The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  He got the feel of the people in the pictures. When he looked with his magnifying glass at the woman pouring the bucket of water over the other woman he could see the shock in the doused woman’s face, could see the discomfort in the way she held her body, could see the amusement of the woman standing on the stool emptying the bucket over her. All of this on a day of bright sunshine and hard shadows somewhere in America at the end of the last century. The women thinking is this guy Muybridge crazy or a pervert or what? And how much money are we going to earn from this whole daft afternoon, larking about in our pelts in front of so many cameras? For Chrissake, Mildred, let’s go home and get something to eat.

  It would have made some picture sequence if it had been his mother’s friends who had been throwing the buckets of water. A naked Nurse Gilliland and a bare Mary Lawless. That would have been some show. They’d have to be buckets of Holy Water, to get them to do it without a stitch on. Their rugs threadbare. Sexy as steel wool. Two women baptising each other.

  The kettle began to boil. He poured some water into his cup and swirled the teabag. He unfolded the packet of sandwiches and saw again his mother’s dainty four-way pernicketiness. She’d made him two sets of sandwiches: salad for tea time, ham for supper time.

  On the nights when Father Farquharson couldn’t make it the talk inevitably got round to ailments. And when Martin was in the room the women would pause. Or would drop their voices. One night Mary mentioned her ‘hem region’.

  ‘A bit near the knuckle, Mary.’ Mrs Brennan glanced in Martin’s direction. ‘A little too close.’

  ‘Mary, you should go and see a specialist. I hear there’s a very good new man at the Mater.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about him.’

  ‘Why? Have you seen him?’

  ‘Seen him?’ She looked around the company and paused.

  ‘Martin, get some more milk.’

  ‘But the jug’s half full …’

  ‘Do as you’re told.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘They’re the same all over — the young ones nowadays,’ said Mary Lawless, winking at Martin. ‘They’ve no notion of what to do with themselves — they don’t know what to be at next.’

  When Martin came back with the filled jug it was Nurse Gilliland who was speaking.

  ‘My bunions have taken off. I’ve no explanation for it but I can not get into a shoe this weather.’ She held her foot up for inspection, turned the shoe this way and that. ‘At the heels of the hunt I blame all that standing in the wards. When I was a young slip of a thing.’

  ‘Think of bunions as medals,’ said Mary Lawless, ‘earned devoting yourself to the service of others.’

  He poured the last of the milk into his cup and stirred until the tea became a rich brown colour. He fished the teabag out with the spoon and looked round for something to read. Gray’s Anatomy was on the table in front of him. It was a thick and heavy hardback volume. It fell naturally open at page 168 and there it was. THE FEMALE PUDENDA. The Promised Land. It reminded him of a thing he had seen in a magazine. The Far East. His mother had ordered this Catholic publication and another called The Catholic Fireside. They had been delivered to the house regularly by the Legion of Mary. Priestly advice had been given from the pulpit that those with young families should not bring English papers into the house, with their salacious pictures, their repulsive morals and pagan attitudes. Instead, rather than leave a gap in the nurture of the minds of the young, they should buy good Catholic Irish publications with entertaining stories and articles written by people who could be trusted. Far be it from the Church to make a suggestion but The Far East was as good a recommendation as any. It was full of photographs of priests in their tropical kit — white soutanes, the occasional pith helmet — surrounded by happy black people who had to look very grateful in the company of those called Father Seamus or Father Malachy or Father Finbar. There were articles written by these same priests which could have come from the Reader’s Digest. It had a children’s page — Colum’s Corner — containing wholesome and educational games. It was full of photographs of children whose mothers had forced them to send in their photographs and write cute letters. The photos were printed with captions like Peadar McGrath lives in Main Street, Kenmare but the rest of Kerry is safe enough. And Mary Jo, Noel and Philomena O’Leary, Carrigaline, Co. Cork pictured during a pause in hostilities. This is where Pudsy Ryan’s column appeared: ‘my diry’ it was called. It was supposed to be written by a boy who couldn’t spell or punctuate but it was really written by one of the priests. Stuff like, unkil jorge is here for a koupil of days an he is krossir than a bag ov kats.

