Rubbernecker

55

PATRICK CALLED HIS mother to tell her he was coming home, but she wasn’t there. He left a message instead, with the time of the train, so she could come and pick him up from Merthyr.

On the ride home, he sat at a table and unpacked the mobile phone Meg had given him on the station platform.

‘For emergencies,’ she’d said.

‘But I don’t have any emergencies,’ he’d said.

‘Patrick! How can you—’

Then she’d realized it was a joke, and laughed.

Still, he didn’t want it or like it.

‘Will you call me?’ she said, as the train squealed in.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered.

‘OK,’ she said, with a strange look on her face.

Now Patrick read the manual, just for something to do.

Outside, the glittering Taff wound under the tracks, and the city dissolved quickly to green. Castell Coch came and went in the morning sunlight, and then the Valleys started for real – the rows of grey and brown stone cottages, set into the sides of the mountains that were sometimes rock and sometimes coal and all coated in careful grass and dotted with sheep.

‘Is it a BlackBerry?’ said one of the two twelve-year-olds who’d got on at Taffs Well.

‘No, it’s a phone,’ said Patrick and the boys grinned at each other.

One twisted his head sideways and peered at the picture on the front of the manual. ‘It’s not even a smartphone,’ he said.

‘It’s fucking shit,’ said the other.

Patrick put down the manual and said, ‘Three weeks ago, I sawed off a man’s head.’

The boys said nothing else, and got off at the next stop.

Patrick was at Quakers Yard before the stupidly complex manual told him how to make a call, and close to Troedyrhiw before he found out how to use the loudspeaker facility so that the phone didn’t fry his brain.

He dialled Meg’s beautiful number.

‘I’m calling you,’ he shouted from a safe distance.

‘I can hear that,’ she laughed. ‘Thank you.’

‘OK!’ he yelled. ‘Goodbye!’

His mother was not at the station to meet him, so he waited on the wooden bench outside for an hour.

Still she didn’t come, so he used his new phone to call the house, but there was still no answer, and this time it didn’t even switch to the machine, so he couldn’t leave another message.

He waited for another hour and went across the road to buy himself a burger, then ate it and waited some more. Not having a bicycle was like not having legs.

Around three p.m. he got a bus to Brecon and then a taxi home.

Not quite home. The meter clocked up the exact amount Patrick had left in his jeans when they were three-quarters of a mile from the house, so he asked the driver to drop him off, then walked the rest of the way. His suitcase was no fuller than when he’d left home, but that was full enough to be awkward, so he left it inside a field gate, up against the hedge, and walked on without it.

The Fiesta was not in the driveway and the back door was locked.

Patrick walked around the house, peering into the windows, and then fetched the spare key from the hook on the apple tree and let himself in.

It was April, but the old stone house still felt cold.

The cat ran into the kitchen to greet him, then stopped when it saw who it was, and sat down to lick its own arse instead.

Patrick noticed that the cat’s bowl was full to the brim with food, as was the one next to it – and the one next to that, and the water bowl was also full to overflowing.

He went upstairs to check her bedroom. There was no sign of her. No indication of where she was.

Back in the hallway he noticed the answerphone was unplugged from the wall. He plugged it back in. There were no new messages, even though he had left one just this morning. That meant his mother had listened to his message after he’d called from the station. She’d known he’d be arriving at midday. Had he missed her at the station somehow? He didn’t see how that could have happened.

He made a fire in the kitchen, and then a sandwich. The bread was stale, so he took the sandwich apart and toasted it instead. That meant he had to eat the cheese and chutney by itself and search through the cupboard for something that started with a late ‘T’ instead of anything after ‘B’. There was a can of tuna, and he forked that between the two slices.

Then he made a cup of tea. When he picked up the kettle to fill it, he realized it was still lukewarm.

It was only when he sat down at the table to eat that Patrick noticed the letter propped between the salt and pepper.

It had his name on the envelope, so he opened it and read it.

Patrick sat and thought about the letter while he chewed slowly on his sandwich. He didn’t like it. Something bad came off it in waves, like a smell. There was definitely a message in it. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded as if she wasn’t coming back. And all that stuff about the will made it seem like she was dead, but that couldn’t be true because nobody knew when they were going to die.

