Rubbernecker Read Online Free PDF

wait in Mr Harris’s broken chair in the grimy little office, which was always covered with pink invoices and black fingerprints, with Miss February forever on the calendar. Her name was Justine, she liked beach volleyball and kittens, and her nipples were dark brown.
    Near the bookies, his father turned and took Patrick’s hand and started to pull him across the quiet road. Patrick stiffened. His father
never
just grabbed his hand without warning! The feeling of it made him want to scream. He twisted free and stepped back towards the kerb. His father spun on his heel.
    ‘Oh, for
fuck’s sake
, Patrick! Take my hand!’
    The car hit him so hard that it knocked him out of his shoes. One moment his father was coming towards him with his hand outstretched; the next there was a space, with only the Doc Marten boots to show where he’d been – one lying on its side, the other rolling awkwardly down the road, like a dumped dog trying to find its way home.
    The car never stopped.
    Patrick breathed hard into that space for a long, deafening moment, then slowly started to follow the second boot. Further up the road, people were running. Running from shops and cars, and out of the bookies. Running away from him.
    Patrick reached the second boot, which now stood on the white line, upright and obedient, the way his father left it in the hallway every night.
    All the running people had stopped in a bundle further up the road . Between their legs, Patrick could see something blue lying on the tarmac. Blue and jumbled, and with angles that made no sense.
    ‘Don’t let him come here!’ shouted the Milky Way man. ‘Keep him there!’
    A young man in a striped shirt blocked his way, and Patrick stopped before he could be touched.
    ‘What’s his name?’ said Stripy over his shoulder.
    ‘Don’t know,’ said Milky Way. ‘Just keep him there.’
    ‘What’s your name, boyo?’ said Stripey.
    Patrick ignored the question and craned around him, desperate to see what everyone was looking at. Then someone moved and – just for a second – Patrick saw his father’s eyes.
    Looking nowhere.
    Patrick waited at the police station until nearly midnight, when they finally contacted his mother. She couldn’t come to fetch him and when they drove him home he understood why. She had been recovering and could barely stand. The older policeman had tried to explain things to her, but she kept losing focus on him. Eventually he had made them both hot, sweet tea, and then had cooked Patrick beans on toast, before driving away under the fullest of moons.
    ‘What happened to Daddy?’ Patrick asked his mother.
    ‘Daddy’s dead,’ she said hoarsely.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because of you,’ she said, and her voice broke in half. ‘Because of
you
!’
    Then Patrick watched her howl, and slap her own head, and crawl about the kitchen floor – and thought that she hadn’t really answered his question.
    For a long time after that day, Patrick had searched for his father. He roamed the Beacons, he peered through the doors of Harris’s garage, he was chased out of the Rorke’s Drift, and he crept into the bookies to huddle beside the Labrador, waiting for his father’s blue legs to pass him. At night he lay awake, restless and alert, sure that he’d hear the key in the lock and catch his father creeping in by moonlight; in the mornings he stood breathless at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hallway, expecting to see the Doc Martens in their proper place.
    His father had been there one moment and gone the next. It was like a magic trick that he might expose, if only he looked up the right sleeve.
    In his dreams he always took his father’s outstretched hand, and they crossed the road together.
    His mother didn’t go to work in the card shop, and Patrick didn’t go to school. His mother slept and slept and slept. He barely saw her, and found that calming. He made his own meals. Every day was sandwiches: breakfast, lunch and dinner. He