Belinda Bauer - Rubbernecker

Two and two equals a doctor.

This is my moment.

I call out to let him know I’m awake. Or, at least, I thought I was going to call out, but I can’t hear myself. I try to clear my throat, but my tongue is big and sticky and I can only really make a little whirr . I try again to speak, and realize that my lips are moving but nothing else is. No air is coming up from my lungs to shape itself into words in my mouth. I’ve forgotten what every newborn knows.

I try to sit up, but that doesn’t work either.

I nearly panic, but all I can do is look at the ceiling, at the little black triangle, and tell myself to calm down. I have to get pretty stern with myself: calm down, Samuel Galen! This is not an emergency. I have time. I have lots of time. I have been here for a thousand years already; another minute won’t hurt.

I concentrate on sensible things; on what I know. The man in the bed must be the one who swore and begged; whose wife and children wept when they visited. The mumbling and the crying wasn’t Lexi at all, because Lexi’s almost thirteen, not a baby in a cot. That bit must have been a dream, I think.

So much of life is.

Also, if this is a hospital then the man in the next bed must be a patient. Like me? I suppose so, if the crash I dreamed was real. And if we are patients, then the doctor will not ignore me, whether I can shout or not. If I am a patient, then I am here to be cared for, and that’s what doctors do. So I don’t have to shout. I don’t have to wave my arms around to attract attention. All I have to do is calm down and wait until he’s finished helping the patient in the next bed, and then he’ll turn to me and see that I’m awake, and help me too.

Ding dong bell. Pussy in the well .

Simple.

Click .

The sound of a switch is soft but unmistakable, and is accompanied by the extinction of the grey light.

The blips have stopped, too.

I turn my eyes again. The doctor’s hand is on the dark machine and the man in the bed is moving a little. Then a lot. Straining; feet kicking under the covers like he’s having a fit; like he’s gasping for air.

Like he’s dying.

My God, he’s dying !

Now I panic. It seizes me, but I can’t shout or run or wave my arms about to share the feeling, so instead it splashes through my chest like electricity, then shoots down my arms and legs and up the back of my head until every part of me tingles with pointless shock.

In my mind I am already there beside him, clearing an airway, pinching his nose, breathing into his mouth, the way we all learned that time from the St John Ambulance. In fact, I can’t move a muscle.

My head screams: Help him! Help him!

But the doctor doesn’t help him.

Instead he just leans over the man and watches him suffer. It seems to take a forever of choking and rattling, and when it’s all over, there’s a vast silence filled only by my heart in my head. Then I hear the soft click of the switch again and the dim light returns, making me blink. I wait for the blips, but they don’t come back.

They never come back.

Is this another dream? I hope so. I beg the grey tiles, Please let it be a dream. Please don’t let this be real .

I hear quiet footsteps squeak towards me and quickly close my eyes. I don’t want to see the doctor, and I don’t want him to see me .

I no longer want him to know that I’m awake.

PATRICK ENTERED A large space filled with dead people and thought of an art gallery.

The Cardiff University dissection room was brighter, whiter, lighter than he had ever imagined; films like Flatliners and Frankenstein had apparently misled him. This was more a hangar than a lab, white and airy under a lofty ceiling filled with skylights, but with no windows in the walls. There were no views out on to the tree-lined bustle of Park Place, and definitely no views in.

It was only after his eyes had lingered on the pale-blue October sky that Patrick looked at the bodies.

Cadavers . He would have to get used to calling them that now.

They were the artworks in this exhibition. Thirty still-lifes – bloated by embalming fluids, and a curious shade of orange – lay on their tables waiting patiently to be deconstructed and analysed more thoroughly than any Mona Lisa, any Turin Shroud.

Each body lay in a cocoon of its own cotton swaddling, like a tender chrysalis. Each head was wound in lengths of unbleached cloth. To preserve moisture, Patrick knew from their anatomy prep sessions – to keep the face from desiccating, the eyes from wrinkling to raisins, and the students from being freaked out.

It was warm, and the smell was… strange. Patrick had been expecting formalin, but this was sweeter than that, although with an odd undernote that was not entirely pleasant.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ somebody whispered faintly from behind him.

‘No you’re not,’ said another student encouragingly.

A dark-haired girl beside Patrick nudged his arm. ‘You OK?’ she said. ‘You’re very pale.’

He nodded and removed his arm from her orbit. He could have told her that pale came from excitement, not nausea. He could have told her that this dissecting room was where his quest would succeed or fail. A quest for answers he’d been seeking since he was eight years old, and which nobody had ever seemed willing or able to give him, so that eventually he’d simply stopped asking out loud.

Patrick didn’t tell the girl that, because it wasn’t in his nature to tell anybody anything.

They were each carrying Essential Clinical Anatomy and wearing one of the twenty white paper lab coats they’d been issued in what looked like a gift bag – poor imitations of the thick white cotton coats doctors used to wear. Each had been given a four-figure code to allow them into the dissecting room via a key pad on the door. Patrick’s was 4017 and he hated it on sight. There were no patterns, no progressions, and the number had no shape other than spiky. He wondered whether it was worth engaging with another student to see if he could swap.

Just inside the entrance were three large bins filled with bright blue latex gloves. Small, medium and large. There were a few nervous giggles as they struggled into them. Patrick took a large left and had to pick up six more before finding a large right. He toyed with calculating the odds, but the boxes held an unknown number of gloves.

The blue latex seemed irreverently jolly here in the dissecting room, like bunting at a funeral.

Next to the gloves were white plastic boxes full of the tools of their new trade. Saws, hooks, scalpels, forceps, scissors – even spoons – all tossed in together. They were tools a handyman might use; a common labourer with calluses on his palms and dirt under his nails. It was a stark reminder that these – their first patients – were already past saving.

Clutching their gift bags and textbooks, the students shuffled forward gingerly towards Professor Madoc. The 150 students barely looked at the cadavers as they filed past them – as if to do so before they were given the green light to start cutting might be rude. They kept their eyes averted and fixed on Professor Madoc as he started to speak.

He was a tall, elegant man in his sixties, with neat white hair and a sailor’s tan. He welcomed them, giving them a brief overview of the anatomy syllabus and stressing the fundamental nature of the work they would learn in this room and how it would inform their studies and their rotations on the wards of the teaching hospital. He thanked the retired professors and junior doctors who had returned to guide the students through what he called the ‘infinite intricacies of the human body’. He nodded at the assorted men and women in white coats at the back of the room.