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.