The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Well, get out then.’

  ‘But I don’t want out.’ He couldn’t look at Martin. ‘Her Christianity is so important. It’s not a superficial thing — like music or how you wear your hair. It’s her whole life.’

  ‘So what exactly can you do?’

  ‘I have to promise I’ll try to …’ Kavanagh shrugged, ‘… believe more. It’s no good just living a life of correctness. She says it has to come from here.’ He touched his closed fist to his chest. ‘I know she doesn’t drink or do stuff before marriage — I accept all that. Always have done. But now she wants me to accept the Lord as my Saviour. I have to accept I’m a sinner.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  ‘This is serious.’ Kavanagh’s voice was turning snappy. ‘She says it’s just not good enough for me to go through the motions. I have to try and believe — or else there is no point in us going together. Our lives must be a threesome with Jesus at the centre.’

  Martin went on fiddling with the teaspoon. He wanted to laugh. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘But you know what I think of all this crap.’

  ‘Pippa’s faith doesn’t believe in Lourdes-type miracles. But she says she’s praying — a medical cure gives somebody a few more years on earth, she says, but the spiritual cure changes us for all eternity.’

  ‘Hard cheese.’

  ‘What’s your problem with this?’ Kavanagh lifted his cup and blew on the tea’s surface. He sipped and looked up, then set the cup down. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands.

  ‘It all sounds very saved,’ said Martin, ‘very Bible thumper.’

  ‘You’re stereotyping. You’re just using labels.’ Kavanagh nodded to the outside. ‘All this sectarian nonsense isn’t making things any easier. I thought the Protestant-Catholic thing was over, a thing of the past.’

  Martin stopped smiling and said, ‘If it matters at all then it must matter completely.’

  ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘Blaise wouldn’t approve.’

  Kavanagh snorted.

  ‘Blaise was a liability.’ Kavanagh stood up and turned the chair beneath him so that he was sitting on it backwards, like he had been in the lab, his elbows resting on the back.

  ‘Any word of him?’

  ‘The grandfather was buried at the weekend. Remember him? With the white goatee. ‘How dare you,’ Martin mimicked an old man shouting and shaking his fist. ‘Bloody burglars.’

  ‘He was just deranged.’ Martin could see that Kavanagh wanted to change the subject but Martin kept going.

  ‘The bit in the paper said he was a W.B. Yeats scholar. Did you know that?’ Kavanagh shook his head — no. ‘I also hear that the father fixed things up when he was back for the funeral. He finally dropped the assault charges.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘The school is exceeding glad. Especially our friend, the Dean of Discipline.’

  ‘I saw him the other day. Strutting up the Falls Road.’

  ‘Condor,’ Martin shook his head. ‘Jesus.’

  Kavanagh nodded in agreement.

  ‘Bad vibes. Bad memories.’ He took another drink of tea. ‘Better left behind.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go straight to Pippa’s place?’ said Martin. ‘Instead of coming here. I’d never have known a thing about it.’

  ‘I want to be open … Anyway she won’t be home until ten or so.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  There was silence. Kavanagh changed his weight and leaned his elbows heavily on the back of the chair. Martin stopped what he was doing and turned and waited for an answer.

  ‘She does dance worship.’

  ‘I fucking don’t believe …’ Martin began to laugh. Kavanagh nodded.

  ‘It’s not really all that far fetched. It’s using your body as a prayer. And, she says, it keeps her fit.’

  ‘Dual purpose.’ Martin was still laughing. ‘That is so fucking Kumbaya, so tambourine …’

  ‘In the past all the arts — painting, music, architecture — have been used for the glory of … have been used as a form of prayer. I don’t see what you’re laughing at.’ Kavanagh’s face was heavy. ‘Just wait till you reach your own Damascus road, Martin.’

  ‘Christ, you’re even beginning to sound like one of them. Loosen up, man. Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I’m trying to find a way. To live my life as best I can.’

  ‘So’s you’ll get to heaven.’

