The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘OK,’ said Kavanagh. He stopped running on the spot.

  ‘I still think he should be falling asleep and I run past him — not run past him but kind of plod past him.’ Now Martin started to make giant steps — his idea of plodding. Blaise punched him on the shoulder.

  ‘Cut it out. You’re thinking of Aesop.’

  ‘Every time Achilles gets to here, dumbfuck will have moved on a bit. And so on — infinitely.’

  Kavanagh rugby-tackled Blaise and brought him to the ground. Martin, rather than be left out, flung himself on top of the other two. The three of them wrestled on the grass. Martin looked up and saw an old gent carrying a silver-topped cane. He was out walking his dog, a wee Jack Russell. He looked down at the struggling heap of bodies and rolled his eyes. The knot of Martin’s school tie was pulled to the size of a sixpence and ended up somewhere below his ear. Blaise’s shirt tail came out and, although he was laughing, he called out for them to stop the nonsense. Kavanagh was revving like an aeroplane and Martin was shouting, ‘What noise does a tortoise make?’

  The old gent moved on, swinging his cane, looking as if he’d like to have waded into the fight and beat fuck out of them all for being out of school at that time of day. Kavanagh got Blaise’s head in a lock grip and Blaise’s voice was yelling out. It was difficult to know if he was pretending to be angry or if he was really mad.

  ‘Stop it you big cunt. Or I’ll fuckin kill you.’

  ‘I’ll kill him for you,’ said Martin and he got a grip beneath Kavanagh’s chin and applied as much pressure as he dared. Kavanagh eventually let go.

  ‘About bloody time, you big —’ Blaise stood and undid his trousers and tucked his shirt back in — ‘fuckers,’ he said. They still couldn’t tell whether he was truly angry or not. His face was red and his hair tossed.

  Martin loosened off the knot in his tie and began to tie it again properly. They flopped down again on the grass. Kavanagh’s chest was heaving. Gradually everyone’s breath returned to normal. Nobody spoke. Martin was near the water’s edge. He smelled the cut grass and trailed his hand in the water.

  ‘Hey it’s nearly warm.’ Martin dried his hand on the side of his trousers and lit a cigarette. He spun the match towards the water. He loved the tang of the smell of the sulphur. He lay down. There was also something in the grass which smelled good — a plant of some sort, like pineapple weed or meadowsweet or something. He looked around and the grass was close to his face. He closed one eye. Some of the blades were veined green, others were stalks — mixed new summer grass which slanted this way and that, creating a pattern that was perfect, with the sky behind it. The blades fitted the sky the way a key fits a lock. Grass green and sky blue. Those were the colours — they were what was being referred to. Adjectives and nouns. Grass and sky, green and blue. The sun was warm on the black material of his blazer. He inhaled his cigarette and felt a jag of pleasure, in his lungs, between his fingers. For a moment his head felt light. Everything combined to give him a rush of intensity at the rightness of things. The key turned in the lock. The liquid went clear with the addition of a single drop. Everything else he thought of only added to the feeling. The water at the edge of the lake was warm and silky on his fingers. His best friends were here, he was sure he would pass his exams this time. He identified the upward rush as happiness. He was sure he would never die. And he was sure he would remember feeling this for the rest of his life. It was like the feeling he’d had in Ardglass when he decided not to be a priest. He wondered if it had anything to do with lying down. Then, he’d lain on a wall, now he was on the grass. He knew it was a daft conclusion — like the kid who thought the wind was created by the waving of trees — but it was funny and the fact that he thought it was funny only added to the rightness of things. Suddenly there was the sound of swans lifting and flying overhead. Moving from one stretch of water to another. The sound of moving from one element to another. The stone falling from air to water. The swans from here to there. Love was in it somewhere but he couldn’t tell where or with whom.

  Instinctively around about four o’clock all three stood up and gathered their things together. They began to walk slowly along the path with Blaise leading the way.

  ‘Why’re we walking in this direction?’ said Martin.

  ‘I want to call in home,’ said Blaise, ‘before I go back.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  ‘Over there,’ Blaise said nodding in the direction of the Cave Hill.

