The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Like Daddy? I suppose.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Somebody said.’

  ‘Why the sneer?’

  ‘I wasn’t sneering. This is just the way I talk.’ Blaise edged the group away from the track on to the avenue of trees. The leaves were just coming out. The path at this point was not broad enough for the three of them to walk abreast and Martin fell behind.

  ‘Fuck past papers,’ said Blaise. ‘What we want is this year’s papers.’

  All three boys laughed.

  ‘That’d be smashin.’ Martin jumped up and snatched a leaf from a branch. ‘Going in knowing the questions.’

  ‘If you knew the questions,’ said Kavanagh, ‘you could nick some answer booklets — no bother — and do the exam at home with all your books and quotes and all, then go in and pretend to do it and leave your good answer and take your drivel one out with you. That’d be some cheating.’

  ‘To take the nearest way,’ said Blaise. ‘Did either of you ever cheat?’

  ‘You wanna hear what he did at his O grades. Tell him, Kavanagh.’

  ‘An ordinary matchbox — OK. You write out all your quotes with a mapping pen, as small a nib as you can get, on tiny bits of card. Then you wedge them into the matchbox. I kid you not. Top right is organic formulae, bottom right is inorganic, top left is definitions, bottom left is … whatever … I don’t remember.’

  ‘How do you know top from bottom?’ said Blaise.

  ‘The sandpaper is only on the right hand side. Of Swan Vestas. If you use Bluebell just peel off the sandpaper on the left hand side. Anyway, your bits of card are so small you can palm them.’

  ‘Elegant enough.’

  ‘We used to cog all the time. Just so long as you don’t get caught. Everybody does it.’

  ‘I remember last year when Ned the Ted was in charge,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Ned doesn’t give a fuck about anything — just gets behind the paper and sits on his arse the whole time. They were only Christmas exams, nothing important. Anyway the door opens and in walks the Reverend Head. You could hear books thumping on to the floor all over the place.’

  ‘In first year,’ said Martin, ‘I was doing the Bishop’s exam. Did you do that at your last school?’

  ‘Yeah — every Catholic in every diocese has to do it,’ said Blaise. ‘It’s like the Spanish Inquisition all over again.’

  ‘And I had this boil on the back of my neck. Jesus, it was so sore you could feel your heart beating in it. Like the biggest pimple you’ve ever had. Hard as a brick. Anyway I wrote as much as I could on the first question — but I hadn’t a clue about any of the others so I burst the bastard. Squeezed it.’

  ‘Ah fuck, you dirty pig,’ shouted Kavanagh, pushing him away.

  ‘I did — I did — then I went up to the guy and pointed to the gloop going down my collar. And he could hardly look. Get out, he says, get outa here. And I never came back. Retired injured.’

  ‘One less bishop for Ireland,’ said Blaise.

  ‘Remember the first time we got a woman invigilator?’

  ‘Aye. She was OK. Not a complete bag.’

  ‘She was lovely. The grey suit, the high heels and all.’

  ‘Anyway she announces at the beginning if there is anything she can do to help. Just ask.’

  ‘And Brennan here wanted to put up his hand …’

  ‘You dirty bastard …’

  ‘No — no he wanted to put up his hand to make your woman come down, all concerned like, and bend over and listen to what he has to say. Which was …’

  ‘And I’m supposed to say Please, Miss, I have an erection.’

  ‘Confusion. Sharp intake of breath,’ Kavanagh elbowed in again. ‘Your woman thinks. Then she says If you would just step outside we could try hitting it with a cold spoon and if that doesn’t work perhaps a jag from a compass point would bring it down.’

  Martin was laughing, walking backwards now. He had a habit of framing stuff with his fingers — making a finger rectangle approximate to a movie screen or a photograph. The sunlight was slanting down through the lime trees and shadows of the new leaves were moving on the ground. The trees and path stretched ahead like an example of perspective. Martin ran round and framed it up.

  ‘Don’t be such a fucking pain,’ said Kavanagh. Martin went on doing it for a while. He didn’t want to stop just because Kavanagh had said. ‘It’s just showing off.’

