‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
He was Patrick’s age but looked older, slightly chubby, and wearing the kind of tinted spectacles she always imagined perverts did.
Sarah brushed the grit from her hands and was suddenly very cold. She noticed his gaze drop briefly to her breasts and folded her arms across them.
‘Well then,’ said Weird Nick, gesturing with the hose so that it made an arc of broken silver droplets in the air. ‘I’d better go and turn this off. We’re on a meter.’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Any time.’
Any time my shed burns down. She only had two neighbours – Weird Nick and his mother; why did both of them have to be so bloody helpful?
‘Night, Mrs Fort.’
She waved a vague hand and watched him follow the hose back towards his mother’s house like a slim green umbilical cord.
She thought she might be sick. The smoke and the vodka and the disappointment.
Ollie was on the back step, barring her way so she couldn’t fail to pet him. She stepped over him into the kitchen, and retched over the sink. Nothing came up. She laid her forehead on the cold steel of the draining board and cried a little, then went to bed.
When she got up the next morning, she left behind a ghost of grey ashes on the sheets.
40
FROM THE CORNER of her eye, Meg watched Mrs Deal’s finger drub mechanically on the bedspread.
‘Can you stop that!’ Meg said sharply, then added, ‘Please. It’s driving me mad.’
Immediately she felt a rush of guilt. Mrs Deal’s lashes did not flicker over her white crescent eyes. There was no forgiveness and no reproach. The finger paused – and then started again. Tap and stop, tap and stop.
Shit.
Meg closed the book.
‘We’ll go on next time, Mrs Deal. We’re almost at the end. After that my friend Patrick’s going to come and read a new book to you. I bet it will be nice for you to hear another voice. I don’t know what he’ll be reading, but I’ve told him no war and no sci-fi.’
She stood up and wound her scarf around her neck.
‘Anyway, I’ll bring him in and introduce you. And check on the book he’s chosen in case it’s crap. You know what men are like.’
She put the book back on the table and looked down at the thing that used to be Mrs Deal. She was only marginally better than dead. It was easy to imagine her as a cadaver in the dissection room. She would be more swollen, more orange, but essentially the same.
Apart from that finger.
Angie came in and smiled at Meg, then checked the drip on the young man in the next bed. His name was Robert and he was only twenty-five, but his hands were becoming claws, the wrists turning at weird angles and his short brown fingers pulling inwards, despite the efforts of the physiotherapist Meg had seen working on him. She never saw anyone else at his bedside, although there was a huge dusty leopard lying under it, so someone must have cared once.
‘You’re doing a great job,’ said Angie, and came over.
‘Am I?’ said Meg. ‘Sometimes it feels pointless.’
‘Never,’ said Angie firmly. ‘It’s never pointless. And Mrs Deal deserves it; she’s such a good patient.’ She leaned down and stroked the woman’s brow.
‘I imagine they all are,’ said Meg, looking around.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised!’ said Angie, with a quick roll of her eyes. ‘Some of them emerge stark staring crazy.’ She held out her left hand to show a crooked finger. ‘One of them broke that. It’s still swollen.’
‘Really?’ said Meg in surprise, and looked around. ‘Which one?’
‘He died,’ said Angie. Then she lowered her voice. ‘I wasn’t sorry.’
Meg said nothing. It seemed like a terrible thing for a nurse to say.
Angie read her face. ‘I know it sounds awful, but Mr Attridge was in a shocking state. Really distressed. And he wasn’t going to get much better. Sometimes dying is the easiest thing.’
Meg nodded slowly. ‘I’d never thought of it like that.’
‘Not Mrs Deal though,’ said Angie brightly – and for her patient’s ears. ‘We love Mrs Deal and hope for the best, don’t we, Mrs Deal?’
Mrs Deal’s finger tapped mechanically.
Angie touched Meg’s shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming.’
When she’d gone, Meg sat down again, all bundled up. She took Mrs Deal’s hand and stroked it. It was cold and so she sandwiched it between her own to warm it up a little.
‘I’m so sorry I snapped at you,’ she said. She sighed and then went on, almost to herself, ‘I’m a bit stressed out at the moment. It’s all Patrick’s fault. He wants me to take pictures of something important. But I only got my camera for Christmas and I’m totally shit at photos.’
It was true. For every in-focus, in-frame photograph she’d lucked into over Christmas, there were two dozen that required immediate deletion. Two dozen shots of huge white faces, giant thumbs, the backs of heads and her own feet. How she was supposed to take clinically reliable close-ups of mucous membranes, precise enough to indicate whether the wounds might have been made post- or ante-mortem, she had no idea.
‘And I have to take them in secret too,’ she sighed. ‘In a place where cameras aren’t allowed. If I get caught, I could be expelled and my dad would go effing bonkers. So I’m sorry I was rude.’
Mrs Deal just lay there, and Meg blushed at the thought of telling the woman her puny problems, before leaving her here in her bed and rushing off to live her life.
She placed the hand gently back on the cover. Immediately the finger started twitching.
‘I’ll see you next week,’ Meg said, and hurried away.
41
PATRICK WASN’T SURE what to do with his time now that he had been expelled, so spent much of the following week pedalling slowly around the city. The glasshouse at Roath Park was a warm haven – dripping with tropical fronds – while outside the sunshine tried to break through the cloud cover of a Welsh spring. At the lake, he loaded his bike into a rowing boat and drifted slowly around the islands that were home to swans and ducks and old crisp packets. There were even hardy little red-eared terrapins that had survived being dumped after the Mutant Ninja craze, and which now basked on logs, surprising natives.
When it rained, Patrick went to the bookies. The third time he went, two horses died, but it happened away from the cameras. Patrick wrote them in his book anyway – Starbright and Mighty Acorn – and made the little marks next to their names which denoted that they had not helped his cause. Afterwards he went to the museum and bought a Coke for supper.
When he got home, Lexi was sitting on the couch between Kim and Jackson, even though it was really only big enough for two people. They were watching Deal or No Deal and Lexi was holding the remote control.
Patrick hovered in the doorway.
‘Hi,’ said Lexi. ‘What happened to you the other day?’
‘Which day?’
‘At the house. With Jackie.’
‘I left,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ she said, rolling her eyes at him – something he was used to. ‘But why?’
‘My ears were hurting.’
Lexi made a screwed-up face and Kim explained, ‘He doesn’t like loud noises, do you, Patrick?’
‘No.’
‘You missed a hell of a fight,’ said Lexi.
‘Oh,’ said Patrick. ‘Good.’
She stood up and dropped the remote in Jackson’s lap. He and Kim leaned gently into the gap where she’d been.