The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘An underground movement,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘A little slippage. There’s no doubt that’s who they’ve got. It’s what the cops are saying anyway.’

  ‘Christ and I’ve no film left,’ said Martin. He looked at the sticks on the green canvas. They didn’t look like bones.

  ‘It’s street theatre,’ said Kavanagh. ‘They’re doing that scene from Hamlet.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Which one d’ya think?’

  ‘The closet scene,’ said Martin and everybody laughed.

  ‘How would they know if it was Henry Joy?’ Kavanagh was grinning from ear to ear, not believing a word Blaise was saying.

  ‘The police said they found the glass phial.’

  ‘What glass phial?’

  ‘The phial with the parchment in it.’

  ‘He’s been reading Enid Blyton too,’ said Kavanagh. ‘The Graveyard of Adventure.’

  Blaise turned and stared at him. He said, ‘At the beginning of the century McCracken’s bones were dug up from the old graveyard in High Street and reburied here. They put a parchment in a bottle saying who it was.’

  ‘The only reunited Irishman in the world,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘You may well scoff,’ Blaise said. ‘But I’m telling you the truth.’

  Brian Sweeny turned up with red stuff at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You got tomato ketchup here,’ Kavanagh pointed to the side of his mouth and Brian wiped it away with the sleeve of his blazer.

  ‘Jam,’ said Brian. ‘Bread and jam.’

  Faintly above the traffic noise they heard in the distance the warning bell for the end of lunch. The four of them — Brian, Martin, Kavanagh and Blaise — walked up the driveway together.

  ‘There’s Bungalow,’ said Martin.

  ‘Who he?’ said Blaise.

  ‘A boarder. They call him Bungalow because he’s got nothing upstairs.’

  ‘None of the boarders have anything upstairs,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘I’m going to board,’ said Blaise.

  ‘Oops.’ Kavanagh pulled a face and said he was sorry.

  ‘You poor bastard,’ said Martin. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Here. Belfast.’

  ‘Then why board?’

  ‘My old man wants it that way.’

  ‘There’s the Sexual Athlete — he’s another boarder,’ said Martin nodding towards a daft looking boy with a crew cut.

  ‘You know why he’s called the Sexual Athlete?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘No,’ said Blaise. ‘But you’re going to tell me anyway.’

  ‘Every night he goes up to the running track for a wank.’ Martin and Kavanagh looked at Blaise to see how he’d react. The new boy just smiled.

  ‘He’ll have the hands of a sprinter, then,’ he said.

  *

  First after lunch was double Physics on the top floor of the science wing. The boys sat around on the staircase trying not to get walked on. The air was full of for-fucksake and take-it-easy and mind-how-you-go.

  A voice said, ‘Cousteau.’ Silence as the teacher came up the stairs jangling his keys. He opened the door and everyone crowded in.

  ‘Easy. Easy does it,’ he said. He was a mild mannered, oldish man who always wore a waistcoat.

  The boys sat on stools around island benches. The benches were empty except for gas taps. Sinks with swan neck taps were on the benches nearest the windows. Martin and Kavanagh sat together. Brian Sweeny didn’t do Physics. When Blaise introduced himself to Cousteau, Cousteau gave him a new experiments notebook and told him to sit down. Blaise moved down the room and slid on to a stool beside Martin and Kavanagh. There was a low murmur of conversation as the teacher cleaned a section of the blackboard. The blackboard had alternate graph and plain sections and moved round like a roller towel. Cousteau began to write up and draw an experiment on the board. Martin whispered to Blaise, ‘He’s only got one ball.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘It’s his left, I think.’

  ‘How would anybody know,’ said Kavanagh. ‘It’s a schoolboy joke — a total fucking rumour. It started because of his real name.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘O’Loan.’

  ‘Oh lone ball.’ Martin was trying to be helpful.

  ‘Cousteau’s name is O’Loan?’ said Blaise. The others nodded.

  Cousteau turned and pulled down on the points of his waistcoat.

