Patrick remained still for an uncomfortably long time. Finally he nodded silently and rose to his feet, then paused and reached across the desk. The professor withdrew slightly, but Patrick picked up the Rubik’s cube.
Professor Madoc watched as the matching colours spread quickly up the six sides until the puzzle was complete and Patrick laid it back on the desk.
‘It’s not difficult,’ he said. ‘I can show you, if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ said Professor Madoc, and Patrick left.
25
THE ORANGE JUICE has gone to my chest.
Pneumonia. They don’t say it, but I know that’s the fear. People die of pneumonia – even healthy people. But I’m incredibly vulnerable. Phlegm rattles in my throat and my back is agony every time I breathe, so I try not to do that.
It doesn’t work.
Jean and Angie use the vacuum on me almost constantly. It’s disgusting and painful. Two doctors come. I wonder if one of them is the killer. Who knows? I would, if only I’d kept my eyes open that night. Would it be better or worse to know whether a killer was standing over me, taking my pulse, checking my drip? Right now I don’t care if one of them killed the man in the next bed, as long as they help me.
‘Blink twice if it hurts,’ says one, tapping my chest in that creepy way that doctors do – as if they’re trying to find a secret passage in a smuggler’s wall.
I blink lots and they exchange worried looks.
Without warning, tears roll out of my eyes and into my ears. I’m going to die, and I will never have seen Alice or Lexi again. I’ll never have told them how much I love them or why I never came home that day, or where I’ve been since.
‘Aaaaa!’ I say.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ says the younger doctor. ‘It will only hurt.’
He’s right, but I don’t care. I don’t want to slip into unconsciousness and die without doing my best to leave something behind, even if it’s a single word.
‘Aaaaa,’ I say. ‘Duh.’
‘Ssssh,’ says Jean, holding my hand and looking nervous. I reckon she and Tracy will get it in the neck if I die. Leslie will be furious – in a monosyllabic sort of way. All that work wasted. Even now my tongue curls away from where I want it to be, and I have to think of everything he taught me. I make an enormous effort, full of grunts and phlegm.
‘Aaaan. Dee.’
‘What’s that?’ says the older doctor, then turns to Jean. ‘Do you know what he’s saying?’
‘I’ll get the Possum,’ she says, but I don’t want it. I want to hear my own voice.
‘Aaanduh!’ I say as my lungs protest, my back spikes, and sweat and tears pour down my nose and cheeks.
I can’t do the S. ‘Aandee!’
There! I did it!
‘Angie?’ says Jean.
Not Angie, for Christ’s sake! Lexi! But it’s all I can do and it really doesn’t matter whether they understand or not. If it’s just the first word of thousands, or the last one ever to pass my lips, at least I’ve named the most important thing in my life.
‘Well done!’ says Jean, looking as relieved as she does encouraging. ‘I’ll get Angie to come and say hello. You’ll be ordering us all about by lunchtime.’
Another big lie.
Who cares? I don’t even know what’s true any more. If you can’t trust a mirror, what can you believe?
Jean bustles away with the older doctor. The younger doctor takes my notes off the end of my bed. I can’t see it happen – I just see the top of his head – but I know the feeling and the sound like my own breathing. The gritty little metal noise and the tiny vibration it makes in the steel frame and through the mattress. The princess had her pea; I have my notes.
He moves slightly so that I can see him as he reads them intently – I wonder what’s written there: just the injuries from the flying Ford Focus? Or everything from childhood measles onwards? He reads them like they’re instructions for a bomb disposal. Then he comes over, jabs a needle into my hip and I close my eyes, exhausted by the effort and the pain of living.
If I wake up dead, so be it.
26
THERE WERE ONLY two Galens in the Cardiff phone book, and only one with the initial S.
The house was up Penylan Road – a large red-brick home set towards the back of a broad, unimaginative garden, where the only flowers were snowdrops and primroses in a narrow stripe either side of the wide gravel driveway. Everything else was shrubbery made of laurels and conifers. Patrick was allergic to conifers and regarded them all with suspicion. If he lived here, he’d dig them all out and have a bonfire.
He wheeled his bike past a late-registration BMW. This was how Number 19 had lived: well. It was a start, but to find out how he had died, Patrick guessed he needed more than he could gather from noting what kind of car the man had driven. He wasn’t sure what he needed, or how he was going to get it, but Patrick also knew that there were too many variables for him to have formulated a watertight plan of action. The front door might be opened by anyone – a wife, a mother, a son, a cleaner – and each of them would require a different strategy.
But he only had one strategy.
Therefore the only concrete opening he had prepared was My name is Patrick Fort and I want some information about Mr Samuel Galen. He assumed everything would fall into place from there.
Patrick put down the kickstand on his bike and knocked on the door. He could see his silhouette in the glossy black paint, and his face in the chrome letterbox.
‘Go away! I’ve called the police!’
Patrick blinked in surprise. It was a woman’s voice, high and screechy. And illogical. Why would she have called the police before he’d even knocked? She didn’t know why he was there.
Even so, he was wary. He took a step backwards. Maybe he’d done something wrong; something he couldn’t understand. It happened all the time. Once when he was fourteen he’d almost been arrested for walking out of Asda wearing jeans and a blue striped T-shirt so his mother, who was in the car, could approve the purchase. Patrick had tried to explain to the security guard that he had left his own clothes in the fitting room, so how could he be stealing these ones? Especially with the labels still swinging off them.
Maybe this was like that. Somebody not understanding things.
The faint sound of breaking glass drew him and his bike around the side of the house to the back garden. He flinched as glass broke much closer to him this time.
A girl stood in the garden. A girl or a woman; Patrick was never quite sure when one became the other. She was as slim as a girl, but as angry as a woman. She had startling white-blonde spikes of hair, and – despite the late-winter chill – wore a white T-shirt, black leather mini skirt and motorcycle boots.
She drew back her arm and hurled what looked like half a brick through a downstairs window.
‘I’ve called the police!’
‘So have I!’ the girl/woman screamed back at the house. ‘You fucking old cow!’ She turned away and Patrick thought she was going to run, but instead she started to look around for something else to throw. It wasn’t easy; the garden was as well-tended as the house – apart from the broken windows. Even the soil in the shrubbery looked stone-free. Patrick couldn’t see where she’d got the half-brick from.