  ‘In a cave?’ said Martin.

  ‘About half a mile that way,’ said Blaise. ‘I want to see if I’ve got any post.’

  ‘Post? Do you get post?’ Martin sounded incredulous.

  ‘Yeah — don’t you?’

  ‘Never. Except exam results.’

  They walked down to a gate at the side of the Waterworks but it was locked. It was of iron bars with viciously sharp points. Kavanagh knew a way up on to the pillar which held the gate and with his big stretch was able to climb over with little trouble. Martin interlocked his hands and made a stirrup for Blaise.

  Blaise put a foot on the cross-strut of the gate then shouted to Martin, ‘Don’t move.’ Martin did as he was told and felt Blaise’s shoe press down hard on his shoulder. Then Blaise was up on to the pillar. Kavanagh helped him down on the other side. Martin tried but he couldn’t follow the route the other two had taken. He stood looking through the bars.

  ‘Use the other gate,’ said Blaise, pointing up the road. Martin turned to run but just at that moment the old gent with the wee Jack Russell appeared. He was taking a bunch of keys from his pocket. The old guy took in the situation at a glance. He tucked his silver-topped cane under his arm like a newspaper and inserted the key. The gate clanked open but the old man barred the way. He whistled to his dog. The wee thing ran through and stood outside beside Kavanagh and Blaise.

  ‘Do you want out?’ said the old guy.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Martin. He sidled out through the open gate then the old man locked it again and stowed his keys away in his pocket. The three boys began to stroll. When they were out of earshot Martin said, ‘Why has that oul bastard got a key?’

  ‘It used to be private or something,’ said Blaise. ‘Everybody in the club had a key.’

  ‘Then they let the hoi polloi in,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Scum like you, Brennan.’

  ‘I thought the hoi polloi was the posh ones?’

  ‘You’re probably thinking of hoity toity,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Is it not really odd to be a boarder with your house so near?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They walked for a while through tree-lined avenues. Then Blaise nodded towards a driveway almost hidden behind a high hedge. There were trees and rhododendrons in the garden.

  ‘Thar she blows,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll not go in,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘You mean you’re going to hang about out here?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll not be long,’ said Blaise.

  ‘Who’s in?’ asked Kavanagh.

  ‘How the fuck would I know,’ said Blaise. ‘I haven’t been home for ages.’

  ‘Who do you expect will be in?’

  ‘You don’t have to talk to anybody,’ said Blaise.

  ‘Why can’t you answer my question?’

  ‘My father’s away. There’ll just be my grandfather and Susan.’

  ‘Who’s Susan?’

  ‘She looks after us — sort of housekeeper cum nurse. The oul boy is beginning to lose the place. Threw his piss-pot through the window one night. Thought somebody or something was coming to get him. But you don’t have to meet him — or her. You can stay in the front room. I’ll make the tea.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a cuppa tea,’ said Martin.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ said Kavanagh. ‘After our labours, a big pot of the old Nambarrie would go down well.’

  The house was set back a long way from the main road. Only part of it showed between trees. Grey brick, a window, some ivy. T
he path to the front door was gravel and cinders mixed and Martin was aware of the noise their feet made in the silence. It had been a long afternoon. Now they seemed to have run out of things to talk about. Blaise took out a wallet of keys from his pocket and selected one for the front door. Inside, the hall was dark, old fashioned. There were glass-fronted bookcases along one side full of poetry books. The floor was brown tiles scattered with rugs to make it seem less cold. Martin noticed that the rugs were rumpled enough to catch anyone’s toe. He had never seen such a big hall, or so wide a staircase in a house before. There was a black grandfather clock with a loud tick. Blaise paused at the hall table and was looking through the post.

  ‘When my dad’s away, he always gets tons of post. It builds up.’ Some of the envelopes were for Blaise. He flicked quickly through them and slipped his to one side — envelopes trimmed with red, white and blue: airmails from America. One from India, one from the Vatican. Martin knew where they were from immediately, from the days when he collected stamps. One brown envelope in particular seemed to please Blaise.

