by David Mark
You might have heard of people who request gold teeth/fillings to be returned. If they’re in dentures, SURE! If they’re attached to a tooth/mandible, NO WAY JOSÉ. The family can hire a dentist to come in and take it out. The fillings are worth a solid twenty-five cents. Maybe. (I may be exaggerating here, but it really isn’t worth the trouble.)
One kind of ‘reverse memento’ I came across, this gentleman had kept a ‘mumu’ (an oversized, long, long-sleeved, busy patterned dress/nightgown) of his mother’s. When he died, his wife brought it in to us and said, ‘If he wanted to keep it so bad, he can be buried with it.’ So I put it in the foot end of the casket.
Other than that, I can’t think of any odd memento mori I have encountered … Then again, what’s considered odd in this business?
I can’t wait to hear about the paper you’re writing. Do please stay in touch.
Harriet.
x
HILDA
I was asking questions the way I always did when I was getting over-excited. If I was a dog my tail would have been going like windscreen wipers in a storm. There was never any opportunity for the poor victim of my interrogations to reply to one question before I hit them with the next. I had the word ‘chatterbox’ as the password on my phone before I lost it and didn’t object when Mum occasionally put her hands over her ears and warned me that if I didn’t give her five minutes of peace, there was a good chance she was going to nail a brick to my tongue.
‘Have you been to Lithuania? It’s nice, apparently. Meda’s city looks like a butterfly. People don’t go there for honeymoons, do they? Did you know Verona and Paris both call themselves the city of love? Has anybody taken you to Paris? How about Verona? I’d love to go and see an opera there but Mum says the flights cost a month’s wages. Is that true? Why haven’t you got married? Are you and the skinny man seeing each other …?’
Lottie was starting to wince on the side of her face nearest to me. It was raining hard and the spray was hitting her liberally about the cheeks but I am pretty sure her expression was more to do with me than the weather.
‘Which one do you want first?’ she asked, raising her voice over the sound of the traffic that creaked past in a cacophony of horns and muffled music, hissing breaks and creaking tyres.
I thought about it. ‘Why aren’t you married?’
‘I like to sleep diagonally,’ she said, and there was a look on her face that, as an adult, I have come to think of as regret.
‘You could still do that and get married,’ I said. ‘Just sleep in different beds. That’s what Mum and Mike did and they seemed happy right up until they weren’t.’
Looking back, I wonder why I said it. More than that, I wonder how that line affected Lottie. I wonder if I said it for effect. The truth is, I never had much interest in where Mike was sleeping. He was a phantom in our lives. It was like living in a haunted house. He was my dad but I wasn’t allowed to call him that. He was Mum’s boyfriend but nobody was allowed to know. He paid for things but it had to be in cash and there couldn’t be any trace. He lived most of the time in a different house, with a lady called Ashley and two daughters who didn’t know they had a half-sister and who had only heard Mum’s name in the context of a colleague with a crush. As an adult, or the nearest thing to it, I can’t think of those years without wrinkling my nose on Mum’s behalf. She took so much shit. Thought she was doing right in insisting I have a relationship with the man she told me was my father. I engaged with him to please her but in truth, neither he nor I gave a damn about one another. It was all duty. If I had the choice of an afternoon in McDonald’s and a shopping trip with Mike, or snuggles on the sofa with Mum, I knew what my heart wanted most. But it seemed important I embrace the idea of a dad, and so I kept telling her that I missed him when he wasn’t there and that I’d be sad if we never saw him again. I still don’t know why. I haven’t seen him since she told him to go fuck himself and I don’t feel any poorer for it.
‘It’s a good job I’m not married,’ said Lottie, scowling at the blue-black air. ‘Your mum would make him a widow this evening.’
‘Stop worrying. Mum loves you.’
‘I wish.’
We were on Globe Road, retracing Meda’s last known steps. It was a little before nine p.m. We were soaked through. Lottie had abandoned her see-through umbrella with the curved handle and beaded trim – giving it to a homeless girl who sat in the doorway of Tesco and asked for a few pence with which to buy hummus. Lottie had been so taken with the specificity of the request that she had given her a £5 note and her umbrella and told the girl to treat herself to some sundried tomatoes too.