  ‘Rewards don’t come into it. What’s wrong with Pippa organising bread and cheese lunches in the basement for the Third World? What’s wrong with me being part of a community of good? Beliefs are useless unless they’re strongly held. As you said, if it matters at all it must matter completely. The fact that Pippa will not go to bed with me is not a restriction, it’s self-imposed, voluntary. It’s Christ’s law accepted with love — and if I don’t agree with that, she says, then I am free to leave. Her body will be her gift to me when the time for marriage comes and not before. When and where the Lord allows.’

  Martin shook his head and stood staring at Kavanagh. He had never heard him like this before. It was as if he was talking to a stranger. He felt he had no right to punch him on the shoulder, or ruffle his hair or say fuck in front of him. Kavanagh went on:

  ‘There’s nothing prissy or timid about being a Christian. Christians are the strongest people on the planet. You have to be strong to swim against the stream. We all admire the salmon, why not the Christian?’

  ‘That is straight out of a Sunday school teacher’s mouth,’ said Martin ‘Who said that to you?’

  The cross-struts of Kavanagh’s chair squeaked under his weight. He pulled a face.

  ‘The thought was Pippa’s. The words were mine.’ Kavanagh looked defiantly at Martin. ‘But this is for me and Pippa to sort out. Nobody else.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Kavanagh threw what remained of his tea into the sink.

  ‘I don’t like it without milk.’ He stood up. He was back to smiling again. ‘So. Will you do a night’s business for me? As planned?’

  ‘Yeah — sure.’

  ‘Any questions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The timing is crucial. But you know that.’

  ‘Yes, Master.’ Martin joined his hands and gave a little bow from the waist.

  ‘I’ll not forget this, Martin. You’re a class act.’ He put his arm on Martin’s shoulder and they walked towards the stairs. ‘And I’ll see you, some time tomorrow?’

  ‘Look — I mean now that you’re back — maybe you could take over in the morning. You sort it out with Pippa tonight, and come in here in the morning and finish the rest. I’ll be knackered no matter what.’ Kavanagh paused and bit his nail. Martin said, ‘I’ve got to get home and back at some stage. Maybe change the drawers.’

  ‘OK. I suppose that’s fair enough. I’ll see you in the morning at the crack of dawn.’ Kavanagh grinned. The lift was still at their floor. Kavanagh pulled back the gate. Martin stopped him with one hand.

  ‘Did you hear the one about the test?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The test for whether or not to wash your drawers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Throw them at the wall — and if they stick, you need clean ones. If they slide down they’ll do you another day.’ Kavanagh made a face of disgust.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ he said.

  Martin was laughing aloud at the joke. Kavanagh pulled the gates shut. They waved goodbye. Martin walked on back to the lab and followed the lift’s descent in sound. The quiet fall. At the bottom of the shaft the clash of the gates opening and closing. The slamming of the outside door.

  In the lab the knife sharpener was still shearing and grinding away. He felt depressed. How could this happen? They had been best mates at school and now Kavanagh was running after somebody who was saved. To the exclusion of all other relationships. He was allow
ing his brain to be deadened with this Christian crap. Blaise would have known what to say. Blaise would have wiped the floor with Kavanagh in any argument. Pippa was trying to trepan into the lad’s brain. Bore a hole in his skull and fill it with a way of life — a way of death, more like. She was trying to twist his arm up his back until the bones cracked and he called a submission. Blaise was right — women were destroyers of men’s friendships.

  Kavanagh had been like this ever since he first met him. Obsessive. Never second best. Like when he’d taken up the pole vault. The Gym teacher had told him he was probably too big to be any good. It was an event dominated by average to small guys. It was about nimbleness and timing — being able to ‘climb the pole’. But Kavanagh loved the event and practised every phase of it after school in the gym until it became second nature. Running at speed with the pole cocked, planting the pole in the box, climbing the pole, his weight making it curve, then the curve straightening and catapulting him higher. At the last second remembering to push the pole away, keeping his feet together and soaring over the bar, his stomach muscles tensed and arched, then the long fall to the cushions in the pit while at the same time looking to make sure the bar had stayed in place and was not going to come clanking down on top of him. By that time the pole itself would have slowly toppled on to the floor. Martin had seen all this because Kavanagh had asked him to help out on many occasions when the gym teacher couldn’t be there. If Kavanagh wanted to practise climbing the pole — as opposed to running with and planting the pole — then it saved a lot of time and energy if there was someone to hold the pole anchored in the box. Martin had agreed. All he had to do was hold the pole at an angle, Kavanagh would run at it, jump, catch and climb and clear the bar.