It irked him that he couldn’t quite work it out, but at the same time he felt a strange urgency. So he left the second half of his sandwich, and took the letter round to Weird Nick.

Weird Nick shook his head and said, ‘Shit, Patrick! This is a suicide note!’

‘Is it?’ said Patrick doubtfully.

‘Yes it is,’ said Weird Nick. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, mate, but your mother’s been behaving like a total nutter. A few weeks back she tried to burn down the shed! I had to put the fire out with the garden hose, and we’re on a meter.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Who knows?’ said Weird Nick, shaking the note like a farewell handkerchief. ‘But this is serious, Patrick. She’s going to kill herself.’

‘She told me she tried to do that once before.’

‘When?’

‘The day my dad died.’

‘Yeah? Well, that proves it. How did she try then?’

‘She said she was going to jump off Penyfan,’ said Patrick. ‘And the Fiesta is gone.’

‘We need to get to Penyfan right now!’ said Weird Nick decisively. Then he said, ‘Shit! I’m not allowed to drive my mum’s car.’

‘I don’t understand why she wants to kill herself,’ said Patrick.

‘It doesn’t matter why, does it?’

Patrick looked Weird Nick in the eye for the first time in his life. ‘Why is all that matters,’ he said.

Patrick’s mind started to bubble – battling once more with the implications of everything he knew. How the puzzle pieces fitted together. He turned suddenly and walked briskly back towards his own garden.

‘Hold on!’ said Weird Nick. ‘Patrick! Where are you going? I’ve only got slippers on.’

Patrick didn’t wait for him.

He only knew three things for sure that had changed since he was last home. His mother had written a suicide note. He had told her he was coming home. She had tried to burn down the shed. He could see no correlation between the three things, but he felt that somehow they must be connected.

He could see the scorched wood at the corner of the shed as he crossed the gravel – a dark scar that must tell a story, just as surely as a blocked artery, swollen meninges, a bitten finger.

He touched the burnt wood, feeling how it crumbled and flaked under his fingers, leaving them black as coal.

Behind him he heard someone coming across the gravel and assumed it was Weird Nick.

The fire had taken a good bite out of the bottom of the shed before being extinguished with Weird Nick’s mother’s very expensive water. Patrick knelt in the weed-cushioned gravel and looked through the hole it had made. In the warm spring afternoon, his eyes took a while to adjust to the dark cavern that was the inside of the shed.

There wasn’t much to see. The weeds continued from the outside to the inside, across the cracked concrete floor of the shed, as if there had never been a barrier there. Against the far wall he could see cobwebs draped like curtains.

He lay down to get a better view. Between the burnt wood and the cobwebs, Patrick could just make out a wheel of a car.

He stood up. ‘There’s a car in there.’

‘Fuck,’ said Weird Nick softly. ‘Is it her?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Patrick. His voice sounded the same, but the urgency inside him was growing with every breath he took.

He jogged to the ruined greenhouse. Among the debris were things he remembered from his childhood; things that had always been there, between the glass and the grass and the cement gone hard in its bags.

One of them was an old, rusted hatchet.

He grabbed it and ran back across the gravel, and didn’t even slow down before driving the hatchet into the wooden door.

‘Shit, Patrick!’ said Weird Nick, shielding his head from the splinters, but Patrick ignored him, using the hatchet like a hammer, and when he’d made a hole that was big enough, tearing at the planks with his bare hands. The wood was old and rotten and soon he tore off the latch itself, and one door creaked crookedly open just a few inches on a rusted hinge.

‘Patrick, wait!’

Patrick did, panting and suddenly frightened, while Weird Nick stepped gingerly forward and opened the door.

‘It’s OK, Patrick,’ he said. ‘It’s not her.’

‘What is it then?’ Patrick stepped forward to look into the shed – and stared in disbelief. ‘It’s our old car.’

It was.

