The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘It would depend on the question, Father.’

  ‘OK. How would you convince a man — be he Muslim, Hindu, Jew or Baptist — that the Catholic Church was the one, true Church?’ Martin sat there, staring ahead. He hadn’t a clue where to begin. ‘Anybody?’ The Spiritual Director looked around the class then gave an audible sigh.

  ‘Or could you, for instance, prove to anyone’s satisfaction that the present Pope, the Vicar of Rome, is Christ’s representative on earth?’

  Martin had been thinking of ways to answer the first question — and this second question threw him. He knew that if he tried to answer there would be those in the class who would laugh at his efforts. The gaper, indeed. He closed his mouth and tried to formulate the beginning of a sentence.

  ‘Anybody?’ Father Barry looked around the class, as if his head was on a tripod. Panning to the left, then all the way round to the right. ‘How is it, in this school I see boys talking all day long — they even talk behind their hands in class — why is it then, when you ask them to talk officially, they clam up? Not a word when it comes to Religion? Not a word when it comes to moral issues. Classes like this make me despair.’ He gazed directly at Martin and said, ‘You’re all old enough to know what we’re here for. You’re all old enough to know that there are problems and philosophies that need to be talked through. You’re an intelligent bunch — the crème de la crème. Why won’t you do it here? I bet you’ll do it after class. In the daffs.’ Everybody smiled at him using the school word.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and a knock at the door. Father Barry strode to open it. It was a first-year sent to fetch him for a phone call.

  ‘I will not be long,’ said the Spiritual Director. ‘I want you to conduct yourselves with decorum in my absence. In other words — act your age.’ And he was away clattering down the stairs.

  The boys heaved a sigh at the prospect of a semi-free period. They fell into relaxed poses and yawned. Some put their feet up on the desks. Different groups started up conversations in different parts of the room. Sometimes in moments of silence things were said between groups. Boys kept looking at the time as the period ticked away.

  ‘There’s hardly any time left.’

  ‘Ya beaut.’

  ‘What does he think we could get up to?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Blow the place up,’ said Sharkey. ‘Like Nelson’s Pillar.’ He mimicked an explosion with his mouth. ‘Wasn’t that brilliant to bring it down like that — in the middle of O’Connell Street.’ There was a lot of agreement and chuckling.

  A voice said, ‘It was stupid.’ They all turned to look. It was Blaise. ‘Somebody could have been killed.’

  ‘Fuck off. It was brilliant,’ said Sharkey. ‘The IRA are geniuses at that kind of thing. Ireland needs more people like that. People who aren’t afraid to commit themselves to getting rid of the British. What we need here is a just war. Like Cyprus.’

  ‘Get a United Ireland,’ said the bonsai lumberjack.

  ‘Nobody seriously talks about such things any more,’ said Blaise. ‘Nationalism helps no one. Violence helps no one. You’re going back to the Dark Ages.’

  ‘This province was hatched in the twenties by Pro British, Unionist-Orange violence.’ Sharkey was becoming intense. ‘So, it follows that the only way to end it is by the use of force — the more the better, and the sooner the better. The second-class citizens should become first-class warriors.’

  ‘What grown-up did you hear saying that?’ said Blaise. ‘A United Ireland is not worth a single fucking life.’ Sharkey turned to stare at Blaise and curled his lip. ‘As Dr Johnson said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” ’ As Blaise said this he was fiddling with his fingers. He pretended to fold them away but left two of them extended in Sharkey’s direction. He motioned them slightly upwards. Sharkey half rose out of his desk.

  ‘Is this how we conduct ourselves?’ said Martin.

  ‘And so, folks, the discussion ended with blood on the floor,’ said Kavanagh putting on the voice of a commentator and holding up a pretend microphone to his mouth.

  ‘And I know whose,’ said O’Grady, one of the Sharkey camp.

