Rubbernecker (20 page)

The porter’s nose.

He quickly withdrew his hand from the counter and wiped it on his jeans. ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ he told her.

‘What
has
it got to do with?’ she said.

‘Something irrelevant. Are you going to take my report or not?’

The young woman stared at his face so he had to blink and look away.

‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘An officer will be right with you.’

Patrick took a seat that faced the glass front wall of the foyer. The rain had left the air outside clear, the trees washed, and the pink gravel avenue sparkling in the February sunshine.

A police van pulled up at the kerb and an officer opened the back doors. Patrick expected to see a dog jump out, but instead a
man
did – the young man in a white tracksuit that Patrick had met in the park.

His sleeves were soaked to the elbows with blood.

Two policemen walked him up the wide steps to the foyer. His wrists were cuffed in front of him but he still had a casual bob to his gait and a faint smile on his face.

The trio came in and walked straight through to an inner door. One of the officers tapped in a code on the security pad. 1109; he made no attempt to conceal it. Patrick wondered whether the exit code was the same.

The young man, meanwhile, stared around the foyer and caught Patrick looking at him. He raised his chained, bloody hands as if pleading – or praying. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said.

‘I doubt that,’ said Patrick, and both policemen laughed, even though it wasn’t meant to be a joke, and then ushered the young man through the door.

‘What’s your name?’

The desk officer was talking to Patrick, leaning forward, with one splayed hand against the glass.

He was suddenly wary. ‘Why?’

‘We can’t file a report without a name,’ she said.

Patrick was puzzled. He’d watched enough TV to know about anonymous tip-offs. Therefore the officer’s words made no sense. Therefore they couldn’t be true.

Therefore, thought Patrick, she was lying.

But
why
?

She’d looked at his knuckles. Patrick thought again of the porter’s nose spreading under his fist. Blood on his knuckles, just as the young man in the white tracksuit had blood up his sleeves. And how the police had laughed when that young man had turned to Patrick and said
I didn’t do it
. Even Patrick hadn’t believed him. The guilt was there on his sleeves for all to see.

And the blood was there on his own knuckles.

Nobody had seen the porter grab hold of him first, or Mark Bennett punch him in the back, the day his father had died.

So instead of giving the officer his name, Patrick stood up and walked out.

She came after him, but he was already running, and by the time he stopped on the steps of the war memorial, Patrick had only his ghostly breath for company in the pale winter sunshine.

The rare ringing of the phone woke Sarah Fort for the second time in twelve hours. This time it was daylight – a stabbing glare that made her wince and hate the world.

At least she didn’t have to get out of bed this time. This time she was already at the kitchen table, where a small puddle of spit marked her spot.

She snatched up the phone and said ‘
Hello!
’ far too loudly, so she said it again more carefully. ‘Hello?’

Silence. Someone was there; she could hear them breathing.

‘Hello?’ she said more forcefully.

Breathing.

‘Are you going to say anything, pervert?’

The breathing stopped.

Sarah put the heel of her palm in her eye and held it there to push the dull pain further back inside.

She hadn’t felt this way for years. Years and years. Years when she’d had to be strong because it was just the two of them, and she’d had to do everything all by herself.

Wasted years now. It had been so easy to stop being strong that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t done it before. She looked down at her cream nightdress with the little blue flowers on it. She hadn’t even got dressed before throwing herself off the wagon – apart from the boots, of course. It didn’t matter; she had no one to
get
dressed
for
; no one who cared. Who would have her with a son like hers in the house? She should have done this years ago and saved herself the empty hopes.

She remembered she was on the phone and put it slowly back to her ear.

‘Patrick?’

The line went dead.

Patrick stared at the receiver in his shiny blue hand and knew that he could not go home. His innards vibrated like a ribbon in a storm. It was ten years since he’d felt this way, but it felt like ten minutes.

It was like riding a bicycle: the sound of his mother when she was drunk.

32

IN THE OVER-MASCARA’D
eyes of Tracy Evans, a written warning for leaving the nurses’ station unattended on the night Mr Galen had died was a small price to pay.

Mr Deal had proved to be an adequate lover that night and on several subsequent occasions – and a more than adequate provider of gifts, whose worth grew in direct proportion to the sexual acts Tracy was willing to perform. She’d already had meals, a Burberry scarf and mid-priced trinkets, despite being uncharacteristically coy with her favours. There was no point in showing off all her wares at once, she reasoned; Mr Deal might be a once-in-a-lifetime cash cow and she was determined to milk him correctly. She would soon have her overdue rent paid, and they’d barely moved beyond the missionary position! Her grand plan was pregnancy – and a fiscal bond that would last a generation.

Plus, there was something about Mr Deal that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Despite their short, frenzied couplings, he remained quite aloof. He was pleasant but not fawning; his gifts were given casually and without sentiment. He took her to restaurants with tablecloths, and sent back the wine. He didn’t call her and rarely answered his phone, even though she knew he had caller ID. In short, there was nothing of the puppy in Mr Deal – nothing of the doormat – and Tracy found herself thinking of him at odd moments, even when she
didn’t
need twenty quid for the gas.

All in all, it was working out even better than she had imagined.

