‘So you take care.’
‘I will.’
‘And the families,’ said Jean, with a look that said that Tracy would soon find out for herself. ‘You mustn’t let them bully you. You’re the professional, not them. Remember that.’
‘I will,’ said Tracy firmly, and looked around the unit. Two wards, twelve beds – ten of them containing people who were neither dead nor alive; who had bought tickets to the afterlife and then had somehow had their journeys interrupted, and who were even now debating whether or not to go on, or to turn around and make their way back home.
3
HE HAD SEEN a lot of doctors, but it wasn’t until he’d started school at the age of five that Patrick realized there was something wrong with him. He hated the disorder of his classmates and the physicality of the playground – where nobody else was interested in clearing the quad of gravel, then grading it according to size.
In the classroom there was no task too complex for him to tackle, and few he could not complete. While the other kids rushed out to play, Patrick would wriggle and shriek if the teacher tried to encourage him away from his alphabet or his sums. He was a barnacle for learning.
He deconstructed his lunchbox and discarded anything red, and was obsessed with parroting any sentence spoken to him, emphasizing each word in turn to taste the changes.
PUT the chalk down.
Put the CHALK down.
Put the chalk DOWN.
And still he’d be holding the chalk.
Nobody rejects difference as quickly and brutally as children. Soon Patrick was not invited to houses and parties, and was excluded from groups and games. But he didn’t want to go to parties, hated groups, and didn’t understand the games, so it didn’t bother him. After all, he was fascinated by the rhythm of ants, but it didn’t mean he wanted to be one.
Until he was seven years old…
Children weren’t allowed in the bookmaker’s, so while his father watched the horses and dogs on the big screen, Patrick sat under the counter nearest the door, hemmed in by bikes and an old black Labrador, which was either always wet or just smelled that way. Sometimes men would stand in front of Patrick without even knowing he was there. They leaned their elbows on the counter to read the pages of runners and riders that were pinned to the walls, and he looked at their knees and their crotches, and the muddy prints their boots left on the lino. He could hear the scratch of the cheap little biros as they scribbled their selections over his head, and their muttering when they lost, which seemed to be all the time.
Occasionally they noticed him and bent down and said, ‘Hello, down there’ and ‘All right, boyo?’ But when that happened, Patrick always edged towards the dog for support, and said nothing back. Once a man held a Milky Way out to him and the Labrador snatched it and swallowed it in two gulps – wrapper and all.
‘Don’t say much, do he?’ an old man once remarked to Patrick’s father, and his father replied staunchly, ‘He’s thinking.’
His father always told the truth: Patrick was thinking – about the way air smelled like rubber when it hissed from bicycle tyre valves, about the odds that changed on the screens, making horses’ names jump up and down the list like fleas, and about why dogs had pink gums but black lips.
Increasingly ignored, Patrick grew to enjoy his post by the door, where he could observe without being observed.
It was a hot summer day, and Patrick was tracing the Labrador’s slumbering outline on to the lino in biro, when a shocked groan went up from the men in the bookies – followed by a terrible silence.
Patrick crawled from under the counter and crept forward past the shoes of the men, until he stood up just inches from the giant TV screen.
Pixellated by proximity, a purple jockey trudged up the emerald grass with a saddle on his arm that should have been on the back of a horse.
Patrick touched the grass and felt the green buzz warmly around his fingers.
‘What’s that kid doing in here?’ somebody called out, and his father got up and held out his hand.
Patrick drew back. He hated to hold hands; it made his bones itch. But he was perplexed to see that his father had tears in his eyes. For some reason he didn’t understand, it made Patrick take his hand without complaint. He even held it while they crossed the busy road, and then all the way to the lounge bar of the Rorke’s Drift. There his father bought him a Coke in a bottle that looked as though it had been squeezed in the middle, and touched his own pint to it with a dull click.
‘To Persian Punch,’ he said huskily, and pinched his nose, which was like wiping it on his sleeve but not as common.
‘To Persian Punch,’ agreed Patrick, although it was only later that he would learn that Persian Punch was a horse.
Had been a horse.
He never forgot the feeling that it had given him. The curious sense that he was closer to his father at that moment than he’d ever come to anyone. That he could almost share what he was feeling. For the first time, Patrick had an inkling of what it was that the other children seemed to know instinctively – that they were part of something bigger, something mysterious.
Something he finally wanted, but still didn’t know how to get.
Discovering that he was missing a critical link turned school into a daily misery for Patrick. Everybody else possessed the key to popularity and happiness, and his clumsy attempts to find his own key always ended with other children looking at him funny, or calling him names. Classmates hid his pencils just to watch him rage, and a group of boys wrapped his winter coat round a rock and threw it on to the roof of the bike shed. The frustration left him confused and angry, and obstinate at home, where he made his parents shout at each other behind closed doors. Patrick would press his cheek to the cool, painted wood and listen to his mother’s voice cracking hysterically: ‘… can’t go on like this! I wish we’d never had him!’
He liked it when she got like that, because then his father would take him on long walks across the Beacons – just the two of them – while she stayed home and drew the curtains so she could sleep. ‘I need to recover,’ she’d say wearily, and they’d return much later to have tea in a darkened house – silently, so as not to wake her – and his father would put the vodka away somewhere different each time.
Finally, when Patrick was eight years old, Mark Bennett – a monster of a farmboy – had shouted ‘Twpsyn!’ and punched him in the back as he swung on the monkey bars. Patrick dropped into the dirt and lay gasping at the sky until his breath came back to him. By the time he’d got slowly to his feet, the bigger boy was already high on the swings, laughing. Patrick had stood to one side and waited for the swing to swoop down and past him – then smashed Mark Bennett square in the face with a rounders bat. The combined speed of the swing and the bat knocked him out cold and off the swing, in an impressive somersault that a generation of Brecon children would claim to have seen with their very own eyes.
The school had called Patrick’s mother, who’d burst into tears and hung up, so they’d called his father, who had left work in the middle of the day to fetch him.
And had died because of it.
4
I’M ASLEEP AND I cannot tell you how hard I try to wake up.