There was a pause.
‘So what must I do about it?’
What indeed? She felt emotion start to clog her throat.
‘Do whatever you think best,’ she said hoarsely.
‘Best for who?’
Sarah could barely whisper. ‘For you.’
There was a long silence and then Patrick said an abrupt ‘OK’ in a tone she knew meant that, for him, the conversation was over.
She didn’t press him, even though it was three in the morning and any other mother would have done. Should have done. Any mother of a different son.
But she was only relieved that he’d stopped asking questions that made her fear him, even as she feared for him.
‘Good,’ she said, and then ‘Goodbye.’
She sat in the kitchen with the phone in her lap long after Patrick had rung off. It was a harsh February and the kitchen fire had long since gone out, but she shivered for other reasons too. The cold from the stone floor seeped through her socks and crept achingly up her ankles and her shins, and still she sat there, thinking about her strange son calling her on a strange night to ask a strange question.
The splinter of progress she thought she’d seen at Christmas – away from the obsessive past and into a more normal future – now seemed like a cruel deception. She wasn’t a religious woman, but she wanted a sign. A single, solid indicator that Matt’s life – and hers – had not been wasted.
She couldn’t think of one.
Not one.
On another night – a warmer night; or if the fire had not gone out; or if the cat had been sitting on her lap – habit alone might have been enough to keep her going.
But this night was cold and this night was dark, and the cat was outside killing small things.
So there was nothing to stop her standing up and staring out of the kitchen window at the Fiesta outside the old wooden shed. Nothing to stop her pulling cold rubber boots on to her bare feet and crunching across the gravel under the slitted moon in her towelling robe; nothing to stop her driving six miles to the twenty-four-hour service station and buying two bottles of Vladivar.
One for now and one for just in case.
29
WHEN PATRICK GOT home it was four a.m., so he was surprised to see the lights were on. The minute he opened the door and pushed his bike inside, Jackson appeared at the top of the stairs in fake silk pyjamas. Patrick knew they must be fake because silk was expensive, but Jackson’s TV was a piece of junk.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Jackson yelled at him.
WHERE the fuck have you been?
Where the FUCK have you been?
Where the fuck have you BEEN?
Patrick said nothing. He wiped his bike down with a towel he kept in the hall, then carried it upstairs and hung it on its hooks, while Jackson harangued him from the doorway.
‘I told you she had to go, didn’t I? She’s your fucking guest and you should have kicked her out. Then none of this would have happened!’
‘None of what?’
‘Oh Jackson, shut up!’ Kim shouted from her room, and Jackson stomped down the short corridor to her door, and they yelled at each other for a bit, using words like ‘whore’ and ‘slag’ and ‘control freak’ and ‘arsehole’.
Patrick almost said something, but then reserved judgement on whether or not there was a need to swear. He used the time alone to strip off his sodden clothing, wring it out of the window and pile it on top of the hot-water tank. He stared at his single trainer and wished he’d had something else to throw. He only had one pair of shoes with him at college; now he only had half a pair.
‘Don’t pretend you give a shit!’ yelled Kim.
‘I won’t!’ Jackson shouted back. ‘I don’t!’
Patrick pulled on dry shorts and a T-shirt, turned out his light and got into his sleeping bag, shivering with delayed cold, and feeling again the paintwork of the old door, pressed against his cheek as his parents fought behind it. Over him. This felt just like that.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ said a voice he recognized as Lexi’s. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep!’
A dull thumping on the wall beside Patrick’s head told him that some of the people trying to sleep lived next door.
Kim’s door slammed like a gun.
‘Fuck you, too!’ Jackson yelled, then came back to Patrick’s room and stood in the doorway.
‘Bitch,’ he said. ‘Fucking bitch.’ And then he walked in, sat heavily on Patrick’s legs and burst into tears.
Patrick stared at the ceiling. He hoped that soon Jackson would tire of crying, get off his legs and go back to his own room. But when none of those things happened, he asked him what was wrong.
Apparently what was wrong was that after Patrick had left, Lexi had crawled out of his bed and into Kim’s bed instead – where it turned out that Kim was a lesbian, after all.
A loud one.
‘If you hadn’t brought her home, none of this would ever have happened,’ sobbed Jackson.
That was self-evident, thought Patrick. But then, if he hadn’t brought Lexi home, he would also never have found out about the allergies. He would still have two trainers, he wouldn’t have called his mother without gloves and on the wrong night of the week, and he would not now understand that the missing peanut might mean that someone was hiding something bad.
Cause and effect was a funny thing.
For the first time since he had come to the city, Patrick felt his need to complete his quest vying for space in his head with this new mystery. He had spent more than half his young life seeking answers about what had happened to his father, but suddenly it was Lexi’s rich, mean, mummified parent that excited his mind.
And the new mystery did not involve the intricacies of reaching out to a life beyond this one, only the simple question of who was guilty, and why.
PART THREE
30
JEAN BOTTI HAD worked on the neurological ward for seven years, so she’d seen it all. Miracles and murders.
Oh, they happened – both of them – although neither was ever acknowledged by the hospital.
Since starting work on what was commonly known as the coma ward, she knew of three reliable miracles and two less reliable murders. The miracles were not of the walking-on-water, feeding-the-five-thousand variety. That would be silly, even to a staunch Catholic like Jean. But, in Jean’s eyes, they were events of such startling recovery that they would have challenged the story of Lazarus.
There was sixteen-year-old Amy Russett, who spent a year frozen in a coma and then, one chilly March night, got up, walked down the corridor and took herself to the toilet – marking the start of a rapid and unexplained recovery.
Then there was Gwilym Thomas, a sixty-six-year-old farmer, who had never been beyond the Welsh border but who, after being gored by his own prize bull, awoke speaking only French. Even more bizarrely, the only English he seemed to remember was the name of the bull. Jean could recall it even now: Barleyfield Ianto.
Mrs Thomas had proved to be a stoic, and hadn’t taken it personally. After a brief flurry of confusion, she had armed herself with a Linguaphone course and started a new, more Gallic life.