Michael Robotham - Shatter

Her mother calls to her. Alice puts the magazine back on the rack and begins helping her pack the groceries in bags. I follow them through a different checkout and out into the car park where she loads the shopping into the boot of a sleek VW Golf convertible.

Alice is told to wait in the car. Her mother skips across the parking lot, head up, hips swinging. She pauses at a crossing and waits for the lights to change. I stay on the opposite side of the street and follow her along the pavement past brightly lit shops and cafes until she reaches a drycleaner’s and pushes open the door.

A young Asian girl smiles from behind the counter. Another customer follows her inside. A man. She knows him. They brush cheeks, left and right. His hand lingers on her waist. She has an admirer. I can’t see his face but he’s tall and smartly dressed.

They’re standing close. She laughs and throws her shoulders back. She’s flirting with him. I should warn him. I should tell him to skip the foreplay. Don’t bother with marriage and the messy divorce. Buy the bitch a house and give her the keys- it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

I am watching her from the far side of the road, standing near a tourist map. The lights from a nearby restaurant illuminate my lower half leaving my face in shadow. A kitchen hand has come outside to have a cigarette. She pulls the packet from her apron pocket and glances over the cupped flame.

‘Are you lost?’ she asks me, turning her head away as she exhales.

‘No.’

‘Waiting for someone?’

‘Might be.’

Her short blonde hair is pinned behind her ears. She has darker eyebrows, her true colour.

She follows my gaze and sees who I’m looking at.

‘You interested in her?’

‘I thought I recognised her.’

‘She looks pretty cosy already. You might be too late.’

She turns her head again and blows smoke away.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Gideon.’

‘I’m Cheryl. You want a coffee?’

‘No.’

‘I can get you one.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She crushes the cigarette underfoot.

I look back at the drycleaner’s. The woman is still flirting. They’re saying goodbye. She rises on her toes and kisses his cheek, closer to his lips this time. Lingering. Then she walks to the door, swinging her hips a little. A dozen garments in plastic sleeves are draped over her left shoulder.

She crosses the road again, towards me this time. Six steps and she’ll be here. She doesn’t raise her eyes. She walks straight past me as though I don’t exist or I’m invisible. Maybe that’s it- I’m fading away.

Sometimes I wake at night and worry that I might have disappeared in my sleep. That’s what happens when nobody cares about you. Bit by bit you begin to disappear until people can look right through your chest and your head like you’re made of glass.

It’s not about love; it’s about being forgotten. We only exist if others think about us. It is like that tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. Who the fuck cares except the birds?

I once had a patient who was convinced that his head was full of seawater and a crab lived inside. When I asked him what happened to his brain he told me that aliens had sucked it out with a drinking straw.

‘It is better this way,’ he insisted. ‘Now there’s more room for the crab.’

I tell this story to my students and get a laugh. Fresher’s Week is over. They’re looking healthier. Thirty-two of them have turned up for the tutorial in a brutally modern and ugly room, with low ceilings and walls of fibreboard bolted between painted girders.

On a table in front of me is a large glass jar covered in a white sheet. My surprise. I know they’re wondering what I’m going to show them. I have kept them waiting long enough.

Taking the corners of the fabric, I flick my wrists. The cloth billows and falls, revealing a human brain suspended in formalin.

‘This is Brenda,’ I explain. ‘I don’t know if that’s her real name but I know she was forty-eight when she died.’

Putting on rubber gloves, I lift the rubbery grey organ in my cupped hands. It drips on the table. ‘Does anyone want to come down and hold her?’

Nobody moves.

‘I have more gloves.’

Still there are no takers.

‘Every religion and belief system in history has claimed there is an inner force within each of us- a soul, a conscience, the Holy Spirit. Nobody knows where this inner force resides. It could be in the big toe or the earlobe or the nipple.’

Guffaws and giggles confirm they’re listening.

‘Most people would opt for perhaps the heart or the mind as logical locations. Your guess is as good as mine. Scientists have mapped every part of the human body using X-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs and CAT scans. People have been sliced, diced, weighed, dissected, prodded and probed for four hundred years and, as yet, nobody has discovered a secret compartment or mysterious black spot or magical inner force or brilliant light shining within us. They have found no genie in a bottle, no ghost in the machine, no tiny little person madly pedalling a bicycle.

‘So what are we to draw from this? Are we simply flesh and blood, neurons and nerves, a brilliant machine? Or is there a spirit within us that we cannot see or understand?’

A hand is raised. A question! It’s Nancy Ewers- the reporter from the student newspaper.

‘What about our sense of self?’ she asks. ‘Surely that makes us more than machines.’

‘Perhaps. Do you think we’re born with this sense of self, our sense of ego, our unique personalities?’

‘Yes.’

‘You may be right. I want you to consider another possibility. What if our consciousness, our sense of self, stems from our experiences- our thoughts, feelings and memories? Rather than being born with a blueprint we are a product of our lives and a reflection of how other people see us. We are lit from without, rather than within.’

Nancy pouts and sinks back into her seat. People are scribbling furiously around her. I have no idea why. It won’t be in the exam.

Bruno Kaufman intercepts me as I leave the tutorial.

‘Listen, old boy, thought I could interest you in lunch.’

‘I’m meeting someone.’

‘Is she beautiful?’

I picture Ruiz and tell him no. Bruno falls into step beside me. ‘Terrible business on the bridge last week, absolutely dreadful.’

‘Yes.’

‘Such a nice woman.’

‘You knew her?’

‘My ex-wife went to school with Christine.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been married.’

‘Yes. Maureen has taken it quite hard, poor old thing. Shock to her system.’

‘I’m sorry. When did she last see Christine?’

‘I could ask her, I suppose.’ He hesitates.

‘Is that a problem?’

‘It would mean calling her.’

‘You don’t communicate?’

‘Story of our marriage, old boy. It was like a Pinter play: full of profound silences.’

We descend the covered stairs and cross the square.

‘Of course all that’s changed now,’ says Bruno. ‘She’s been calling me every day, wanting to talk.’

‘She’s upset.’

‘I suppose so,’ he ponders. ‘Oddly enough, I quite enjoy her calls. I divorced the woman eight years ago, yet find myself living and dying by her opinion of me. What do you make of that?’

‘Sounds like love.’

‘Oh, heavens no! Friendship maybe.’

‘So you’re saying you’d rather snuggle up to a post-grad student half your age?’

‘That’s romance. I try not to confuse the two.’

I leave Bruno at the bottom of the stairs, outside the psychology department. Ruiz is waiting at his car, reading a newspaper.