Everything was different now.
Suddenly, a concentrated strike in the flesh between her shoulder blades. A searing, mandible rip. Fucking horsefly. Roaring, she reached over her shoulder and felt the blood. Got her good.
She turned back down the hill, still coughing, and Red was thigh-deep in roadside ferns, collecting the berries out of the dirt. She wanted to crawl inside his body and curl up and sleep. He ignored her, and she sat in the middle of the road until the coughing stopped and all that was left were shudders of the cough. She went to him in the bracken and apologized, and he put his arms around her and she took in the old-sweat smell of his hat, felt his beard on her forehead. His body was soft; loose flesh gave way easily over bone. He held her face in his hands and asked her to help him find all the berries.
‘It would be an unforgivable waste,’ he said.
She parted fern leaves, scraped her shins and forearms on a thousand thorns. Berries squashed in her toes, soft and jammy and wet.
‘You’re bleeding,’ he said, and pressed his palm into the middle of her back.
‘Horsefly,’ she said.
He shrugged, popped a handful of raspberries into his mouth and closed his eyes, worked the fruit around his mouth with his tongue. ‘These taste so fucking good,’ he said.
37
Pieter
Flight to Baltimore, 1959
I was on a flight to Baltimore, Bear, four years after you died. I had never been to the United States before. I had never been on an aeroplane. Your mother packed my bag and she’d forgotten the cigarettes, or I’d forgotten to remind her about cigarettes, and halfway into the flight I smoked the last one from the pack I kept in my jacket pocket. Frustrated, I stared through the plexiglass window at the bottomless, boiling white, at an air bubble caught in the plastic. When you stare at so much nothing for too long, you start to see things: an aeroplane on a collision course with your own; the faces of your wife and daughter; the face of your son. I was exhausted, and I was anxious, so I unbuckled my seat belt and walked, grasping the seats hand over hand up the aisle, until I got to the front of the plane where another passenger was smoking. I tapped her on the shoulder, a well-dressed woman, older, and I asked her if she could spare a cigarette.
‘Of course,’ she told me, and rummaged in her handbag, and pulled out a silver case. She opened it, and I saw that it was full, the cigarettes lined up and kept neat by a thin metal frame. How simple, how easy. It made me feel unequipped.
‘Could you possibly make it two?’ I said.
She handed me three, setting them delicately in my palm, and smiled. Her lips were painted a bright pink, and the pink, I saw, had been transferred to the cigarette she was smoking.
Back in my seat, I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Remember I told you, Bear, there had been a letter. It had arrived six weeks before this flight and remained unopened on my desk, buried under orders and invoices, and the only reason I’d found it was because I had been throwing things away.
I took it out of my jacket pocket, and read it for what was probably the fifteenth time. The letter was from two men, anaesthetists – Dr Miller, an American, and an Austrian, Dr Wolf – who were working together in Baltimore, and it explained a brief history of something that I had never come across before. A subject I would have had very little interest in had my life been any different than it was. Meaning: if you hadn’t drowned. The letter was about artificial respiration, which I want to tell you about now.
Artificial respiration, in its earliest form, was described thus: for the purpose of restoring persons apparently drowned or dead. In the middle of the nineteenth century, medical practitioners recognized that any method used for resuscitation should require no more than one person and no medical equipment. Think about it. You break out in a rash, fracture a bone, you receive a wound, you succumb to disease . . . all of these things afford a victim time to be taken to hospital. Time for the doctor to be called. But if somebody stops breathing, say he has a cardiac arrest or has been pulled from the water, there are minutes only to save his life. The procedure had to be accessible to anyone present – doctor or not.
The early developers of artificial respiration advocated certain manipulations of the body. They understood that some sort of manual inspiration and expiration of air was required to get oxygen back into the lungs, into the blood.
These men knew that the cessation of breath didn’t have to mean the end of life.
