The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘If it was me I’d just work in a bank or the post office. Well away from the people you’re talking to.’

  ‘They’ve glass screens in the Northern Bank.’

  ‘Or a telephonist. That’d be a good job for somebody like that.’

  ‘I believe it comes from the teeth.’

  ‘But cleaning them won’t help. I knew a schoolteacher once and he brushed them ten times a day, but he could still wither plants at the back of the classroom when he said “Amen”.’

  ‘It’s the gums,’ said Nurse Gilliland nodding. ‘Pyorrhoea.’

  ‘And the tongue,’ said Mrs Brennan. ‘A coating on the tongue can leave you like that … it’s just one thing after another.’

  ‘Hawing on people like a dragon.’

  ‘I’ve told Martin always to scrape his tongue first thing in the morning.’

  ‘A tongue strigil,’ said Martin.

  ‘No — a spoon,’ said his mother.

  ‘We did that in class once — Everyday Life in Ancient Rome. When the Romans got sweaty and dirty they covered themselves with oil and scraped it off with a bit of metal called a strigil.’

  ‘The dirty bastes.’

  There was silence for a while after Mrs Brennan’s strong language. People smiled politely and looked over at Father Farquharson.

  ‘Why is it?’ said Nurse Gilliland, ‘that you rarely get rhyming names? It just struck me that somebody with the surname Faul would never be called Paul. Paul Faul.’

  ‘Isn’t he Peter?’ said Mrs Brennan.

  ‘Aye Peter Faul. But I hear what you mean. Paul Faul? I’m not so sure,’ said Mary Lawless. ‘Although I once knew a Pete Street. Lived at the back of the Tech.’

  ‘It’s OK if there’s a Mac in the name,’ said Mrs Brennan. ‘Alan MacCallan, sounds not too bad.’

  Mary Lawless cleared her throat.

  ‘A thing I’ve always wondered is this,’ she said. ‘If you had two weighing machines and you put a foot on each one, what would you weigh? Can we just assume that the sum of the two scales would be your weight? Eh Martin, a bright boy like you should know that. What do you think?’ Martin smiled and shook his head. Mary Lawless went on without waiting for an answer. ‘There’s a dearth of places where you find two weighing machines side by side. So I never get the chance to do my wee experiment.’ Martin nodded. ‘My problem is I think too much. Isn’t that right, Martin?’

  ‘You’re a holy terror, Mary,’ said Mrs Brennan. ‘But there’s none of us getting any younger.’

  ‘Wait till you hear this,’ said Mary Lawless. ‘Yesterday I was just coming out of my front door and who should be there sunning herself but Mrs O’Neill …’

  ‘She’s a lady, a real lady,’ said Mrs Brennan.

  ‘Aye, a dinner lady,’ said Mary Lawless. ‘Anyway I’d been up the stairs and down again and I was out of puff and she says Mary says she you’re getting to be an oul doll. Isn’t that a good one?’

  ‘Getting to be an oul doll,’ said Mrs Brennan, screwing up her face.

  ‘Ach, the advance of age,’ said Nurse Gilliland.

  ‘I see it in my hands,’ said Mary Lawless.

  ‘What, you don’t look in the mirror?’

  ‘I do and I don’t. But when you look in the mirror you subtract things. Sometimes I be sitting and my hands be here …’ Her hands rested on her thighs. ‘And I say to myself — who in under God owns those podgy hands? Then I pick up the skin and it stays up — like making a meringue. They’re the hands of another woman — they’re my Aunt Tessie’s hands and she was buried fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Och, it’s sad right enough.’

  ‘Sad’s not the word for it.’

  ‘Sometimes I catch myself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe and I’m shocked. I say Merciful God how did she get in here? I never knew there was oul women burglars.’

  ‘The body is one thing,’ Father Farquharson shook his head. ‘But did you ever arrive into a room at speed and think, what am I here for?’

  ‘That’s the way I am at this very moment,’ said Mary Lawless. They all recognised what the priest had said and nodded in agreement.

  ‘The mind,’ said Mrs Brennan, ‘is a killer.’

