About the Book ‘The dead can’t speak to us,’ Professor Madoc had said. That was a lie. 2 страница

I’m going to call out: Hey! Hello! I’m down here! And they will look down the well and see me at the bottom, and wave in surprise and go and get help and pull me up in a big wooden bucket, like a kitten that’s been lost for ever.

Hey! Hello! I’m awake! I can hear you! I’m awake!

The words are always on the tip of my stagnant tongue. All it will take from me is the air to form them with, the effort of pushing them out, and I’ll be away.

But for some reason, I’m frightened to try it.

If I can’t force myself to wake from my own dreams, what if I also can’t shout out when I need to? Or if I can shout out, but nobody hears me? What if they pass right by the lip of the deep, dark well, and never look down, however hard I’m screaming?

That would no longer be a dream.

That would be a nightmare.

Tracy Evans noticed that coma patients were not visited with Get Well cards and grapes; coma patients were attended by those who loved them, or by those who felt a sense of duty. It was easy to tell the difference. Those who loved stayed for hours, touching, washing, talking, playing favourite music through iPod earphones, bringing in childhood toys and adult knickknacks, holding scented flowers under breathless noses, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ with tears in their eyes and croaks in their throats.

Those who loved hoped for recovery.

Those who came out of duty hoped only for an end, one way or the other. They sat and read or brought their laptops to catch up on their emails – and asked endlessly for the password for the free Wifi. They bit their nails and tapped their feet and read any old magazine they could find, even the gardening ones. They stared out of the window, down across the roof of the car park and the city beyond it – as if even that were preferable to looking at the person in the bed who wouldn’t make up their mind whether to live or whether to die.

Tracy Evans liked those visitors better. They never asked for vases or for the blinds to be opened, or thought they’d seen a twitch or a blink, or a finger tapping out SOS in Morse on the lemon-coloured blankets.

The ones who were there for love were a bit of a pain. She’d only been here a few weeks but already she’d had a girlfriend leave a boyfriend a life-sized stuffed leopard, a woman bring in an electric frying pan to cook bacon by her husband’s bedside, and four karate club members performing some kind of routine, complete with loud yells, in the hope that the sound would kickstart a brain that no longer worked. She couldn’t even tell them off for waking the other patients, because waking the patients on the coma ward was sort of the whole point.

It was all mildly diverting, but in no way did it replace or facilitate Tracy’s obsession with the progress of Rose Mackenzie’s life.

The one bright spot was Mr Deal.

Mr Deal came every night after work to see his wife, whose notes told Tracy that she had been here for nearly a year, after suffering a brain haemorrhage following a fall downstairs. Mrs Deal was forty, which meant Mr Deal was old enough to seem far more exotic to Tracy than the young men she routinely met in Evolution on a Friday night. Those young men hunted in packs and vomited in gutters; she couldn’t imagine Mr Deal doing either of those things.

There was something authoritarian and brooding about him – something of the Raft Ankers, if Tracy were honest – and every time his visits coincided with her shifts, she got a little thrill.

He never came at weekends, and seemed just uninterested enough in his wife during week-night visits to make Tracy think that a bit of mild flirtation might not be such a sinful thing – or a wasted one. She hadn’t done it yet – not properly – but she knew she would quite soon, unless Mrs Deal died or got better. Actually, only if she got better. If Mrs Deal died, Tracy thought she would still be in with a chance. Men hated living alone and were no good at it; Tracy knew this because her father had tried leaving her mother once, and had been so thoroughly hopeless that he’d returned home just two weeks later with his tail tucked between his legs, right where his balls should have been.

Mr Deal wasn’t a pilot or a doctor, but he was obviously rich and important. Tracy guessed the former because he had a set of keys on a Mercedes fob, which he often twirled on his finger while he looked at the car park with his back to his wife. She guessed he was important because when he spoke on his BlackBerry about work, he sounded as if he were giving orders, not taking them, and frowned and sighed as if he were running the United Nations.

