A Rush of Blood

by David Mark

  For a time there is nothing. Just the rhythm of the tyres and the squeal of the steering wheel and the distant banality of the cabbie’s voice.

  ‘Here you go, matey. Nice chatting to you.’

  Mr Farkas climbs out of the cab and on to the quiet street. He stuffs two notes through the open window and turns away without change. Breathes deep. Holds it. Spray on the back of his legs as the cab splashes away through a puddle.

  He pulls out his keys from the pocket of his trousers. Feels the great blanket of familiarity and comfort envelop him. Home. Here on this quiet street with its tall old buildings and its hidden little gardens; its neat symmetry and faded grace. Here, within the echo of Christchurch and the shadow of the Ten Bells.

  Mr Farkas makes himself presentable. He cannot allow Beatrix to see him this way. He wants her passage into wakefulness to be a lovely thing and knows he must make his face kindly before he puts his hand upon her wrist and urges her awake.

  The house where he has lived these past years is a converted apothecary. The door used to be canary yellow but has faded to its current lurid, mustard hue. In absolute darkness, Mr Farkas keys in the code to the burglar alarm. He takes off his wet shoes and hangs his cape upon the hook in the long, thin hallway. He takes the long-nosed matches from their place on the telephone table and lifts the oil lamp from the high shelf. The match rasps as he creates a flame. His face becomes a scrawl of charcoal lines. It takes the softer glow of the oil lamp to make his features less ghoulish. He closes his eyes until he can better deal with the new illumination, then walks down the hall to the kitchen. The wallpaper in the hallway is mildewed and hangs from the walls in ragged strips that always make him think of tattered flesh. Lumps of plaster and brick skitter away as he catches them with his feet. In the kitchen is a long wooden table covered in papers, abandoned crockery and books. A sheet has been pinned up in front of the windows. There are photocopies of old newspaper articles on the wall and a model of an unravelled human being has been drawn on to a bamboo roll which hangs from a hook in the ceiling. The room contains a smell that no longer troubles Mr Farkas. It is the odour of festering meat, as if the walls have been scrubbed with a dead cat.

  Mr Farkas reaches down beside the table and fastens his fingers around an iron hook in the floor. He pulls it, hard, and feels the pain in his chest bite afresh. He props the hatch open and closes his eyes. Lets himself enjoy it. Enjoy her. The nearness of true love.

  The room below the kitchen contains a Victorian bed with a polished brass headboard. The sheets are stretched tight over the form of the girl he calls his daughter. She does not move. Only the slightest rising and falling of her chest gives away the fact she is alive.

  Mr Farkas inspects the girl by the light of the lamp. He knows her face so well he could draw it from memory. Knows her shape and scent.

  He inspects the rest of her fairy-tale bedroom. Notes that the flowers in the vase by the bed are turning brown. Decides to buy her some more tomorrow. Chocolate, too. A special treat. Perhaps some music. A CD of the choir from the church. He has a memory of being at church. A memory of a brown man asking him questions. Was that long ago? How many weeks was it since he last left the house? He should not leave her. Not his Beatrix. Not his beloved cica.

  ‘Wake up, my love,’ he says, rubbing her arm as gently as he can. ‘It is story time. We will take a journey, yes? To an enchanted land. A story of villains and heroines and swordfights on the steps of a mighty castle. See,’ he says, pulling the book from the bag and unwrapping the tissue paper. ‘See what I got for you!’

  The girl in the bed does not speak. The eyelids that flicker do so beneath a mask of heavy synthetic flesh.

  ‘You could say something,’ says Mr Farkas, and his shoulders sag with disappointment. ‘It wasn’t cheap. Perhaps when we have read it you will like it …’

  He pulls the wooden chair up next to the bed and sits down. He clears his throat. Begins to read.

  In the bed, Meda gulps and swallows and fights for breath. A fever is eating her from within. The mask made from a dead girl’s face is pushing down upon her features and she cannot breathe. There is a goose quill in the crook of her elbow and the blood with which she has been repeatedly filled is rotting within her veins.