  ‘It certainly is not. It’s practice. I’m developing my eye.’ Martin felt he had to keep doing it for long enough to show that he wasn’t Kavanagh’s slave. ‘Aren’t photographs astonishing?’ said Martin. ‘In a scientific way? Paper soaked in silver nitrate — light darkens it. That’s the whole of photography. That’s the best of all the photographs that have ever been taken — the masterpieces and the box Brownie snaps from nearly every household in the Western world — all the emotion, all the politics, all the news pictures of disasters … all the love, the posturing, people caught off guard …’

  ‘All the pornography,’ said Blaise.

  ‘All of it is there because silver nitrate darkens with light. Fuck me.’

  ‘What about LPs? That’s better science,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Recorded vibrations in plastic. So you can record all the greatest music in the world.’

  ‘This is all bollicks,’ said Blaise. ‘The science has nothing to do with it. That’s like saying what about charcoal. A burnt bit of stick. Then you pick it up and make a mark on paper and before you know where you are it’s a fucking drawing by Leonardo. That is, if your name is Leonardo. Why get amazed at that? It’s like saying you add chromium or strontium to glass and it turns different colours. So fucking what? It took a bit more than science to make the rose window at Chartres.’

  ‘How could a stained glass window be just one colour?’ said Martin.

  ‘Jesus, do you know nothing? A rose window is a shape — not a fucking colour. The window at Chartres is rose shaped.’ There was an embarrassed silence. Blaise had raised his voice and Martin had been wrongfooted. Kavanagh spoke to save the situation.

  ‘A good mate of mine, Gus — he was here last year — he told me that maths was as beautiful as music. Maths had the ability to make him cry. Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The simplest and the shortest way of solving is the most beautiful. Result. Tears.’ They all laughed. ‘Have you seen the windows in the chapel here?’

  ‘This is my first week.’ said Blaise. ‘Chapel is hardly a priority.’

  ‘I thought boarders had to go to mass every morning,’ said Kavanagh. Blaise looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘There are other places one can seek sanctuary.’ By now they had reached the end of the avenue of trees. They moved towards the Wee Field.

  ‘Hey, if we’re going to have a smoke we’d better go now,’ said Martin. ‘I don’t want to be going into class smelling of it.’ They headed towards the toilets. Blaise asked Kavanagh,

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘No,’ said Kavanagh. ‘I prefer my health risks to be venereal.’

  ‘I like that,’ Blaise said.

  As they were going into the toilets some of the Gaelic football crowd were coming out. Logan stopped Kavanagh and said, ‘What did the lemmings say when they charged off the cliff?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Kavanagh. ‘What did the lemmings say when they charged off the cliff?’

  ‘Fuckin graaa-aa-aa-vity.’

  Inside, the three of them found space against the white tiled wall. Martin pulled out a ten packet of Regal with two in it.

  ‘Put those away,’ said Blaise. He produced a full twenty of Marlboro and opened it.

  ‘Where’d you get them?’ said Martin.

  ‘Duty free.’ Martin took one and lit it.

  ‘Do you like them?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re OK.’ Blaise took a cigarette out. He looked clumsy with it — lit it awkwardly.

  ‘You’re mad, all of you,’ s
aid Kavanagh. ‘Destroying your lungs. More than your lungs. Did you know that smoking makes your feet drop off?’ They laughed. ‘It’s not funny. The arteries in your legs degenerate, you get gangrene. Your feet go black then drop off.’

  ‘Not after one cigarette,’ said Blaise.

  ‘Don’t be such a fuckin doom merchant.’

  ‘I only do it occasionally,’ said Blaise. ‘I’m only being sociable. Here.’ He handed the rest of the packet to Martin. Blaise held the cigarette between his middle and ring fingers. His eyes squirmed when he brought the cigarette up to his face. Eventually he gave up and dropped the cigarette to the floor, only half smoked, and squidged it out with his shoe.

  ‘Do you like Balkan Sobranie?’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Very posh tobacco. Have you never seen them? Pastel colours, gold tips? I can get them, if you want to try them.’

  ‘How?’