  ‘There is too much talk going on.’ His voice was quiet and slightly annoyed. The noise died away. He turned to the board and continued writing. The chalk clacked and dotted against the canvas in the silence.

  ‘Also it fits the song.’

  ‘What song?’

  Martin leaned over to Blaise and whisper-sang,

  ‘Cous-teau has only got one ball.’

  ‘When we do experiments it is usual to be in pairs,’ Cousteau turned and said to the new boy.

  ‘Like testicles,’ Kavanagh whispered.

  ‘But unfortunately we have an odd number in this class. For experiments you can team up with another pair. Or work by yourself.’

  ‘I’ll work by myself,’ said Blaise. Cousteau dusted the chalk from his fingers and turned to read what he had written on the board.

  ‘Take this down,’ he said. Blaise shrugged and asked the question out of the corner of his mouth as if it was an inevitable one.

  ‘So why is he called Cousteau?’ Kavanagh leaned forward to tell him.

  ‘In second year he was setting up an experiment which involved a filled sink. And some of the water had pissed over the side. Anyway he was leaning forward and wearing the wrong kind of shoes and he slipped and went head-first into the sink. Jacques Cousteau — Underwater Explorer.’

  ‘Absolute fucking crap,’ said Blaise.

  ‘There is far too much noise today,’ Cousteau turned. ‘If you want to be treated like senior boys you’ve got to behave like senior boys.’ There was silence. Cousteau walked to the side of the board and picked up a pointer. ‘Acceleration of gravity. When an object falls it does so with increasing speed.’

  Martin put his elbows up on the bench top and covered his mouth and nose with his hands. He whispered to Blaise, ‘Why does your old man want you to board?’

  ‘He thinks I’ll be forced to study if I’m in here. And there’s an element of imprisonment in it.’ Blaise seemed to be able to talk naturally out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Why would he want to imprison you?’

  ‘Because he thinks I’ve fucked things up. On the studying front. Last year, there was an unfortunate hiatus in my education.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An interruption.’

  ‘Sounds familiar,’ said Martin.

  Cousteau said, ‘Is my teaching interfering with your conversation? Would you prefer me to stop? What did you say your name was?’ Everyone looked innocently around. ‘The new man. I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Blaise Foley, sir.’

  ‘Well, Mr Foley, I would be very grateful if you would stop talking out the side of your mouth like some sort of a jailbird. And apply yourself to what I have to say. You may be falling through the air some day and wish to know the speed at which you are going. Perhaps from this very window.’

  Cousteau talked on and on about acceleration and gravity. Martin stared ahead. The sun came out, slanting window shadows across the cream wall. Blaise sat on a stool just in front of him. The back of his head looked strange. Or else it was the way his hair was cut. He had yellowish sandy hair cut in layers so that his skull seemed ridged. Like grass on an escarpment. What was this thirty-two feet per second per second? Had Cousteau developed a stammer? The sunlight caught a set of prisms on top of a cupboard, making an intense horizontal rainbow appear on the wall. Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. Martin had seen film of people free-falling out of planes. They seemed to be able to fall for ages. He wondered if you would e
ver get used to it. What would happen, for instance, if you went very high to start with and had to go on falling for a couple of days? Maybe, if it was physically possible, a couple of weeks. Would your eyes ever stop watering with the wind of falling? Would you feel hungry? Would you fall asleep? Fall asleep! Jesus — that’d be some awakening, wouldn’t it? Opening your eyes and fucking hell your stomach is in your mouth. Then trying to adjust to it. Getting up and getting dressed and the tears blinding you — nothing new there — but all at thirty-two feet per second per second per second per second per second. Trying to chew your toast, and the hot tea going up your nose like Coca-Cola.

  ‘I suppose you know all of this, Brennan?’

  ‘What sir?’

  ‘You’re not taking any notes — so you must know it.’

  ‘I wrote it up last year, sir.’

  ‘For all the good it did you.’

  And what would happen to that other morning event in free fall. If he had a crap would the crap fall at the same speed. Would his own crap accompany him for the rest of life’s journey? At turdy two feet per second per second?

