Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer Read Free Book Online Page B

coma patients die very easily. They succumb to infections, or have strokes, or asphyxiate on food or their own spittle, or sometimes the heart fails due to cumulative factors.’
    Cumulative factors like being
murdered
!
    ‘The longer someone is in a coma, the less likely they are to regain full consciousness. Such deaths may be sudden, but they are rarely unexpected or unexplained.’
    ‘It’s been two months now,’ says the other woman, and someone touches my forehead with something that smells of rubber. ‘But there’s still a chance he’ll …?’
    ‘Emerge.’
    ‘Yes. There’s still a good chance he’ll
emerge
, isn’t there?’
    And all of a sudden I realize they’re talking about
me
! Me, Sam Galen. Talking about
me
emerging – and talking about me
dying
!
    I snap out of the cloud and get a bit frantic, which is difficult to do when you can’t move or make a sound. I try to open my eyes. No lying doggo now! But they won’t open. They won’t bloody well
open
! I strain my brows upwards until it feels like my forehead will peel back like banana skin, but still my lids are dark maroon.
    Maybe this is how it was for the man in the next bed – maybe somebody thought
he
should just ‘slip away’ while he tried to open his eyes.
    ‘Every case is different,’ the doctor hedges.
    ‘All I want is an educated guess,’ says the other woman. ‘I understand it’s not a diagnosis.
Please
.’
    ‘In that case …’
    Long silence. I can almost see the doctor tapping her teeth with the end of her pen as she takes an educated guess at my future existence . I stop straining to open my eyes and instead listen so hard that I feel the empty air swirl in my ears, while a smooth rubber finger drags over my cheek.
    ‘I’m afraid,’ says the doctor, her voice heavy with practised sorrow, ‘it’s getting to the point where
if
he emerges, it may not be in one piece.’
    The finger leaves my cheek and there’s no answer for a long time, and then only the sound of quiet sobbing.
    I’m in one piece!
I scream soundlessly.
Here I am! I’m in one piece!
    Aren’t I?

10
    EVEN WHEN THE streeets had been washed clean by rain, the malt rising from the Brains brewery made all of early-morning Cardiff smell like late-night Horlicks.
    Patrick rode through the dawn, listening to the sound of his tyres hissing on the damp tarmac as he made a loop through the city.
    In the Hayes, pigeons purred softly from the roof of the snack bar, and made him think of home.
    It was an old city, despite the veneer of new wealth that made it shine in the wet Welsh sun. The buildings over the glittering shop fronts were all curled stone and soot, and the castle walls dominated the city centre, guarded by a strange collection of beasts, furred and feathered in stone. Victorian arcades linked the thoroughfares like secret tunnels, filled with shops that sold old violins, shoes, and sweets by the quarter from giant jars.
    Cardiff was also a small city, and was easy to leave for the hills and forests and beaches that cupped it all round with nature. Sometimes Patrick rode west to Penarth and sat on the pier, which smelled faintly of fish, and which bore the scars of a thousand anglers who’d cut their bait on the salted wood. Sometimes he cycled beyond the narrow suburbs to the fairy-tale castle that guarded the city’s northern approach; sometimes east across the flat, reclaimed land that bordered the sea so closely that only a grid of ditches kept it dry.
    Ish.
    Wherever he went, his route was guided by Welsh and by English – each road sign to
ildiwch
a reminder that the old oppressor had finally given way, after failing to beat the language out of the nation’s schoolchildren.
    The room Patrick was renting was the smallest in a small house that was distinguishable from its neighbours only by the white plastic ‘7’ screwed to the front door. The back of it looked over the railway line where trains took passengers to and from the South