  Blaise grinned and thrust both hands into his pockets.

  *

  For some time Blaise was glad to wear his tweedy jacket and light trousers. He told Martin and Kavanagh that there was a wardrobe at home stuffed with various school uniforms. But the authorities were adamant that he had to get this particular school uniform quickly. An oldish woman, not his mother, it was said, came and took him to Fergal Quinn’s. Quinn’s had a monopoly on the contract for the school blazers. Fergal Quinn was a brother of the Bishop.

  So Blaise appeared in the daffs at lunch time in his bright new uniform. Nobody whistled because they were still wary of him. He was carrying a small holdall. From it he produced a box of fifty Balkan Sobranie. He opened the box and passed the multi-coloured cigarettes around. Then he took from the bag a bottle of Bison vodka. It had a pale stem of grass from the Russian steppe standing upright in its centre. Then a column of triangular paper cups like tiny dunces’ caps. He passed them around and poured a splash into each paper cup. He apologised, saying that in an ideal world vodka should be drunk ice cold. Also that there were not enough paper cups and when people were finished it would help if they could pass the cup to somebody else. There were so many takers for the vodka that nobody got drunk. One splash each. They all pretended to be drunk, staggering around, bouncing off the tiled walls, shouting and whooping, some smoking pastel-coloured cigarettes as they imagined sophisticated but drunk women would do, others holding the cups to the top of their heads as if they were dunces — drunken dunces, at that, as they clowned around. But when the bell went everyone composed themselves, straightened their blazers and ties and headed for class. Blaise stood at the daffs doorway — it had a brick protecting wall to prevent people seeing directly into the toilets — with his holdall open and the empty vodka bottle inside it, collecting the used paper cups. ‘Cover your tracks — always cover your tracks,’ he said to Martin as he went out. Kavanagh told Martin later that Blaise had gone around picking the paper cups out of the toilet bowls because the wax paper would not flush away.

  One day a typed notice appeared on all the main doors inside the school which said that due to circumstances beyond the control of the authorities the school would close early at 2.20p.m. Every pupil chose to believe it and left. Investigation of the note traced the typeface and its slightly eccentric e below the line to the Spiritual Director’s typewriter. The Spiritual Director had allowed boys to type articles for the school magazine. It was after this that the school put up a notice to say that ‘official’ school notices would be displayed only on the noticeboard with the lockable glass doors.

  Two weeks later another notice appeared — this time inside the glass case — dismissing the school at 2.20p.m. and there was a stampede for the gates before any of the teachers could prevent it. The notice said that there would be a celebration of a special mass for ST MARY EUPHRASIA PELLETIER, Virgin at 6 o’clock in the school chapel for those who wished to return for it.

  These things were blamed on Blaise but he stood with his hands up and said: not guilty. He didn’t even know where the Spiritual Director’s room was. What would be the point in him doing something like that? He was a boarder and couldn’t get out anyway.

  4. An Evening Stroll

  The photograph is of a split second. A man attempting to leap a large puddle. But you can see that he’s not going to make it — he has no chance of making it. His heel is cocked like a gun and about to strike its own reflection in the water. The man is moving so fast that he is out of focus, fudged, but somehow his reflection seems sharper. He has launched himself from a half-submerged wooden ladder and the reactive force has set up ripples close to the ladder. They have not yet had time to spread and break the stillness of the water surface.

  Martin pored over the Carrier-Bresson book. He was totally absorbed in it — had spent a lot of time over each incredible image. He heard someone laugh, too loud for the public library Reference section. It was Kavanagh. He was at the far side of the reading room leaning over, talking to this girl. Martin could see that she was embarrassed by the noise he’d made. She put her head down so that he could see the straight parting that ran from brow to crown, but her shoulders were shaking with laughter. She was Philippa Dobson, but people called her Pippa. She looked up at Kavanagh and said no to whatever he was proposing.

