The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  He began to feel more alert, was beginning to get a second wind. But he couldn’t stop himself smiling. He must look daft — cycling and smiling. The girl smiling to herself as she came out of the pub, at something said, or someone seen, and he remembered liking her for it. He imagined a person on the pavement seeing him, Martin, smiling at this very moment and liking him for it.

  At the other side of the road he saw a girl coming down the hill of a side street on to the main road. From a distance he felt she was someone familiar. Or he even thought he knew her. Or wanted to know her. She was wearing a yellow outfit, very summery. Her back was straight and she carried herself well. He had to keep glancing for fear he would run into something, like the back of a bus. He stared at her for as long as he dared. Jesus. It was Patricia Downie — the one at the glass case in the library. The ghost, the reflection. Her hair was different, but it was definitely her.

  Again he was immediately taken with her, as he had been at the school sports. If anything, she was even more attractive. A greater proportion of her hair was now blonde. Sunshine sometimes did that. And it was longer. Martin swerved and jinked between cars. He applied his brakes and nipped up on to the pavement beside some railings. Keeping his eye on her on the far side of the road he locked the bike to some church railings. He was afraid she would disappear. Into a shop, on to a bus. He wanted her in his sights for as long as possible. She was carrying a bag slung over her shoulder. Martin looked this way and that and threaded his way through the traffic to her side of the road. She turned on to the main road totally oblivious of him. He tried to take in everything about her with his eyes.

  But she stopped at the bus shelter and made a face, even though she was by herself. Because there was no one else queuing she’d obviously just missed one. She’d be late for work. He stopped. Should he approach her? He felt he still had some bravado from the early morning alcohol. It had not worn off completely. And it had the advantage, because it was pure alcohol, that it couldn’t be smelled off his breath — like vodka. Maybe he was so tired it didn’t matter. Maybe he had changed in some way.

  ‘Hi.’ He greeted her with such conviction that she was slightly taken aback. She smiled, thinking it her fault that she didn’t recognise him. There was sleep still in her eyes. She waited for him to speak, still smiling. ‘I was at school with your wee brother, Eddie. How is he?’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Teacher training. In London — Strawberry Hill.’

  ‘You used to go down to the Central — the library. To study.’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘I remember you. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I didn’t know you lived around here.’

  ‘Just up there. Magdala Street.’

  ‘So what are you doing? How did you get on?’

  She was tall and looked directly into his eyes. He wanted to die. Wanted to swoon. But this was rush hour. Swooning would get him nowhere. There would be a bus along any second. She gazed at him, trying to recall who he was. A man joined the queue behind them and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Not so hot,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get enough to get me into teacher training. That’s what I wanted to do as well.’

  ‘There’s this book I read — Wisdom from the East — it says if you have a desire to teach, wait till it passes. Teach, only if you have no compulsion to do so.’ She stared at him and raised an eyebrow. But smiled at the same time. She doesn’t know me from Adam. There was the danger of a silence developing. Then he noticed that she was wearing the same small silver cross at her throat as she had worn that day in the library. Two more women stopped in the bus queue. ‘I’m sorry — that’s not a criticism of you. It’s just wisdom.’

  ‘Thank you for it.’ She was laughing.

  ‘So what did you end up doing?’

  ‘The Civil Service.’

  ‘My mother is a great one for civility.’ She looked at her watch. Then took a step forward to look up the road for her bus.

  ‘And you?’ she said. ‘Where did you end up?’ She’d asked him a question. A whole new line of conversation was beginning. Patricia Downie was showing an interest in him. To a certain extent. She’d asked the question over her shoulder while she was looking up the road for her bus, but it was still a question. She had initiated something. He was getting on famously. The bus queue now extended out of the back end of the shelter. Her eyes were detaching certain connections in his brain. He could no longer think. He was tired, he wanted to fall asleep on her breast there and then. The link between thought and tongue was almost completely gone. Her look had scissored vital pathways. She was showing an interest in him only because she didn’t know him very well. So far. Just wait. He was falling. Skydiving in her presence. Plummeting. Without protection because the loose flesh of his cheeks was rattling and his hair felt as if it was straight up. Behind her lovely head the Perspex of the shelter was covered in felt-tipped graffiti. Obscenities. Cocks and balls. Perineums.

  ‘The Uni. I’m working up at the Uni.’

  ‘Very good.’

  The bus stop was across the road from the Bonne Bouche. A woman was going into the premises, unlocking the double glass doors, opening the place up. Once inside she stopped to pick up the mail lying on the mat. He was aware of the listening queue behind him and dropped his voice.

  ‘Have you time for a coffee?’ The words just came out of him. A coffee would waken him up. A caffeine injection. Restore coherence to his gibbering. She leaned slightly forward.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Have you time for a coffee?’

