Rubbernecker Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

6
    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