  Footsteps on the stairs prevented Sharkey getting right out of his seat. He stared at Blaise and Blaise stared back. Father Barry bowed his head and came back into the room.

  ‘Where were we?’ Nobody answered. ‘Yes, that reminds me. I was just decrying your inability to contribute anything to our debate. In the little time left to us today is there anything of a spiritual nature you would like to discuss?’

  There was a long tense silence. There was still an atmosphere of threat in the air. Sharkey was looking round at Blaise. Blaise raised his eyebrow. Father Barry allowed the silence to continue in order to embarrass someone into saying something. He pointedly sat down on his chair as if to say I can wait for ever. But everybody was hiding, looking down at their desks. Father Barry leaned back, put his hands behind his head. Then somebody cleared his throat and began speaking.

  ‘Father, why not begin at the beginning.’ It was Blaise.

  ‘A good place to start. To whom am I talking?’

  ‘Blaise Foley, Father.’

  ‘That’s right. You’re welcome. And you were saying?’

  ‘We were talking about this earlier. In the daffs. If we begin at the beginning and discover that there is no God then that’ll save us a lot of work.’ There was an amazing silence in the room. Somewhere distantly a door slammed. In the convent somebody was washing cutlery. Martin looked at Kavanagh. Kavanagh looked at Martin and made a face which said, I cannot believe he just said that.

  ‘Go on,’ said the Spiritual Director.

  ‘And if there is no God then we can just dismiss the rest of it.’ Father Barry’s lips seemed to have got thinner. He took his hands from behind his head and placed them on his knees. Blaise paused a long time before he spoke again. ‘It seems to me that there are two ways of thinking in this school. There is the scientific way — we go into laboratories and do experiments — we measure and weigh. We gather evidence. Science is about evidence and observation. Science is about repeatability. But in the same school we walk from the laboratory to this classroom and the approach to everything changes. In here we speculate and wonder. This is called metaphysics. And we’ve just come from physics. We can’t measure God and the reason why we can’t measure God is because he doesn’t exist.’

  The Spiritual Director took off his glasses and began polishing them with his white linen hanky.

  ‘Anybody?’ he said.

  Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

  ‘Measuring God is a nice idea. But God is not for the measuring, He’s for worshipping. An entirely different proposition. An entirely different dimension. It’s like trying to measure how loud a sound is with a weighing machine. Or measuring the amount of love we have with a ruler.’

  Blaise was trying to speak but Father Barry went on. ‘Descartes — one of the greatest minds of all time — said that the human body may be regarded as a hugely complicated machine but it only becomes a person when it is joined to an incorporeal soul. The body bit we can measure; the other we can’t.’ Blaise opened his mouth but Father Barry was not finished. ‘But I suppose in a way you are right. Kant would say that there is no rational argument to prove the existence of God. “I had to remove knowledge to make way for faith,” he says. The spiritual derives not from deductive logic but from personal experience — a kind of Christian existentialism — which you, Foley, are obviously and sadly lacking …’

  In the distance the bell rang. ‘Another day, Mr Foley, we shall discuss this at greater length. And I would appreciate it if the rest of you could think of something to contribute to the arguments.’ He stood up and swept from the room, almost forgetting to duck his head on the way out.

  It was lunch time. The classroom began to empty. Sharkey coincided with Blaise going through the door.

  ‘Poncy cunt.’

&n
bsp; ‘That’s a good argument,’ said Blaise. Sharkey pushed Blaise’s shoulder, thrust him back against the jamb of the door.

  ‘Hey — fuck off,’ said Blaise.

  Sharkey cocked his fist but Kavanagh grabbed it and pulled them apart. Kavanagh’s height and weight meant he was in charge. He pushed Sharkey on ahead, down the corridor and held Blaise behind him. Sharkey sneered at Blaise, ‘You watch yourself, ya poncy cunt. You have it coming to you. Your mates won’t always be around.’

  Blaise had gone ashen. They walked out into the sunlight of the yard.