Rich and important, and just a little bit dangerous.

Tracy Evans pulled a fresh sheet tight over Mrs Deal’s slowly curling body, tucked it in hard, and hoped she wouldn’t get better too soon.

IT WAS ONLY the first week of August, but Patrick had already packed his bags for college.

Bag, singular.

Sarah Fort stared down into the battered old suitcase, open on his bed in the room under the eaves that looked out across the smooth green hills of the Brecon Beacons.

She had told him to take everything he’d need for the twelve-week term, so he’d packed his laptop, his textbooks and his hoodie with the word HOODIE on it.

Nothing else.

With a sigh, she opened Patrick’s drawers and started to fill the suitcase with sensible things. Sweaters, shorts, socks. His washbag held only toothbrush and paste, cheap shampoo, and a razor with innumerable blades, each one supposedly more efficient than the last. Sarah smiled at the razor. Patrick got so angry about the lies advertisers told: the best ever, the longest lasting and eight out of ten cats outraged his logic. But he’d bought the razor anyway – prey to the power of advertising, just like any normal person.

Normal.

It was all she wanted for him – to be normal. Of course, she wanted him to have a job and a wife and a family, too – but she’d settle for normal. Normal would be a relief.

Down below, next to the ramshackle wooden shed, on the patch of weed-strewn gravel they called the driveway, Patrick was leaning over the engine of her little Fiesta. What could be more normal than a boy fixing a car on a sunny day? The scene gave Sarah hope. He’d got that from Matt – that obsession with mechanical things, even though Patrick had never learned to drive. The Fiesta was twenty years old now, and still ran like a dream, thanks to him.

She watched him tinker. From this distance she could see the boy and the man; the way he was changed but still changing. Big hands on the end of wiry arms, wide shoulders but narrow hips, and cropped hair that came to a childlike curl at his nape as he bent to read the oil level.

Sarah sighed. Patrick had been such a sweet baby; a boisterous toddler. But then – increasingly – a strange little boy. He’d started to stiffen when they tried to hug him, to look away when they spoke. His teachers said he was the cleverest in the class at sums, but then looked down at their hands while they mumbled about everything else: his fixation on detail and routine, his isolation and his lack of eye contact.

After Matt had … died, Patrick had got worse. He shrieked if Sarah reached out to him, and barely spoke – except to ask obsessively, ‘What happened to Daddy? ’

The doctor said it was understandable.

When it went on for a year, the doctor turned his palms up more cautiously, and said it was an understandable obsession.

Sarah hated the word ‘obsession’. She preferred to call it a ‘phase’.

But it had gone on so long …

Patrick had started to bring home dead animals. Birds, squirrels, rabbits. He sat and stared at them for hours, rolling them gently back and forth with a stick, or spreading a dead wing to watch the feathers move into place. After a while he’d begun to slice them open, peering into cavities and unravelling intestines. Making his bed one day, Sarah found a peeled shrew under the pillow. After that, dead things weren’t allowed in the house. She had caught him testing the padlock on the shed door instead, and warmed his backside for him.

No means no, Patrick!

The dead-animal phase had lasted years, and then Patrick had become more focused on mechanical things. When he wasn’t fine-tuning his bicycle gears, he was peering at the engine of her car, or those of neighbours, coaxing dead and dirty metal back to life with a spanner he wielded like a wand. Now his hands often reminded her of Matt’s, with the whorls on his fingers mapped in oily isobars.

Sarah frowned. This sudden desire to go to college – to learn anatomy – seemed like an unwelcome return to that earlier obse—that earlier phase. No good could come of it.

She watched her son tighten the spark plugs, then put each of the old ones back inside little cardboard tubes for disposal and line them up neatly on the ground, making sure each one was parallel with the last. She knew that when the time came to throw them away, he would take them out of the tubes one last time and check each one again before dropping it into the bin.