Under a thick layer of dust was the old blue Volkswagen. In an instant, Patrick remembered how deep the back seat was – so deep that he’d have to kneel if he wanted to see out of the windows, and covered with a comforting velour. A back seat for sleeping, as he loved to do. He remembered how his mother had seemed so small in the plush driver’s seat, and how his father would laugh at her and pat her on the head and make her laugh too. He remembered his father opening the bonnet and showing him the plugs and the air filter and where to top up the radiator. He could do it right now; it was so fresh in his head.

But he didn’t remember the damage.

The front edge of the bonnet was crumpled, the radiator grille smashed, the VW badge popped out, leaving only a black circle in its place. And in the middle of the bonnet was another dent – a shallow pan impressed in the metal, as if someone had taken a medicine ball and dropped it there.

Patrick stared at it.

For no reason at all, he thought of his mother’s stinging hand on his backside when she’d caught him testing the lock on the shed door.

No means no, Patrick!

Was the car in here then?

Why would she hide it?

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

His mother’s words. Telling him something as surely as the dead man had. In a slow fog, Patrick reached out and touched the distorted metal – ran his thumb along the steel creases, with their seams of rust.

‘It’s been in a crash,’ said Weird Nick.

And that was all it took – to hear the truth spoken aloud.

With a lurch of his insides that actually made him sway, Patrick saw his father’s hips crush the front edge, his legs smash the radiator grille, his head bounce off the place that looked as though it had been punched by a monster fist.

A strangled shout escaped him and he clapped his hand over his mouth in surprise.

His mother had killed his father.

But why?

Because Weird Nick’s mother was out, they took her car, even though they weren’t allowed, and even though neither of them had ever driven on the roads.

Patrick drove because Weird Nick said that it was his emergency and that his mother would therefore be more likely to forgive Patrick if anything happened to her car.

Patrick didn’t follow the logic but assumed his neighbour must be right. He was more concerned that the word ‘emergency’ had made him realize he’d left Meg’s phone on the kitchen table next to his tuna sandwich. He wished he had them both.

Driving Weird Nick’s mother’s car was nothing like Grand Theft Auto. Patrick steered and braked and pressed the clutch whenever Weird Nick said so, and Weird Nick changed gears, looked both ways at junctions, and kept an eye out for small children running into the road in the villages, and sheep thereafter.

At times they reached speeds of thirty miles an hour.

‘I hope we’re not too late,’ said Weird Nick.

Patrick remembered, ‘The kettle was still a bit warm. She can’t have been gone for long.’

They lurched to a halt beside the Fiesta, which was parked opposite the Storey Arms at the base of Penyfan. It was only then that Weird Nick realized he was still wearing slippers, and was therefore ill equipped to climb the highest peak in South Wales.

‘I’m such an idiot!’ he wailed.

Patrick didn’t answer pointless statements. Instead he just got out of the car, jogged across the road and started up the slope alone.

56

AT A SHADE under three thousand feet, Penyfan was little more than a very steep hill, really, but it still took some climbing. It was also deceptive. It started broad and shallow, with an inviting footpath passing through gentle fields, bathed in sunshine. A family might ascend, with small children; maybe Nana in a wheelchair!

But soon there was a stile, and then a mean descent into a cheating valley, before the real rise began again from below the original starting point.

By halfway up, the slope was a proper incline that required the bowing of the head, the lifting of the knees and the sending back of children and the elderly, while the drop on either side of the stony footpath grew closer and closer, until it seemed that to stray too far from the path might be a rash thing to do.

Here the winds gusted hard, cooling any sun and blowing one briefly raised leg across the other in an effort to trip the unwary walker.

Halfway up there was a monument to a five-year-old boy who had died of exposure on the spot, having wandered away from a local farm and tragically walked up, instead of down.

After that it got steeper.

And narrower.

Until the footpath itself had to narrow to stay atop the new moon of a ridge that fell away steeply on the left-hand side, down carved swathes of dark green, as if giants had slithered down the face, digging their fingernails in all the way down.

It felt like a mountain now.

Patrick had been up Penyfan on several occasions, but never in T-shirt and trainers.

