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.