What went on inside his head?

Sarah had been asking herself the same question for eighteen years and knew she probably would for another fifty, if she lived that long. What was it that made Patrick panic if his T-shirt was too tight? What hitch in his brain made him arrange his books by publication date, and eat his food in alphabetical order?

Sarah never asked him. They talked – but never about the things that mattered. It was all Bring down your laundry and Don’t forget your coat. Part of her yearned for more; another part shied away from anything deeper or more difficult. The truth was, she didn’t want to know why he was the way he was, or whether there was anything she could have done about it.

Or not done …

She caught sight of her reflection in the window: tight-lipped, no make-up, mousey hair scraped into a utilitarian knot. The face of a woman who has no one to wake up with.

Through her own ghostly eyes she watched Patrick wheel Matthew’s old bike across the gravel and disappear down the lane. She knew he’d be gone for hours, and felt the relief.

There were two dusty framed photos on Patrick’s bedside table. The first was a picture of Matt on the Beacons, taken from a child’s angle that only accentuated his stature.

He’d been such a handsome man, thought Sarah, and they’d shared such dreams. Not grand dreams, but humble ones – of a better couch, a holiday in Scotland, and of going together to watch their son on the rugby field or in the school play. They hadn’t wanted much, but they’d been denied even that.

The other photo was of her and Patrick standing awkwardly together – not touching – next to the old blue Volkswagen she’d once loved but which she couldn’t bear to look at after Matt’s death. Patrick was only seven or eight in the photo – a thin child with dark-blue eyes and brown hair that was always clipped too short, to save time and money. She’d framed it because it was one of the few pictures she had of him where he was actually looking into the camera. No doubt because Matt was behind it, she thought with an unexpected flicker of the old resentment. Patrick had always been more Matt’s son than hers. Matt would explain things to Patrick in a low, soothing voice, and never cared if Patrick said nothing in return, or got up and left in the middle of it.

Both of which drove her crazy.

The least you could do is nod your head, Patrick!

If you’re not going to sit at the table like a big boy, you can bloody well go hungry.

It wasn’t often Sarah was able to hold Patrick’s gaze, and now she picked up the photo and thumbed a path through the dust so she could study his eyes. Even though they were ten years out of date, they were still the same – solemn and wary. He didn’t trust her; she knew that. Even as a small boy he would turn and look to Matt for confirmation of anything she’d said – each glance a needle in her heart.

On a whim, Sarah slid the photo under the hoodie, where Patrick wouldn’t notice it until it was too late. It knocked against something wrapped inside the thick material of the sweatshirt.

Sarah took out a black hardcover notebook with a red cloth spine, and opened it – expecting that Patrick had already begun making notes for his anatomy classes. He was the most conscientious of students.

Instead there was page after page of dense pencil lists in his firm block capitals.

… CHARGER, BELLADONNA, HOSTILITY …

She frowned at the long columns of random words.

… EXIT STRATEGY, SLEEPER, COMMON GOOD …

Sometimes there was a date, or an asterisk next to a word, or a symbol that meant nothing to her. None of it meant anything to her. She doubted it meant anything to anybody apart from Patrick. She flicked through dozens of almost identical pages, increasingly uneasy, yet not knowing why. Partly it was because she’d never seen the book before, which meant Patrick must have kept it hidden. That alone was disturbing. But mostly because its contents just seemed so odd – and she discouraged odd wherever possible. Odd had never done Patrick any favours, and never would.

As she was about to close the book, it fell open near the back where the pages were still clear, and suddenly she was looking at a black and white photograph of a little girl in a white dress.

Panic squeezed her throat, and gooseflesh rose down her forearms. What was this? Her mind – always primed to expect the worst – launched like a firework, spinning crazily through a ruined future where the police knocked on the door, where she had to find the money for solicitors, where people spat at them in the street and broke their windows, whether Patrick was found guilty or not.

Then she realized that the photo was not so much black and white as sepia.

