The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Dye,’ he said.

  ‘No.’ She placed his hands back on her breasts and he continued touching them because he only sort of knew what to do next. On the radio the music stopped and a DJ began to talk.

  ‘Do you want the radio on or off?’

  ‘I want everything off,’ she said, pulling up his shirt. ‘Including that fucking knife sharpener.’ He laughed and got to his feet and switched the machine off. She switched off the radio. The silence was wonderful.

  He knew what the aim was. But quite what that involved he was not too sure. Yes, he knew it involved his penis and her vagina. But that was a bit like saying chess involved a squared board and two sets of differently coloured pieces. There was more to it than that. More information was required to play a game with someone. How did you know about the moving? And he was not thinking of the chess pieces. Kavanagh had said just think of the woman as your hand. Fingernails? Knuckles? Did she do it or did you? Did it coincide with the groaning — what speed was the moving to be at? Was there any speed to the groaning? There was a joke about an alien watching humans doing it and when he heard that it took a further nine months to produce offspring he said what was all the rush at the end for? Jokes were unreliable for information. And knowing the names for things didn’t help much. Kavanagh called it thrusting. But Martin stuck to calling it the moving. Was it possible to do it and not move? What if you put it in the wrong hole? It was full of holes down there. Would she tell you? That’s my urethra you’re in. Or — God, he would die — That’s my ass.

  When he hurried back to her she asked him again what age he was and he replied that women didn’t like being asked that question. She laughed and rumpled his hair and told him that he was wet behind the ears. She said it was not where it was happening to her. And he asked her where — where was it happening to her and she stood up from the swivelling chair and pulled at the laces of her boots and looked sideways at him as she did so, smiling. And when the boots were off she stepped out of her jeans and stood in front of him in just her socks and a pair of white pants. She undid the buckle of his trousers and let them fall to the floor. Then with her thumbs in the waistband of his underpants she unhooked them from his cock and let him step out of them. He touched her and quick as a pen scrape, he came.

  And he was profoundly embarrassed.

  The little clots of his sperm fell to the lino with a strange repetitive sound — a pattering. He felt ashamed and repeated over and over again that he was sorry. She drew him to her and hugged him, her arms beneath his shirt and around his waist. She told him not to worry — such urgency was quite endearing. It was sweet when it happened. She said that they had all night to get it right. She tugged a tissue from a box on the bench and wiped the floor. She was still smiling. He made a joke that she was wiping up the lives of millions. This particular tribe was well and truly lost. He was still apologising to her, his body half crouched in shame. She asked him to take off his shirt and curl up with her on the camp bed. He said that he was too thin, too much of a skinny bastard to take his shirt off in front of anybody. She said how much better it was than being a fat bastard. She asked to see his muscles. He pulled up his sleeve, bent his arm and flexed his biceps. The muscle became a faint hillock. And he grinned. He said that it was funny how his elbows didn’t come through his skin, they were so sharp. She kissed him and led him to the camp bed while they were still in the kiss. Shuffling, like inadequate dancers.

  They lay together and talked, Martin half sitting up, her head against his shirt. She pointed to a small raised mole on his waist and made a face.

  ‘That’s my sultana,’ he said. ‘I’m saving it for an extreme situation. About to die of starvation halfway up Everest. Then I’ll eat it.’

  ‘You’re utterly disgusting.’

  They talked some more about the kind of music they liked. Then movies. Martin told her about one of his favourites, Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, The Killing. About how it chopped up time and reassembled it in a more interesting way. The way Sterling Hayden chewed his matchstick. Then she remembered In the Heat of the Night and Rod Steiger chewing his matchstick. ‘Mista Tibbs,’ she kept saying over and over with her chin up and her mouth turned down at the sides in a good imitation of Rod Steiger. He reminded her that the character’s first name was Virgil. Virgil Tibbs. And her all time best ever movie Love Story with Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. But he hadn’t seen it. So she told it to him. It took a long time. As she talked he stroked her skin wherever it was near to him — her shoulder, breasts, neck, arm.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. She had a great tan and her incredibly fine body hair was blonde. It reminded him of patterns iron filings took up in magnetic fields. He held his hand above her skin, hovered it there — felt something was touching but nothing was touching.

  ‘I like your hair,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’ She tilted her head and pulled a few strands down in front of her face.

  ‘No, I mean the hair on your skin.’

  ‘I’m not hairy.’ Her voice was sharp.

  ‘Then why do you get goose-bumps, as you call them? For every goose-bump there must be a hair.’

  ‘Some on my forearms maybe.’ She looked, rubbed a forefinger across her wrist. ‘Sometimes beneath my watch. In the dark, like mushrooms. Euucch!’

  ‘Did you ever hear of Mary Magdalene?’

  ‘Is that a polite way of saying I’m a whore?’