The owners of the corner supermarket had been reluctant to offer any help. I know now that Karol had already been in, asking the same questions that I had put to them in my rather less intimidating fashion. The lady behind the counter was Bangladeshi and there was a gap between her two front teeth that made me thankful for the fact I had never seen her eating spare ribs. She wore a gaudy sari and oval spectacles and she ate After Eights from the box as she told me she was sorry that Meda was missing but, like she had told the rude man two days before, they had many customers and could not remember them all.
‘She was big,’ I told her, and I tried to ignore the grumbles from the half-dozen people in the queue behind us. ‘Big for her age. She bought bread and milk and tuna. Two tins …’
‘She seemed pleased with herself when she worked out the change,’ said the shopkeeper, flicking apologetic glances at the others in the line for service. ‘She ran back and got a second tin. I do hope she is OK. Is she a friend of yours? I thought she was Lithuanian …’
I didn’t understand what difference any of that stuff made. I didn’t care that the lady shopkeeper helped me because I was English and pale-skinned. I just knew she was being kind to me, and that she saw me as more than a little girl with a rain-soaked jacket and a face laced with sodden hair.
‘Had she been in before?’ I asked, hoping to stumble on to something useful. ‘You must have known her. She was big, like an ostrich. Clumsy …’
‘I knew her face,’ said the shopkeeper, closing her eyes as she said it, as though the memory made her sad. ‘She was always full of smiles. She liked to dance, yes?’
That was when she told us the thing she hadn’t told Karol. Chatting with a ten-year-old girl and her purple-haired friend, she told us something that a bruiser from the Lithuanian mob had never managed to squeeze out of her.
‘It was for her friend, the extra tuna,’ said the shopkeeper, under her breath. ‘Most girls, when they get spare change, they buy a chocolate bar or a can of drink and they walk slowly home enjoying their little treat. She did something for the poor man. She bought a prize for Banky.’
The tumblers fell. I remembered a conversation, weeks before. She spoke of the man who lived in the doorway of the abandoned bank. He had a springer spaniel called Ray. He was Scottish and polite and shy and he cried the time she gave him her packed lunch and went to the Co-op and bought a packet of ham for his dog. He lived in a sleeping bag and he ate food from the tin. His teeth were rotten and his skin looked sore but he always had a smile for her and kept telling her how he liked her accent and that he had been to Russia for a football match and had a picture of himself somewhere outside the Kremlin. She had never corrected him about her origins. She just stroked his dog and told him that it would all be better in summer and promised to buy him something nice next time she got her pocket money.
We have to talk to him. That was the thought that pounded at my skull. I no longer truly knew what I felt about Meda’s whereabouts or the circumstances of her disappearance, but I felt that if we had been given a clue of such obvious importance, we were duty bound to follow it up.
‘You are so soaked,’ said Lottie, looking me up and down. ‘And oh my goodness that tastes amazing. That is literally a party in my mouth. I am biting the air. Hilda, please, tell me if anybody’s looking – I’m about to start licking
the window of this place …’
Lottie hadn’t taken much persuading to take me out. With Mum gone and Lottie nominally in charge of my welfare, I’d been able to convince her without any real effort that I would sleep better and feel more settled if I had been allowed a stroll before bed. If that stroll happened to take us past the shop where Meda bought her supplies on the night she disappeared, surely that was a good thing all round. Lottie had agreed for primarily selfish reasons. Brendan was in, offering her his theories on the identity of the person who had outbid him on some weird object he was determined to own. Lottie couldn’t face it that night. He was just too absurd a creature for her to keep indulging. I got a sense that if Mum didn’t have a word with him, he was going to start costing us customers.