And that the child was dead.

She gasped and bent her head over it more intently, with the little bedside alarm clock ticking suddenly loudly in her ears.

This was beyond odd.

The little girl in the picture was aged about five. Her face was pinched and workhouse poor, but her flaxen hair had been brushed and a dark ribbon tied into it over one bony temple. She wore a long, carefully arranged dress full of lace frills and impractical flounces. It was a dress worn only for such photos, Sarah guessed – likely to have been provided by the photographer, and probably the only decent dress the little girl would ever have worn.

The child in the picture was propped on a chair; Sarah could just see the tips of her shiny black shoes dangling below the pristine hem. The girl’s eyes were closed, but that might just have been the taking of the photograph, Sarah knew. Those Victorians had to keep utterly still during long exposures, and children often couldn’t make it. They blinked, they twitched, they yawned … they blurred. So the eyes might have been caught mid-blink.

No, it was the hands that gave it away.

A cheap doll had been placed on the girl’s lap and her arms arranged around it, as if she were holding a favourite toy. But this child’s hands were beyond holding. The wrists were curled inwards, and the fingers were slack – and the photographer had failed to notice that the pinkie on the girl’s left hand was bent backwards under the doll, in a way that no living child would have suffered.

This girl was dead.

Somewhere Sarah had heard of such photos, but she had never seen one. Pictures taken of the dead for their families to remember them by, in a time when few could afford to spend precious pennies on such fripperies for the living.

She felt overwhelming relief, then gave a short, nervous laugh at the thought that she could be relieved by finding a picture of a dead child among her son’s possessions.

Her brief illusion of normality popped like a soap bubble and she looked out across the Beacons, where sunlight illuminated the very top of Penyfan, throwing its swooping drop into ominous shadow. She remembered the day Patrick had been suspended from school – how she’d swayed on that crest, staring into the abyss, while fingers of mist caressed her calves and encouraged her to take a closer look.

She hadn’t been back since. This was close enough.

She heard again the smooth, cultured voice of Professor Madoc on the phone a few days after Patrick’s interview – talking in careful circles, tying her up in condescending knots about empathic response and special requirements – and her registering none of it but the single word ‘quota’. Patrick had got into college because of their disability quota. That was the bottom line. Not because he had smashed national academic records in A-level biology and zoology, but because of his Asperger’s Syndrome.

Professor Madoc could patronize her till the cows came home, but she wasn’t stupid; she’d had an education once; she’d had a life! And no amount of politically correct verbal acrobatics could hide the fact that, although they were letting him take anatomy, Professor Madoc thought there might be something badly amiss with Patrick.

At the time she’d felt killing tears scorch her eyes. Now – sitting on her son’s bed, with his cryptic notebook in one hand and a photograph of a dead child in the other – she wasn’t sure he was wrong.

PATRICK LAY ON his back and watched the clouds obey the breeze. The sheep-shorn grass was warm under him, and the smell of hay drifted over him from the farm in the valley below. Good enough to eat.

On late-summer days like this, with his eyes starting to close, it was easy to imagine his father was still alive – lying beside him in a silence that had only ever been broken by a quiet word or a gentle snore.

But even in this warm cocoon, he could never remember his father without thinking of that day …

He’d followed him out of the school gates, staring at the back of his blue overalls, and at the Doc Martens with the steel toecaps that felt like lead when he stepped into them at home to play Deep Sea Diver.

His father rarely walked so fast, so Patrick guessed he had forgotten he was behind him. Every few paces, Patrick had to break into a jog just to keep up.

He was glad to be out of school. Everybody looking at him, and all the loud words. Nobody had seen Mark Bennett punch him in the back. No adult, at least. But they had all come running to pick the bigger boy off the ground, and they had all seen the blood. Mr Jenkins had shouted and asked him if he understood how wrong he’d been, but Patrick didn’t feel wrong, and couldn’t lie about it, which made Mr Jenkins even louder. Then, when his father had arrived, Mr Jenkins had been loud with him, as if he were eight years old, too.