  ‘That always makes me so angry.’ Blaise sat down on the ground with his back to the wall and knotted his fists in front of him. ‘Violence always wins in the short run.’

  ‘Sharkey is a complete wanker,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Yeah.’ Martin and Kavanagh hunkered down beside Blaise, one on each side.

  ‘Hey, it’s really warm.’ Kavanagh closed his eyes and put his head back.

  ‘Sharkey’s a fuckin tit,’ said Martin. ‘Take no notice of him.’

  ‘It’s nice to know he considers us mates,’ said Blaise. He made a chicken-like gesture with his elbows, hitting both of the boys at once. They elbowed him back. ‘You know what I think,’ said Blaise. ‘I think we should take the rest of the day off. Stroll out into the world. Leave this place to get on with the business of indoctrination.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’ Martin also turned his face up to the sun. ‘Yeah — into town?’

  ‘Naw, town is crap,’ said Kavanagh. ‘What about the Waterworks?’

  ‘That’s very close to my home base,’ said Martin. ‘My ma or some of her oul biddy friends might see me. And I gave her my word I’d work my bollicks off.’

  ‘Nobody’ll see you.’

  ‘Maybe we could do some work?’

  ‘Aye — that’ll be right.’ Kavanagh laughed.

  It must have been the fat girl’s day off. Or else she was out the back peeling spuds. They got sausage suppers and walked up the Antrim Road eating them out of bags. Martin led them to the side of the road farthest from his street. He kept ducking down into his collar and staring at the ground. Blaise laughed at him.

  ‘Your mother must be some machine,’ he said.

  ‘It’s too near the exams,’ Martin said. ‘And I’m on my word of honour.’

  They made it to the Waterworks without meeting anyone who knew them. It was a park but not a park, an old reservoir open to the public. Inside the gateway was a large noticeboard displaying the Bye-Laws. Blaise stopped in front of it — his head back, looking up. Every line of its small print began with DO NOT. There were two hundred and forty-eight things you couldn’t do.

  ‘It’s like school,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘And that doesn’t include the serious things, like calumny and murder,’ said Blaise.

  ‘No mention of open air wanking, is there?’ said Martin.

  ‘Why? Do you want to indulge?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Did you hear about the complete wanker?’ said Kavanagh. ‘Somebody stuck a label on his dick — For external use only.’

  There were three ponds at different heights separated by grassy slopes and waterways. The lowest was more a river than a pond, a sluice disappearing down into a black underground tunnel. Because it was overlooked by the road, old prams and trolleys had been thrown down and remained there as rusting barriers gathering other junk. Martin had frequently seen rats there. They walked up steps to the middle level, a model boating pond — a rectangular expanse of water surrounded by concrete paths. A number of grown men were sailing model yachts from one side to the other. The boats looked good, their white sails at a tangent to the water. The top corners of the middle pond were always full of floating debris: cigarette butts, sweet papers, glass bottles, sticks and grass. In the autumn, sour stolen apples with one bite out of them bobbed in these corners. If the day was windy, brownish foam lathered up from the choppy waves and covered everything in the corners with a frothy scum.

  ‘During the war,’ said Martin, ‘the Germans thought it was the docks and bombed the fuck out of it — including the houses all round. My mother’s area.’

  The uppermost pond was large enough to be called a lake. It had fish in it and there was always a big flock of swans drifting about, white against the dark of the water. From a distance their thin necks created intricate patterns, lowering and lifting, looping to feed beneath the surface, turning to preen beneath their wings. Martin loved to watch them take off, running with those flat webbed feet, the splashes further and further apart until there was no splash and the bird was up, its neck arrowing into the air in front of it, its wings creating that whoop sound against the air.

  ‘Have you ever seen them taking off?’ said Martin. The two others nodded.

  ‘It’s a bit of a slap dash,’ said Blaise.