The setting sun was bright, yet up here it was a cruel mirage observed through the iced window of an igloo. Its warmth was dashed away by the wind that roared in his ears and pummelled his chest, then his back, then his sides – each time waiting until he had adjusted his weight into it, before dropping suddenly to make him lurch without its support, and running round behind him to try to push him over while he was still catching his balance.

As soon as he reached the crescent with the steep drop, Patrick walked with his head up, his watering eyes slitted into the wind, to look for his mother.

If she wanted to kill herself, it would be from this sheer ridge. Now and then he walked carefully close to the edge, or dropped to his hands and knees and crawled there, and looked over the side.

He couldn’t see a body, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

The sun lost its brightness and turned orange as it sank towards the horizon. What little warmth it had lent to the wind was reduced still further, and Patrick’s teeth started to chatter.

He would have to turn back. It wasn’t logical to go on. It wasn’t safe. Even now he’d be cutting it fine if he wanted to get back down before dark. Penyfan by day was one thing; by night it was quite another. Even colder, even steeper – and the footpath seemed to shift just that little bit closer to the drop…

But he kept going, kept going.

‘Mum!’ he shouted twice, then stopped, because it was disconcerting how quickly the sound was torn from his lips and tossed aside by the wind.

He looked behind him and stopped while he watched the red sun squeeze itself down behind the Black Mountain. It disappeared, sucking the last of the thin warmth from the air, and left a leaden warning in Patrick’s belly. Night was coming. He had to go back. Not to was stupid – possibly fatally so.

Instead he went on.

In the dusk the curved drop had turned black. No longer grass-covered rock, but something dark and subterranean rising up through the Beacons. Something unnatural.

‘Mum!’ he shouted again, although he didn’t know whether it was for her, or for himself.

He found her close to the summit, in almost complete darkness. Another ten minutes and he could have walked right past her. She was sitting hunched at the edge of the drop, her legs dangling off it like a child on a swing, her head bowed over her lap, her arms crossed, her hair and her thin cardigan whipped around her by the wind like foam on a stormy sea.

She didn’t move.

‘Mum?’

She turned her head and looked at him. All he could see was the pale smudge of her face.

‘Patrick?’

He went towards her and she shrank away from him.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t touch me!’

He stopped a few feet away. ‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘Of course you weren’t,’ she said.

He was close enough to hear her now, even though the wind did its best to rip up her words and scatter them across the hills like confetti.

‘We have to go down,’ he told her.

‘Go then,’ she said.

He was momentarily confused.

‘We have to go down,’ he repeated more clearly.

‘I’m staying.’

‘You’ll die if you stay here.’

‘So what? You read my letter.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I didn’t have the guts to jump,’ she said with a nod at the drop below her sandals. ‘So I’ll just stay here until it’s too late to get back.’

Patrick didn’t know what else he could say, so he walked the last couple of yards to the edge of the ridge and sat down close to her. Lowering his feet off the side made him feel giddy, even though he could barely see the dark hole that might swallow him if the wind caught him off-balance.

He found she was right – that the only real way to sit here was to clasp his own forearms across his ribs and hunch down to protect his head from the worst of it.

Darkness fell fast and everything melted into blackness, and sitting at the edge of a three-thousand-foot drop became much more like sitting on the pier at Penarth, dangling his legs and watching the little yachts scud by on the white-tops.

Apart from the cold.

The cold was like falling into iced water. The cold would kill them both – or render them so stupid that they would tumble off the pier and into the black ocean below.

He wondered how long Weird Nick would wait for him, before panicking and taking his mother’s car home. He didn’t blame him, not even for the slippers.

‘I found the car,’ he told his mother through chattering teeth, and she nodded very slowly.

‘Then why did you come after me?’

He thought about that. Why had he?

He worked it out while he spoke. ‘Because I want to know the truth. And being dead makes that difficult.’

She said nothing and looked down at her feet, pale against the void.

‘Why did you kill him?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘But you hit him with the car.’

She nodded slowly again and for a long time said nothing.