  A woman’s voice called from a room at the bottom of the hall.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me,’ shouted Blaise. ‘Go in there,’ he pointed to a door. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  It was a double room with two fireplaces and two doors and two sets of windows and the most obvious thing about it was the grand piano by the back window, its huge black lid uplifted, like the fin of a shark, making the inner room seem deprived of light. There were several aspidistras and cheese plants by the windows. Martin noticed that there were no religious images anywhere, neither picture nor statue. Beside one of the plants was a metronome. Dark prints hung on the walls. There were one or two abstract paintings, brightly coloured. Martin set his bag by the door and went over and looked inside the piano at all the strings and hammers. He plucked one with his finger and it zizzed a bit, then stopped. Kavanagh put his hands in his pockets and started looking at ornaments of spear carriers on the mantelpiece. Between the two rooms, dividing doors had been folded back, concertina-like against the wall. Martin sat down on the edge of a sofa by one of the fireplaces. The sofa was hard and the material rough to the touch.

  ‘Some place,’ said Kavanagh. His voice was hushed so that the criticism would not be overheard. ‘Do you think Blaise is OK?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That stuff about the beautiful boy in the gym.’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe he’s bisexual.’

  ‘Did you hear about the guy who thought bisexual meant going to bed with two women?’

  ‘No — what about him?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  The room smelled faintly of lavender. Cars could be heard on the road in the distance. And the ticking of the clock from the hallway. The carpet just in front of the sofa was threadbare. The place where everybody sat, the place where all the feet had shuffled over the years. Straight lines of hessian stuff were obvious where the pattern had worn away. Kavanagh moved up to the top end of the room to see what was outside the window. Martin went to the piano again. The sheet music on the rack was Schubert. He pressed a chord of three notes. Softly. Listened to them resonate.

  ‘They go on for longer if you press the pedal,’ said Kavanagh. Martin put his foot on the pedal and pressed three different notes. Their sound seemed a rich mixture of brown and cream that hummed infinitely. The sound fitted the room the way the blue sky had earlier fitted the grass around it. The way a blade fits its sheath. When it was no longer audible he struck the same chord again. And savoured it.

  ‘That’s such a mournful fucking sound,’ said Kavanagh. Martin shrugged and moved away from the piano to look at a picture above the second mantelpiece. Kavanagh reached forward and touched the metronome into motion. It clacked backwards and forwards quickly. He bent and looked at it closely to read what was written on the scale.

  ‘That’s vivace.’ He stopped the machine and adjusted it. It clacked more slowly. A kind of plodding pace. ‘And that’s adagio.’

  ‘Who’s talking about mournful,’ Martin said. ‘Play the vivace again.’

  Kavanagh changed the metronome back to the faster speed. There was a creaking as one of the doors opened and Martin looked round, grinning. But instead of Blaise an old man stood there. He was tall, but slightly stooped. He had a white goatee beard and glasses. All his movements were very old — shaky and indecisive.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ the old man hissed. He moved across the room and raised his hand to strike Martin but instinctively Martin ducked, not knowing what to say. He evaded the old man. The old man was unsteady on his feet as he turned.

  ‘How dare you!’ he shouted. ‘Bloody burglars.’ He staggered a bit as he looked around for a weapon. Kavanagh started to say something to try and calm the old guy down. ‘And you’ve the cheek to do it in your school uniform.’ The metronome was going clack-clack-clack over by the window. There was a brass poker standing up in a companion set on the hearth. Martin saw the old man make a grab for it and that was enough.

  ‘Make yourself scarce,’ Kavanagh shouted. ‘I don’t want to have to hit this old guy.’ Martin picked up his bag and ran down the hall. The door had a Yale lock and a twist handle and it required two hands. He waited for Kavanagh to open the second lock, then they were away running, crunching down the path. As he ran Martin felt his knees shaking.

  ‘Fucking madman,’ he said.

  ‘Totally berserk.’ Kavanagh was starting to laugh.

  ‘How dare you,’ shouted Martin. ‘Bloody burglars.’

