Rubbernecker (2 page)

The title alone of
Rose in Bloom
promised much in the way of conflagration, and twenty-four-year-old Tracy had filled the opening on Cardiff’s neurological unit with that very vow in mind. She’d imagined rows of sleeping patients, serene among the machines, and herself moving silently between them – more a nightwatchman than a nurse – or turning slow pages by the light of a single yellow lamp …

The reality, however, had turned out to be quite annoyingly different, in ways Tracy had barely imagined, let alone encountered. A few patients
were
deep in comas – ostensibly asleep, motionless – but others were in a range of vegetative states. Tracy undertook all the usual nursing tasks – changing drips and catheters, sponge baths, administering medication and nutrition, and noting alterations in respiration or motion. But here there was also cream to be massaged into skin to keep it supple, guards to be raised on the beds of those patients who thrashed and flailed, and bedsores to be prevented on those who did not. There were grunts and moans and blinks and incoherent shouts to be translated into sane requests for water or a switch of TV channel. There were nappies to be changed and arses to be wiped clean of soupy orange excrement. Physios wrestled noisily with stiffening limbs and clawed hands. There were splints to be strapped around legs, and dead-weight bodies to be hoisted into wheelchairs, or on to tilt tables, where patients hung as if crucified – all in an attempt to keep them from contracting into crooked foetal balls from which there might be no return.

Basically it was bedlam. Combined – for Tracy, at least – with a prickling fear that the dead-eyed patients were
watching
her, and biding their time …

To cap it all, there was the ward initiation – a painful C-diff infection that had Tracy doubled over in the toilet half a dozen times a day, and left her literally and figuratively drained. The other nurses called it ‘the diff-shits’ and told her it wouldn’t be so bad the next time. Tracy vowed to learn by her mistake and to start applying now for other jobs, before the next time could ever become
this
time.

In the meantime she learned that there were good coma patients and there were bad coma patients. A more experienced colleague, Jean, told her this in a way that let her know that such things were
understood
, and that it was OK to understand them, but not to talk openly about them.

Good coma patients were quiet. They didn’t make noise; they didn’t lash out when you tried to help them. They didn’t get pneumonia and require a lot of extra attention, or pull out their feeding tubes and drips. Good coma patients had families who were polite and didn’t clutter the place up with bits from home, and who brought little gifts – bribes, really – for the nurses, in the hope that they would take good care of their loved ones in the long hours filled with their absence. There were always at least two boxes of chocolates open behind the nurses’ station; Tracy liked the nuts, and would lift up the top layers before they were finished to get at the hard centres below, before anyone else had a chance.

It was also understood – by the nurses, at least – that good coma patients had been good people in their previous lives, too. They were here because of strokes brought on by overwork, car accidents that were not their fault, and falls from ladders while helping neighbours clear their guttering, or rescuing cats from trees.
Good
coma patients got their brows stroked and kind words in their ears, encouraging them to return to the world in one mental piece.

Bad
coma patients cried all night long, or choked on even the thinnest porridge, or gripped their bed guards and rattled them like the bars of an old cage. They shouted out and flailed, and sometimes connected with a fist or a foot. They soiled themselves into freshly changed nappies – apparently just for the hell of it – and got constant infections that required extra nursing all night long. Bad patients were here because of drug overdoses and speeding and drunken brawls outside pubs. Their families were demanding and mistrustful. Bad patients got pursed lips and brisk handling, and their restraints tightened ‘for their own good’.

Nothing of this distinction was written down or discussed with doctors or families, but all the nurses knew the difference. When
Jean
first showed Tracy around the ward, she walked from bed to bed, filling Tracy’s head with biographies that were never to be rewritten or erased – or even verified as truthful.