Experimenting on dogs and cadavers, a physician by the name of Silvester developed a technique wherein the victim was laid on his back with his arms at his sides. To force inhalation of air, the arms were raised above the victim’s head, expanding the ribcage and creating a vacuum, forcing outside air to rush into the lungs. To expire this air, the arms of the victim were crossed over his chest and great pressure was applied there. The biggest problem with this method was that the victim’s relaxed tongue filled the mouth, blocking the movement of air.
Some forty years later, another doctor, a Mr Schafer (who had moved on from dogs and dead bodies to live, hyperventilated test subjects) turned his victim on to the front and applied pressure to the lower part of the back, just above the buttocks, forcing air out of the thorax. This helped alleviate, in part, the problem of the tongue, but reduced the volume of air exchange.
Having no better alternatives, both the Silvester and Schafer methods were taught and employed across Europe and overseas. Of course, there would have been people residing in either camp, and I’m sure arguments over which method was superior reached religious heights, but nothing much changed until, in the 1930s, a fitness instructor in the Danish army cunningly blended both methods to create the Nielsen method, which was eventually accepted by the International Red Cross. Nielsen’s method required one operator positioned at the prone victim’s head. The arms of the victim would be raised and bent at the elbows, so that the hands were under the head. Pressure would be applied to the shoulder blades to expel air, and the arms would be grasped at the elbows and raised for inhalation. This method could be applied for hours, was straightforward and seemed to be the final answer.
But the midwives, Bear, as far back as the sixteenth century, knew better than all of these men. They knew that to save the life of a non-breathing infant you had to create a seal around the infant’s mouth and nose with your own mouth and to exhale directly into the infant’s lungs. This was natural and effective, but was never accepted by any medical bodies as official procedure because it was considered vulgar. And all through those decades that the learned men argued over arm positioning and whether a victim should be prone or facing the sky, the midwives continued to save lives this way.
Mouth to nose. Mouth to mouth.
Others tried to introduce mouth-to-mouth into the medical mainstream, but it was repeatedly ignored. Too sexual. Too disgusting. Who would want to put his lips around the mouth of another who is so close to death?
Bear, the authors of this letter that I carried in my breast pocket, Miller and Wolf, the anaesthetists in Baltimore, explained that they had experimented on live patients, administering mouth-to-mouth and measuring the gases in their blood. Their data proved that expelled air from a rescuer, delivered straight into the lungs of the victim via the mouth, resulted in significantly higher levels of blood oxygenation than that produced by the push–pull method, the Nielsen method.
Because this is everything. This is what it’s about, Bear. Oxygen. Water flooded your respiratory system. You asphyxiated. Which meant there was a lack of oxygen in your blood. Which stopped the beating of your beautiful, beautiful heart.
By the time they contacted me, Miller and Wolf’s recommendations for formalizing mouth-to-mouth as the official method of resuscitation had already been accepted by the American Medical Association. It had yet to be accepted by any international medical governing bodies, and they knew that for this to happen, they would hav
e to demonstrate that the method was simple and that it could be performed by anyone, even women and children. Practising on live victims on a larger scale wasn’t feasible, and they wanted to design a training manikin. A doll that looked unconscious but not morbid. Made out of a material that could be manipulated, that would resist but also yield a little to touch. The impression of life. This is why they wrote to me, Bear. Because of what I could do with soft plastics. Because of the Anne doll. They hadn’t even known about what happened to you.
38
L’Inconnue
Paris, 1899
I was still alive when I was pulled from the black water. The batelier who hauled me out slapped my face once or twice and, when he got no response, assumed I was dead. I seemed dead, and anyway moments later, I was. Besides, he wouldn’t have been able to resuscitate me had he known there was still a beat to my heart – he wouldn’t have known that was possible.