‘Follow me, ’ his father had said as he left, without looking at him, and so that’s what Patrick had done – followed him out of the school gates and down towards the town.

The garage was at the other end of Brecon. Patrick knew he would sit and wait in Mr Harris’s broken chair in the grimy little office, which was always covered with pink invoices and black fingerprints, with Miss February forever on the calendar. Her name was Justine, she liked beach volleyball and kittens, and her nipples were dark brown.

Near the bookies, his father turned and took Patrick’s hand and started to pull him across the quiet road. Patrick stiffened. His father never just grabbed his hand without warning! The feeling of it made him want to scream. He twisted free and stepped back towards the kerb. His father spun on his heel.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Patrick! Take my hand! ’

The car hit him so hard that it knocked him out of his shoes. One moment his father was coming towards him with his hand outstretched; the next there was a space, with only the Doc Marten boots to show where he’d been – one lying on its side, the other rolling awkwardly down the road, like a dumped dog trying to find its way home.

The car never stopped.

Patrick breathed hard into that space for a long, deafening moment, then slowly started to follow the second boot. Further up the road, people were running. Running from shops and cars, and out of the bookies. Running away from him.

Patrick reached the second boot, which now stood on the white line, upright and obedient, the way his father left it in the hallway every night.

All the running people had stopped in a bundle further up the road. Between their legs, Patrick could see something blue lying on the tarmac. Blue and jumbled, and with angles that made no sense.

‘Don’t let him come here! ’ shouted the Milky Way man. ‘Keep him there! ’

A young man in a striped shirt blocked his way, and Patrick stopped before he could be touched.

‘What’s his name? ’ said Stripy over his shoulder.

‘Don’t know, ’ said Milky Way. ‘Just keep him there. ’

‘What’s your name, boyo? ’ said Stripey.

Patrick ignored the question and craned around him, desperate to see what everyone was looking at. Then someone moved and – just for a second – Patrick saw his father’s eyes.

Looking nowhere.

Patrick waited at the police station until nearly midnight, when they finally contacted his mother. She couldn’t come to fetch him and when they drove him home he understood why. She had been recovering and could barely stand. The older policeman had tried to explain things to her, but she kept losing focus on him. Eventually he had made them both hot, sweet tea, and then had cooked Patrick beans on toast, before driving away under the fullest of moons.

‘What happened to Daddy? ’ Patrick asked his mother.

‘Daddy’s dead, ’ she said hoarsely.

‘Why? ’

‘Because of you, ’ she said, and her voice broke in half. ‘Because of you! ’

Then Patrick watched her howl, and slap her own head, and crawl about the kitchen floor – and thought that she hadn’t really answered his question.

For a long time after that day, Patrick had searched for his father. He roamed the Beacons, he peered through the doors of Harris’s garage, he was chased out of the Rorke’s Drift, and he crept into the bookies to huddle beside the Labrador, waiting for his father’s blue legs to pass him. At night he lay awake, restless and alert, sure that he’d hear the key in the lock and catch his father creeping in by moonlight; in the mornings he stood breathless at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hallway, expecting to see the Doc Martens in their proper place.

His father had been there one moment and gone the next. It was like a magic trick that he might expose, if only he looked up the right sleeve.

In his dreams he always took his father’s outstretched hand, and they crossed the road together.

His mother didn’t go to work in the card shop, and Patrick didn’t go to school. His mother slept and slept and slept. He barely saw her, and found that calming. He made his own meals. Every day was sandwiches: breakfast, lunch and dinner. He stopped bothering to put the lid back on the jam.

Two weeks after the accident, a woman and a man came to the cottage and spoke to his mother with files on their laps, while Patrick watched through the crack in the door. They said the car had not been found, that the driver had not been traced. They said someone had seen a number plate but that someone had got it wrong. They said they would keep trying but that the trail was going cold. His mother sat on the couch as limp as a rag doll, and nodded her head now and then. When she looked up, her eyes were almost as empty as his father’s had been.