‘I didn’t really mean any of it to happen. I just got in the car. I know I shouldn’t have – I’d had a drink. I was going to come and pick you up anyway… but then… but then I saw you crossing the road…’

She looked up at the darkening sky and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

‘It happened so fast. You stepped backwards, and he stepped forwards…’

She shrugged and shook her head.

Patrick remembered the moment and thought she must be remembering it too – but from a different angle. He tried to imagine how they had looked, crossing the road outside the bookies: him pulling away, stepping back.

His father turning towards him, into the path of the car.

Where he should have been.

‘You wanted to hit me.’

She said nothing. She stared out across the sinuous hills that stretched all the way to the dark northern horizon.

He took her silence as confirmation, and nodded.

‘That makes more sense,’ he said.

She looked at him, the wind thrashing her hair around her face. ‘Does it?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

‘You understand why I wanted to kill you?’

‘Yes.’

He did. And he also understood that the accident had been just that – the unlucky culmination of a million tiny moments that had fallen into place – or out of it – on that bright spring afternoon. He understood that sometimes things happened that nobody could prepare for; that what was done was done and that there was no going back. Like Weird Nick’s slippers.

His mother looked away from him. Right away.

‘Well, now you know the truth,’ she said roughly. ‘Now you can go.’

‘OK,’ he said. He shuffled himself backwards and got up. ‘Come, then.’

‘I’m staying! For God’s sake, Patrick! Just go before we both freeze to death.’

Death.

Patrick thought suddenly of his leap over the car-park wall and into the bitter night air. Of how his heart had burst with a sudden hunger for life, even while his head knew it was almost certainly over. He had come close – he knew that. He could still feel its breath on the back of his neck.

It made him shiver with the pleasure of not being dead.

That was a good feeling. Good enough to share. He thought of the goldfish in the tank, and flexed his fingers.

‘It makes no sense not to come,’ he said carefully. ‘I know everything now. Things will be better.’

‘No, they won’t,’ said Sarah. ‘And how can I live with what I’ve done? To your father, and to you?’

‘But Dad’s dead,’ he said. ‘And I don’t care.’

Sarah turned and stared at him in surprise, and then she laughed. She actually laughed.

‘What?’ said Patrick. ‘What’s funny?’

But she couldn’t stop, even though they were on a wind-whipped ridge where they would both probably die quite soon.

‘You don’t care?’ she said, wiping her eyes.

He shrugged. ‘Not enough to die for.’

Sarah looked up at him, then back down into the void. As she did, one of her sandals tipped off her foot and was quickly gulped down by the hungry dark.

‘Shit!’ she said. ‘My shoe.’

She started to cry.

She couldn’t stop.

‘My shoe,’ she sobbed. ‘My shoe.’

Patrick watched her and thought of his father and of Persian Punch and of that feeling of connection.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He had heard it a million times, but this time he believed it.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Take my hand.’

His mother looked up in surprise.

She glanced back into the darkness one more time, then wearily pushed her hair away from her face, and put her hand in his.

They staggered and fell, and sometimes they crawled down Penyfan. Three times they lost the path, and held on to each other’s clothes while they tested the grass with tentative hands and feet until they felt the safety of stones again and went on their way. Twice Sarah begged Patrick to leave her, and he had to drag her over the sharp flint until she was hurt enough to get up and go on, every step making her weep with pain and cold and exhaustion.

Halfway down, Patrick saw lights coming up to meet them. It was a mountain-rescue team, armed with blankets, soup and heat pads for their armpits.

They put Sarah on a stretcher and Patrick walked beside it on legs he could barely feel.

In the deep valley they met Weird Nick, who had walked as far as his slippers had lasted to come to meet them.

He hadn’t taken his mother’s car home; he had called the police instead.

‘Thank you,’ said Patrick.

57

TWO DAYS AFTER they got home from the hospital – while Sarah was still in bed – Patrick burned down the shed.

It took a little while to get going, but once it took hold it was unstoppable.

Weird Nick was woken by the sound of crackling, spitting flames on wood and rushed outside for the hosepipe, only to find that someone had stolen it.

Instead he went next door and stood beside Patrick while the shed consumed the car and the car consumed itself, helped by whatever fumes were left in its tank.