  From the top pond the view was of the green hills which surrounded the city. Black Mountain, Divis, Squires Hill, Cave Hill with Napoleon’s Nose obvious from this angle — an emperor lying on his back staring at the sky.

  There was a tractor cutting the grass at the far side of the lake and the smell drifted across, mixed with the brackish smell of the water. On this side of the pond the grass had not yet been cut: when they walked down to the water’s edge it was up to their knees. Kavanagh spread his blazer to sit on. The others did the same. The long grass trapped underneath gave a pleasant springiness to the material when they first lay down. The stones beneath the surface of the water were not like natural stones but octagons and lumpy pentagons, covered with brown underwater moss, like fine hair, which waved as the water moved. The water made continual clucking noises not far from their feet. The breeze rippled the surface. There was a Waterworks guy in overalls rowing a small boat near the swans. They could hear the dull thumping as he shipped his oars at one point. They heard it fractionally later than they saw it. The sun was warm, now that they were down out of the wind. Martin pulled a stalk of grass and began to chew the white sweetish stem.

  ‘Hey, this beats school.’

  ‘Anything beats that place.’ Blaise lay flat looking at the sky. A fish splashed not far from the edge with a slap. Martin had noticed about Blaise that he rarely laughed. He said funny and outrageous things but didn’t laugh at them. Occasionally he smiled. And it was good to see him when this happened.

  ‘Did you see Father Barry’s face this morning when you said — about there being no God,’ said Martin. ‘He nearly shit a brick.’

  ‘I thought he took it quite well,’ said Kavanagh. ‘An older priest would have put an arm lock on you and marched you straight to the Reverend Head’s room — henceforth to be expelled.’

  ‘Who’s Kant?’ said Martin.

  ‘A philosopher,’ said Blaise.

  Kavanagh put on a posh English voice and said, ‘He won’t be a stewpid facking Kant then.’

  ‘No indeed,’ said Blaise. ‘A man rowing a boat.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What’s so good about a man rowing a boat?’ said Martin.

  ‘It’s a good thing to watch. It’s a good image.’

  ‘What’s it an image of?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a good visual image.’

  ‘I thought an image had to be like something. Like something else. One of the dominant images in “Macbeth” is of food and feasting.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And what else? You said it had to be like something. What is food and feasting like — in Macbeth?’

  Martin shrugged.

  ‘Normality. Banquo’s ghost fucks everything up.’

  ‘You have displaced the mirth,’ snarled Kavanagh, ‘broke the good meeting, with most admired disorder.’

  ‘OK — it’s not Banquo who fucks things up, it’s Macbeth,’ said Blaise. He too was chewing at the stem of a piece of grass now, biting fragments off it and spitting them out. ‘We are all lik
e a man rowing a boat. We have our backs to the way we’re going. We can’t look ahead, can’t see the future. All we can see is the past behind us.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Kavanagh. ‘But not so the canoeist.’ They all laughed.

  Blaise joined his hands and cradled them behind his head and said, ‘Where do you think we’ll be three or four years from now?’

  ‘What a crass question,’ said Martin.

  ‘It’ll be easier looking back. Three or four years from now you’ll say — remember that day we mitched off to the Waterworks.’ They thought about this in silence. Clouds covered the sun and their shadow could be seen moving on the hills. The water sounded continually at the lake edge.

  After a while Kavanagh asked Blaise, ‘So what’s it like to be a boarder?’

  ‘The fuckin pits.’ Blaise wrinkled his nose. ‘The place is full of ganches from the country. They’d believe anything. In the Big Dorm there’s supposed to be a ghost cubicle — Number 13 — it’s never used. A guy in the 1930s or ‘40s from Rasharkin, his da was a rich farmer and the boy was gambling too much, getting the day-boys to put bets on for him. Eventually he topped himself — hung himself with his football laces.’ Blaise smiled. ‘He took his own life while the balance of his bank was disturbed.’ They all laughed.