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So I don’t
have
to shout. I don’t
have
to wave my arms around to attract attention. All I have to do is calm down and wait until he’s finished helping the patient in the next bed, and then he’ll turn to me and see that I’m awake, and help me too.
    Ding dong bell. Pussy in the well
.
    Simple.
    Click
.
    The sound of a switch is soft but unmistakable, and is accompanied by the extinction of the grey light.
    The blips have stopped, too.
    I turn my eyes again. The doctor’s hand is on the dark machine and the man in the bed is moving a little. Then a lot. Straining; feet kicking under the covers like he’s having a fit; like he’s gasping for air.
    Like he’s dying.
    My God, he’s
dying
!
    Now
I panic. It seizes me, but I can’t shout or run or wave my arms about to share the feeling, so instead it splashes through my chest like electricity, then shoots down my arms and legs and up the back of my head until every part of me tingles with pointless shock.
    In my mind I am already there beside him, clearing an airway, pinching his nose, breathing into his mouth, the way we all learned that time from the St John Ambulance. In fact, I can’t move a muscle.
    My head screams:
Help him! Help him!
    But the doctor doesn’t help him.
    Instead he just leans over the man and watches him suffer. It seems to take a forever of choking and rattling, and when it’s all over, there’s a vast silence filled only by my heart in my head. Then I hear the soft click of the switch again and the dim light returns, making me blink. I wait for the blips, but they don’t come back.
    They never come back.
    Is this another dream? I hope so. I beg the grey tiles,
Please let it be a dream. Please don’t let this be real
.
    I hear quiet footsteps squeak towards me and quickly close my eyes. I don’t want to see the doctor, and I don’t want
him
to see
me
.
    I no longer want him to know that I’m awake.

PART TWO

8
    PATRICK ENTERED A large space filled with dead people and thought of an art gallery.
    The Cardiff University dissection room was brighter, whiter, lighter than he had ever imagined; films like
Flatliners
and
Frankenstein
had apparently misled him. This was more a hangar than a lab, white and airy under a lofty ceiling filled with skylights, but with no windows in the walls. There were no views out on to the tree-lined bustle of Park Place, and definitely no views in.
    It was only after his eyes had lingered on the pale-blue October sky that Patrick looked at the bodies.
    Cadavers
. He would have to get used to calling them that now.
    They were the artworks in this exhibition. Thirty still-lifes – bloated by embalming fluids, and a curious shade of orange – lay on their tables waiting patiently to be deconstructed and analysed more thoroughly than any Mona Lisa, any Turin Shroud.
    Each body lay in a cocoon of its own cotton swaddling, like a tender chrysalis. Each head was wound in lengths of unbleached cloth. To preserve moisture, Patrick knew from their anatomy prep sessions – to keep the face from desiccating, the eyes from wrinkling to raisins, and the students from being freaked out.
    It was warm, and the smell was … strange. Patrick had been expecting formalin, but this was sweeter than that, although with an odd undernote that was not entirely pleasant.
    ‘I’m going to be sick,’ somebody whispered faintly from behind him.
    ‘No you’re not,’ said another student encouragingly.
    A dark-haired girl beside Patrick nudged his arm. ‘You OK?’ she said. ‘You’re very pale.’
    He nodded and removed his arm from her orbit. He could have told her that pale came from excitement, not nausea. He could have told her that this dissecting room was where his quest would succeed or fail. A quest for answers he’d been seeking since he was eight years old, and which nobody had ever seemed willing or able to give him, so that eventually he’d simply stopped asking out loud.
    Patrick didn’t tell the girl that,