The Anatomy School

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘What’s on?’ they both said. Blaise handed them a paper each and turned to the first page.

  ‘Macbeth,’ he said.

  ‘Fucksake we know that — we’ve been studying it all year so it would be on. What’s the question?’

  ‘Imagery … How does the imagery contribute … A quote from Caroline Spurgeon …’

  ‘I can do this one,’ said Martin. ‘I’ve already done an essay on this. Ill-fitting clothes and all. Who’s on the poetry?’

  ‘Ummm — John Donne — Milton — Hopkins.’

  They talked and laughed their way through the whole exam paper, then began to open the others.

  ‘Come on, lads,’ said Kavanagh. ‘A bit more systematic. A bit of self-discipline is needed here. Photos, Brennan.’

  The English paper was laid flat on the desk and Martin took a reading with his light meter.

  ‘No walking about,’ he said. ‘It’ll shake the floor.’ He released the shutter and at the noise the other two stood in exaggerated attitudes — like a game of statues. Martin ignored them and counted the seconds aloud: ‘Fuck the Queen — one. Fuck the Queen — two. Fuck the Queen — three.’

  The statue joke wore off after a while but Martin continued to count the seconds in the same way. Even when it was into himself.

  When the English paper was photographed Blaise took one of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office envelopes, its fresh gum shining, and slid all the papers back into it. Kavanagh had brought a dish of water and a sponge from the bathroom. The gummed flap was wiped and the envelope sealed. It looked perfect.

  ‘What more could you want?’ said Blaise.

  ‘A big girl lying on her back,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Ask and you shall receive.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe not the real thing,’ said Blaise. ‘But a picture of the real thing. Lovely ladies and gentlemen showing their wares.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘In your wet dreams,’ said Blaise.

  ‘Porn?’

  ‘If that’s the case, I can do without the pictures of gentlemen,’ said Martin over his shoulder.

  ‘How much are they showing?’

  ‘Everything you’re interested in — they show more than their wares.’

  ‘Where is this stuff?’

  ‘Don’t fucking scoff. I can get it — for you.’

  ‘Well, do then. Share that kind of thing around.’ Martin looked hard at Kavanagh to see if he was serious. ‘Just curiosity,’ Kavanagh said to Martin. ‘It’s all part of our education.’ He hung his tongue out like a dog. Martin turned up his nose.

  ‘That kind of stuff. I don’t know …’

  ‘Martin sounds like he disapproves,’ said Blaise. ‘But I knew he would. You’re so steeped in establishment values. Pornography is all about class. The people at the top tell the people at the bottom what they can look at, what they can read. It’s OK for the censor, who sits and views this material day in day out without being corrupted, but just show it to a working-class chap and he’ll be utterly destroyed by it. How dare they?’

  ‘Pornography just makes you want to wank. And that can’t be good.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanking,’ said Blaise. Martin rolled his eyes and laughed. As if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The shutter whirred and clunked. ‘Everybody does it, so it can’t be wrong.’

  ‘Every man for himself.’ Kavanagh was laughing. ‘Do you think girls wank?’

  ‘Naw — how could they?’ said Martin. ‘They don’t have a cock. Or so I’m led to believe.’

  ‘Such vast anatomical knowledge,’ said Blaise. He too was laughing. He began speaking directly to Kavanagh. ‘In England the people in charge are the upper classes. Here in bog Ireland it’s the clergy. They make the rules. St Patrick would have been far better employed if he’d driven out the priests, instead of the snakes …’

  ‘They are the snakes,’ said Kavanagh. ‘Blacking out pictures in art books. They say it was Condor did that personally — sat up all night doing it — the Indian ink bathing trunks.’

  ‘Remember second year?’ said Martin ‘The biology books with the twenty pages guillotined out.’

  ‘Human Reproduction,’ Kavanagh told Blaise. ‘They thought we were so stupid we wouldn’t look up the index.’

  As the other two talked Martin worked his way through the other subject papers methodically, turning pages, flattening the centre fold with a rub of his gloved finger. Each time the shutter mechanism worked it made a satisfying clunk. Turn the page. Martin said he felt like a doctor, what with the clear gloves and the hypodermic feel to the cable release each time he pressed it. Blaise lay on the bed and Kavanagh was on the floor with his feet in the hearth.

  ‘I should get somebody to write out the answers for me beforehand,’ said Blaise. ‘On blank answer books — and bring them in. One of you guys could do it for me.’

  ‘I’m no good,’ said Martin. ‘If I did it for you you’d probably fail. Even knowing the friggin questions. And a handwriting expert would put us in jail.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have to be an expert,’ said Kavanagh. ‘But why wouldn’t you do them yourself?’

  ‘I’m a lazy bastard.’ They all smiled and nodded. ‘And I’m a dumbfuck speller.’

  ‘It’d be just an extra risk,’ said Kavanagh. ‘You’d get caught going in with it.’

  ‘I need a piss,’ said Martin.

  ‘Third on the right,’ Kavanagh told him. ‘Don’t forget to take the gloves off.’