  Boys like Pudsy never liked to wash. Oh, what an imp! Pudsy Ryan did naughty things which you were supposed to laugh at. But he never wanked, of that Martin was quite sure. It would have been good to read — pudsy ryan jerx ov or if you prefair puls his plonker. To be fair to him, Pudsy was a bit on the young side for that kind of activity.

  It was on this fun page he remembered a picture of a slightly balding man with frizzy hair and a frizzy beard — the face was completely surrounded and outlined by hair — and he had wrinkles on his forehead and wrinkles on his chin — a face a bit like a fist — and he was frowning. Definitely frowning. But if you turned him upside down he was smiling. Definitely happy. The same thing was happy and sad. Depending on how you looked at it.

  page 168 of Gray’s Anatomy had a version not unlike that strange face on the fun page of The Far East. Like a mop head. Mysterious, sexy, weird. This was a head-on, spread-thigh view with everything named. URETHRA, ORIFICE OF VAGINA, ANUS, GLANDS OF BARTHOLIN, CLITORIS, MONS VENERIS. The geography of a place he’d never been. Enid Blyton’s The Playground of Adventure. His eye skimmed down the page and read again ‘Each labium has two surfaces, an outer, which is pigmented and covered with strong crisp hairs; and an inner, which is smooth and is beset with sebaceous follicles and is continuous with the genitourinary mucous tract …’

  He began eating his sandwich. It was a mixture of crunch and sloppiness. He loved that. It would be awful to eat salad sandwiches if they were freshly made. They had to be seasoned for hours and hours. The bread had to be moist from the tomato which had to merge with the butter and the salad cream, the spine of each lettuce leaf had to stay firm and slightly crisp, the yolk of the hard-boiled egg had to remain dry but the white still had to have a certain slipperiness.

  When he finished eating he closed the book and carried his still hot cup of tea back to his own lab. He saw the camp bed laid out and avoided stumbling over it. The hot tea he set on the floor. With great care, so as not to unbalance the bed, he lay down on top of the sleeping bag and stretched out. Before he joined his hands behind his head he looked at his watch. He had twenty minutes before the next rat. His stomach rumbled and he wanted something sweet. Since giving up smoking he’d got this sensation after eating. It used to be a cigarette — now it was chocolate or something sugary. He was getting horny. But there was no time for that kind of thing. He felt very much on his own — isolated. He hadn’t felt this way since the silent Retreat. It had been a bizarre couple of days which had been important for him. If it matters at all it must matter completely. He’d made an important decision there. NOT to go with the religious life. And that, in its turn, had gradually led him to think — if it doesn’t matter completely then it doesn’t matter at all.

  He thought of the foetus again, of the funeral of himself descending the steps to the basement. He didn’t want to pray for it. He wanted to call it something other than ‘it’. To burn something without a name seemed wrong somehow. Was it male or female? Evelyn. Some names applied to both sexes. Hilary was the same kind of name. He’d put a shovel of coal on the animal house fire and brought it to a white hot roar with the metal shield. Before he threw the foetus on, he opened up the gauze for a last look. It lay curled up in pink profile. Its tissues were somehow translucent, showing the delicacy of arm and leg bones, of fingers and toes. It had the
feeling of a life stopped. Like a photograph. Of a life not started.

  He folded the gauze over again — tucked it in — and threw the bundle on the fire. The gauze burned briefly with a blue flame at the edges. He remembered Blaise and the dirty photographs. The way they burned. This is what sex produced. The fire downstairs. He turned and walked away. His legs trembled as he climbed back up the steps.

  He could be over to the Students’ Union and back before his tea cooled. Buy a Kit-Kat or a Penguin. Maybe a Wagon Wheel. He got up off the bed and checked he had enough money. He took off his white coat, hung it on the back of the door and headed downstairs. The quad was empty as he crossed between the neat lawns. It was a fine evening — the sun had come out and was low in the sky. His shadow was long and diagonal to him. There was still a smell of burning rubber in the air drifting from Sandy Row. He called with the security people and told them he was going to be in the department all night. They said they had already received notification from the Prof.