A doctor came and gave her an injection. Patrick slipped out the back way and ran across the Beacons, scattering sheep.

After that, he went back to school. For the first few days, he got a lift with Weird Nick and his mother. Then one day when he got home, they had the Fiesta instead of the blue Volkswagen and a new jar of jam, and life returned to some kind of normality – on the outside, at least.

The school counsellor asked him how he felt and he didn’t understand the question, so she told him.

‘You feel sad, ’ she said. ‘That’s normal. You’ve lost someone you loved very much and if you want to cry, that’s not being a baby. ’

Patrick didn’t want to cry; he only wanted to find out what had happened to his father.

The counsellor sighed. ‘You see, Patrick, when somebody dies, it’s like going through a door. Once that door closes behind them, they can’t come back. ’

Patrick had never heard of a door you could only go through one way. He hadn’t seen a door opening or closing – or even his father moving towards it. He’d simply been there and then not there. But the counsellor seemed very sure.

‘Then I can just find the door and open it and find out what happened, ’ he told her.

‘Oh, Patrick, ’ said the counsellor with tears in her eyes, and reached out to give him a big hug.

He’d had to hit her to keep her at bay.

I CAN SMELL bacon! Frying bacon. I can even hear it sizzle – and the waves of memory crash saltily into my mouth.

Sunny mornings outside the caravan down on the Gower.

Why don’t we sell the house and live like this? That’s what Alice and I always say to each other, sitting in our old stripy deckchairs, after the breakfast and before the washing up, while Lexi and Patch chase each other through the tufted dunes, squealing and yapping.

Flying the pink plastic box kite I bought Lexi in the little shop festooned with beach balls and buckets; feeling it dance and tug at the end of the line. And then suddenly we’re holding nothing but falling string, as the kite breaks free and soars into the Wedgwood sky like something that knows where it’s going, and can’t wait to get there. As it disappears into a dot, Lexi slips her little hand into mine and says, ‘Look at it go, Daddy! ’ – and my heart is overwhelmed with joy, because watching it go is better than holding it back, even if we’ll never see it again.

I can feel her hand now, squeezing my fingers so hard that it hurts. But I don’t pull away because holding her hand is so special; so precious …

All that from the smell of the bacon. All that wonder and joy …

Somebody tells me they love me. It’s not Alice but it warms me anyway. Love is never bad, wherever you find it; Alice taught me that.

I wonder where they are, Alice and Lexi. Do they even know I’m here – waiting for them to come and find me while a stranger holds my hand? Until they’re with me, what am I? Not a husband and not a father.

I’m lost without them.

The only noise is a soft blip … blip … and the sound of my own breathing. In and out … and in and out … and in and out … and in and out. My chest rises and falls to the maddening rhythm. It makes me think of Lexi learning to play the piano. ‘Chopsticks’ outrunning the metronome, and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ lagging behind it. But she stuck at it, even though her fingers were never going to be long enough to be good. That’s my fault; I brought the stubby hands to the marital table. Alice brought the even temper, the sense of fun, and all the looks.

And the sad eyes.

When did that happen? Is that my fault?

In the cot next to the bed, Lexi cries as if her heart is breaking.

So sad. So sad!

I want to roll over and comfort her, before she wakes Alice. In my head, I do.

’S OK, I whisper. ’S OK, sweetheart, go to sleep.

But I’m the one who sleeps, down the dark years.

When I wake again, sliced white bread is laid out in neat squares for buttering. For a party, perhaps? A catered event, and here’s all the bread, waiting for the tuna and the cheese and the coronation chicken. I’m not hungry, but a sandwich would be nice. A sandwich and maybe a sausage roll, and a pint of Brains bitter. My mouth is so dry.