Free Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer Page A

joking.’
    ‘You’re allowed to laugh.’
    ‘Maybe later,’ he said.
    ‘There’s a party tonight. You want to come?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Oh, come on. You’ll have fun.’
    ‘I won’t.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I know I don’t like parties.’
    ‘What
do
you like then?’
    He stopped talking and looked up the street to the traffic lights, wishing he was already there and that she was behind him.
    ‘Do you like
any
thing?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like some things.’
    ‘Name your top five.’
    He said nothing. He couldn’t. He only had three.
    Meg sighed theatrically, then held an invisible microphone under his nose. ‘How does it feel to be a man of mystery?’
    Patrick stared blankly at her fist. ‘I don’t know.’
    She smiled. ‘If you change your mind, here’s my number.’
    She took out a pen and lowered it towards his knuckles, so he tucked his hands into his pockets so she couldn’t write on his skin.
    She went red. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s 07734113117.’
    ‘OK.’
    She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You got that?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘See you at Number 19, Patrick.’
    ‘OK,’ he said, and swung his leg over the crossbar.
    As he rode home he replayed the conversation in his head. It was the longest one he’d had with a stranger in ages. Now he tried to analyse it, the way his mother always nagged him to.
    People say things for a reason, Patrick. If you listen carefully, you’ll understand not only what they’re saying, but why
.
    But while people were talking, he was always so busy wishing they would leave him alone that he found it difficult to think his
own
thoughts, let alone decipher theirs. Patrick didn’t know what more he could have told Meg. Animals and photographs were two of the things he liked – and he didn’t have to say
why
. But if he’d told her two things, she might have asked about the third – and the third was secret.
    The third was his quest.
    Patrick was not a liar by nature, but he had lied to Meg, just as he had lied to his mother and to the admissions interview panel.
    He didn’t care what made people work.
    He was only interested in what happened when they
stopped
…

14
    WHAT HAVE I done to deserve this? It seems like a logical question but the holes in my memory make it a pointless one too, because the answer is
I don’t know
.
    I keep looking for clues, but until I come up with something that justifies what’s happening to me, I can’t help feeling pretty short-changed in the karma stakes.
    There’s a photo next to my bed. I don’t know the people in it and it hurts my eyes to keep them swivelled to the left for that long, so unless I’m on my left side, I only see it in snatches. A middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman. The man looks a bit like my father, but the woman is not my mother, that’s for sure, even though she acts like it when she comes to visit me every day – stroking my hand, kissing my hair, massaging my feet the way the therapist told her to, and arranging bluebells and anemones in a jug she brought with her. I think I recognize the jug, but from where?
    I don’t know. Again.
    The woman who’s not my mother has stopped wearing the surgical mask, but she still wears the blue gloves.
    ‘Apparently you can get the most dreadful infections if you don’t take precautions,’ she tells me conspiratorially. ‘Upset tummy, you know.’
    Sure I know
, I think, and shit into my nappy some more, which makes her nose wrinkle. I don’t care. It annoys me that she is here and Alice and Lexi are not.
Why don’t they come?
It makes me sad – but also angry and suspicious. I hope they’re all right, of course, but if they
are
then what would keep them from coming to see me?
    Maybe they’ve been lied to. Maybe they’ve been told I’m already dead, and are even now getting over me, while I am here, hidden away, waiting for a fate that someone has designed especially for me. Sometimes I even wonder about the crash. Did