  She laughed. Her mouth was wonderful.

  ‘I’m on my way to work.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m all disorientated. I’ve been on the night shift.’

  ‘At the University?’ It was his turn to laugh.

  ‘Yeah — emergency philosophy. A callout.’ She smiled and turned her head quickly to look up the road again. Her hair momentarily remained behind, then followed, like the swish of a skirt.

  ‘Oh come on, come on.’ She kept moving her feet. He noticed again they were very big. ‘D’you think there’s been a bomb scare?’ she asked.

  ‘No, the buses are obviously running.’

  ‘They’re just not going where I want to go.’

  ‘Tomorrow maybe?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A coffee. What day’s this?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘A coffee tomorrow. The weekend. Here.’ He nodded across the road to the Bonne Bouche. ‘Are you working?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Eleven o’clock?’ She didn’t say anything for a moment.

  ‘But …’

  ‘For old times’ sake …’

  ‘Two o’clock would suit me better.’ Again she looked at her watch, then looked up the road. She kept fidgeting. The tops of her feet were tanned. A bus turned the corner and she relaxed visibly. He couldn’t believe what she had said. She had accepted his invitation. He had a date. With Patricia Downie.

  ‘If it’s for old times’ sake I’d better know your name.’

  ‘Martin Brennan.’

  She put her hand out. Martin raised his hand automatically. For a moment he was confused. He thought she was trying to shake hands but her hand was gesturing out and away from him — impossible for him to reach. He half attempted to … then he realised she was putting her hand out to stop the bus. Oh fuck — had she noticed that he had moved his hand? There he was, going to shake on a deal like a horse trader and all she was doing was flagging down the fucking driver. The bus stopped and the queue shuffled forward.

  ‘I’m Patricia Downie,’ she said. And she was away. He stood rooted to the spot and saw her take her seat downstairs on his side of the bus. As it pulled away from the pavement, in the act of sitting down, she smiled at him and gave him a small wave. No dumbfuck he.

  He walked back to his bike and unlocked it. He
could hardly believe what he had just accomplished. With Patricia Downie. The bike moved off as if it had a life of its own and he mounted it at the run. It felt part of him — he had never been on a horse or mount of any other sort but he imagined that this is what it would have felt like. The control he had over it — the leaning, the weight, the nuances of nudging and steering — threading the eye between bus and pavement. Pegasus was a horse with wings and as he cycled around the complexity of the Square it felt he was on such a creature, gliding. It was about gravity and defying gravity at the same time. The morning air parted as he moved through it and closed again behind him. The rush hour traffic was beginning.

  It was coming at him from all angles but it seemed of no consequence. He was above it all. He feinted between vehicles, shouted warnings to pedestrians. His upward glance took in Frink’s two huge verdigris figures high up on the white side of the Ulster Bank. The top body was horizontal, the lower one at 45 degrees to it appeared to be winged. He should really stop some day and take pictures — it was such a strong image. Two strong images. He had taken the laboratory job ‘in the meantime’ and the meantime had lasted too long. Maybe Cindy was right: he should look at something else. He should think about something in photography. In his bones he felt it was becoming more and more important to him. It was what he would like to do. But how could he get into it? How could his life be shaped by darkness and light? Like Macbeth. By space and time? By silver salts on paper. What is a photograph, after all, but an image which invites contemplation. Like the one hovering above him on the wall of the Ulster Bank. Before the fall, the stall. Martin had always guessed they were in the act of falling — like angels chucked out of heaven. Sent down — like Blaise. Falling apart and falling together. Horizontal, stretched — like the pair on the motorbike who were killed beneath the bus in his street. Or he thought of them as 1920s American stockbrokers hurtling to the pavement in a death plunge. Victims of both gravity and capitalism. His falling dreams were like adolescence. You never knew where you were. You didn’t know what you knew — at least you couldn’t trust it. People could burst out laughing. Or they could nod and agree. The same as in a dream or real life. You had no way of knowing. You could be catching on to something solid and permanent which was anchored or something solid and permanent which was falling at the same speed as yourself. That was in fact what was happening. People believed themselves to be on solid ground when in fact they were falling through space on the earth itself. Newton’s Unknown Law of Motion. A bad apple falls at the same speed as a good apple. He had another notion that the Frink statues were bodies rising — two of them, lofted, buoyed up on thermals of hope. About to come into bodily contact with one another. With a loud metallic clanking. A dying fall — that was a term in music — for a trumpet. Had that woman just shot him down? Tomorrow at two o’clock would she be laughing in her bedroom remembering the boy at the bus stop — or even worse — not remembering a thing about him. Or would she be sitting across from him, her mouth red after a strawberry tart, playing with the spoon in the sugar bowl, occasionally looking up at him with those eyes and saying yes, I do want to make my life with you — even before you’ve asked me.

