Belinda Bauer - Rubbernecker

Something heavy hit the back of his legs and he staggered slightly, then looked round to see Rob crumpled on the floor behind him.

‘Shit,’ said Spicer cheerfully. ‘So much for surgery.’

I FLOAT, CALM and disconnected. I feel as though I’m on drugs and I wonder why I’ve never tried them before if they’re all this good. Mark Williams at work tried them all the time and had a ball. Until the college had to fire him, of course; then it wasn’t such fun. But this is nice. This is like drifting on musical clouds. Maybe I am on drugs! This is a hospital, after all.

‘He would just slip away,’ says a woman very quietly.

‘Would he be in pain?’ That’s another woman, also somewhere off to my left. They’re discussing the man in the next bed. That means he’s not dead, which is good and right. It was just a bad dream, like the giant crow and the masonry that fell on me from a crumbling building somewhere in Japan. Or Mauritius. Dreams are rarely geographically sound.

‘Oh no.’ The first woman again. ‘We monitor his medication very carefully. He wouldn’t know anything about it.’ She must be a doctor.

Through my haze I feel vaguely angry for the man who wouldn’t know anything about it. How would they know? Maybe he’d know all about it; maybe he’d be scared, or in pain, down at the bottom of his own personal well.

‘Is that what happened to the gentleman who used to be in that bed?’

‘Mr Attridge? No, he died quite suddenly overnight. It happens like that sometimes.’

Oh, he is dead. Shit. His name was Mr Attridge and I watched him die.

‘But what did he actually die of?’

I’m all ears.

There’s a long hesitation and I can hear the doctor being careful.

‘Sadly, coma patients die very easily. They succumb to infections, or have strokes, or asphyxiate on food or their own spittle, or sometimes the heart fails due to cumulative factors.’

Cumulative factors like being murdered !

‘The longer someone is in a coma, the less likely they are to regain full consciousness. Such deaths may be sudden, but they are rarely unexpected or unexplained.’

‘It’s been two months now,’ says the other woman, and someone touches my forehead with something that smells of rubber. ‘But there’s still a chance he’ll…?’

‘Emerge.’

‘Yes. There’s still a good chance he’ll emerge , isn’t there?’

And all of a sudden I realize they’re talking about me ! Me, Sam Galen. Talking about me emerging – and talking about me dying !

I snap out of the cloud and get a bit frantic, which is difficult to do when you can’t move or make a sound. I try to open my eyes. No lying doggo now! But they won’t open. They won’t bloody well open ! I strain my brows upwards until it feels like my forehead will peel back like banana skin, but still my lids are dark maroon.

Maybe this is how it was for the man in the next bed – maybe somebody thought he should just ‘slip away’ while he tried to open his eyes.

‘Every case is different,’ the doctor hedges.

‘All I want is an educated guess,’ says the other woman. ‘I understand it’s not a diagnosis. Please .’

‘In that case…’

Long silence. I can almost see the doctor tapping her teeth with the end of her pen as she takes an educated guess at my future existence. I stop straining to open my eyes and instead listen so hard that I feel the empty air swirl in my ears, while a smooth rubber finger drags over my cheek.

‘I’m afraid,’ says the doctor, her voice heavy with practised sorrow, ‘it’s getting to the point where if he emerges, it may not be in one piece.’

The finger leaves my cheek and there’s no answer for a long time, and then only the sound of quiet sobbing.

I’m in one piece! I scream soundlessly. Here I am! I’m in one piece!

Aren’t I?

EVEN WHEN THE streeets had been washed clean by rain, the malt rising from the Brains brewery made all of early-morning Cardiff smell like late-night Horlicks.

Patrick rode through the dawn, listening to the sound of his tyres hissing on the damp tarmac as he made a loop through the city.

In the Hayes, pigeons purred softly from the roof of the snack bar, and made him think of home.

It was an old city, despite the veneer of new wealth that made it shine in the wet Welsh sun. The buildings over the glittering shop fronts were all curled stone and soot, and the castle walls dominated the city centre, guarded by a strange collection of beasts, furred and feathered in stone. Victorian arcades linked the thoroughfares like secret tunnels, filled with shops that sold old violins, shoes, and sweets by the quarter from giant jars.

Cardiff was also a small city, and was easy to leave for the hills and forests and beaches that cupped it all round with nature. Sometimes Patrick rode west to Penarth and sat on the pier, which smelled faintly of fish, and which bore the scars of a thousand anglers who’d cut their bait on the salted wood. Sometimes he cycled beyond the narrow suburbs to the fairy-tale castle that guarded the city’s northern approach; sometimes east across the flat, reclaimed land that bordered the sea so closely that only a grid of ditches kept it dry.

Ish.

Wherever he went, his route was guided by Welsh and by English – each road sign to ildiwch a reminder that the old oppressor had finally given way, after failing to beat the language out of the nation’s schoolchildren.

The room Patrick was renting was the smallest in a small house that was distinguishable from its neighbours only by the white plastic ‘7’ screwed to the front door. The back of it looked over the railway line where trains took passengers to and from the South Wales Valleys. One of them would have taken him halfway to Brecon if he’d caught it, but he had his bike, so he didn’t need to.

His bed was squeezed between the wall at its head and the hot-water tank at its foot. He measured it and found it was six feet long – exactly one inch longer than he was. It took him a week to get used to sleeping on his side, with his knees bent, so that he wouldn’t touch at either end. Even so, he was woken every morning by five thirty, when his feet grew warm as the heating kicked in. He slept in his sleeping bag because it smelled of grass and earth, and often he woke thinking he was on the Beacons.

A strip of chipboard under the windowsill served as a desk so small that he could only open one textbook at a time and still use his laptop. His books and disks had to go on top of the wardrobe. He had found a photo in his bag that he had not packed, and he left it there. The walls were woodchip, painted magnolia, and the carpet was brown, although Patrick wasn’t convinced it had always been so.

The window had been modified so that it only opened about six inches. A deterrent to burglars, he guessed, although he doubted any burglar would brave the railway line, climb the tall garden wall and risk a drop into the thick brambles below, when it was plain from any angle that this grimy little terraced house must contain little worth stealing, and that easier pickings would surely be found almost anywhere else along the row. Even so, Patrick carried his bike upstairs to his room every night to protect it. It was a ten-speed Peugeot racer that was older than he was, but it was the only thing he’d inherited from his father, so he screwed two stout hooks into the wall and, while he slept, the bike hung over him like a sparkling blue talisman.

Two other students shared the house. Jackson and Kim were both doing art degrees. Kim was a staunch lesbian – an elfin blonde who made lumpy ogres from plaster of Paris, with nuts and bolts sprouting at their genitals. Jackson made tedious video art that, to Patrick, looked like scenes where the cameraman had been killed and left the camera pointing at a dark corner of a dull room. Jackson had long, pale hands that flapped on slender wrists, and dyed black hair, so short at the back and so long at the front that Patrick itched to reach out and realign it with his head. He wore eyeliner, cowboy boots and a Yasser Arafat scarf, even when he was making toast.