‘She did take her mobile, yes?’ asked Lottie. ‘Your mum. She’s OK, yes? Of course she is. She’s tough. She’s from Scunthorpe. What am I saying? I don’t even know Scunthorpe. I just know my spell-checker thinks I’m being rude whenever I put it in an email …’
We were standing outside a chicken shop and I could tell that Lottie was feeling uncomfortably sober and very hungry. She had quite the appetite, did Lottie. I could always imagine her at work, tucking into a hamper of sandwiches with one hand and weighing heart and lungs and spleen of a flabby cadaver with the other.
‘You know what she’s like,’ I said, and that covered most of what I felt at that moment. ‘She’s probably out of data or something.’
‘Are you not worried?’ she asked, and her eyes were big and wide and pale, like she was a drawing of a pixie.
‘Worried about what? Did you not see her last night? She’s tough, like you said. And Karol’s with her.’
‘You don’t really know him either …’
‘I know he fancies Mum. And he’s well hard.’
‘You think he fancies your mum? Why?’
‘I know how people look at people when they fancy them.’
I’ve replayed that sentence a thousand times in the years since. I don’t think I was being cruel. I don’t think I was trying to tell Lottie that I knew her secret or that she had made a fool of herself in front of a child. But I know that it must have hurt her and I’ve always been sorry for that.
‘She said she wasn’t ready for another boyfriend,’ said Lottie, and I seem to recall she was combing her hair with her fingers as she said it and her hand seemed a little firmer around my own.
‘She’s not. She thinks men are a bit embarrassing really. I asked her about it. She said she likes men but can’t be bothered to get to know another one. All that stuff about who sleeps on which side and who gets to hold the remote controls and when it’s OK to fart in front of them …’
We walked along in silence for a spell after that. I was a bit frazzled with nervous energy. And a bit burpy, truth be told. It’s nice when the chap responsible for your evening meal has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants and thinks you’re awesome. I’d eaten a tea of chicken and leek pudding in a rosemary and tarragon jus, and it had taken half an hour of thinly concealed belches before I felt able to refasten my trousers. It had helped to persuade Lottie of the need for an evening walk in the rain. I’d also promised her there was an awesome Lebanese takeaway near Meda’s house and was beginning to wonder how she would react when she learned it wasn’t true.
‘Do you really think she likes him?’ asked Lottie.
‘I don’t think it matters,’ I said, dismissively, and I think I went out of my way to step in a puddle. ‘She’s sort of given up on all that, and …’
That was when we saw it. The blue lights and the yellow tape and the men and women in luminous jackets. That’s when we saw what had happened to the man I had forgotten and who meant the world to Meda.
That’s when it all made sense.
That’s when I knew that if she ever came home, she would never be the same again.
That’s when I saw them lifting Banky’s body from the canal.
Red Gold – a precis of the work of visionary and pioneer Jean-Baptiste Denys
An extract from student magazine interview with
Goldsmith’s research fellow Eve Burrell about her
chosen doctoral thesis
April 9, 2013
AG: Have I got this right? People have had blood transfused into their veins from different animals? Why haven’t I heard about this before?
EB: Good question! But I frequently meet people who haven’t heard about man walking on the moon so don’t be ashamed to have a gap in your knowledge. Science is essentially a little bit ashamed of itself over the work of the early transfusionists but I’m optimistic that viewpoint will change. I personally admire the grandeur of the original vision and the desire to better understand and better use the human body. For me, and thankfully for my supervising tutor, Jean-Baptiste Denys was a genius.
AG: That’s not a name I’m familiar with. Tell us more.
EB: In the seventeenth century, not long after blood circulation was theorized and proven, the scientists of the day began to think about the nature of blood. There were those who believed it somehow contained the soul. Think about it – we know that our loved ones are made of our flesh and blood. We talk about the nature of our blood and the calling of our blood. It’s almost as if it contains who we really are. Would the blood carry personality traits? That was the question people found fascinating. And how could one’s nature be changed by the injection of other substances? Scientists moved to animal models in which they were taking anything from water, beer, wine, opium, and injecting it into dogs to see what would happen. These experiments were being conducted in Britain by some great men who next began to wonder whether animal blood could have an effect on a human. Would the blood of a gentle lamb or calf somehow cool the heated blood of a maniac?
