I wonder drowsily what he hears in there; whether my lungs have passed their orange-juice crisis. My breathing still hurts, but nothing like it did a week ago. I’m on the mend.
He stares intently at the linen beside my ear. Then he straightens up and looks in the direction of the nurses’ station. I turn my head with a little surge of athletic achievement and follow his gaze.
There is nobody there.
It was going to happen.
Tracy Evans could feel it in the air. She was on three nights in a row. She’d got a spray tan, her eyebrows threaded, her legs waxed, and her pubic hair ripped agonizingly into a dark little heart. It didn’t match her blonde hair, but nobody had ever complained. She was wearing underwear that matched and wasn’t grey, and she’d bought that perfume by Britney – not fat, bald Britney, but slutty Britney in school tie and knee socks. Now she wore her ugly blue tunic with new sensuality – her smooth new wonders sliding beneath its utilitarian starch.
On the first night, Mr Deal had sniffed the air around her, but hadn’t gone for it immediately, which was slightly annoying. But at least it had given the pimples on her pubis time to calm down.
This was the second night. Angie had swapped shifts with Monica, who was new and easily bossed about, and even more easily deceived. Tracy had already been through the Quality Street and eaten all the big purple ones while Monica was helping someone with a bedpan.
She heard the lift doors open and felt a delicious twitch as Mr Deal came round the corner, silhouetted against the harsh fluorescents.
Tracy hid Rose Budding, which she was re-reading, then picked up a sheaf of random paperwork, pushed out her chest, sucked in her tummy, and composed her form and her features into their most flattering aspect.
‘Hello, Tracy,’ he said quietly, and she turned as if surprised and gave him the demure but promising smile she’d practised so long in the mirror. Slutty Nun, she called it. She was rewarded by seeing his brooding face soften into a look of being pleased to see her.
Men were so easy!
But he’d better make his move before she had to go through the hell of waxing again, or she’d make him suffer.
For an hour Mr Deal stood with his back to his wife with a cup of machine coffee. At nine p.m. he had another. Tracy knew that nobody chose to have two cups, so he was obviously killing time. She went into the ladies’ bathroom and threw away the cardboard bedpans that she routinely left stinking on the windowsill. Made the place a bit nice.
At ten thirty p.m. Mr Deal put another pound into the coffee machine and Tracy Evans’s nipples responded.
Just after eleven, she told Monica to go out for a cigarette. As they were on the fourth floor, Tracy knew that that entailed a fifteen-minute round-trip for a two-minute smoke, and so Monica usually had a couple while she was outside the ambulance-bay doors. Which took it up to twenty minutes.
Plenty of time, in her experience.
‘You sure?’ said Monica.
‘Course,’ said Tracy. ‘You go. I’ll be fine.’
The lift doors closed and Tracy got up and hitched up her bra straps.
The dance had been slow and frustrating but she knew that the end of it would be as familiar to her as her own reflection.
The doctor looks back down at me and clears his throat.
‘I’m very sorry, Mr Galen,’ he says softly.
My mind turns slowly around the pivot of his words. He does sound very sorry. What for? I start to worry. Maybe he heard something in my lungs. Maybe I’m not as on the mend as I thought I was. Maybe—
Then he leans over me again and I see that in his right hand he holds a pair of tweezers.
And that between their glittering points is a peanut.
My heart spasms with electric terror and in an instant I understand everything.
He’s the one! He’s the killer!
And he knows how incredibly vulnerable I am…
My panicked hand flaps like a fish on a bedspread beach as my memory detonates: I’m four years old and my throat tightens and my eyes swell shut, even while the traitorous treat still seasons the inside of my mouth. My mother screams somewhere, and my head bounces on my father’s arm as he runs from the stalled car into the hospital, shouting, ‘He can’t breathe! He can’t breathe!’ I’m jostled and tossed and snatched from my father’s arms by other arms in white sleeves, and the lights jiggle overhead as the doctor runs down the corridor to save my life with a scalpel and a tube in my throat, so that I can grow up to bring the stubby hands to the marital table. The stubby hands and the allergies listed on my medical notes for everyone to see…
The doctor lowers the peanut towards my lips.
‘Guh!’ I cry. ‘Guh!’
I’m more scared now than when I was a child. No one is going to help me this time.
I feel a knuckle against my chin, the nut nudging my lip – and I jab out my well-trained tongue, my only defence. It knocks the peanut from the grip of the tweezers and for a split second I’m triumphant.
And then I feel it drop instead into the back of my throat…
Dying is far easier than it looks in the movies.
There are no flashy cuts, no explosions, no speeches – just a clumsy doctor, swearing and fumbling between my teeth, digging the sharp tweezers into my palate and tongue, even as my throat swells jealously around the evidence he wants back.
The terror. The panic.
The sorrow for all I’m leaving behind.
I can’t die! I have people to hold, to love; to make it up to—
Too late. Too late. Pain cleaves me. My jaw clamps in agony and I slither back down the well. There’s no tunnel, no light, no return.
Darkness snaps shut and truth spills from my dead heart – I love you I love you I love you—
A small hand takes mine.
‘Look at it go, Daddy!’
28
4017.
The ugly code had its uses.
Patrick took a while to find the switches, then blinked as the lights shuddered awake to banish shadows from the dissecting room.
The cadavers were just sickly-sweet leftovers now. Missing limbs, gaping chests, with their skin peeled off them in dirty brown folds, and their pale brains gleaming with wetting solution beside their empty skulls.
Yet they seemed more alive to Patrick now than they had at the start. More real, now that he understood them better.
As he passed them, his sense of excitement grew. He knew the cause of death. He was sure of it. The list was wrong; Mick was wrong; Spicer was wrong; his fellow students were wrong; and whatever doctor had signed the death certificate was wrong. None of them knew what he knew – that Lexi Galen had an allergy to peanuts. And Patrick would bet the bicycle he’d inherited from his father that she had inherited that allergy from hers.
He couldn’t wait to tell them all that he’d solved the puzzle. Especially Scott.
Patrick looked down at Number 19, whose one remaining eye stared through him dully. He looked away quickly, and hunched down beside the table. Underneath it were the scores of bags they’d slowly filled with the dead man’s lungs, his liver, his small intestines – all pressed against the clear plastic like the cheap mince his mother bought from the wagon at Brecon market. More of Number 19 was now under the table than on it.
Patrick sorted through it all but couldn’t find the peanut.