Belinda Bauer - Rubbernecker

‘No, I think he ’s in trouble,’ said Scott, and jabbed a finger at Patrick. ‘You ever touch me again, I’ll take your fucking head off.’

‘Oh, don’t be a melodramatic twat,’ snorted Rob.

Scott slapped his book shut and walked out, ripping off his gloves as he went.

‘Too late,’ said Meg quietly, and Rob and Dilip laughed.

‘ Pronator teres ,’ Patrick concluded.

It was six o’clock and already close to dark when Patrick unlocked his bike from the railings on the ramp outside the dissecting room. Students hurried past in the slow October drizzle, unaware that they were a slim brick wall away from thirty bloated bodies that looked as though bombs had gone off in their chest cavities.

As he wheeled his bike on to Park Place, Meg fell in beside him.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Scott’s not bad really. I think you just gave him a fright.’

Patrick was puzzled. Why was she walking with him? Why was she saying anything to him? Maybe she was just talking for her, not for him – the way his mother did.

His silence was no deterrent.

‘So, why don’t you want to be a doctor?’

Patrick had often noticed that the less he said, the more people wanted him to speak. But he had no idea what she wanted him to say . Meg wasn’t his mother or the med school interviewing panel, so why was she interested in what he did or did not do?

‘I’m just curious,’ she said, as if she had read his mind. ‘I mean, you’re clever enough, so why not?’

She kept asking; he was going to have to answer her.

‘Not interested,’ he said.

‘Not interested in what?’

Patrick was taken aback that she had a follow-up question – and so fast !

‘What aren’t you interested in?’ said Meg, as if he hadn’t understood her the first time.

‘In making people better,’ he said, and put a foot in his toeclip to show he was finished talking.

Meg wasn’t finished. ‘So what’s the point of just doing anatomy?’

She frowned and Patrick thought she was angry but wasn’t sure. He’d never been able to understand what people meant just from their faces. It was hard enough guessing from their words. She obviously wasn’t going to leave him alone until he answered, so finally he did.

‘I want to see what makes people work,’ he said.

Meg wrinkled her forehead some more. ‘But you don’t want to fix them or help them work better ?’

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But you have such a great bedside manner.’

‘No I don’t,’ Patrick said, and then saw she was grinning. ‘Oh, you’re joking.’

‘You’re allowed to laugh.’

‘Maybe later,’ he said.

‘There’s a party tonight. You want to come?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on. You’ll have fun.’

‘I won’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know I don’t like parties.’

‘What do you like then?’

He stopped talking and looked up the street to the traffic lights, wishing he was already there and that she was behind him.

‘Do you like any thing?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like some things.’

‘Name your top five.’

He said nothing. He couldn’t. He only had three.

Meg sighed theatrically, then held an invisible microphone under his nose. ‘How does it feel to be a man of mystery?’

Patrick stared blankly at her fist. ‘I don’t know.’

She smiled. ‘If you change your mind, here’s my number.’

She took out a pen and lowered it towards his knuckles, so he tucked his hands into his pockets so she couldn’t write on his skin.

She went red. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s 07734113117.’

‘OK.’

She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘See you at Number 19, Patrick.’

‘OK,’ he said, and swung his leg over the crossbar.

As he rode home he replayed the conversation in his head. It was the longest one he’d had with a stranger in ages. Now he tried to analyse it, the way his mother always nagged him to.

People say things for a reason, Patrick. If you listen carefully, you’ll understand not only what they’re saying, but why .

But while people were talking, he was always so busy wishing they would leave him alone that he found it difficult to think his own thoughts, let alone decipher theirs. Patrick didn’t know what more he could have told Meg. Animals and photographs were two of the things he liked – and he didn’t have to say why . But if he’d told her two things, she might have asked about the third – and the third was secret.

The third was his quest.

Patrick was not a liar by nature, but he had lied to Meg, just as he had lied to his mother and to the admissions interview panel.

He didn’t care what made people work.

He was only interested in what happened when they stopped …

WHAT HAVE I done to deserve this? It seems like a logical question but the holes in my memory make it a pointless one too, because the answer is I don’t know .

I keep looking for clues, but until I come up with something that justifies what’s happening to me, I can’t help feeling pretty short-changed in the karma stakes.

There’s a photo next to my bed. I don’t know the people in it and it hurts my eyes to keep them swivelled to the left for that long, so unless I’m on my left side, I only see it in snatches. A middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman. The man looks a bit like my father, but the woman is not my mother, that’s for sure, even though she acts like it when she comes to visit me every day – stroking my hand, kissing my hair, massaging my feet the way the therapist told her to, and arranging bluebells and anemones in a jug she brought with her. I think I recognize the jug, but from where?

I don’t know. Again.

The woman who’s not my mother has stopped wearing the surgical mask, but she still wears the blue gloves.

‘Apparently you can get the most dreadful infections if you don’t take precautions,’ she tells me conspiratorially. ‘Upset tummy, you know.’

Sure I know , I think, and shit into my nappy some more, which makes her nose wrinkle. I don’t care. It annoys me that she is here and Alice and Lexi are not. Why don’t they come? It makes me sad – but also angry and suspicious. I hope they’re all right, of course, but if they are then what would keep them from coming to see me?

Maybe they’ve been lied to. Maybe they’ve been told I’m already dead, and are even now getting over me, while I am here, hidden away, waiting for a fate that someone has designed especially for me. Sometimes I even wonder about the crash. Did I really hit ice while fiddling with the radio? Or did somebody run me off the road? Did somebody plan all this, to get me here, away from the people I love, where I can be experimented on – murdered! – without anybody knowing, anybody caring? It happened to the man in the next bed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just next in line.

Or maybe they don’t come because of the same elusive reason why Alice has sad eyes. That fear is so great that sometimes it makes me cry, which is my only outlet for any emotion.

The nurses make up their own reasons for my tears. I’m crying for my old life is their favourite. They mean well, I suppose, but I still hate them for not bothering to understand.

When my eyes are open, I try to watch everything – not just the top of the TV. When I’m on my back, I can only see the top third of the screen anyway before my own cheeks get in the way, and that has to be the worst third of all. The top of Bargain Hunt is all squinting through jewellers’ glasses at unseen treasures; the top of the rugby is only the stands and the occasional up-and-under, and the top of Top Gear is basically Jeremy Clarkson’s head.