  He’d jump off the cushions, talking to himself, shaking his head, and walk back to come pounding down the floor at Martin and the pole again. This went on endlessly until Kavanagh was satisfied he had made some progress. Then they would walk up the road together.

  It paid off for Kavanagh because he won the event and set a new school record by clearing a vault of 10 feet 5 inches on sports day. In front of a crowd, half of which were girls. Martin found that amazing — to see groups of girls in their summer clothes sauntering around the track of the Big Field which had been limed with lines for the day. To walk in their wake and smell their perfume. To hear them laugh and see their feet printing the ground where previously only boys had walked. To see a cardboard sign in the corridor painted with black paint which said LADIES →. To see guys blushing when they started to talk to the girls. To hear priests ho-ho-ho-ing, talking to boys’ mothers and sisters. Clapping and rubbing their hands together. For some reason it caused an ache in him which he could not account for. There was something desperately sad about it.

  And of course Martin was there to record the events on film. He got several really classy shots of Kavanagh in the act of pole vaulting but the picture he got of the actual record vault was not good. And whatever way Kavanagh was frozen in time you could see up the leg of his shorts. There was something up there — underpants or dick — it was insufficiently focused and Kavanagh was embarrassed enough to choose an earlier shot — with the bar at a slightly lower height — to use in the school magazine.

  Then something had happened that almost took Martin’s breath away. Through the crowds walking round the black ash of the track he saw the girl he had seen in the library — the one who had stared into the glass case and who had ended up giving him a wee smile. It gave him such a swoosh of panic when he saw her. She was walking along, oh so casually, talking to Eddie Downie. Martin stared at her, hardly believing they were occupying the same space. He kept her in his vision for most of the afternoon. At one point he ran and got Kavanagh. Talked almost gibberish to him — said he wanted to take a picture of him just standing by himself at the edge of the field. He positioned him and waited, did all the calculations in his head so that there would be no mistake. Eddie Downie and the girl approached and when they were level, but on the other side of the fence from Kavanagh, Martin started clicking. At any one time he knew exactly where she was: watching the long jump, walking between the colonnade of trees, buying an ice cream from a van the school had invited in to do the catering.

  Blaise had been conspicuous by his absence at the sports. After it was all over Martin was on his way to the office to return the photographic gear to Cuntyballs when Blaise came strolling past the willow tree in the quad.

  ‘Where have you been?’ said Martin.

  ‘Around. I went a walk.’

  ‘Were you up at the Big Field?’

  ‘No. Sports day is just one more way of humiliating the majority of the pupils in the school. All but the winners.’ Martin shrugged. He didn’t want an argument because his head was still full of the girl with Eddie Downie. ‘It’s another exam with a particularly low pass rate. I want no part of it.’

  ‘Kavanagh broke the school record for the pole vault.’

  ‘Did you get any good pictures?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can see them in my mind’s eye. You kinda freeze it.’ Blaise looked at him intently. They both turned to walk in the same direction. Blaise smiled at him. Their elbows touched through their blazers.

  ‘You don’t want to heed the half the things I say,’ said Blaise. ‘Sometimes naive is good — for a photographer that’s important. To see fresh. Don’t lose that.’

  When he had the gear handed in Martin couldn’t wait to talk to Downie. If she was his girlfriend it would be so sickening.

  ‘Who was she you were talking to, Downie?’

  ‘Why is everybody asking me that?’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘My big sister — Patricia.’

  And now he had a name for her. He could hardly believe his luck. Patricia Downie. A name with softness. Duck down. A feather falling.

