How did all that just end?
Where did it all go?
And once it was switched off, could it ever be switched back on?
So far, Number 19 had been thoroughly dead. But if any spark remained – or any promise of more than a mere spark – then it would be found in this most tantalizing of organs.
Over the course of a morning, they prised the brain out with spoons, and it flopped into Patrick’s hands like a water-filled balloon. He shook a little as he turned it, his eyes and his fingers probing the jelly-mould mind for clues, while the others peered over his shoulders and prodded at it with their blue fingers.
Patrick felt his excitement morph seamlessly into disappointment. Not the disappointment of a child denied a treat, but the kind of disappointment that makes the chest ache and the belly roll with nausea at the loss of all hope.
There was nothing.
The tightly packed convolutions were wrapped in dura, decorated with a network of nerves, and fed by thick arterial passages like mineworkings in blancmange. The pink-grey folds taunted Patrick with their perfect mystery. Whatever had made Number 19 the person he had once been was now lying right here in his hands, and yet there was no trace of him left, nor any clue as to how he had disappeared. No pearl, no tumour, no secret passageway to the beyond.
Patrick felt hope desert him.
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.
Patrick felt his face grow hot, and he stared stupidly down at the perfect practical joke overflowing in his palms.
If there were no answers here, then he no longer knew where to look for them.
He fumbled the brain to Dilip and walked out of the dissecting room in a blur.
Patrick was in the cafeteria, not eating chocolate pudding, crisps and a tuna sandwich, in that order.
Outside the window he always faced was the rack where he always locked his bike. He could get on it and ride away. There was nothing here for him now; now that he knew a dead man was no better than a dead bird. A dead father.
If he had kept hold of his hand, would that have anchored him to life?
Would the car have missed him?
Or hit them both – and revealed the truth to two instead of one?
‘Can I sit here?’ said Meg, and then sat there anyway before he could do anything about it.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Penny for your thoughts.’
Patrick stared at her blankly and she went a little pink.
‘My grandma used to say it. I’ll give you a penny, and you give me your thoughts.’
Patrick didn’t like the sound of this game. ‘Do I have to?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘You haven’t even given me a penny.’
‘It’s just a silly saying. You don’t take it literally.’
But Patrick was still perturbed by the whole concept. ‘And a penny is nothing. You can’t get anything for a penny. You’d have to pay a lot more than that.’
Meg sighed. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’
‘I know I don’t.’
‘I just wondered if you were OK, that’s all.’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Patrick.
‘What’s wrong?’
Patrick stirred his chocolate pudding mechanically, the spoon grating on the china.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘It’s just meat. Meat and shit.’
‘Oh,’ she said carefully. ‘What did you expect?’
‘Something else. Something more.’ He felt weirdly like crying, and his stomach knotted and ached the way it had that day. The day of the punch in the back, the bat in the face. He knew now what Sad looked like; was this how it felt? He didn’t like it.
‘But there is more,’ she said, grabbing the salt cellar for emphasis. ‘Just because we don’t know doesn’t make it any less… amazing. Can’t you feel it?’
‘No, I can’t,’ he said. ‘If someone dies and you don’t see it, how do you know what really happened?’
‘See what?’
‘That thing that changes between here and there. Between life and death. I can’t feel it; I want to see it. I want to know what it is.’
‘We’ll all know that one day.’
‘I want to know it now!’ he snapped.
There was a long silence while Meg stared into the crusted hole where the salt lived.
She cleared her throat. ‘You’re different, you know.’
‘Only different from you,’ he said. ‘Not different from me.’
‘That’s true.’ She smiled. Then she poured a careful little pyramid of salt on to the table.
‘What’s it like to be you?’ she said.
Patrick was surprised. Nobody had ever asked him what it was like to be him, not even his mother.
What was it like? He’d never even examined it himself before. Never been asked to come to a conclusion about it and share it with another. But Meg hadn’t called him names, and she wasn’t rushing him, and so, for the first time in his life, he reached into himself in the hope of finding something to tell her – something to show her – in the same way that Number 19 had submitted to being opened and deconstructed.
‘It’s…’
He scraped slow chocolate patterns in the bottom of the bowl while he struggled to corral his feelings and put them into words.
Meg waited for him.
‘It’s very…’
He gritted his teeth. This was crazy. There was so much in there – he could feel a million things coursing through him, and yet he kept coming up empty. It was like putting his hand into a tank filled with goldfish and trying to grab one. He’d done that in a pet shop once and it hadn’t worked, and his mother had slapped his legs.
Still Meg waited, and suddenly Patrick was filled with a tight, burning frustration at his inability to explain what it was like.
‘It’s very,’ he said forcefully. ‘Very very.’
‘Very what?’ she asked quietly.
But he had nothing to give her, even when he tried.
He dug his spoon so hard into the bowl that it rang, and spewed chocolate across the table.
‘Very,’ said Patrick.
People looked at them in a sudden hush. Then the faces turned away and the low drown of voices and echoes and cutlery resumed.
Meg simply nodded. ‘It must be.’
22
THEY’RE TRYING TO kill me.
I don’t think it’s my imagination, although that’s what the doctor is telling the woman who says she’s my wife. My wofe is how I think of her now – not the same thing.
‘Paranoia is common… emerging coma…’ he whispers, trying to keep me from hearing, but I get the gist. ‘A normal response… situation.’
They both glance at me with the same expression – concern and pity, and the need to keep things from me for my own good.
Maybe I wouldn’t be paranoid if they weren’t out to get me. The idiot Tracy Evans who regularly unplugs my heart monitor so she can plug in the electric razor; the cleaner who bumps my bed with her mop and glares if I wake; and the doctors who stand over me – too close, too watchful – and make covetous notes that they hang on my bed for everyone to see but me. Every time one of them stands over me, the sweat runs into my eyes and stings a warning.