Even my wofe. She’s supposed to be on my side. She doesn’t seem to notice that I’m an old man now. She says she loves me; calls me Darling.
‘SOMEONE KILLED THE MAN IN THAT BED.’
She’d looked at the Possum screen, then looked at the bed, frowning – as if the fact that the man was no longer there somehow cast doubt on my claim.
Secret, I’d begged her with my eyelids. Secret.
Doesn’t she understand English?
Now the doctor looks at me but whispers to her, ‘… infection… several days. Sometimes… sudden cardiac episode… vulnerable.’
There it is again. Vulnerable.
The thing that makes me feel most vulnerable is you bastards whispering in a corner about me! That doctor might even be the one! He might be the killer! Now he knows I saw something. Now he knows! And what will he do about it?
Anything
he
likes.
Fuck you, doctors. Fuck you, nurses. Fuck you, wofe. That’s the last time I trust you. The last time I confide.
She comes back over and starts to repeat the lies.
‘Sam, sweetheart, the doctor says—’
‘Ah ah ah ah ah. Ee ee ee ee ee…’ Deep and squeaky.
‘Darling, I’m trying to—’
‘AH AH AH AH AH EE EE EE EE. Guh! Guh! Guh!’ I want my wife back. I want my child. I want to speak and eat and move my own feet. I want to know what happened to the man in the next bed and I want to know what happened to me. If I have to do it all myself, I will; I can’t rely on anyone else – I see that now.
‘Guh! Guh! Guh!’ I put everything I can into it, to let her know how angry I am.
‘Sam, please…’
She takes my hand and I close my eyes; I know that hurts her.
She starts to cry and I don’t care.
23
THE MORE PATRICK scrubbed his bedroom carpet, the more he felt betrayed by the corpse. Number 19 was not a rabbit or a crow; Number 19 had been a man, just like his father, and Patrick felt the cadaver had somehow reneged on a species-specific agreement to give him the answers he sought. Instead of revealing what happened when a person stopped working, Number 19 had only added to the confusion with his elusive cause of death. And Meg had only rubbed his nose in it, going on about how ignorant they all were. As if Patrick didn’t know that.
He was sick of being confused. About everything.
Losing his father had at first seemed to be a kind of confusion – like losing a glove or a sock. Those things didn’t cease to exist just because you couldn’t see them; they were always somewhere – under the bed, in the machine, down the back of the sofa – and eventually they turned up.
Sooner than eventually, if you actively looked for them.
So Patrick had actively looked. Ever since the school counsellor had told him about the one-way door, Patrick had tried to find some sign of where it was and how it might be opened. First he’d sought it in the animals and birds he brought home off the Beacons, then in the faces of the dead that he found on macabre postcard collections, or of the dying in African aid stations on the News at Ten. Finally he searched the eyes of racehorses as they waited patiently for the bullet on snapped legs, in the only sport where death was routinely televised. With every crashing fall, Patrick felt the shock of the inevitable, and then a tingling in his belly – a bubble of anticipation in case this was the one, this was the horse, this was the moment when all would be revealed to him, when the door might open just a chink and allow him to glimpse a deathly Narnia on the other side.
He had never come close.
Upinarms, Malaga, Freezeout, Luckbox. Each now knew the secret he was so desperate to share, but watching them die only left him feeling more empty than before. Still, Patrick wrote their names in quiet pencil lists because who else would mark their passing? His father had remembered Persian Punch with a pint and a bottle of Coke; it seemed only right to do something.
The carpet was filthy. He’d already emptied his bucket of dirty water twice, and only properly cleaned a patch a foot square. Under the dark brown it was a vile ginger. Patrick didn’t like it, but he was determined to reveal it anyway.
He emptied more blackened water into the bath, refilled the bucket and added another dollop of bleach.
‘What are you doing?’ said Jackson.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Patrick.
‘Huh?’ he said, and Patrick showed him the scrubbing brush.
‘I’m cleaning.’
‘Ha ha, very funny,’ said Jackson, then followed Patrick back to his bedroom and hung around in the doorway as if cleaning were a spectator sport.
‘Have you seen Pete lately?’
‘What’s lately?’
‘In the last couple of weeks?’
‘No.’ Patrick realized he wasn’t going to be able to do this all in one go, so he mentally divided the visible carpet into squares.
‘I think maybe they broke up,’ Jackson went on.
Patrick didn’t feel that required an answer. Not that he had an answer. Or an opinion – although he did hope Kim had washed the kimono.
‘Do you think I have a chance?’ said Jackson.
Patrick sat back on his heels and thought about it. He wasn’t quite sure what Jackson was talking about, but horse racing had taught him that everything had a chance – of death and of glory.
The idea invigorated him, and suddenly he felt his determination surface again from the mud of betrayal. He was employed in solving a far bigger mystery than Number 19’s cause of death, so he shouldn’t let something as simple as that get the better of him! Patrick knew exactly where to get the information he was entitled to.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’
Jackson said, ‘Thanks!’ Then – in a rare burst of generosity – he added, ‘Your carpet looks great.’
Not yet, thought Patrick, but it would. He got to his feet and dropped the brush into the bucket with a plop. He was newly filled with hope, and his head and nose felt suddenly clear again. He wondered briefly whether it was the bleach.
He lifted his bicycle off the wall and started down the stairs.
He wasn’t going to be beaten by a carpet or a corpse.
4017.
Patrick prickled at the need for the offensively random code.
The door of the anatomy wing clicked shut behind him, damming the flow of other students and leaving him alone in the quiet corridor creek that led to the dissection room and, beyond that, the stairs leading down to the embalming room, where Mick spent most of his time.
His Pumas made a low squeak on the scuffed tiled floor.
The white double doors of the DR were not locked. It wasn’t a dissection day, and so the cadavers lay patiently on their tables, looking lost without their attending students. Patrick picked out Number 19’s domed form from across the room. He felt a sense of adversity that had not been there before.