AG: Really?
EB: It was visionary stuff. But while the Brits were dilly-dallying over the ethics of it all, a young French doctor beat them to it. He performed the first transfusion on a young boy with sheep blood. It was a success. The boy didn’t die. What’s more, the ailments that had afflicted his mind were no longer present. Soon he was the talk of the scientific community. For the next transfusion, he used a butcher who was healthy and who had likely provided the sheep for the first transfusion. It was another success, though Denys was curious to find the butcher getting drunk in a tavern shortly after the procedure.
AG: But how was the procedure carried out?
EB: It probably sounds a little barbaric to modern ears but essentially, the recipient of the blood had a vein opened and emptied of a good quantity. The donor blood was then poured in through a tube and a syringe. The very earliest syringes were made of goose feathers. There was obviously a good deal of spillage and mess and the patients reported strange sensations within themselves as the blood entered their system, but there was no doubting the results.
AG: Tell me more! Are you saying they just stuck goose feathers in people’s veins?
EB: Well, they would puncture them with a lancet. They would do a cut, and then they would slide a goose quill inside and drain the blood out. Later on, they had a more elaborate system using silver pipes. At the Paris Academy of Sciences they used a scale. One dog was on one scale. One dog was in the other. They transfused blood and they were watching this delicate dance between the scales to get an idea of how much they put in.
AG: It sounds almost laughable.
EB: Not at all. It was primitive, of course, but that’s where the purity of the vision has to be admired. This was uncharted territory. And yes, mistakes were made and yes, perhaps there were ethical concerns, but no great accomplishment has ever been achieved without some suffering.
AG: You sound like you’re a big fan.
EB: My supervising tutor said that my zeal for the subject was what had persuaded him to oversee my work, so I suppose being a fan has served me well. I just think Denys needs to be better recognized. The public at large know nothing of what he achieved. He altered what
we know about ourselves. There are those who believe he was close to finding the very nature of a human soul. I’ve put in request after request to study his actual notebooks and the original letters he sent to the British scientists after pipping them to the post, but they are in private collections that guard them very jealously. But fingers crossed!
AG: I understand Denys was eventually accused of murder after the deaths of one of his subjects.
EB: That was the result of a conspiracy. He disproved that charge in his own lifetime. The blood recipient was poisoned by those who wanted to stop Denys’s work. These are the lies that myself and Mr Farkas will put right with my publication …
MR FARKAS
The bookseller is thin and limp and wrapped in a greyness that seems to go straight through to the bone. He seems to have too little blood in his body. Too little light in his eyes. His hands are forever fretting with the clutter upon his desk or patting at the air, like a blind man trying to find their way out of a phone box. His shirt is crumpled and though he is seated, his corduroy trousers look as though they will be too short to cover his stripy socks when he stands. He looks at home here, among the racks of paper and leather; the unwashed tea cups, the unwatered potted plants; the mingled scents of paper, polish and cat. He looks as though it would take little effort to fold him into a binding and store him next to the illustrated botany textbooks on the top shelf.
‘It’s a beauty. Exceptional, in fact. Going to hurt me to part with it.’
‘It will go to a good home,’ says the customer, his voice gentle as leaves upon water. ‘It will be cherished.’
The bookseller nods appreciatively. He does not have any doubts that the volume will be cared for. The man before him has the look of a true bibliophile. He looks at the book the same way that the bookseller does – with a reverence verging on the obsessive. Within the bookshops on Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road, such a look is prized. This is where the serious booklovers come to buy their signed first editions; their rare hardbacks and limited prints. This is a paradise for the men and women who wear white gloves when they read and who would die in a house fire rather than leave their collections to burn. The purchaser standing beside the till in Wilkin’s Antiquarian Bookshop looks the sort that can turn a bad week into a spectacular one and principal bookseller Vernon Halliday is having to keep his hands busy just so he doesn’t start rubbing them together and mentally spending his commission.