  The Students’ Union shop was open until late. He got his Kit-Kat and headed back. The assistant had given him two ten pence pieces in the change. He chinked them as he walked. Then he rubbed their milled edges together. Coins, he felt, were the size of bin lids. There was a cleaner in the Biochemistry Department, Bella, her name was, who had one of these embedded in her. On her day off she’d gone for a cup of tea in town. When a bomb goes off, everything becomes shrapnel. Including a saucer of tips. She survived the explosion but would have a ten pence piece embedded in her pelvis for the rest of her life. It was so close to something vital that the surgeon thought it best to leave it alone. She was told not to overdo things. Thanks for the tip. What was embedded in her mind? Or was the mind incapable of taking in the enormity of what had happened? One second you were blowing on the surface of your newly poured tea before tackling your biscuit, maybe an Empire biscuit, maybe leaning slightly forward in your seat, and a millisecond later you were fifteen feet out into the street having been punched through a plate glass window with both your arms broken and multiple fractures of the right leg and some of your skin ripped off and your other knee sliced open by a soup bowl and a ten pence piece hammered into your pelvis. All for somebody else’s Cause. People sitting in the street with their bones sticking out. There were still arguments about who did that particular one. Whether it was the IRA or the Loyalists or the Brits — what did it matter? It would be hard for Bella to get a night’s sleep ever again.

  When you heard an explosion — if it was just that — it was bad. Ominous. If it had not been preceded by the nee-naw of fire engines it meant that no warning had been given. There would be casualties. He had heard such an explosion one night in the distance as he walked home. News at Ten had said there were five dead. A pub beyond the University.

  The girl with the rucksack was still around. She had come into the quad and stood facing the sun with her eyes closed, her hair brightly lit. She looked really good standing like that. Her sunglasses nesting on top of her blondish hair, jeans, a white T-shirt. She had a white wool sweater around her shoulders, the sleeves loosely knotted in the middle of her chest. The shadows of the archways sliced across the flat stone of the walkway. She opened her eyes when she heard his footsteps. The closer he got, the better looking she was. Bare arms, tanned skin. What a good face. Her hair was curled like pine wood shavings or spilled clock springs. He was shy of looking her straight in the eye. He looked down at the flagstones and sort of smiled vaguely as he passed her.

  ‘Hi again,’ she said. His heart leapt in his chest. Was she speaking to him? He was the only one there. He looked at her. She had the face of someone it was easy to like. She was smiling and she was definitely addressing him. ‘Do you know where the Anatomy Department is?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said pointing. ‘Just there. Where I’m going.’

  They fell into step. She was exactly the same height as he was. Their eyes were on a level.

  ‘Are you going to the jazz?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Maybe later. I don’t think it starts until later.’ He stammered a bit, didn’t know whether he should launch into a whole explanation about working there and all that. Blah-blah-blah. ‘There should be a notice over here.’

  She was going to walk the whole way to the door with him. Jesus. What were they going to talk about?

  ‘Your accent,’ he said. ‘Is it American?’

  ‘Naow,’ she laughed. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Australia. Down under.’

  ‘I thought you were American. Because of the jazz, maybe.’

  ‘Naow. It’s just I said I’d meet somebody there. A fellow countryman.’ She didn’t say anything more. She was leaving it up to him. The thing he’d said about being American because of the jazz was just so fucking stupid. Oh Jesus.

  ‘That’s a nice evening,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’d need to be careful about where you go in town. There was a bit of trouble down the road — earlier, when I was coming past.’ The girl stopped and bent over and stared down at something on the path.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Hairy caterpillars. Granny Greybers we call them here.’ Two of them were speedily inching and arching their way across the tarmac of the path, brown and bristling between the pink petals of cherry blossom.

  ‘Like a couple of escaped eyebrows,’ said Martin.

  ‘In search of a forehead,’ said the girl.

