Rubbernecker (18 page)

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.

PART THREE

30

JEAN BOTTI HAD
worked on the neurological ward for seven years, so she’d seen it all. Miracles and murders.

Oh, they happened – both of them – although neither was ever acknowledged by the hospital.

Since starting work on what was commonly known as the coma ward, she knew of three reliable miracles and two less reliable murders. The miracles were not of the walking-on-water, feeding-the-five-thousand variety. That would be silly, even to a staunch Catholic like Jean. But, in Jean’s eyes, they
were
events of such startling recovery that they would have challenged the story of Lazarus.

There was sixteen-year-old Amy Russett, who spent a year frozen in a coma and then, one chilly March night, got up, walked down the corridor and took herself to the toilet – marking the start of a rapid and unexplained recovery.

Then there was Gwilym Thomas, a sixty-six-year-old farmer, who had never been beyond the Welsh border but who, after being gored by his own prize bull, awoke speaking only French. Even more bizarrely, the only English he seemed to remember was the name of the bull. Jean could recall it even now: Barleyfield Ianto.

Mrs Thomas had proved to be a stoic, and hadn’t taken it personally. After a brief flurry of confusion, she had armed herself with a Linguaphone course and started a new, more Gallic life.

Jean’s personal favourite was Mark Strickland, who crashed his
car
as a drunken lout, and emerged from his coma six weeks later quoting a Bible he’d never read, and humbly asking the Lord for help as he sweated through the agony of physiotherapy.

Miracles all, in Jean’s eyes.

Then there were the murders.

Jean couldn’t help thinking of them that way, even though she knew they were not malicious. She would have preferred to think of them as ‘mercy killings’, but in her heart she knew that God didn’t agree with her.

Of course, just as the miracles were never official, neither were the murders.

Just a few months after she’d first started work on the ward, a boy named Gavin Richards had come in after being mugged. He had been hit so hard in the head that the shape of the claw hammer was clearly outlined in his shaven skull.

At first his family hoped for a miracle. They
all
did; it was only natural. But, as the days started to pass into weeks, and the weeks into months, it became apparent to everyone that seventeen-year-old Gavin was never going to make it. Everyone except his mother, that is. Gavin’s mother came in every day and spent hours holding his hand, clipping his nails, putting cream on his raw bottom, and singing childhood songs to him in a gentle, quavery voice barely above a whisper, while her other children – a boy of nine and a girl of fourteen – suffered the twin loss of a brother
and
a mother. Tragedy upon tragedy.

Despite the best care, Gavin slid slowly downhill towards death. Soon the doctors would start to speak to his family about withdrawing life support and allowing him to slip away.

But then, one terrible day, Gavin inexplicably opened his eyes and said, ‘Mummy.’

Immediately he’d sunk back into the hinterland of unconsciousness, but the damage was done. His mother redoubled her efforts – and her neglect. She started to bring in a sleeping roll
and
spend nights under his bed. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she told Jean as she crawled out every shivery morning. ‘I just want to be here when he wakes up.’

But Gavin was
never
going to wake up. That was the trouble. And even if he did, so much of his brain had been pulverized that his future held nothing but animal needs in a shell of a human body. But however often the doctors showed her the scans and explained the extent of the horrible damage the single hammer blow had caused, Mrs Richards would have no truck with the idea that he might not come back to her just the way he’d left on that fateful night.
Mummy
had been an aberration, a false dawn, a cruel neurological hiccup that would hold Gavin’s family captive forever unless something was done.

And so a senior consultant did something.

He suggested that Gavin was ready to go home.

Gavin’s mother cried with joy; Gavin’s father cried because he understood what that really meant.

With a bravery Jean was humbled to witness, the family made preparations for young Gavin’s homecoming. They altered their home with ramps and rails. They bought medical equipment and an optimistic wheelchair. They hired nurses. And they were not rich people.

Gavin left hospital with his mother alongside the trolley, beaming and waving as though she were leading in the Derby winner.

Five days later, Gavin was dead from the expected complications, and his family was reunited in grief – as they should have been months earlier.

Jean had received the news with a sudden welling of tears, but they were of relief – and of guilt. If he had not gone home, Gavin would still be alive.

In a manner of speaking.

And there was the rub. She’d hated the consultant for making a decision she would never have been able to make herself. She still
had
sleepless nights about it. Nights when she would sit up in bed and read trashy novels by the dim circle of a booklight, to avoid waking Roger.

The second murder – just last year – was more straightforward. An elderly woman, hospitalized after a massive stroke, who was being kept alive by means of a ventilator.

Her large, sweet-natured family had trooped in and out of the ward twice a day to suffer the slow, heartbreaking erosion of everything they had loved, while the nurses struggled to keep her alive when it was plain she would be better off dead.

Once more, it was left to a doctor to make the decision – this time a young man only recently qualified, but with a kind heart and a caring way with people.

On the fifth night of their vigil, he had suggested that the family might like to take a break in the coffee shop downstairs.

‘You’re exhausted,’ he said. ‘It’s important that
you
remain strong.’

They had been reluctant, but had finally nodded and left.

‘You look as if you could do with a coffee too, Jean.’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she’d smiled.

‘
I
’m not,’ he’d said. ‘I’d love one. Would you mind? I’ll hold the fort here.’

He’d insisted on giving her two pounds, and she’d left. It was only when she’d been halfway down in the lift that she’d wondered why he hadn’t simply asked one of the family to bring him a coffee.

Jean had returned to the ward just as he’d switched the ventilator back on.

Her heart had jumped so hard that she’d slopped the coffee on her hand. She’d heard of this before but never seen it – this kind of simple, final intervention that was undoubtedly in the best interests of the patient, and just as undoubtedly murder.

In a manner of speaking.

Jean had swallowed her heart and her shout, and backed away
from
the door of the ward. With shaking hands, she’d mopped up the spilled coffee and wiped down the half-full cup. Then, in a moment that would define her for ever, she’d re-entered and handed it to the doctor, along with his two pounds.

‘Mrs Loddon has passed away,’ he’d said, and Jean had noticed that he was holding the old lady’s hand.

‘Oh dear,’ she’d replied. And then, ‘Shall I go and get her family?’

‘No. Let them have their break.’

Jean had nodded and they had sat there together in silence in the semi-darkness until Mrs Loddon’s family had come back, refreshed.

There had been deaths since then, but deaths were expected on a ward like this, where patients prevaricated between living and dying, and frequently did one or the other against medical expectation.

Jean had not seen anything she could call murder since – but then, she no longer looked too hard. When Mr Attridge died last March she was relieved enough for all of them not to question it. When Mr Galen died just a few months later it had been more unexpected, but the pneumonia had not cleared entirely from his lungs, and it might only have taken some panic over a bit of phlegm to cause the heart attack that had killed him.

At the end of the day, it was almost always a merciful release for patient
and
family, and that sense pervaded all who worked on the neurological ward.