‘This poor lad was going to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring when he was hit by a taxi. Driver was on his phone, I’ll bet,’ said Jean. ‘The girl comes in after work and just cries. Every day for seven months. Sweet little thing says she still wants to marry him. Breaks your heart.’ She sighed and sounded sincere, so Tracy nodded in a way she hoped denoted that she, too, was a little bit heartbroken – even though she thought that if
her
(hypothetical) boyfriend were in a coma for more than a few weeks, she’d probably just cut her losses and move on, not stick around to watch him shit in his pants for the next fifty years.

Jean was on to the next bed. ‘
This
one,’ she said with a brusque tug of the sheets over the chest of a middle-aged man, ‘fell off that bridge at the end of Queen Street. Drunk, most likely. Or running from the police. Shouldn’t have been on it in the first place; it’s a rail bridge, you know, not pedestrian.’

Tracy did know. She herself had staggered under it many a Friday and Saturday night as she wove the mile from Evolution back to the house she shared with three other girls. People were always hanging over the parapet of the bridge with spray cans, or playing chicken with the trains as they left Queen Street station.

‘A right pain, this one,’ whispered Jean over another man. ‘Bawling and shouting. Sometimes in a foreign language, makes me think he has something to hide.’

Tracy nodded, enthralled.

‘He has us all running about like headless chickens. Gets violent too.’

‘Really?’

‘Well,’ shrugged Jean, ‘he doesn’t
mean
to, I suppose, but he can knock things about. He’s very strong. He broke Angie’s finger.’ She
nodded
at a pretty, dark-haired nurse with white tape on her left hand, then looked back at Tracy seriously.

‘So you take care.’

‘I will.’

‘And the
families
,’ said Jean, with a look that said that Tracy would soon find out for herself. ‘You mustn’t let them bully you.
You
’re the professional, not them. Remember that.’

‘I
will
,’ said Tracy firmly, and looked around the unit. Two wards, twelve beds – ten of them containing people who were neither dead nor alive; who had bought tickets to the afterlife and then had somehow had their journeys interrupted, and who were even now debating whether or not to go on, or to turn around and make their way back home.

3

HE HAD SEEN
a lot of doctors, but it wasn’t until he’d started school at the age of five that Patrick realized there was something wrong with him. He hated the disorder of his classmates and the physicality of the playground – where nobody else was interested in clearing the quad of gravel, then grading it according to size.

In the classroom there was no task too complex for him to tackle, and few he could not complete. While the other kids rushed out to play, Patrick would wriggle and shriek if the teacher tried to encourage him away from his alphabet or his sums. He was a barnacle for learning.

He deconstructed his lunchbox and discarded anything red, and was obsessed with parroting any sentence spoken to him, emphasizing each word in turn to taste the changes.

PUT the chalk down
.

Put the CHALK down
.

Put the chalk DOWN
.

And still he’d be holding the chalk.

Nobody rejects difference as quickly and brutally as children. Soon Patrick was not invited to houses and parties, and was excluded from groups and games. But he didn’t want to go to parties, hated groups, and didn’t understand the games, so it didn’t bother him. After all, he was fascinated by the rhythm of ants, but it didn’t mean he wanted to
be
one.

Until he was seven years old …

Children weren’t allowed in the bookmaker’s, so while his father watched the horses and dogs on the big screen, Patrick sat under the counter nearest the door, hemmed in by bikes and an old black Labrador, which was either always wet or just smelled that way. Sometimes men would stand in front of Patrick without even knowing he was there. They leaned their elbows on the counter to read the pages of runners and riders that were pinned to the walls, and he looked at their knees and their crotches, and the muddy prints their boots left on the lino. He could hear the scratch of the cheap little biros as they scribbled their selections over his head, and their muttering when they lost, which seemed to be all the time.

Occasionally they noticed him and bent down and said, ‘Hello, down there’ and ‘All right, boyo?’ But when that happened, Patrick always edged towards the dog for support, and said nothing back. Once a man held a Milky Way out to him and the Labrador snatched it and swallowed it in two gulps – wrapper and all.

‘Don’t say much, do he?’ an old man once remarked to Patrick’s father, and his father replied staunchly, ‘He’s thinking.’