  ‘No. I saw these drawings in an art book at school and she was being lifted up into heaven by angels but she was hairy, like a gorilla.’

  ‘I don’t like the drift of this conversation.’

  ‘She’d given up the bad life, thrown away her classy clothes and wandered off naked into the desert. But the problem was, if she received communion from a priest she would be an occasion of sin to him. So she prayed and her prayers were answered and her body was miraculously covered with hair.’

  ‘That’ll teach her. Who told you that?’

  ‘A priest — he said it was a holy legend and not to be believed. I’d seen the drawings and asked him. That’s what he came up with.’ She started to undo his buttons. ‘Take off that shirt and let me see how hairy you are.’

  He stopped her unbuttoning and drew the shirt off over his head. Her eyes travelled around over his whiteness.

  ‘Not a single one. Hey, what happened there?’

  ‘I dunno.’ There were some scratches and dried blood on the back of his shoulder. ‘Oh yeah — I cycled through a bit of a riot earlier. I got hit with something. I was trying to cycle over the bridge.’ She touched the vicinity of the wound with her fingers.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I dunno — a half-brick. I didn’t hang around to find out.’

  ‘It’ll be bruised tomorrow.’ She kissed around it. ‘Maybe you better put something on it. Stop it getting infected.’

  ‘And here, look at this,’ he said, pointing to where he had cut his shin with the bicycle pedal. ‘You were to blame for that — coming in the door.’ She stood up from the camp bed and it tilted over with Martin’s weight. He almost rolled off on to the floor and they both laughed. Cindy walked in her sock feet to her rucksack and pulled out a wash bag. She set the wash bag on the floor and squatted beside it. The ripple and curve of the bones of her spine. Again she tossed her hair with her hand.

  ‘Why do you keep doing that?’

  ‘What?’ He mimicked her gesture. ‘Oh that. It gives my hair more body.’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t give your body more hair.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘No — no, I’m only joking. You look great.’ She found what she was scrabbling for and came back to him, grinning.

  ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’ She sat down behind him and he felt something cold on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Ointment.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘It’s a mixture of crocodile shit and Vegemite.’
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br />   ‘No — what is it?’

  ‘It’s an antiseptic cream. It can do you no harm.’ She had a little left over on her fingers and she stooped in front of him to anoint the wound on his shin. She turned her face up to be kissed for all her good work. They continued to touch and caress. He could smell the faintly perfumed antiseptic cream from her hands. He found a softness between the clavicle bones at her throat, a hardness on the high dome of her foot. At some stage she had painted her toenails a dark maroon but she hadn’t maintained them. He pointed this out to her. They kissed. He asked her what she did. She told him she’d gone straight from school into a hairdressing course and worked in a hairdresser’s shop in Sydney — in King’s Cross. Eventually, when she settled down after her travels, when she’d done roamin’, she planned to set up a place of her own, maybe call it Scissors Palace — like in Las Vegas. Did he get it? Yes, yes he did. She hadn’t thought up that name herself but she’d seen a hairdresser’s called that somewhere on her travels and thought it clever. She was convinced that travel broadened the mind and her one really, really true ambition was to visit Disney World in Florida. He had found the heat of the inside of her thighs strange. They kissed. Gradually she stopped talking and removed her pants and said he could kiss her if he wanted. He was unsure and looked at her face, then down at what Gray called her ‘organs of generation’.

  ‘Your hair — it’s not the same.’

  ‘Yes — my downstairs hair and my upstairs hair are different colours because I’m a skilled hairdresser.’ She pointed between her legs and he hesitantly bent down and kissed her — not quite a peck on the cheek, but more of a brief goodnight kiss and she said, Gee thanks. Whatever was expected of him he knew he wasn’t doing it right. It was like an exam — like being asked to compare Milton and Keats and he hadn’t done any Keats and only one poem of Milton’s. He was definitely missing a large part of what was required for a pass mark. But this was so much worse. This was embarrassing stuff. Nobody was embarrassed when they knew fuck all about Milton. He remembered Kavanagh’s advice about paying attention to the face. He found it difficult, if not impossible, to pay attention to her face and her perineum at the same time. He bent to her again and did the same thing.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why all the enthusiasm?’ He looked at her. He was sure she was making fun of him.

  ‘We just started bacteriology.’ She looked at him, unsure of the word. ‘Hygiene.’

  ‘You think I don’t wash?’

  ‘No — no, of course not.’

  He had been in this kind of trouble before. He recognised the danger signals. The first time he had come into contact with the female ‘organs of generation’ it had been dark, at a barbecue. He had been snogging this girl — she must have been one of the organisers because she smelled of paraffin and wood-smoke. Then they went for a walk, and later a lie down where various mutual fumblings occurred. She made him come in the sand and when it was over they walked to the sea’s edge and he said, ‘Do you mind if I wash my hands?’

