by Paul Tomkins
FIVE
There is a head on my desk. With eyes firmly shut I run my hands over the skull: small, feminine, smooth between its fissures. I try to get a feel for the face: the curvature of the cheekbones, the jut of the jaw, the ellipses of the eye sockets; how these would have affected the tissues above and around. In time I will approach the skull more scientifically, with my charts, my high-precision ruler and my tissue-depth markers, but at first I want to work with impressions, instincts. My eyes may tell me most of what I need to know, and science inform my decisions, but the tips of my fingers will shape the reborn features. They need to become intimately acquainted with the contours. They need to learn through touch; learn like the blind. Upon this base I will build, in layers, the face of someone the world lost, or carelessly mislaid.
* * *
Absence has been a shadow cast by nothing – cast by the missing thing – since my childhood. For as long as I can remember I have been the one left behind, forever losing a grip on the relationships of my life. Sometimes abandoned – a pattern that began with my father when I was just six. Other times, such as in the case of a young woman who had such a major impact on my life, thwarted by circumstance; the intervention of a cruel twist of fate that to this day leaves me searching out a resolution. I carry a constant background concern, like the humming of a refrigerator that only comes to mind when you stop and listen. There’s an underlying sense of panic, as I reel in the threads of those escaping, only to find an empty end to the cord. I cannot tie anything down.
The missing are my area of expertise. As such, it made sense to make them my career, albeit after failed attempts in other fields. Absence is my forte: there exist spaces where once stood people. It is my job, as a forensic artist and reconstructor of faces, to help fill those spaces, with that person, or with an answer. People slip from the radar of their loved ones, and a blip vanishes from the screen.
Faces of the dead stare down, from photographs and sketches lining the walls of my study, and from the eerie gazes of clay reconstructions lined along a shelf: an identity parade crying out for recognition. Then, in my desk drawer, a cluster of manila files, gruesome photographs escaping at the seams. On a daily basis I ask them Who are you? One day they will remember, and whisper their names.
There is another image of a missing person, the only one I knew personally, the only one who, as far as I know, isn’t dead. It is in the form of an oil painting, shoddily stuck together with Sellotape, which hangs centrally within the room. In my top drawer I keep her file. But she is not officially missing. She resides in her own life, and is merely absent from mine.
* * *
Knowledge > grief. That is the key equation. People would much rather hear bad news than no news. They can just about handle the concept of a murdered son or daughter, parent or spouse, if they can eventually lay him or her to rest. The alternatives the mind throws up, in the lack of knowledge – in the dark of cluelessness – are often too disturbing to dwell upon. No one wants to think of their child lying in a ditch in a forest, cold and alone (not that the dead feel cold, or alone, but the thought still haunts the minds of the living). It’s all just earth – bones in earth – but the difference could not be more pronounced. Closure means everything. Closure is the lid of a casket. Closure is a vicar’s scattering of dirt. Closure is a gravedigger’s shovel. It doesn’t mean forgiving, or forgetting. And closure is such a trite word. It just means an answer. As long as someone remains missing, the story never ends.
I’m not religious, so I cannot pray for the missing. But crossing one’s fingers seems too inconsequential.
* * *
I can’t switch off, leave this work behind. I am always pondering the evidence, wherever I am. A torn item of a child’s clothing strewn across roadside brambles: blown from the window of a passing car, or ripped from a frail and frightened young soul? A dew-dampened jumper at the centre of a park: a forgotten goalpost from a twilight game of football, or something more sinister? The discarded black thong: lost in a moment of drunken passion, or pulled down against its wearer’s will? I pick it all up and bag it, just in case. Is it evidence, or irrelevance? I look for stories in everything. Stories where others see nothing. On the nameless (sometimes faceless, occasionally headless) corpses that remain free of identity there may be a series of physical clues.
Almost two decades on, and with Black’s whereabouts unknown, I ponder every conceivable possibility, think of innumerable locations where she may reside. But the world is never bigger than when someone is cast adrift of your own personal sphere.
Plagued for decades by insomnia, I prefer to work at night, by candlelight. I place six to eight candles of varying sizes on a ledge above the table, along with a hurricane lamp. It casts organic light, alive in the room; animating the features as they take shape. It drops bristling shadows into recesses, flickers movement across pock-marked clay. It draws me into the subject. In these moments I am God, taking part of a real human and, for the first time since he or she took shape in the womb, forming features from scratch. How much more control can you have than literally shaping someone? Even a plastic surgeon doesn’t delve all the way down to every last inch of exposed bone. But my aim is not to create a new look, or someone’s idea of physical perfection. I need to find the faces of the dead, when alive; faces lost to decay, faces burnt away. Faces eaten by woodland creatures, devoured by insect life. Faces slipped away in the river’s flow.
A person’s features are largely determined by the shape of their skull, but there are many blanks in need of filling, where guesswork is inescapable. Noses, beyond the apex of the bridge, are mostly cartilage that rots. Eyes, each pair with their own distinctive gaze indicative of the life behind, can never be truly recreated. And hairstyles, eyebrows, beards and moustaches, all of which dramatically change an appearance, are often missing pieces of these kinds of puzzle; the colour and style of which can only be guessed at. Without evidence, there’s no real way of knowing how to get a perfect likeness.