  ‘Once upon a time …’

  LOTTIE

  Lottie is blowing raspberries, quietly, behind her cupped palm. She likes her lips to look full for the camera. She wears a cherry-red lipstick that clashes extravagantly with her blue hair, which she has twisted into a 1950s curl. She is wearing clear-glass spectacles that curve upwards at the edges like cats’ eyes and is dressed in a tight pinafore dress beneath a baggy red lumberjack shirt.

  ‘Nearly there,’ says Jay. He’s an intern at the hospital and endlessly enthusiastic. He’s a year out of university and is managing to support himself during his unpaid tenure at the hospital by doing some technical wizardry for the various professors and doctors who enjoy high-profile social media work. He has been Lottie’s cameraman since the summer. It isn’t a difficult job. All he has to do is point the camera and Lottie does the rest. She is a natural. Sometimes Jay is literally open-mouthed in his admiration. One day, she might let him sleep with her, but it will have to be as a going-away present. She finds him far too earnest and excitable to consider him for anything more than a one-nighter. She gets the impression he would do irritating things, like get up early to make her breakfast, or do all her laundry as a nice surprise. She has no time for such largesse. It makes her shudder.

  ‘I think we’re good,’ says Jay, looking through the scope of the large black camera and double-checking the screen on the laptop at his side. The camera is trained upon a brown leather chair in which Lottie sits like a founder member of a gentleman’s club. She has her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands upon her knees. Behind her is the pathology museum that she helped to establish during her own internship; row upon row of clear glass jars containing perfectly preserved samples of human anatomy and labelled in her own neat hand. This place has become one of the standard bearers for the burgeoning world of morbid anatomy – a subculture filled with people fascinated by the art of death. Her YouTube videos detailing some of her favourite specimens regularly get more than a million viewers, though she suspects that many of those tuning in do so to get a glimpse of the crazy blue-haired lady in the mini skirt. She curates endless exhibitions and organizes guest lectures and theme nights. She writes a popular blog about her daily work and is the go-to girl when radio stations and TV shows are seeking somebody photogenic to give a layman’s terms description of something scientific.

  ‘You’re blocking the spleen,’ says Jay. ‘Just a touch to the left.’

  Lottie shifts her position and gets a thumbs-up. She blows a final raspberry.

  ‘Just lost the Facebook Live feed,’ mutters Jay, holding up a hand and checking the laptop. ‘Plenty people logged in. Your pal is back. Eyeballz12. Wants to know if you’ll rub the liver like it’s a sea cucumber. Do you think he’s being rude? And some woman called Nessa wants to know where you got your shoes …’

  Lottie sighs, disappointed at the interruption. She wants to get this over and done with. Normally she adores these sessions but today her mind feels like an open bin liner, her thoughts billowing like raked leaves. She’s worried, for the first time, that she might make a mess of her live show. She has no pre-prepared script. She usually finds talking to the camera effortless. But today her mind is full of Molly and Hilda and the injuries to her friend and the dead tramp in the canal. She spends her days among the dead and has never felt any unease about touching innards or slicing through great ripples of flesh and fat and muscle, but it was all she could do not to cry out when Karol brought Molly back to the Bonnet. There was blood over half her face and her eye was bulging and swollen. Karol’s arm was hanging limp and there was more blood on his skull. Lottie had presumed that professional instinct would take over, but her hands shook as she gripped Karol’s bruis
ed hand and yanked it and heard the ugly crunch of the elbow slipping back into the joint. She had been more at ease sliding the shard of glass out of Molly’s eyebrow. She had been gentle with her. She was more used to working with the blissfully dead and she was grateful when Molly told her that she had lovely soft hands and had made it as painless as could be. Truth be told, Lottie had enjoyed the intimacy of the moment. They’d closed the doors of the Bonnet and sent the bar staff home and Lottie had performed her little surgeries by lamplight in the snug. It had felt perversely pleasurable, bending over her friend as she lay back on the wooden bench and tried to be brave and not to shudder as the large chunk of glass slid free from her skin. Lottie had stroked her hairline with her fingers; the tiniest gesture of tenderness between friends. She had seen her own reflection swim on Molly’s brown irises and enjoyed the way her likeness blended with the reflected oil lamps to become a collage of patterns flecked with gold. To Lottie’s own expert eyes, Molly had definitely been crying. Much as she had tried to downplay what happened, there was something in her expression that spoke of a colossal sadness. The cold, unforgiving blackness of grief. She seemed to have reached a decision that Meda was not coming home, and that had been reinforced when Hilda told her about their grim discovery while retracing Meda’s steps. A police constable had been indiscreet with the little information that he had. A tramp’s body had been found wedged beneath a riverboat in the canal that cuts through Bethnal Green Gardens. His dog had been making a nuisance of himself on the bank, yapping and howling for days on end. He’d tried to bite the wardens when they came to take him. Eventually the owner of the canal boat had decided to fix the problem by mooring elsewhere. As the barge took off, the bloated, alabaster-white body had bobbed to the surface and the dog had let out a howl that sent great shivers down the spines of the wardens. They had called the police.