The chances of his having come upon me in the moment that he did – in the seconds I stopped struggling but before I would have sunk – were minuscule. But this was the way it happened. He became aware of me in that navy light because of one flap of my arm. He thought he’d come upon an enormous bass, and was fixing to drop a line when he saw the moon-pale flesh of my hands, my arms suspended in the yoke of the dead man’s hang. The deep was claiming me fast, and it was only because he had the bargepole in his hand that he was able to catch me. After hooking me at my collar, he hoisted me up by the waistband of my skirt. Bemoaning the loss of a good fish supper, he dragged my sopping bulk over the side of the boat and covered me with an oil-stained, sooty blanket. He tucked me between two barrels and carried on with the morning deliveries that stood between us and the morgue. And I. Lay there, dead. A frothy mixture of air, water, blood and mucus issued from my mouth and nose, and water dribbled thinly from my ears. One unseeing eye casually open like a door somebody forgot to close.
* * *
The morgue was located at the south-eastern tip of the Île de la Cité, and was like most other administrative buildings in Paris: a stone box fronted by Grecian pillars, mansard roof, a facade screaming post-revolutionary idealism engraved with the words: Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! The building backed on to the river, its stone wall almost flush with the bank, where the bodies of the drowned – and there were many – could be delivered by boat.
This wasn’t the city’s first morgue. The original, a stinking black hole dug underneath Le Châtelet, the prison, was nothing more than a cadaver dump. Deceased prisoners were shunted down that hole but also Paris’s anonymous dead; men and women like I had been, pulled by their shirt collars from the river, or loners from the streets, or lost children. More murdered than not. Scores of suicides. The dead were piled like bricks on the floor, uncovered. It was a place you would go if someone in your life had disappeared and you hoped (or hoped not) to find her there, in the pestilent fug, with only the oily flicker of the warden’s lantern to guide you.
When the prison was demolished, the medical inspector insisted on a new morgue that would be much improved upon the old, including better light, ventilation, cooling systems and a salle publique more suitable for viewing, separated from the dead by a wall of glass.
I was delivered to the morgue in the purple smog of early morning. My arrival was one insignificant and regular detail out of a million details in a city waking up for another day. A gang of workers was crossing the Pont de la Tournelle, shovels slung over strong, bent shoulders. Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys and street by street, alley by alley, people living on top of one another were swinging their legs out of bed, their feet landing on cold, waxed floors. Boiling water for coffee or standing in front of shaving mirrors or darning stockings that they hadn’t had time to repair the day before.
Towering over the morgue there was of course Notre-Dame, white birds circling and screaming around its spire.
Mine was the only body to be delivered to the morgue that day. I was received by the pathologist on duty, Laurent Tardieu, a man who daily wore a fragrant sprig of dried lavender (tied tightly and sent in batches by his sister, who lived in his native Provence) in the buttonhole of his jacket to help ward off the stench of death. The lavender was no match for the fumes in which Laurent Tardieu worked – an odour like syrupy fruit from the fresh corpses, like rotting fish from the overripe ones – but all the same, he wore it.
Laurent Tardieu laid me out on a marble slab in the examination room and, as a formality, felt for my pulse with the pad of his middle finger pressed against the inside of my wrist. He listened for my heart through a small brass stethoscope shaped like a trumpet. After officially confirming my death, he logged my arrival into the morgue records, which were reviewed regularly by the gendarmes. He then peeled off what remained of my outer clothing. My linen petticoat and skirt, my blouse and cardigan. My stockings. He was not surprised that I wore no boots, and assumed that they had been left by the riverbank. (Later that morning they would be found, where I’d left them with my coat, by a young bookbinder, and taken home to his sister. She would, in turn, pass the boots on to a friend and get great use out of the coat for many years after.)