Sarah emerged in her nightdress and wellingtons and stood on the step with Ollie winding his way around her rubber legs.

‘How did that happen?’ she said.

‘It’s not difficult,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ll show you if you want.’

She raised her eyebrows at him and just for a second he met her gaze, before looking away with a little smile.

‘Hey,’ said Weird Nick, pointing towards the old greenhouse. ‘What’s our hosepipe doing over there?’

‘You’re on a meter,’ said Patrick.

Patrick got a job washing up in the Rorke’s Drift. He loved feeding the dirty glasses and dishes into one end of the big dishwasher and retrieving them at the other end, steaming with cleanliness and too hot to touch. He instituted a system that meant they never ran out of teaspoons, which had been a long-standing headache, and he worked so hard and fast that he quickly became a favourite with the staff, who got fewer complaints and gave quicker service, and who voted to share their tips with him – an exercise unheard of in the pub’s history. At the end of the first week the landlord told him he was putting his money up.

Patrick would have done it for nothing. He was allowed to have Coke in an hourglass bottle, and once a shift he got a free meal – the chef would cook him anything he wanted from the menu. Anything. Often Patrick chose a toasted tuna sandwich, because he’d come home from the hospital still wanting his half-sandwich, only to find the cat had licked off all the tuna and left only the soggy toast behind.

His mother gave him an advance on his wages and he bought a new bicycle – a mountain bike this time, although still blue, obviously. He no longer had to catch the bus to work, and spent his weekends cycling across the Beacons, where he was happiest. Sometimes he found a dead sheep or a fallen crow, and often slowed to stare at it, but never picked it up.

He always took Meg’s phone with him, just in case, and sometimes he called her, because she seemed to like that, and he didn’t mind it either – even though the sheep scattered when he started to shout.

58

THREE MONTHS AFTER the events that marked the end of Patrick’s brief spell at university, he came home from a lunchtime shift at the pub to find Professor Madoc and Mick Jarvis having tea with his mother.

They all said hello, and his mother kept smiling, so he knew there was something afoot.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘Nothing bad,’ said Sarah.

‘No,’ said Professor Madoc, ‘it’s very, very good! We’re expanding the department, Patrick, and we’d like to offer you a job.’

‘What job?’ he said suspiciously.

‘Trainee lab technician,’ said Professor Madoc. ‘You’d be Mr Jarvis’s assistant. He would train you to do all aspects of his work – embalming, dissecting-room preparation, hygiene, all the paperwork for the acceptance and dispersal of donated bodies, the whole shebang.’

‘What’s a shebang?’

‘Nothing,’ said Sarah. ‘It just means everything. It’s just a figure of speech.’

‘Oh,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve never heard it. Shebang.’ He rolled it round his mouth quietly. ‘Shuuuuurbang.’

‘It’s not important right now, Patrick,’ said his mother.

‘I’d be very happy to have you, Patrick,’ said Mick. ‘I know you’d do a very thorough and professional job.’

‘Yes, I would,’ agreed Patrick.

‘Apart from all the shoe-throwing, of course.’

Mick winked, but Patrick only said, ‘It didn’t hit you.’

‘Mr Jarvis is only joking,’ said the professor hurriedly. ‘That’s all in the past now. We’re talking about your future here. So, what do you think, Patrick?’

What did he think?

They were all looking at him, and Patrick had to stop himself wriggling under their combined gaze.

He thought he was much better at that these days. He thought he was much better at a lot of things. Like being touched; he didn’t enjoy it, but he could stand still while it happened. He answered his mother sometimes, even when her statements were pointless, and that made her happy.

He thought he was happier, too. He understood more, and worried less. He had friends at the pub and a friend on the phone, and a new bicycle.

Best of all, he knew what had happened to his father, and that comforted him like an alphabet plate.

He thought that knowledge was the sweeter for having been lost along the way.

Patrick realized that they were still watching him, and waiting for him to tell them what he thought about the job in the dissecting room. He understood that they were offering him a gift, and that he needed to be grateful.

‘No, thank you,’ he said carefully. ‘I’m sick of dead things.’