  ‘Back up,’ says Jay, excitedly. ‘Good in ten?’

  Lottie closes her eyes and thinks about what she is about to say. She expects it to be popular with her hard-core fans. She calls them her die-hards, which they love. More than that, she hopes to attract in some of the floating viewers who have yet to allow their interest in the art of death to become a full-blown hobby. She knows they will be made welcome. Most of her followers feel a little out of place in mainstream society. When they attend her museum and feast on specially made cupcakes in the shape of ulcerated eyeballs, and listen to her lectures about the best way to make plaster stick to human skin, they seem much more at home.

  ‘Maz_morbid wants to know if you ever found out what happened to the saw you were raving about.’

  Lottie cocks her head, hawkish. She had ranted in a recent interview about the ghoulish collectors who were buying up anatomical specimens for private collections instead of scientific research or public display. She had just failed in a month-long attempt to purchase an important sample for the pathology museum. Heine’s osteotome saw, made in 1850, was a beautiful specimen. Made by Charriere and terrifyingly beautiful in appearance, the object was an imbroglio of blades and spikes, including one spear used to fix the instrument to the bone prior to the grinding amputation. She had tracked down the seller only to learn that an anonymous private collector had already made a cash offer. The seller had refused to divulge the buyer’s details and Lottie had still been in a frustrated bad mood when she gave a live lecture about such people. She had attracted the usual combination of sympathy and sneering. She has no shortage of online detractors who accuse her of turning death into soft pornography, but she has never felt compelled to defend herself. She has enough people to do that for her. Whenever a viewer leaves a critical comment, dozens of her die-harders leap on them like wolves upon an injured fawn. She feels lucky to have such a resource. She is half tempted to tell her viewers about Meda’s disappearance. She fancies she would know everything she needs to within the hour.

  ‘Lottie, can I read this please? Oh sorry, you’re on …’

  Hilda appears behind Jay. She hasn’t been to school today. When she learned that the men in the East End did not have Meda, her face had crumpled into tears. She and Molly had held each other in a bloody embrace as they tried to comfort each other and Lottie and Karol had looked awkwardly away. They told each other the same things. Meda would still be OK. It didn’t mean anything. The police would get things done properly now. They had both spouted the same lies and felt better for telling them than for hearing them. Molly had told Hilda she could stay off the next day and Lottie, asleep on the sofa, had said she was welcome to come with her to work. Together they have spent a pleasant enough few hours, cleaning up samples and dealing with interview and filming requests. Hilda has been a help. She shows no distaste at touching the specimens and shares Lottie’s fascination for the stories behind each bobbing chunk of flesh. Lottie left her to clean the sample jar that contained a particularly ulcerated gall bladder from 1860, and had come back to discover that Hilda had invented an entire life story for the man who had once been wrapped around the painful organ.

  ‘He was called Thomas,’ said Hilda, lifting the gall bladder from its temporary home in a Tupperware jar and reverently tying it to the fine string that would dangle from the jar’s lid when replaced in situ. ‘He was tall and liked music and used to get a painful left ankle on cold days where he had fallen while running away from a butcher he had stolen some sausages from when he was little. He had scars on his back from the beating he got from the authorities. After he had his operation he told people the scar was from a bayonet wound and sometimes people bought him drinks for being a brave soldier.’

