Belinda Bauer - Rubbernecker

‘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.

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.

Patrick went upstairs and Lexi followed him.

‘Any luck?’ she said.

‘With what?’

‘Finding out who killed my dad.’

‘No. But Meg’s taking some photos of the throat, where there are wounds that could be ante-mortem.’

‘What’s ante-mortem?’

‘Before death.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Like post-mortem.’

‘Yes. But not.’

She nodded and followed him to the bathroom while he filled his bucket with water, then back to his bedroom. He shifted the bed away from the wall and started to scrub the carpet where it had been.

Lexi sat cross-legged on his bed for a while – then wriggled down inside his sleeping bag and stared at the ceiling, which was a-swirl with Artex.

‘What did you find in my dad? Apart from the peanut, I mean.’

‘Nothing.’

‘There can’t have been nothing .’

‘Nothing you wouldn’t expect to find.’

The carpet that had been under the bed was dusty as well as dark brown, and the water in the bucket was soon black and hairy.

‘It’s weird to think about you poking around inside his head when he’s dead. I wish I could have done that when he was alive.’

Patrick sat back on his heels. ‘Dissected his brain ?’

‘Just to find out why he did some of the shit he did after my mum died. I mean, God knows what he was thinking half the time.’

‘I understand what you mean,’ he said, with an unexpected chink of empathy.

‘Was your dad an arse too?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t.’

‘Oh,’ said Lexi. ‘That’s nice for you.’ She played absently with the zip of the bag. It was a heavy-duty YKK that Patrick kept running smooth with WD40. He wondered if she might say something about it, but she didn’t.

‘Mine wasn’t always an arse,’ she said instead. ‘This one Christmas Eve when I was, like, three or four, I was asleep and he and my mum were downstairs with friends.’

‘How do you know?’ said Patrick.

‘How do I know what?’

‘How do you know they were downstairs with friends if you were asleep?’

Lexi frowned at him and said, ‘They just were , OK? You’re so fucking weird.’

She looked at the ceiling and Patrick pursed his lips. He didn’t like stories where he didn’t understand all the reasons why things in them happened.

‘So I’m asleep in bed and all of a sudden he grabs me out of bed, so fast I didn’t know what was going on, and he runs downstairs with me in his arms, and he’s so excited he’s kind of shaking , you know?’

Patrick nodded, even though Lexi wasn’t looking at him. Something about this story made him put his brush in the bucket and give her his full attention.

‘And he takes me through to the front room and all the lights are off, apart from the fairy lights on the Christmas tree, and all the presents are under the tree and my mum and their friends are by the window and the curtains are open—’

‘That’s how you knew,’ said Patrick. ‘Because the friends were there when you went downstairs.’