  ‘But what about the soul?’ said Nurse Gilliland. ‘After the body and the mind how does the soul show its age?’

  ‘Aye, I’ve often heard that said,’ said Mrs Brennan, ‘the poor old soul.’

  ‘I suppose — in a kind of spiritual wisdom,’ said Father Farquharson, assuming the question was addressed to him. ‘As we grow older we develop habits of holiness. Ritual is a kind of spiritual keep-fit for the soul, eh?’

  ‘It is — it is indeed, Father.’

  ‘Martin, you’re very quiet tonight,’ said Father Farquharson. ‘Do you do drill at that college?’

  ‘Drill?’ Martin laughed.

  ‘Or whatever they call it nowadays. PE or Gym or Sports.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘What’s your favourite subject?’

  ‘Science.’

  ‘A man of the future and no mistake.’

  ‘Did you ever hear that said, Mary?’ said Mrs Brennan, talking across the conversation. ‘The poor old soul.’

  ‘I did. But I don’t think it means the same thing — what we were talking about.’

  ‘Oh excuse me, constable!’ His mother became very huffy after that. ‘Pardon me for butting in,’ she muttered quietly so that everyone could hear.

  ‘Can I go now?’ said Martin.

  His mother nodded, smiling through him at her guests. As Martin left the room he heard Nurse Gilliland saying, ‘The last day you had a twenty-inch waist, Mary, was the day of your First Communion.’

  When the guests left Martin’s mother asked him for help with the dishes. He grumbled a bit but agreed that she would wash and he would dry. Which meant that she was finished and sitting down before he was. She sat on the chair in front of the fire with her head back. She shouted in to him.

  ‘Thanks be to God to get off my feet,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on the go since this morning. Is there anything wrong, son? You’re very quiet.’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘You’re in a kind of a brown study.’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Have you everything ready for school in the morning?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Martin dried and put the last plate away. She had reminded him. He went into the kitchen and walked past her chair to the cupboard. He reached up and lifted down the button box. The box was of black lacquered material with patterns of roses on its side. It had a sliding lid with a scooped-out D for your fingernail to get a grip. He opened it and began raking through the contents. There were shapes and sizes and colours in here he remembered since childhood — buttons like black beetles, ones of mother-of-pearl, a card with hooks and eyes stitched to it, striped tiny buttons, wooden toggles, plain sensible men’s buttons with four central no-nonsense holes.

  ‘Must you make so much noise?’ said his mother.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Martin, what do you take me for? You come in and make a beeline for the cupboard and get the button box down and start looking through it and you’re not looking for anything.’

  ‘Nothing important. Just some ones I remember. Like this one.’ He held up a yellowish fur-covered button. ‘Remember that?’

  ‘I don’t know what that was off.’ ‘Probably Rupert the Bear.’

  Martin saw what he was looking for. A couple of old Yale keys held together by fuse wire. He slipped one into his pocket but went on looking through the button box for some time.

  ‘Could you waken me at half seven?’

  ‘Why so early?’

  ‘There’s a mass for the exams. In the school chapel.’

  ‘It’s good you’re taking it to heart this year.’

&n
bsp; After about an hour in the dark of his bed he was still awake. At least it seemed like an hour. Maybe it was only fifteen minutes. Time was a bit like Mary Lawless’s elastic measuring tape. It could stretch. Be different things under different conditions. Like when he was trying to pass the forty minutes while mitching the English class. In the dark of the bedroom time dragged as well. The whole scheme was fucking madness. And yet he had volunteered for it. Jesus. Did he dare to eat a peach? If he didn’t get some sleep he wouldn’t be fit for anything. He flinched and turned yet again in the bed. Priests were weird. Far Easts was the rhyming slang for them in school. If he was caught doing what he planned to do … it didn’t bear thinking about. His mother would be summoned to the school. Fuck, she’d be asked to come in to the police barracks, more likely. If he thought of something boring maybe he would drift off. The supper night he’d just endured — especially the priestly contributions. Father Farquharson was one of the weirdest. He was like two different people — one when he was visiting, another when he was in church.