His father always told the truth: Patrick
was
thinking – about the way air smelled like rubber when it hissed from bicycle tyre valves, about the odds that changed on the screens, making horses’ names jump up and down the list like fleas, and about why dogs had pink gums but black lips.

Increasingly ignored, Patrick grew to enjoy his post by the door, where he could observe without being observed.

It was a hot summer day, and Patrick was tracing the Labrador’s slumbering outline on to the lino in biro, when a shocked groan went up from the men in the bookies – followed by a terrible silence.

Patrick crawled from under the counter and crept forward past
the
shoes of the men, until he stood up just inches from the giant TV screen.

Pixellated by proximity, a purple jockey trudged up the emerald grass with a saddle on his arm that should have been on the back of a horse.

Patrick touched the grass and felt the green buzz warmly around his fingers.

‘What’s that kid doing in here?’ somebody called out, and his father got up and held out his hand.

Patrick drew back. He hated to hold hands; it made his bones itch. But he was perplexed to see that his father had tears in his eyes. For some reason he didn’t understand, it made Patrick take his hand without complaint. He even held it while they crossed the busy road, and then all the way to the lounge bar of the Rorke’s Drift. There his father bought him a Coke in a bottle that looked as though it had been squeezed in the middle, and touched his own pint to it with a dull click.

‘To Persian Punch,’ he said huskily, and pinched his nose, which was like wiping it on his sleeve but not as common.

‘To Persian Punch,’ agreed Patrick, although it was only later that he would learn that Persian Punch was a horse.

Had been a horse.

He never forgot the feeling that it had given him. The curious sense that he was closer to his father at that moment than he’d ever come to anyone. That he could almost
share
what he was feeling. For the first time, Patrick had an inkling of what it was that the other children seemed to know instinctively – that they were part of something bigger, something mysterious.

Something he finally wanted, but still didn’t know how to get.

Discovering that he was missing a critical link turned school into a daily misery for Patrick. Everybody else possessed the key to popularity and happiness, and his clumsy attempts to find his own
key
always ended with other children looking at him funny, or calling him names. Classmates hid his pencils just to watch him rage, and a group of boys wrapped his winter coat round a rock and threw it on to the roof of the bike shed. The frustration left him confused and angry, and obstinate at home, where he made his parents shout at each other behind closed doors. Patrick would press his cheek to the cool, painted wood and listen to his mother’s voice cracking hysterically: ‘… can’t go
on
like this! I wish we’d never
had
him!’

He liked it when she got like that, because then his father would take him on long walks across the Beacons – just the two of them – while she stayed home and drew the curtains so she could sleep. ‘I need to recover,’ she’d say wearily, and they’d return much later to have tea in a darkened house – silently, so as not to wake her – and his father would put the vodka away somewhere different each time.

Finally, when Patrick was eight years old, Mark Bennett – a monster of a farmboy – had shouted ‘Twpsyn!’ and punched him in the back as he swung on the monkey bars. Patrick dropped into the dirt and lay gasping at the sky until his breath came back to him. By the time he’d got slowly to his feet, the bigger boy was already high on the swings, laughing. Patrick had stood to one side and waited for the swing to swoop down and past him – then smashed Mark Bennett square in the face with a rounders bat. The combined speed of the swing and the bat knocked him out cold and off the swing, in an impressive somersault that a generation of Brecon children would claim to have seen with their very own eyes.

The school had called Patrick’s mother, who’d burst into tears and hung up, so they’d called his father, who had left work in the middle of the day to fetch him.

And had died because of it.

4

I’M ASLEEP AND
I cannot tell you how hard I try to wake up.

I dream of Jesus hanging on a cross in his pyjamas, his hands twisting in agony while Mary in a blue uniform tugs on his drubbing feet. Other times it’s a birdman in a black cape and a gas mask, come to plunge its long beak into the jelly of my eyes and drag me off by the sockets – and I scream until my throat hurts, but nobody comes.