Laurent Tardieu left me in my chemise and culotte while he checked the pockets of my skirt for anything that might help to identify me. He found nothing. He then inspected my clothing for laundry marks, initials sewn with cotton thread on lapels or inside collars or waistbands. He did find initials on my blouse, which he added to the log, but on their own, meant not a lot. As far as he knew, my clothing could have been second- or even third-hand. He took note of the condition of my belongings: everything inexpensive but well looked-after. A tightly sewn patch on the elbow of my cardigan, neat darn tracks on the heels of my stockings. He noted that I wore no wedding ring nor any other jewellery. No lace or ribbon adorned my underclothing. Though my hair had become tangled and undone under the water, he could see that it had recently been washed. From my hands he retrieved one brown leaf and a slippery tangle of river weed. Common, he knew, from the struggle of the drowned. The residue of bloody foam in my mouth told him that I had inhaled water into my lungs, which meant that, when I entered the water, I was still alive. The lack of trauma to my body told him that, most likely, the water had been my choice.
Yet, I eluded him. My corpse and what I wore revealed very little about who I might have been, other than the assumption that, at some point in my life, I must have had some claim on the future, otherwise why the careful darning? Why the effort to make an item of clothing last just that little bit longer? This, more than anything else in his work, was what touched Laurent Tardieu’s heart the deepest. Jackets worn down to the seams, elbows reinforced with leather. It was the ingenuity, the bringing out of thimble and thread that represented some will to survive, but then, in the case of suicide, the evidence before him on the slab that this woman or that man had, at last, given up.
Laurent Tardieu was a wonder at recognizing professional darning and leather patchwork, and sometimes traced the dead through the establishments that performed these services. He knew where certain silks, velvets and satins were sold, the signature styles of lace and needlework, of seams and cuffs and collars. He knew the craftsmanship of several cobblers in Paris, and had identified more than a few victims with the help of these artisans.
Meticulously, in tight, slanted handwriting, Laurent Tardieu added to his log every blouse, shawl, boot and bonnet. Every scar, tattoo, broken bone or missing digit. Wounds or blemishes on the body were attributed with their size, severity, location and possible cause.
He had observed that most river suicides were carried out by single women. Often on a Sunday. Often in the spring. It was the blooms and the stench of reproduction, he believed, that spurred a certain melancholy in unwed women of a particular age and social standing. These women were alone in the world, or at least alone in Paris, and proof of this was the fact that they usually went unclaimed, their corpses bla
ckened and split like rotting plums after days of submersion. They would have known the river, these women. Perhaps they lived close by. They had spent time walking its bridges and embankments. They imagined what the cold water would have felt like, or what would have waited for them down in the dark. They imagined their own loose hair and skirts flowing with the current, down there with the weeds and the silt and the other unknowable things.
Laurent Tardieu’s logbooks read like a saga but the real drama existed within him, within the stories he imagined beyond the physical clues.
There was the boy who had been dragged from the river the year before, and in his pocket were found a few bits of string and a rat’s tail. Laurent Tardieu composed a life for this boy that played out in a tiny attic flat, looked after by a single mother with raw, laundry-house knuckles. The boy, about seven years old, only wanted to be with the other children who, in summer, bathed off the Quai de la Rapée. Not knowing how to swim, he dipped into the water and lost his purchase, and no one noticed when the river drew him, lovingly, into her body.
Or what about the elderly man who, before drowning himself, dressed in layers of clothing? Shirts and collars, waistcoats and trousers, top boots over his woollen slippers. His torso, thighs and chest were pocked with the ghost scars of syphilitic papules, a decade healed. In his pockets: a silver snuff box, a leather pouch of tobacco, keys and spectacles. A foreigner, obvious from the cut of his clothes, who, Laurent Tardieu concluded, lived a few steps below the position he would have liked to have occupied in life. Probably widowed. Likely confused and stumbling through the tertiary stage of his venereal disease, demented or insane.
Though he found no signs of trauma on my body, Laurent Tardieu did discover a familiar bilateral bruising along the muscles of my neck and chest, further evidence of drowning, or rather, the thrash and struggle of the drowning victim to survive. He began to create my story. Suicide, naturally. I was the right gender, the right age. He inferred correctly that my missing boots had been placed deliberately on the bank. Apparently quite common.
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