  Lottie had looked at the girl and seen herself. Had entertained again the idea that the child belongs to herself and Molly. That they are family. Parents. Together. She did not let her thoughts linger on the mental images. She is confused enough already about her feelings.

  ‘Come on, quick,’ says Lottie, impulsively. She reaches out a hand and urges Hilda to join her by the chair. ‘Do you want to be my assistant?’

  Hilda looks taken aback but reservation quickly gives way to excitement. ‘Do I look OK?’

  ‘Brilliant. Quick. We’re live in a moment.’

  ‘Will Mum mind?’

  ‘Why would she mind? She’ll be thrilled. She might even be watching. She often does.’

  Hilda grins and looks like herself again for a moment. She walks noisily across the wooden floor and stands next to Lottie, facing the camera. Jay does not seem displeased by the alteration of the picture and raises a hand, silently, to indicate they will be live in three, two, one …

  ‘Hello there, my ghoulish guys and gals. Welcome to the latest Dead Pretty video blog. Are you sitting comfortably? Probably not if you were the owner of this particular haemorrhoid. Hilda, if you will? Excellent. Now, floating in this specimen jar is an infected haemorrhoid which, at its peak, was three inches across and which eventually ruptured and caused a bleed that had to be cauterized using hot pincers, then surgically removed. If you’re descended from the poor gentleman in question, I would urge you to be grateful for every hot bath. Now, viewers, you’ll notice that I’m joined by a rather glamorous assistant. This is Hilda, one of the best children in the universe, ever. Hilda, say hello.’

  ‘Hi,’ says Hilda, shyly.

  ‘And can we safely assume that there is more than a touch of the peculiar about you?’

  ‘Probably. I like weird stuff.’

  ‘Weird stuff is what we’re all about. Do you think you might like to work with the dead some day?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure I’d like seeing bodies. Not sad bodies, like old people or little girls.’

  Lottie nods, understanding. ‘All you can do in those circumstances is to honour the poor victim. To do what’s best for them. Those are the days when you need two showers when you get home. The days you can taste death on your tongue even after the second glass of wine. But a body does not contain the soul, and I am happy to talk about souls while still thinking of mysel
f as a scientist. I see that’s already getting you all Tweeting like mad. Who’s this? LuckyTiger wants to know how I would cope doing an autopsy on a baby. I suppose I would simply go into autopilot. It has to be done. It can be done tenderly. After death the body is just a machine, after all. Now, if you’ll hold your horses, I will tell you about the most kissed corpse in the world. Did you know that the doll we all practice artificial respiration upon is based on the death mask of a teenage girl pulled from the River Seine, whose serenity so enchanted artists in her time that she led to a whole artistic movement that glorified the beauty of the corpse?’

  Lottie reaches behind her and retrieves the box containing the grey face. It shows a beautiful girl, eyes closed, mouth curled into a soft and accepting smile. It has an angelic quality.

  ‘Quite the looker, wasn’t she, Hilda?’

  Hilda is looking at the face that Lottie holds in her hands. Her chest is heaving and her bottom lip starts to tremble. Lottie could curse herself. What was she thinking?

  ‘I’m not sure they’ll do this with me when my time comes,’ says Lottie, trying to make light of it. ‘Maybe I’ll be stuffed. Or turned into a rug. Just my head and my bum left as they are …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Hilda, and she walks out of shot. For a moment, Lottie doesn’t know what to do. She is live. She has thousands of viewers waiting and watching. But in this instant, death seems unimportant. It is Hilda’s tears that matter to her. She shakes her head, just once, then tells Jay to cut the feed. She stands and runs after Hilda.

  She does not stop to read the messages that scroll through on the laptop as it reflects back the endless rows of gleaming jars and scorching lights and the collage of excised organs that float like corpses in the clear preserving fluid. She does not see the insane stream of words flowing from the fingers of one viewer who has just looked upon perfection.