  ‘If I was you, I’d keep them on,’ shouted Blaise.

  In the bathroom Martin wondered if he should take them off. At least the right hand one. In the end he decided not to. The glove material made whispering noises as he unzipped. The bathroom shelves were crowded with bottles of shampoo and conditioner, lotions and moisturising creams, deodorants and perfumes; the waste bin was full of bundled tissues with make-up on them; nail files and waxing strips, a jam jar of soft brushes and powder puffs, packets of sanitary pads and tampons sat openly on the shelf beside the toilet. Utterly mysterious. Spells and potions. When shall we three meet again. There was a separate shower as well as a bath. He took a tampon out of the box and looked at it. Like a little white cardboard tube with a string. A little stick of dynamite. He didn’t want to think too much about it and replaced it carefully just as he’d found it. No incriminating fingerprints. Before he pissed he lifted the seat. When he finished he put it back down again. The toilet flushed with a stainless steel lever. He was going to wash his hands, then remembered he was wearing gloves. It would be so great to have a bathroom like this.

  When he went back in to join the others he felt they had been talking about him. There was a long pause before Kavanagh said, ‘Would anybody pay good money to know what was coming up?’

  ‘Don’t even think it,’ said Blaise. ‘It would be round the school in two minutes — and somebody’d shop us. This is definitely just for the three of us.’

  ‘We must be very careful not to do too well,’ said Kavanagh. ‘If three of us were to end up getting ninety-eight per cent they’d smell a rat.’

  ‘If Martin got fifty-eight per cent,’ said Blaise, ‘they’d smell a rat.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ There was a lot of nervous laughter going on — Kavanagh and Blaise were on a high. Martin was trying to be in the same sort of mood but was failing.

  ‘What’s up Brennan?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Martin. He hated being slagged at any time, but couldn’t bear it now when he was feeling so iffy. About the cheating. About everything. He wanted to cry more than laugh. All the time his innards were falling, like in a fast elevator.

  ‘There is something getting up Brennan’s nose,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘No, there isn’t.’ He went on turning the pages, pressing the remote cable, counting his seconds. But he knew he was on a greased slope and there was nothing he could reach out for
to stop his slide. A slope was gravity sideways — Galileo’s inclined plane.

  In school the next morning Martin and Kavanagh knocked on the staff room door and asked for Jacques Cousteau — by his real name. They told him they had a free double and they wanted to develop some film. He lent them his key. The darkroom was a walk-in book cupboard, off the physics lab. They thought it better if Kavanagh sat outside — a lookout to put anybody off the scent if they came into the lab.

  Martin sat inside, where the darkness was total. Pitch black. He had seen pitch being poured on the roads — oily treacle. But the word was not accurate because pitch shone, was glossy, whereas the dark of the darkroom had nothing shiny about it. Like it was fur. In the Hopkins sonnet: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark not day’. Fell was a covering of hair. Hopkins, in his despair, felt his face was being pressed into it. But even fur and hair could have a sheen to it. The dark of the darkroom was matt black — a quilted coffin with the lid screwed down which had been put in the earth and covered by five feet of soil. No chink of light, no pinpoint. No shape. Shape totally disappeared and could only be reestablished by touch. It was as if the blackness was wrapped around him — it was flat, one dimensional. To get any sense of it not being flat he had to reach out and touch something. He found and saw things with his fingers. This must be what blind people experience. Dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon. That fucker Milton again.

  He loaded the two films into the developing tank and accurately poured in the developer, guided only by his sense of touch. He agitated the round tank in his hand, hearing the gurgle as he did so — listening to the ticking of the timer. As he waited in the dark he always turned his face up, like some sort of a flower.

  What the fuck was he going to do? Nothing about this whole scam felt right for him. He wished he could think himself into Blaise’s position of justification — but he was never any good at that kind of argument, he couldn’t argue to convince himself. The thoughts he had wakened with that morning went on repeating in his head all day. Last night in the first rush of enthusiasm he had seen the English paper. And he couldn’t forget it — that was an impossible thing to do. But he hadn’t looked at any of the others — the Physics or the Chemistry or the Latin. He had photographed them, yes, but he had only looked at their surfaces — he was blind to what they said. He had made sure the print was in focus, but had not actually read the meaning of the text. He had been absorbed in getting the photography right while the other two had talked and taken notes about what questions had actually been set.

  Martin made up his mind that after he had developed the negatives he would hand them over to Blaise and Kavanagh and tell them he was having nothing more to do with it. But what if Blaise was right? That the whole establishment was corrupt and doing something like this would help bring about its downfall? It could only be changed by an accumulation of such acts. He’d read that the photographer, Dorothea Lange, had given up on the idea of the single picture — the bull’s eye theory of photography — that somehow it could all be captured on the one piece of paper. A collection of pictures was better, a lifetime of pictures even more so. To simplify was to falsify.