Of course, Tracy was
sorry
that Mr Galen had died. He hadn’t been a bad coma patient – no worse than any other – and his wife had been OK, despite the bacon-frying. If she’d heard the alarm that had accompanied his demise then Tracy would almost certainly have responded. It had simply been Mr Galen’s bad luck to go into cardiac arrest just as she was suffering her own little death astride Mr Deal in the ladies’ loo, behind a sign that read – aptly – OUT OF ORDER.

She’d explained her absence that night by saying she had a pelvic inflammation which required frequent toilet breaks. Her explanation was accepted and, ironically, proved to be true a few days after the sealing of Mr Deal’s fate.

Jean and Angie were disapproving. They said nothing to her face, but
everything
behind her back. Monica, on the other hand, was a staunch supporter of anyone who covered for her fag breaks, and nodded vigorously when Tracy told her, ‘They’re just jealous.’

Tracy honestly believed this to be true. Jean was a dried-up old martyr, whose pot-bellied husband wore a moustache with bits in it, and Angie had snagged herself a junior doctor and a ring, but was still emptying bedpans – so obviously didn’t understand the rules of engagement in the war of the sexes.

In August, a month after Mr Galen’s death, Tracy transferred to the geriatric ward, where people dying was even less unexpected than on neurological, and where few of them could reach the buzzer – or even remember that they
had
a buzzer.

Monica gave her a tiny white teddy bear holding a big red heart that said ‘We’ll all miss you’.

But Jean and Angie didn’t even say goodbye.

33

THIS WAS ONLY
her second time, but already Meg wondered how much longer she could read to Mrs Deal.

She was normally a fluent reader, but here she was too aware of her mute listener, too distracted by the still horror of the situation to give her all to a book – even when it was
The Da Vinci Code
, which she’d found beside Mrs Deal’s bed and which had sucked her in so fast that she’d abandoned any pretence she’d ever had of tackling
Ulysses
. She would be going along just fine, then Mrs Deal’s finger would twitch and she would have to re-read a sentence three times until it made sense. Or she would turn a page and a machine would gurgle – then would wonder if she’d skipped a page, so would go back and start again – only to realize three-quarters of the way down that she was indeed repeating herself.

Meg stumbled over the prose for the umpteenth time, and saw Mrs Deal’s hand judder in apparent response. Was that how coma victims expressed annoyance? By flicking a finger and hoping that everyone understood how pissed off they were?

The finger flicked again. It drubbed a little, then stopped.

Meg sighed. Jean had warned her about imagining communication where none existed. There was no understanding in Mrs Deal, she said; no control.

Meg looked at Mrs Deal’s face. She wondered whether she’d been pretty once. It was hard to tell now; she was so ashen and thin, and the bottom half of her face was covered by the thick white
plastic
of the ventilator that kept her breathing. Sometimes her eyes opened and they were a pretty hazel colour, but mostly they were closed or showed only slim crescents of white, like now.

‘Are you OK, Mrs Deal?’ said Meg, and stroked her hand. Under her palm, the finger twitched again several times, then stopped.

It gave Meg the creeps. What was going on inside Mrs Deal’s head and fingers? Was the twitching a desperate attempt to communicate? Or just the sputtering leftovers from a failed electrical system?

She picked up the woman’s loose hand.

‘I could do your nails. Would you like that, Mrs Deal?’

The finger stayed still.

‘Would you like pink?’

The finger stayed still.

‘Or red? Go for the vamp look.’

The finger stayed still.

Meg sighed and placed Mrs Deal’s hand gently back on the pale-yellow cover. Immediately the finger juddered again, then stopped.

Meg frowned. ‘Can you do that again, Mrs Deal?’

She did it again.

‘Can you give one tap for yes, two for no?’

Meg held her breath. Mrs Deal’s finger started to tap, but kept going – five, six, seven,
eight
times, and Meg picked up the book again. She wondered whether she was just wasting her time. For the first time, she realized that her actions were not entirely altruistic. Deep down, she had hoped that reading to a coma victim would spark a recovery for which
she
would be responsible. It was humiliating to confess such a motive – even to herself. She was a kind person, sure, but was she also a glory-seeker? A show-off? Meg didn’t like the new light by which she found herself examined. It was not modest or selfless and it made her ashamed.

Chastened, she found her place again and resumed reading.
From
the corner of her eye, she saw Mrs Deal’s finger tapping and stopping, tapping and stopping.

Angie came over to check one of the machines beside Mrs Deal’s bed, and smiled at Meg.

‘Why does she do that?’ asked Meg, nodding at Mrs Deal’s juddering finger.

‘It’s just something that happens – a patient twitches or speaks, or opens their eyes, even when completely unconscious.’

Meg nodded slowly.

‘Does it bother you?’ asked Angie.

‘A bit.’

The nurse smiled sympathetically. ‘I know it’s upsetting at first, but after a few weeks you won’t even notice it.’

She smiled a goodbye and moved on to the next bed.

A few weeks!

With a sour ball of dread in the pit of her stomach, Meg stared slowly around the ward, at the bedridden lumps that had once been real people.

The idea of this clammy vigil becoming part of her future for weeks or months to come sent a shiver down her spine.