Belinda Bauer - Rubbernecker

Payback.

He gritted his teeth and breathed hard and it didn’t happen, and he was proud of himself for getting through the moment. He pulled his hands free quickly, though, and immediately scraped all the bits off the floor and into a clear plastic bag with yet another black zip-tie and yet another flat metal numbered tag. Patrick always cleaned up so diligently that he had used more than double the number of bags and tags of his nearest rivals. Mick had had to order more Number 19 tags specially. He had told Patrick this with a look on his face that Patrick felt sure must be approval for a job well done.

Months of lying prone without the benefit of circulation had left the body flattened on the bottom like a bag of sand. Now inverted, the buttocks remained oddly two-dimensional.

Rob started on the dissection, making long, assured incisions that showed how much they’d all learned.

‘It’s my birthday on Saturday,’ said Meg. ‘You’re all invited.’

‘Ace,’ said Scott.

‘Thanks,’ said Rob.

‘Cheers,’ said Dilip.

‘Coming, Patrick?’ Meg asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Again.’

He had told Meg his feelings on parties before and thought she must have a very poor memory. He wondered how she was going to pass her exams with a memory like that. Dr Spicer had an endless supply of mnemonics – most of them dirty – to help stupid people. The bones of the wrist were the Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate and Hamate. Spicer’s aide was ‘Slowly lower Tilly’s panties to the curly hairs.’ Scott had laughed long and hard, and kept repeating it, until Rob had told him to shut up. There were others much dirtier – especially between the forearm and the fingers, with all those flexors in between – but Patrick only found them confusing.

‘AH AH AH ah ah ah,’ in a deep voice.

‘Ee ee ee ee ee ee,’ in a squeaky one.

This is what I’m reduced to. Ee-ing and Ah-ing like a crazed Northern mule, tended by strangers. It’s not how I planned my life.

Leslie the therapist makes me do it. He’s a thin, taciturn Scotsman without discernible humour, but with a grim determination to train my tongue as if it were a contender for the Olympic one hundred metres. Of course, he manhandles me too. Hangs me from the cross and pulls my legs. Pushes my head and holds it there, like a sadistic barber. Rolls tennis balls down my arms and tosses sudden bean bags at me, saying, ‘Catch!’ They flop on my chest or tumble off my legs on to the floor, and he just shrugs and picks them up and says, ‘Better luck next time.’

But really, he’s the tonguemeister.

Talking and eating are his goals in life – for me, anyway; I’m not sure he does much of either himself. Every few days he comes in and makes me stick my tongue out and waggle it, or puff up my cheeks, or blow through a straw, or struggle through an endless rota of farmyard noises.

‘Aug!’ as in August. ‘Guh!’ as in gun. I try so hard I fart, but he doesn’t laugh.

What kind of man doesn’t laugh at a fart?

‘Ah ah ah—’

‘Deeper,’ he says.

‘Ah ah ah—’

‘Deeper. Dig down for it.’

‘Ho ho ho,’ I try for a joke. Dig. Hoe. You know.

But he just glances up from twisting my fingers and frowns. ‘Not ho. Ah .’

Nobody gets a joke. Must be the way I tell ’em.

The bluer the sky gets, the harder I work. Nothing means more to me now than being able to talk and to eat. There are words I need to speak; questions I need answered. If my tongue works, then I have a future beyond the infuriating Possum screens and the coded blinks and the taste-free food, so I devote my half-life to its recovery. Even when Leslie’s not here, I practise the exercises he gives me over and over and over, pursing my lips, straining my jaw. The nurses have stopped being impressed by me sticking my tongue out at them, although Angie will still sometimes stick hers out in return as she passes with a bedpan, or pushing a drip. Other patients’ visitors see me gurning and grunting and avert their eyes.

I like the exercises. They exhaust me and so I sleep better. And when the doctors poke and prod me, or bring their baby-faced students to stand in a horseshoe around my bed and stare at the horror life can hold, I suck and blow like a whale in labour, to take my mind off the reason I am here and the people I have lost.

To take my mind off murder.

Christmas was coming, and someone hung the head of a laughing plastic Santa on the dissection room door, and his severed limbs around the room.

‘Idiots,’ said Rob.

‘Yes,’ said Patrick. ‘They didn’t put the tags on. How is anyone supposed to know they all belong together?’

Meg gave each of them a card with glitter on it. Number 19 gave them nothing but an empty stomach, full bowels and perspiration.

For the last week of term they worked on the back like navvies – stripping away the layers of muscle like old wallpaper, scoring either side of the vertebral column using handsaws, and finally breaking through to the shining river of the spinal column with hammers and chisels.

Patrick wiped sweat from his brow with the crook of his elbow and thought, How can a human being die so easily when they’re so hard to break?

PATRICK MADE THE long ride home to the cottage outside Brecon that stood with a handful of others in a place too small for a name of its own. It was forty-five miles and rained all the uphill way, but it still felt good to be going somewhere real on his bike instead of making pointless circuits of the city.

December soon slid from sleet to bitter snow, but Patrick went out most days anyway. He preferred it to staying in the cottage with his mother.

Sometimes he went next door to Weird Nick’s and they played Grand Theft Auto. Mostly he headed off alone across the Beacons, following the narrow impressions that marked sheep trails under the snow. Sometimes he went as far as Penyfan’s flat peak. His favourite days were those where the sky was almost as white as the hillsides, so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. In that dreamscape Patrick’s world narrowed to the exchange of warm air for cold in his nostrils, the crunch of crystals under his hiking boots, and the sting of his fingers and ear-tips. With a kind of nostalgia, he thought of all the dead things that would be revealed by the thaw. He didn’t need them any more; he had something much better now.

Once he stood aside to let a small band of soldiers jog past him, laden with packs that would have bent donkeys.

‘Lost?’ said the last man, without stopping.

‘No,’ said Patrick. He had never been lost on the Beacons, and never expected to be. The soldiers jogged on and Patrick watched them until they disappeared over a rise and left him alone in his white world.

When he was in the house, Patrick spent most of his time in his room. When the TV reception wavered – as it often did up here in the mountains – Patrick cycled the five miles to Brecon, carving a deep scar in the snow behind him.

The bookies put memories into his head that he’d rather weren’t there, but he didn’t want to miss anything. Every time he wheeled his bicycle into the shop, he glanced under the counter. He knew the Labrador must be long dead, but he couldn’t help himself. The same men were here though. Ten years older; fatter, greyer, poorer – just the way his father might have been. The Milky Way man always said hello, and Patrick always said hello back. That was all. He never joined in their coarse, friendly banter and never bet on anything, even when the woman behind the counter winked at him and called him ‘Big Spender’. Patrick was no fool: the lino at the Bet window was worn through to the concrete, while at Payout it was as clean and shiny as the day it had been laid.