  He liked Cousteau. Apart from hard work and committing stuff to memory he liked anything to do with science — the experiments, weighing stuff in Chemistry and Physics — the boxes of bronze weights — the way they sat snug in their holes. The box was held shut with a small hook and eye. Inside the lid the green velvet was bruised where it had come in contact with the weights. The knobs were to give something for the tweezers to lift. Never use fingers: the sweat would alter the weight and render them inaccurate. He liked all the weights, from the 50 grams — a real bruiser — right down to the lightest, no more than bits of metal foil so fragile they needed to be covered with a glass lid lest they be lost, lest they blow away. The balance itself was enclosed in a glass and wood box to protect it from draughts. Wind could skew the results, said the teacher. In really critical weighings they were told to close down the glass front so that their breath would not prejudice the result. The weight of your breath. The dark needle would swing against the white calibrated scale and it would come to be exactly vertical with the addition of the smallest silver wisp.

  ‘Dead on,’ Martin would say.

  And in Chemistry classes titrations amazed him. How could something change so utterly and so completely? He would have a conical flask of navy or scarlet liquid in his left hand. He would have to swirl it to keep the liquid moving until it would suddenly — with the addition of a single drop from the burette — turn clear as tap water.

  Every time it happened he got a jag of pleasure. Like when a sum worked out. Or when he suddenly understood something the teacher said. A clarity. Like the day he understood weight, that it was dependent on gravity, how hard a thing pressed downwards was its weight.

  Cousteau finished talking and gave the go-ahead to set up the experiment.

  Martin said to Kavanagh, ‘Do you know what we’re doing?’

  ‘Yeah sure.’

  There was a traffic jam as everybody tried to get the same pieces of apparatus at the same time. Kavanagh got a candle and lit it from the Bunsen.

  ‘Get a glass plate from that drawer,’ he said to Martin. Martin did as he was told. Kavanagh held the plate obliquely over the candle. The flame licked at it, smoking it black. Kavanagh moved the candle so that the whole face of the plate was covered except for the fingerprints by which he held it at the very corners.

  ‘Ya beauty,’ Kavanagh said and set it upright against a tripod. Martin looked round to see how Blaise was getting on. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching them. Martin nudged Kavanagh. Kavanagh looked at the new guy and said, ‘Need any help?’

  ‘I think I will work with you two,’ Blaise said. Kavanagh blew out the candle and the smoke drifted around.

  ‘Where do we get Madame La Guillotine?’ he said.

  Martin shrugged. The two guys working beside them had already got the apparatus.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘Up my arse.’

  ‘Nah — come on.’ One of the guys pointed to a cupboard by the sink. Martin went over and brought back a thing shaped like a guillotine but with no blade.

  ‘This place smells like a fucking church,’ Blaise said.

  There was a to-and-fro spring in front of the guillotine. A needle had to be fitted to the end of this. Then touched against the smoked plate. The spring had to be twanged and the plate dropped in a guillotine fashion. There would be a needle trace on the plate and by measuring its peaks and troughs a graph could be drawn from which the acceleration due to gravity could be calculated. Their first trace looked like a snake. They cleaned and re-smoked the plate and conducted the experiment again. This time it worked much better. Measuring the peaks and troughs of the trace Kavanagh’s hands became black and the soot transferred to his workbook. Martin started laughing, falling about.

  ‘What? What is it?’ Kavanagh was smiling at Martin laughing.

  ‘What did the sheep say falling over the cliff?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Fuckin graaa-aa-aa-vity.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’ Kavanagh leaned over to the next pair of boys. They were Gaelic football players, two defenders from the McCrory Cup team.

  ‘What did the sheep say when it fell off the cliff?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  As Kavanagh told them, the door opened and Condor came in. The class moved from an easy working murmur to silence. Condor talked to Cousteau then turned and beckoned Blaise.

