Patrick’s legs and burst into tears.

Patrick stared at the ceiling. He hoped that soon Jackson would tire of crying, get off his legs and go back to his own room. But when none of those things happened, he asked him what was wrong.

Apparently what was wrong was that after Patrick had left, Lexi had crawled out of his bed and into Kim’s bed instead – where it turned out that Kim was a lesbian, after all.

A loud one.

‘If you hadn’t brought her home, none of this would ever have happened,’ sobbed Jackson.

That was self-evident, thought Patrick. But then, if he hadn’t brought Lexi home, he would also never have found out about the allergies. He would still have two trainers, he wouldn’t have called his mother without gloves and on the wrong night of the week, and he would not now understand that the missing peanut might mean that someone was hiding something bad.

Cause and effect was a funny thing.

For the first time since he had come to the city, Patrick felt his need to complete his quest vying for space in his head with this new mystery. He had spent more than half his young life seeking answers about what had happened to his father, but suddenly it was Lexi’s rich, mean, mummified parent that excited his mind.

And the new mystery did not involve the intricacies of reaching out to a life beyond this one, only the simple question of who was guilty, and why.