  The making of the Holy Water had been so embarrassing. It had been just after Father Estyn O’Hare had stayed in their house. Martin was one of the altar boys for the Easter ceremonies and one of his tasks was to push the container of water up to Father Farquharson at the front of the church. It was a Ladies of Charity tea urn which held eight gallons and it was mounted on small steel castors. It was so heavy. When Father Farquharson gave the signal that he was ready Martin had to get help from a man to start it moving. He blushed as he pushed, trying to make as little noise as possible with the steel wheels, which were squealing and chattering over the floor. And every single person in the church turned and stared at him leaning his weight into this stupid thing, his two arms out straight in front of him, pushing for all he was worth. And Father Farquharson standing on the altar steps with his nose in the air and a book in his hands. Then one of the castors caught in the broken metal grille on the floor — there was a clack sound as the wheel socketed in. The water see-sawed over the lip of the urn and some of it hit the floor with a slap everybody in the church heard. Father Farquharson was of no help whatsoever. This was ritual — there was no way he could move to help. He looked away with a little sigh. The fault was entirely Martin’s. He’d been warned. ‘Take care you don’t get stuck in that broken grille.’ But how could he have seen ahead? He was behind the bloody tea urn, pushing. One of the men from the St Vincent de Paul stepped into the middle aisle and lifted the urn’s castor free of the grille. Martin’s ears were red with blushing. His gym shoes slipped on the wet floor but he didn’t fall. He got to the altar steps and Father Farquharson began the blessing of the water. Praying over it from the book and putting drops of holy oils in it and some chrism, making crosses in it — and over it — with his finger, sometimes three times. He breathed on it in the shape of a cross and he dipped the bottom of the lit paschal candle in it three times. And each time he said what he said, he said it higher. It was like somebody was squeezing him by the balls. Three, like forty, seemed to be an important number in religion — three persons in God, three Hail Marys, three crosses on Calvary. His mother also used forty a lot. ‘She’s as cross as forty cats,’ she’d say and she was always going for ‘forty winks’. If only he could get forty winks now. He’d settle for thirty-nine. He turned yet again in the bed.

  The next day Martin and another altar boy, Maginn, had been asked to give out the Holy Water. The thing that amazed Martin was Father Farquharson’s attitude, after the seriousness of the performance the night before. People came and went all morning bringing with them an assortment of bottles — blue milk of magnesia bottles, lemonade bottles, flat whiskey bottles that fitted the pocket. The two boys filled them all from the urn and handed them back — Maginn from the tap where the tea would normally come out, Martin from the surface of the water. Any bottle Martin put in horizontally made pleasant glooping noises as it filled. Martin’s hands were raw red with the cold dipping in and out the water. About midday Father Farquharson came into the baptistry.

  ‘Hello, boys,’ he said, ‘How are things?’

  ‘The Holy Water is getting low, Father.’

  ‘Holy smoke! Stupendous. We must have been doing a good trade then?’ Father Farquharson moved up and down on his toes. He leaned over and looked into the urn. ‘Golly! You’re right. An impending drought. Maybe that’s because you sloshed so much of it out on to the floor last night, Martin.’

  ‘What will we do if we run out, Father?’ Maginn asked.

  ‘Fill her up at the tap, man — at the back of the parochial house.’

  Martin looked at Maginn, then at the priest to see if it was a joke. ‘It’s quite all right — all quite liturgical. Use the bucket — if you can’t bring the mountain to Mohammed … Martin don’t look so worried. You see, it has all got to do with atoms. What you have here is concentrated stuff. It stands to reason we can only bless so much of it on Easter Saturday and yet that amount has to do us the whole year. So we add water. Dilute it, so to speak. To make it go round.’ Father Farquharson interlocked his fingers and when he pulled on them they did not come apart. ‘Atoms hold on to one another, so to speak. Haven’t you done any science in school?’