  ‘And you’ve the cheek to be in school uniform.’ They stopped running when they reached the main road and looked back. Kavanagh put his arm around Martin and they fell about laughing. The old man was standing at the door shaking the poker and shouting at the top of his scrawny voice. From that distance his white goatee was jerking like a rabbit’s scut. A danger signal. Blaise was nowhere to be seen.

  7. A Sleepless Night

  ‘No offence, Mrs Brennan — I’m sure you’re the best mother in the world — but that boy is thin. The only growing he’s doing is up. How he does it, living with a baker like yourself, I’ve no idea. I’d be out like a balloon.’

  He hated Mary Lawless for mocking him. He’d been wearing an open-necked shirt and when he opened the door to let her in she pretended to use the cavity between his collarbones as a holy water font. She dipped her finger into the hollow and blessed herself as she entered the house.

  She was followed in by Nurse Gilliland who said, ‘If he gets any thinner the Cruelty will be on to you, Mrs Brennan.’

  Later when the food was being handed around a second time Mary Lawless said, ‘I’m on a diet.’

  ‘What for?’

  She patted her stomach and rolled her eyes to heaven.

  ‘Martin, do the needful,’ said his mother. ‘Offer those buns around.’

  Mary Lawless refused with her hands up.

  ‘I have had an elegant sufficiency.’ She patted the corners of her mouth with her serviette to let them all see she’d finished. It was only then she seemed to notice its colour. ‘I’m very fond of the navy blue, Mrs Brennan.’

  ‘Oh thank you.’

  ‘I find the dark colours are so attractive,’ said Nurse Gilliland. ‘So stylish.’ She held her serviette up against the lapel of her navy blue dress and it matched perfectly.

  ‘I knew you were coming,’ said Mrs Brennan.

  ‘You’re never going to believe this,’ said Mary Lawless, ‘but — I had a twenty-inch waist the day I was married.’

  ‘You had an elastic measuring tape, as well, if you ask me,’ said Nurse Gilliland. Father Farquharson turned in his straight-backed armchair and watched each person as they spoke. He had a face which was always on the verge of smiling.

  Mary Lawless insisted, ‘No, I had really — twenty inches.’ She created a circle by joining her thumbs and index fingers together to demonstrate her size. ‘That’s twenty inche
s.’ Martin was going to set the plate of buns on the coffee table but his mother made a gesture that he should insist.

  ‘Very like a whale in a wee tin,’ said Mrs Brennan. ‘You took the sausage rolls.’

  ‘Sometimes I eats like a horse and sometimes I just eats grass. My hunger is now assuaged.’

  Martin set the plate down.

  ‘All the more for me tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Ate up, you’re a growing boy,’ said Mary Lawless. ‘It’s hard to believe I used to have an hourglass figure.’

  ‘Aye — always running out,’ said Nurse Gilliland.

  Mary Lawless joined in the joke then said, ‘Fruit is said to be a very good thing.’

  ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor at bay,’ said Mrs Brennan.

  ‘I find apples an uphill struggle.’

  ‘Aye, I know what you mean,’ Nurse Gilliland nodded. ‘It’s hard to make a meal of an apple — like you wouldn’t get a man coming home from the pub starving and then sitting down to an apple. Dieting also can do strange things to the breath.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me nicely …?’

  ‘No, I am not, Mary. It’s just that I was talking to Peter Faul the other day. He’s badly failed.’

  ‘A sight for sore eyes.’

  ‘Is he no better?’

  ‘Naw. Not by a long chalk.’

  ‘As yella as a duck’s foot.’

  ‘Aye, they say he’s not well at all.’

  ‘The doctors have given up on him.’

  ‘Is that so? But sure the doctors give up on everybody.’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’

  ‘Merciful hour.’

  ‘There’s something odd about his face.’

  ‘Aye — like somebody sat on him when he was warm.’

  ‘Aw, Mary you’ve the quare way of putting things.’

  ‘A body could tell he wasn’t right. His breath was … a bit … y ‘know.’

  ‘There’s nothing worse, I always say.’

  ‘Than what?’

  ‘Bad breath. Breath that would knock you down. And the worst of it is — there’s no way you can diagnose yourself. Somebody has to tell you.’