  It was a blue Gothic door, twin sides meeting at the apex. Each half of the door was plastered with notices and embedded drawing pins and corner remnants left over from previous stuff. She bent slightly forward to read and hummed and hawed. She stretched out her left hand and leaned against the stone pillar of the doorway. The inside of her arm was paler, blue veined. Her hair fell over her face a bit and she jutted her lower lip and blew hard up into her own face. The hair stirred. It moved on her brown temple. How is it that she is not amazed at herself?

  ‘There it is,’ Martin said. ‘Peetie Red Wallace and His Bald Eagles. Nine o’clock.’

  ‘That’s not for ages.’ She looked at her watch.

  ‘Would you like a bit of Kit-Kat?’

  ‘You think I’m gonna starve in the meantime?’

  ‘This door should be open soon,’ he said, ‘the band’ll have to set their kit up and all.’ He tore off the red outer wrapper of the Kit-Kat and snapped a piece through the silver paper. He peeled back the foil and held the biscuit out to her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Very polite.’

  ‘It’s the way my mother reared me.’

  ‘Well, she sure did a good job. Why do they hold a jazz night in an Anatomy Department?’ Martin couldn’t think of a good answer. ‘Do the skeletons dance?’

  ‘It’s a good space, the bottom lecture theatre — there’s a bit of atmosphere.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ve gotta go. I don’t use this door. I go in the back.’

  ‘What’s your hurry?’

  ‘I’ve to kill … something.’ Oh fuck — why had he said that? He was afraid of talking about rats. So he hadn’t mentioned them. But it had made it so much worse. Her eyes widened — they were so big and dark. ‘It’s an experiment. Maybe I’ll explain later. If I see you at the jazz.’ She popped the last of the Kit-Kat into her mouth and licked the chocolate from her fingertips.

  ‘Great tucker, mate,’ she shouted after him. He hurried away, almost moaning to himself. You daft cunt, what will she think of you? I’m off to kill something.

  As he went up in the lift it occurred to him that in the faintest possible way he had made a date. He would see that woman later on.

  He slammed the lift gates closed and went up the steps to the Anatomy Library two at a time. If he got there fast enough he could get another look at her as she retraced her steps across the quad. He was glad he’d taken off the white coat to go for the Kit-Kat — he looked such a ganch in it. Nearly as stupid looking as the secur
ity staff. The library door squeaked loudly as he pushed it open. He ran to the window overlooking the quad. There she was, sitting on one of the benches, her rucksack on the ground. As he watched her she swung her feet on to the seat and sat lengthwise. The library door swung slowly closed. After it clunked shut the department became silent again. On the bench she moved her arm and did something with her hair.

  There were some monocular microscopes sitting on a demonstration bench showing glass slides of various tissue samples. He grabbed one and slipped the glass slide out of place. He upended the microscope, adjusted the eyepiece and concave mirror and pointed it down into the quad. It was one of the guys in Embryology who had showed him this trick — how to make a telescope out of a microscope. He had to rest the instrument on a shelf in front of the windowsill because the shake of holding it made it impossible to see anything. Then there she was — up close — filling the circular lens. She looked great. She moved her hand up and clawed her hair over her head, against the nap, while looking away off at something. It was good when women did that, concentrated on something. In music shops flicking through a pile of LPs, looking briefly at each one; in a library staring down, reading, the eyes moving slightly across the page line after line. A hand under the chin. Staring down into a glass case at an exhibition of books, moving a silver cross backwards and forwards on a neck chain. A face of such attractiveness. Intent. Looking at her. The feeling of swoon when she looked at him. He had nearly died. Touching the lobe of her ear without knowing she was doing it. He thought about a girl coming down the aisle with communion in her mouth. It wasn’t the same thing, at all. It was the opposite of the first two things he’d imagined. Girls coming from communion were self-conscious and shy. They knew they were being watched — most of them were throwing their heads up like racehorses. It was the total lack of absorption of self which made women so attractive. They were at their most completely attractive when they were most completely themselves. It helped if they had nice breasts. This is what was happening now. This Australian was sitting by herself, in the evening sun, absorbed by her Victorian surroundings. She had nice breasts.