  Why couldn’t he sleep? Macbeth talks about sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. What did that mean? The sleeve of your jumper or pullover or something would have had to unravel first, so that it could be knitted up again. Shakespeare was crap sometimes, but he was a hell of a lot better than fucking Milton. Darned — his mother talked about darning socks when she was young. She had a wooden mushroom thing to prove it. She just slipped it inside the sock and the job was so much easier to do. He twisted and turned. He was exhausted trying to get over to sleep. He wondered if he should get up and make some hot milk. His mother’s remedy. But at least he was warm now and there were periods when he drifted off into a state of half-sleep where words became weird and repeated and distorted. A word like gwine or murock or feburate — what did they mean? Or pellagera or feculant or mermish. They were like place names signposting a part of the country he didn’t know. Why did they disturb him? They had almost a feel to them, they weighed too heavy or too light, they had sandpaper edges or cut his lip like paper when he spoke them and there was blood left on the gummed edge. And his face was too close to the moon — like velvet sandpaper … or he was falling. Falling dreams were the worst, where his stomach elevatored in the safety of his bed. He could experience falling, if the brain put out the right chemicals. And he hated it. Like when he was a baby, like when grown-ups threw him up in the air and caught him on the way down. The first time he must have giggled, because whoever it was thought he liked it and threw him up again and again. Each time his stomach swooned as he fell. The uncle or whoever it was added variations — to make the thing seem more dangerous — like clapping hands between the throwing and the catching. Like closing, or pretending to close his eyes when Martin began his fall. Whatever way it was done, Martin was terrified by the game but, perversely, his face showed delight. It was exactly the feeling he was experiencing now. With Blaise. With Kavanagh. But this time the stomach was fine. It was the air. In the pitch black. He felt the breeze. He had to distinguish whether it was the air was moving or him. If it was him, he had to work out whether he was moving horizontally, say, being driven at sixty miles per hour along a road through the darkest night. Or whether he was travelling perpendicularly downwards and the brain somehow had not been told to react in the normal stomach scream way. A bellyful of — was it adrenalin? If he was travelling perpendicularly down he wondered if there was a method of escape. The situation was not yet urgent but at least he would like to reassure himself that, firstly, there was a trapeze or some such thing and secondly, that it was within reach. If not a trapeze, then at least a catcher. But if a catcher caught him, firmly locking hands, the way atoms are supposed to, according to Father Farquharson, holding the wrists for safety, some time could elapse before he realised, or the
y jointly realised — for he had no way of knowing the mental state of the catcher — that both of them were falling. The safety of the grip was an illusion. Although the sinews and bone and muscle had locked on to his hands, the catcher’s wiry legs were not hooked around the bar of anything. The catcher in effect was not attached. But not to worry, there would be safety nets below them. Except that somehow word had been got to him that they were not yet in place. Things had been delayed. Negotiations were not yet finished and the nets were lying flat on the ground and he would die instantly with the pattern of a safety net embedded in his skin. And then people could use him as a grid for playing noughts and crosses before they buried him …

  8. An Early Morning in School

  He woke before his mother and was dressed when he heard her call. He didn’t feel like eating anything. On his way down the road to school he smoked a cigarette to calm his nerves. It was the sign of a real smoker, smoking on your own. Not just a social thing. Not showing off.

  The clock in the post office said seven minutes to eight. He was in good time. Take it easy — he didn’t want to get there too early. But he wanted the maximum amount of time to do the business. Fuck, he was mad. He wished Kavanagh had come along to keep dick. It would be a comfort of some sort. Right now, the only way he could cope with what he was about to do was not to think about it. Not sleeping hadn’t helped.

  The school driveway was empty. Not a soul. Martin walked up, keeping close to the wall and the science buildings. If you kept in close to the wall you couldn’t be seen from the main staff corridor on the first floor. He didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why he was in school so early. The first thing was to dump the bag. He took his time. There was nobody in the locker room yet. Nor in the corridors. He climbed the stairs and passed the cleaners’ store room. The door was dark brown, wood-grained — with its number, 109, painted in faded yellow.

  He went up the steps towards the chapel with as little noise as possible. Through the coloured glass doors he tried to make out if mass had started. Then he heard Condor’s unmistakably deep voice.