  Also available in Vintage

  Bernard MacLaverty

  SECRETS

  AND OTHER STORIES

  ‘A born writer with a manifest destiny’

  Guardian

  Married love, male friendship, a small boy intruding upon secret adult grief, a husband contemplating infidelity — in these wonderful stories Bernard MacLaverty catches his characters at moments of epiphany, when ordinary life is set alight with sudden knowledge, memory, regret or desire.

  ‘Tender and honest and full of the embarrassments and contradictions of a very real Ireland’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A marvellously good collection of short stories … Bernard MacLaverty manages to slip through the mysterious barrier that exists between good, serious, well-written prose and art’

  Jennifer Johnston

  VINTAGE

  Also available in Vintage

  Bernard MacLaverty

  A TIME TO DANCE

  ‘Taut, knuckly prose … humour as bleak and raw as the landscape’

  The Times

  Bernard MacLaverty’s beautifully turned stories are full of humour, terse realism and moments of touching or shocking surprise. Nelson plays truant and sees something he wishes he hadn’t in the title story, ‘A Time to Dance’. In ‘Phonefun Limited’ Sadie and Agnes, retired prostitutes, hit upon an inventive new way of ‘making someone happy with a phone call’, while in ‘My Dear Palestrina’ a remarkable music teacher initiates her pupil into the mysteries of art and maturity.

  ‘Expert, elegant, mature and passionate’

  Scotsman

  ‘A splendid collection … MacLaverty is one of the best practitioners of the genre we have’

  New Statesman

  ‘A writer with a real affinity for the short story form’

  Times Literary Supplement

  VINTAGE

  Also available in Vintage

  Bernard MacLaverty

  CAL

  ‘A formidable fictional triumph’

  Observer

  For Cal, some of the choices are devastatingly simple … He can work in the abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella.

  Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark.

  ‘It performs the remarkable feat of compressing into its short span both a doomed love affair and an account of the impossibility of living, in the circumstances of that doomed province, without redemption and without punishment … Mr MacLaverty has a true feeling for tragedy’

  Anita Brookner

  ‘To fashion a short, telling novel out of the hideous complexities of Northern Ireland takes narrative skill of a high order. In Cal Bernard MacLaverty has manage to do it superbly’

  Nina Bawden

  ‘Cal is a most moving novel whose emotional impact is grounded in a complete avoidance of sentimentality…Cal will become the Passage to India of the Troubles’

  New York Times Book Review

  VINTAGE

  Also available in Vintage

  Bernard MacLaverty

  WALKING THE DOG

  ‘His tales are poised and beautifully balanced, outward yet intimate, graced by both subtlety and substance’

  Independent

  ‘These funny and compassionate stories focus on telling details, but hint always at the big events, separation and death, that lie just beneath the surface’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘A Belfast man out walking his dog is kidnapped … A Catholic schoolboy with priestly ambitions confronts a B-Special on guard duty when he runs to retrieve a football. In ‘At the Beach’ a middle-aged couple … awkwardly appraise the state of their long marriage … To point out the excellence of MacLaverty’s writing is almost to do it a disservice. His prose is invisible, free of tricks, as though it was your own thoughts. His characters are revealed whole through every scrap of dialogue’

  Observer

  ‘Bernard MacLaverty, the author of Cal, writes with an honestly that is irresistible. With his attention to everyday detail, nuances of speech and small, significant actions, he goes to the heart of his characters to produce something profound and quite unexpected’

  Evening Standard

  VINTAGE

  Also available in Vintage

  Bernard MacLaverty

  GRACE NOTES

  ‘Beautifully structured … This is a marvellous book’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘Here, more powerfully than ever, MacLaverty proves that … he ranks as a master of haunted realism … His best novel yet. He deals with death and love and tragedy’

  Observer

  ‘MacLaverty’s long-dormant powers
as a novelist marvellously revive … Suffused with luminous attentiveness as it surveys Catherine’s attempts to keep her live and her art in equilibrium, it’s a magnificent portrait of the sources and ends, wretchedness and rewards, of creativity’

  Sunday Times

  ‘The strongest impression left by Grace Notes is that of its central image — of the “notes between notes” which seem to compose themselves: of a life happening while its heroine is busy making other plans … If architecture is frozen music, Grace Notes is the literary equivalent, full of its own powerful rhythm’

  The Times

  ‘This is writing of a high quality … MacLaverty brings off the remarkable feat of allowing the reader to hear music that has not been written … It is magical … A convincing work of art’

  Scotsman

  VINTAGE