  ‘Feel free,’ she said. He squatted down and waited for the wave to come up to him. When it did he paddled his hand in the salt water. He looked around and she was away, half walking, half running back to the barbecue.

  Again Cindy pointed down to herself. He half expected to see the little straight lines labelling her parts. He knew the diagram in Gray, like the map of Ireland — yet what he was looking at now was like Ireland upside down. Was that Galway or Cork? Belfast had become Dublin. The real lines were the tracks of elastic on her waist and inner thighs.

  If he was to say any of the anatomical words out loud how would they be pronounced? How would he begin to have a stab at saying urethra? Or the glans of Bartholin? Knowing the medical name wasn’t a help. And school names for things weren’t any improvement. Her rug. Her bush. Her tush. Her cunt. Her asshole. She would slap his face if he used words like that to her.

  ‘I like your undergrowth,’ he said. She smiled at his word. Pudenda, when he looked it up in the dictionary, said: the external sexual organs, especially those of a woman. From the Latin, literally ‘things to be ashamed of’. He straightened up and said this to her.

  He continued to stroke her with his fingers. She changed position, shrugged and said, ‘I know some Latin.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Terra nullius — an empty land — Australia.’

  ‘Terra incognita,’ he said. ‘An unexplored region.’

  ‘Ohh, that’s nice. Yes.’

  ‘Our Latin teacher was called Ned Kelly.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Wasn’t he an Australian gunman?’

  ‘Bloody good bloke. Down a bit.’

  ‘I know he was hanged.’

  In response she reached down and touched him. ‘Lazarus is back from the dead.’

  ‘Did you know he was a brother of Mary Magdalene’s?’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Martin?’ She turned and looked at him. It was as if something had just dawned on her. ‘Is this your first time?’

  ‘No,’ he said. But it didn’t sound convincing enough so he added, ‘It’s always been dark before.’

  ‘I want you inside me,’ she said. Jesus. What did she mean by that? Could she swallow him? Or part of him? Was it like communion or what? It was just such a confusing request. Sounded like it was worth forty marks — one of the big questions, like the essay.

  ‘Eh …’ he said.

  ‘Yes. It’s safe,’ she said. ‘I’m on the pill.’ Somehow he knew she was close to taking over. Questions about where to put your tackle and how to move it were on the verge of being answered. ‘Let me show you.’ As she moved, the bed again tipped. ‘Fuck this for a lark.’ She unzipped the sleeping bag all around so that it became a quilted blanket which she spread on the floor. She invited Martin on to it. Then she sat astride him and eased him up into her. Then he heard a shot. It was definitely a shot. Not a car backfiring. It was followed by another burst of firing. He lay there watching her move, gliding up and down on him with little lifting movements of her hips. He looked at her face to see if she’d heard the shot. If she did she said nothing, she just kept moving. He wondered if he should tell her he loved her, to make her feel better. He certainly felt extremely grateful to her. Generosity like hers was something he had never encountered before.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she panted out the words. ‘Don’t be such a drongo.’

  As she gyrated she held her hair with both hands, as if it was going to fly off like a wig. Then she began to touch herself. At first slowly. Martin felt as if he didn’t need to participate any more. He was in danger of becoming a spectator at his own initiation. She groaned and made those throat noises again. Louder and louder. Martin wondered would any of the security staff be patrolling the place. Would they have heard the shots? Would they, indeed, have been the ones who fired the shots? All that was needed now was for some bigoted Orangeman in a uniform to come in and find them at it. Get the Catholic boy the sack, for having sex on the premises. But there was something wrong with Cindy. There was definitely something wrong with her. She had her eyes closed and was shouting, threshing her hair from side to side. Jesus — she was having a fit of some sort. At a time like this, for fuck sake. Martin might as well have been in the animal house for all the attention she was paying him. He wondered if he had done something to her, triggered some bad reaction. A heart attack? Her breathing was all over the place. He hardly noticed himself coming, so concerned was he for this woman pounding on top of him. It scared the living daylights out of him. Or maybe she had been shot. A stray bullet had got her in the back. He went through the sequence of phoning the porter’s lodge and reporting a dead body. In the Anatomy Department? Is this a hoax call? Is it in connection with the recent shooting? Or, if not the porter’s lodge, then Kavanagh. I lost my v
irginity but the woman is in hospital in a serious condition. In intensive care. With a half yell she stiffened and stopped breathing. Jesus. Fuck me one. Fuck me two. Fuck me three. Your honour, she just stopped breathing. Then after what seemed like an infinity she slumped forward shuddering on to Martin’s chest. Waves moved through her and she kissed into the side of his neck. Oh Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin she was saying. She was panting close to his ear.