It’s a slow process, with preparation paramount. I’m always eager to jump straight in, get my hands wet with clay; skip ahead to the point where it starts to pay off, when an identity takes shape. But everything constructed in layers relies on what lies beneath. I have to underpin the skin with the correct amount of simulated sinew and fat to turn a skull – hard bone – into a soft face. Ultimately it’s about accuracy, not creativity. Then again, I don’t possess the raw talent and imagination of someone like Jacob. I am competent at realistic portrayals and little else, and I’ve learned to accept that. I need a script to follow, rules to adhere to. Without these I flounder. I have skills, such as an obsessive attention to detail, and well-honed powers of observation, but little flair.
First I secure the various elements of the skull. Loose or dislodged teeth are glued in place. A forensic odontologist will assist if it’s not an obvious case of slipping one or two teeth back into the matching cavities – it’s usually obvious what goes where, like a nursery play-set. Next, the mandible is attached to the cranium. Slim foam spacers are placed in the temporomandibular – the hinge where jaw meets skull – to simulate absent cartilage. This is as far as I’ve got with the woman whose identity I am hoping to help discover. Found under piles of wood on Brighton’s West Pier, no more than a bare skeleton: no flesh, no clothes, no jewellery. Just the wire from a bra curved beneath the bones, and a scrap of a label, on which the barely legible ‘32C’.
I never believed in psychic visions before I got into this line of work. But when you hold someone’s disembodied head in your hands, its life vacated, it’s hard not to experience some kind of connection with the person whose thoughts once resided within. With my eyes closed, and fingers clasped around what is now no more than an empty shell, an array of images filter through my mind. These are probably no more than the free associations of imagination. But occasionally I wonder if it’s something more; something I don’t understand, which will guide me in my work.
>
Can I see her face, smiling?
Next in the reconstruction process comes the numbered tissue-depth markers, cut to size and glued to designated points on the skull, plotting a course around the cranium: a kind of three-dimensional dot-to-dot, indicating the height to which the skin and tissue will on average rise, depending on the sex, race and build of the deceased. There are subtle differences between skulls of European, Asian and African descent, just as there are variations between male and female. The male forehead is usually more sloping, and has a projecting brow ridge area. The lower half of the face will be proportionally larger than in a female, due to a stronger jawbone. Teeth also tend to be larger in a man. In a female, the jaw is usually more obtuse, the chin more pointed.
There are also differences between these categories regarding the depth of the flesh. In a slender white woman such as this, the glabella – the smooth part of the forehead above and between the eyebrows – is half the average depth you’d find in someone obese. The mid-philtrum – the vertical groove on the upper lip, below the septum – is five millimetres on the work in progress, whereas even on a thin male of African origin it would be double that length. The skull of a black person will usually be recognisable by alveolar prognathism – a forward projection of the lower face – and the nasal openings will be wider than in a Caucasian. The faces of white people tend to be flatter, with zygomatic bones that slant back. It’s not simply a question of skin colour, or delicate features, that differentiate between races and sexes; all the stage make-up in the world can’t make a man of African origin convincingly resemble a white woman, or vice versa.
When there’s nothing but the skull itself to work from it comes down to these kinds of distinctions to determine the race and sex, before reconstructing their identity. Make no mistake, beauty goes beyond the shallow depth of skin. In a number of ways it’s possible to tell, with a fair degree of certainty, that the woman whose skull is propped upon my desk was good-looking. The gateway to the senses rot – nose, ears, eyes, lips, tongue – and in life these do so much to determine attractiveness. But what remains, in this case, is as close to perfect as I’ll ever get to see. The bridge of the nose is delicate and petite, and the skull has a pleasing orbital shape to it. The jawbone, now secured back in place, presents a subtle curve that doesn’t jar when viewed from any angle. Beauty is often about symmetry, and here the right side perfectly mirrors the left. The teeth, even now, are flawless. From the lack of wear and tear, and the half-emerged wisdom teeth, it’s possible to say she was in her late teens or early twenties.
No one imagines themselves like this – a component, detached and placed on someone’s desk as part of a working day. At one point in time this woman had her whole life ahead of her. She will not have stopped to consider this option, even had she sensed the worst. We have various concepts of our own death, and we have an understanding of what follows – not relating to an afterlife, but to the rituals of burial or cremation in front of a collection of mourners. It has a kind of comfort: that we will be missed, and that people will come to say goodbye. But this is unimaginable. No one thinks they will end up with their identity shrouded in mystery, reduced to an inanimate object onto which a stranger superglues plastic cylinders and overlays swabs of clay. Unless held captive, and given time to contemplate an unseemly end, none of this will have crossed her mind.