  ‘Foley, could I have a word?’ The new boy moved to the head of the class and Condor took him outside. But Martin figured it couldn’t have been too serious because Condor kept the door slightly open. They could just see the bottom of his soutane and hear his deep voice. Martin went to the front to leave back the guillotine apparatus but he could not hear what was being said on the other side of the door.

  When Foley came back in, all eyes were on him. He pretended nothing had happened and went down to join Brennan and Kavanagh.

  ‘What did he want?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘A little more information on Henry Joy McCracken.’

  ‘You’re taking the piss about all that, aren’t you?’ said Martin.

  ‘But he doesn’t know that. He’s away to report the whole thing to the Irish News.’

  ‘But how do you know all that stuff — about the glass phial and all?’

  ‘One hears, one retains,’ said Blaise. ‘In company one keeps one’s ears open.’

  ‘The same way I know about soup mix,’ said Kavanagh.

  Martin toiled up the road by himself because Kavanagh had to stay on for basketball practice. He was looking forward to making a sandwich from yesterday’s meat when he got home. With mustard on it — a thing he had just learned to like. An ambulance passed him, speeding down the road. It was preceded by a police car. When he came within sight of his street he could see there was something wrong. Small groups of people were standing about, talking and staring at the road. They weren’t dressed for outside — people in shirtsleeves, the butcher in his apron. Martin tried to see what it was, but there was just a lot of sand scattered on the road. Then he realised what this was and felt his stomach sink. The sand was there to hide something. Martin hung around and listened.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked the woman from O’Grady’s.

  ‘Two people killed by the bus.’ Martin was stunned. In our street? The woman went on. ‘They were on a motorbike. It just slid under the back wheels. A boy and a girl. Neither of them was wearing a helmet.’

  There was a motorbike pulled up on to the pavement and lying on its side. The front wheel was buckled badly. Nobody seemed to want to go away. They stood around in little groups, mostly women, whispering and talking and pointing across.

  ‘Both dead, God love them.’

  ‘We’re not used to it.’

  ‘Two of them?’

  ‘Death on such a scale.’

  �
��She was wearing a wee white frock.’

  ‘It’s frightening.’

  ‘I’ll never get over it.’

  ‘The light nearly left my eyes.’ Those who had witnessed it were still ashen faced. Numbed. One woman said, ‘What a place.’ She pointed. ‘To think there was a poor woman murdered not half a mile from here only two years ago.’

  ‘He gave her a terrible death.’

  ‘He got off because he was a Protestant.’

  Martin tried not to look again at the sand but, in spite of himself, he did. He thought he saw, or imagined he saw, dark red beneath it. He tried to envisage the pressure of a bus tyre on a head. And the blood and brain stuff in the sand. And felt his stomach heave.

  He wandered down the street, hovering between thinking about it and trying not to think about it. He looked around him for distraction. The red brick gable ends had election posters pasted to them like stamps on envelopes — all at one corner. Vote Unionist. Vote Nationalist. Vote Fitt. Vote Kilfedder. When elections were over nobody took any responsibility — they just left the posters there to become tattered and fade away. They became wet and ragged. The sun and wind dried them. The red and blue, the green and yellow faded to shades of grey. The faces of the politicians wrinkled and cracked like icons. Men with moustaches and horn-rimmed glasses — men without looks. Men who had no other reason to be photographed. They were not used to it: they all had fixed smiles. Children clodded mud at them, at the faces from the opposite side. They ripped them where they could reach. And where they could not reach they got their pals to lift them up. Join hands. Make a stirrup.

  Once he had heard a cat run over by a navy blue van. His mother had asked him to bring in the milk from the door. He had opened the door and stooped to lift one of the bottles. He must have disturbed a black cat because it dashed out into the road and a van ran over it. He could still hear the squeal and the rubbery thump it made. Not wanting to see, he ran inside with the milk bottle. The milk was to make tapioca. But when his mother put it in front of him, with its jellied globules, he could eat none of it. The feeling now was the same. By the time he arrived home his notion for a meat sandwich, with or without mustard, had gone.