  The next day he developed the sports day pictures and the only ones he wanted to see were the ones of Eddie Downie’s sister. He did an enlarged print of the picture of Kavanagh standing by the edge of the field, his arms folded. If anybody asked, it was a picture of his mate. But behind his mate was Patricia Downie, her lovely face turned to glimpse the athlete getting his photograph taken. Martin kept the picture among the books on the mantelpiece in his bedroom where he could look at it whenever he felt like it.

  He had seen her only once again. In town on a Saturday afternoon, coming out of Robinson & Cleaver’s and looking up distastefully at the rain. He was on the top deck of a bus and his first instinct was to knock the window furiously to draw her attention but then he realised how utterly fruitless such a gesture would be. An instant later she put up a white umbrella and then he could only see her feet. She walked round the corner into Donegall Place. She was wearing dark boots. He noticed that her feet were very big.

  As he worked in silence he wondered if the Australian woman would turn up.

  Just before nine o’clock he heard what sounded like music. Faint at first. Like a radio somewhere. It sounded like ‘Blue Moon’. The jazz starting. It wasn’t a tune, they were just warming up. Two floors away. Saxophone, piano, drums.

  On the hour he killed another rat, then tidied up the bench. He washed his hands thoroughly — who wanted to go on a first date, however tentative, smelling of freshly eviscerated rat? He took off his white coat. He was wearing jeans and a denim shirt. He should shave. Just in case. He turned on the geyser and the gas plumped loudly and blue flames were visible. When he’d told his mother he had to work overnight she’d produced a drawstring bag for his ‘kit’, as she called it. Into it she put a toothbrush, shaving gear — although he really only shaved once every two or three days — and at the bottom a teaspoon. She recommended its use to scrape the tongue first thing in the morning.

  He filled a beaker with hot water. To see himself he fetched the small mirror from the Ladies. When he finished, the beaker was full of grey blue soapiness with hairs like
grains of sand rotating in it. A quick scrub of the teeth, a tongue strigil and he was ready for action. He put the mirror back where he found it.

  The corridors were darkening and seemed very strange with this distant jazz sound in them. Usually after lectures they were full of students’ talk and the banging of metal locker doors. He stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. The saxophone had a smooth Paul Desmond feel to it as it drifted up the stairwell. There was light down below and voices, as well.

  Outside the door of the basement lecture theatre someone had set up a table and was taking money. He was talking to a bearded guy in leathers with a motorcycle helmet in his hand. The guy asked how much it was and made a face when he heard.

  ‘Fuck, who’s playing? Miles Davis?’ The doorman sort of laughed and waved the biker into the hall. Then looked up at Martin. The only money Martin had was the change from his Kit-Kat.

  ‘I work in here,’ said Martin.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m a technician in this building.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I thought maybe I’d get a concession.’ The doorman looked at him.

  ‘We get the venue free,’ he said. ‘The money is for the band.’

  ‘I’ve gotta hang around all night to close this place up,’ said Martin. The guy held up a bunch of keys.

  ‘We always do it ourselves.’ Why was this fucker so stroppy?

  ‘I just want to look in — see if somebody’s there.’

  The doorman seemed very reluctant to let him have a look around but eventually he waved his eyebrows in the direction of the lecture theatre.

  ‘I suppose we need whatever audience we can get on a night like this.’

  Martin nodded a sort of thanks and stepped inside. It smelled of joss sticks — probably lit to disguise the formalin and chalk dust smells. Or marijuana — jazz bands had that reputation. Martin knew the place in daylight, knew that the space was circular and raked only slightly. It was filled with curved benches around a raised dais. The curved walls were lined with glass cupboards. The place was dark except for a couple of spotlights beaming down on to the band, picking out the shining bits of the drum kit, reflecting the metallic yellow of the saxophone, whitening the tops of the musicians’ heads. It took some time for his eyes to adjust to the low level of light. The saxophonist wore a cloth cap back to front. The pianist had sunglasses on and when he put his head back the reflected spotlight flashed from the lenses. It was so dark it was difficult to make out if there was an audience, never mind who was in it. The music finished and there was a spatter of applause and a few whoops.