* * *
I no longer casually observe faces. I can’t help but see people in terms of spatial geometry, facial infrastructure. I ease myself under the skin, get a feel for the foundations. What is the underlying bone structure? How would I reconstruct his or her appearance if presented with their detached skull? When your area of expertise is all around you – when it’s at the very core of human interaction – it’s impossible to switch off. It’s not so much a case of taking work home with me, as it following. Is there something defining about a person’s appearance – shallow scar, lazy eye, bulbous nose, distinctive mole – that would take no subcutaneous instruction, and leave me without a clue? Sometimes a conversation will come to an abrupt halt, or maybe even only skip a beat, and I feel caught out: that look from my companion – not fear exactly, but perhaps an acknowledgement of the threat of invasion, like a prey’s wariness of its hunter – that leads me to think they’ve read my mind. I am looking too deeply. I am peering beneath the skin. I’ve gone too far.
It’s like being caught undressing a woman with your eyes. Except I’ve been caught undressing a face.
SIX
“Holy fucking shit!”
The open-plan kitchen of Jacob’s apartment, the door of an upright freezer ajar before me. Having mistaken it for the fridge – hunting out something to snack on – I am confronted by a human head.
I jump back. And then –– of course –– draw the natural conclusion: it’s not real, is it? It has to be a sculpture.
But no. Eyeball to eyeball, I can see that it is without doubt the severed head of a man of early pension years, icicles spiking from his prickly beard. I see a lost polar explorer – a Franklin, a Scott – exposed to the elements, peering through unblinking deep blue eyes glazed with a layer of ice. Those eyes, framed by powdered lashes, stare past me, at a fixed point on a blank horizon: at a world of white.
My appetite is suddenly suppressed. It is, without doubt, the most weird and unexpected thing I have ever encountered in my life.
Jacob brushes past. “Close that thing,” he says, pushing the door shut before I have the chance. “Fuck, man. You could get me arrested.”
“I could get you arrested? It’s a fucking head. In your freezer. I was looking for something to eat.”
“It’s not what you think,” he says, haughtily.
“No?” I say, still looking at the freezer, as if its door were still open.
“No.”
“In what way? You mean it’s not real?”
“No, it’s real. But it’s... complicated. It’s kinda okay for me to have it.”
“Ah, that clears it all up, then.”
“It’s a cadaver,” he says, accentuating each syllable. “A friend smuggled it out of medical school for me. It’s not like I went out and killed someone. All the same, it’s not exactly something I should be advertising. At least, not until it’s ready for what I want to use it for.”
“I’d ask what that is, but truth be told, I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Let’s just say it’ll be something a little more... dramatic. In a way, I’m doing him a favour. He’ll live on, as art.”
“I’m not sure art was what he donated his body to.”
“Like he cares,” he snorts.
“Ah – the failure of the dead to complain about their plight. They’re just too blasé.”
“Look, he was probably just a tramp. They’re always tramps. Just some nobody, not missed by anybody. And this is the crucial bit – he’s dead.”
Another key difference between the two of us is that Jacob sees art as an excuse for anything; that art exempts him from normal societal boundaries and laws. Me – I care too much about such things.
At his behest I join Jacob at his easel, to inspect the painting of Black. I know how touchy he can be about his work, and purposely avoided studying it until invited. We stand within a rhombus of light at the heart of the room.
“So, this is your latest masterpiece?” I say, instantly regretting my choice of words. I perform a sharp intake of breath, perhaps willing them back into my mouth. They remain out there, hanging in the air, a verbal mist.
“Masterpiece?” he spits in hard syllables. “Who the fuck do you think I am? Jeez, man. Masterpieces are for artists who’ve been dead hundreds of years. I simply paint pictures, and, bizarrely, leave it up to others – often people who haven’t a fucking clue – to decide whether or not they’re any good. Half the time I don’t even know myself.”
“I walked straight into that. The wrong thing to say.”
“Wait until I’m dead. Then you can tal
k about masterpieces.”
Jacob respects my ability, but he knows I’m not a true creative force. That has been clear since college. Sometimes he includes me in his discussions on what it’s like to be creative; at other times I’m blatantly excluded.
“It’s always a great moment when you see a definitive progression,” he tells me as we stand facing his painting, speaking in such a way that suggests I should feel enlightened. “Looking at an old piece and realising you’ve moved on to a whole new level. But at the same time, there’s the eternal damnation of your mistakes, your poor works, being out there – you can’t go and ask for them back, or instruct people to burn them. Monet destroyed his own work, y’know? Van Gogh – he destroyed his own work too. But they did so before the pieces were able to flee the nest. I’d like to track down and take a Stanley knife to some of mine.”
“So… Black,” I say, looking into her painted eyes. “She’s very different from the life models you used to use.”
“How so?” I can sense the mischief in Jacob’s voice. He knows damn-well what I am getting at. The last time I saw his work it depicted men and women so overweight that their bodies had to invent new places to store fat.
“You know… she’s just so ... perfect.”
“Oh, I’ll tell her you think that.”
“Well, compared to the models you were using before,” I say, trying to play down my attraction to Black.