  Martin yawned and got to his feet. He could do with going downstairs to the toilet. The doors of the reading room closed with a breath of air behind him. The staircase was of white marble and Martin liked the way the steps were shallow. You could glide down, rather than step. He stood there resting his left hand on the balustrade. On the landing was a glass case where a book exhibit was always on show. There was a girl standing looking into the glass case. Immediately he was taken with her. She was lovely. Not so much beautiful, but somebody he felt he could fall in love with. This was always happening to him, but somehow with this woman it was immediately more intense. He felt certain. She was half crouched, holding back her hair from her face in case it interfered with what she was looking at. Martin slowed the pace of his descent right down: he wanted to have her in his sights for as long as possible. He could adore her. She was in jeans and a white blouse, holding a folder and some books against her chest. Martin decided to have a look in the glass case even though he had passed it hundreds of times in the past month. The girl moved around to the opposite side, concentrating on the display, totally unaware of him. She was tanned and her hair was streaked with blonde. She had soft, deep brown eyes. There were spotlights focused inside the case and he saw her profile reflected on the glass at a mirror angle. She was lovely from both sides. Like an Italian film star whose name he couldn’t remember. He could see through one of her images in the case, making her seem like a ghost. The image was paler than her reality. An apparition. She tilted her head sideways the better to see something and he imagined her as Snow White. In her glass coffin. Fuck, he had her dead before he’d even met her. She had a small silver cross on a chain at her throat. Her hand went from her hair to the cross and she slid it to and fro along its thin chain. Even her hands were lovely. Then she raised her eyes and looked up at Martin. Looking at her. He nearly died. The girl’s eyes were so deep and dark. Her gaze held for a moment, then she switched it off and looked down into the case again. He swooned — saw himself cartwheel and tumble down the marble of the staircase. The more shallow the steps the more frequently he would bang his head. Like trailing his fingers down a glass washboard. Causing vibrations inside him. Martin looked away, afraid to be caught staring at her if she was to look up at him a second time. He felt the hairs on his neck prickle, either in anticipation or reaction, he didn’t know which. Through the stuff of her white blouse he could discern curlicues of even whiter lace. Jesus. He was pretending to look intensely at the display as they circled the case. And yet if he had been examined on what was in the case he would have been unable to answer. There were books. Yes, of that he was sure. But whether they were in English or Latin or Irish … or were about cookery or bridge-building or word origins — he hadn’t
a clue. She continued to stare down at the exhibits, then she raised one eyebrow, a bit like the way Blaise did. She disapproves of something. Maybe think of something to say. So — you don’t agree Or open a conversation with I have found inconsistencies here myself. She straightened up, flashed him a quick smile and climbed the stairs away from him. Shout now — Hey, come back, I’ve something more to say to you.… Or Excuse me, you forgot your … Or why did you smile at me just now? She climbed the staircase with just the soles of her shoes coming in contact with the marble. Her heels made no contact. She walked with a straight back, with elegance. And not once did she look over her shoulder at him. If she’d been Lot’s wife she’d have lived. One pillar of salt less for the world.

  He had to be careful when he went back up. Should he tell Kavanagh he had seen the most amazing woman, a woman he fancied way beyond the call of duty? If he pointed her out then Kavanagh would be over beside her like a shot, saying, what’s your name and what school do you go to and my mate holds you in the highest esteem, fancies you something awful, I kid you not — he thinks you the most salubrious thing he’s ever seen. Then he would grin and point Martin out. ‘Him — there. The one with the scarlet throbbing face.’ And that would be the end of it. The girl would be embarrassed, pack her books and leave. And never come back. ‘Some skinny geek I saw prowling around the stairs in the library fancies me.’

  When he went into the reading room Kavanagh was back in his place and the Pippa woman had her head bent over, studying. Martin sat down and scanned the room. Where was she? The ghost woman, the reflection? Then he saw her, halfway down the room, sitting with her back to him — her blonde streaked hair, her straight back.

  Kavanagh said, ‘What are you smiling about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Martin snapped open the rings of his physics file and hooked them into the holes of the last sheet of notes he had written up.

  ‘There’s skulduggery afoot. Shenanigans of some sort in progress,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Honest. Naw,’ said Martin. Then he couldn’t stop himself. ‘I just saw an extraordinary woman.’