  Last night they had agreed that Blaise would take the resealed envelopes back to school with him. It was Kavanagh who suggested that Martin take an extra roll of film as a cover, just in case somebody, like Cousteau, asked awkward questions. Let’s see the film you just developed, boys. And that was them fucking dead. So they sat around and made faces and Martin snapped them. He used the delayed action to get into some of them himself. The flash seemed to burn the centre of his vision to a black hole. Once the negatives had been developed and were seen to be OK the exam papers, snug in their new envelopes, could be put back in the store room at the first opportunity and nobody would be any the wiser.

  The alarm bell on the timer rang, startling him. He changed the developer for the stop bath. He knew that Kavanagh could hear the bell outside. He’d be wondering, is it OK? Did the light get in, somehow or other? While the films were washing, Martin went out and gave Kavanagh the thumbs up. Kavanagh came in. Martin wiped the hanging strips with squeegee tongs and finished them off with a blow from the hair drier. He tore a page from a jotter and folded it over so that it formed a wallet of sorts for the finished negatives. He put them carefully in his inside pocket. He did the same for the negatives of the three of them larking about.

  ‘To the daffs, for a smoke.’

  The break bell had already gone and they walked across the crowded quad.

  ‘What was Blaise rabbiting on about last night while I was working my back out taking the photographs?’

  ‘The usual pomposities.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Shelley, for God’s sake. Nothing that my masters knew or taught I wanted to learn.’

  ‘Shelley?’

  ‘Blaise thinks it’s a reasonable assumption: to say whatever we’ve been taught is wrong.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ said Martin. ‘Surely that’s bollicks.’

  ‘Yeah it is — he says things just to test you — just to make you think.’

  ‘Just to annoy you.’

  Inside the daffs they shouldered through the others to their corner. A moment later Blaise arrived. He was smiling.

  ‘Any developments?’ he asked. He had an eyebrow which would arch and loop as he spoke, or when he would listen. If Martin said something and Blaise’s eyebrow went up he knew he was beaten.

  ‘Ha-ha.’ Martin patted his inside pocket.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Did you put the papers back last night?’ said Martin.

  ‘No. I wanted to be sure the negatives were OK.’ Martin’s face must have betrayed how he felt. ‘It’ll be OK, Martin. Trust me. Stop worrying. I’ll put them back when the time is right. Then we’ve won.’

  ‘But not until then.’

  ‘Where are they now?’ asked Kavanagh.

  ‘Not in but under my drawer. In the dorm.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s a good place — that space beneath a drawer. It’s where I kept these.’

  He produced a flat brown envelope and handed it to Kavanagh. Kavanagh opened it and peered in. He inserted a hand and pulled a small photo out. He turned it around trying to make out what he was seeing.

  ‘Jesus.’ Just then Sean McMahon, one of Sharkey’s Republican crowd was passing. He saw better what the photo was from a distance.

  ‘For fuck sake,’ he said and reached round Kavanagh and snatched the photo out of his hand.

  ‘Who’s messing?’

  ‘Where’d you get this?’ shouted McMahon.

  ‘It belongs to Foley — give it back.’ Kavanagh made beckoning gestures. ‘I haven’t even had a chance to look at it yet.’

  ‘It’s a big cunt — like you,’ shouted McMahon. He was backing away to where Sharkey and his crowd were, over by the right hand cubicles. Kavanagh was following him. McMahon reached out and gave the photo to Sharkey and made a grab for the envelope in Kavanagh’s hand. It wasn’t a fight. Everybody knew when a fight was starting — the way the crowd moved. This was different. This was pure codology — messing. Martin was close behind Kavanagh.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Nobody seemed to know. Blaise elbowed his way into the mělée.

  ‘Dirty photos.’ There was an outcry.

  ‘Let’s see.’ Kavanagh snapped the picture back from Sharkey.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Is she wearing any knickers?’

  ‘It’s your big sister, Foley.’

  ‘Can you see her nipples?’

  ‘Fuck her nipples, can you see her tits?’

  Blaise was shouting for people to get back — he was using his elbows to fend guys off, trying to clear space for himself. Kavanagh’s bulk shielded Blaise from the mob of guys who were pressing in. Both of them blocked the cubicle doorway.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Blaise. Kavanagh dropped his voice.

  ‘Wh
at are they?’

  ‘Just some pics. Get back.’ Blaise made to kick out at the press of bodies. Kavanagh helped him.

  ‘Rabble — begone,’ he shouted and shoved them back. ‘You blocks, you stones. You worse than bollicks.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ shouted Martin from behind. Kavanagh, still holding tightly on to the brown envelope and the picture he had snatched back from Sharkey pulled Martin and Blaise into the cubicle and slammed the door shut. Those left outside slapped the door with the flat of their hands. Somebody shouted, ‘They’re away in for a wank.’

  ‘Give us Barabbas.’

  Kavanagh reached into the envelope and produced a small pile of pictures.

  ‘What have we got?’

  ‘They’re actual prints. This is not your Health and Efficiency,’ said Blaise.

  The pictures were black and white. Blaise rested his foot on the delf rim of the lavatory as the other two boys looked. Martin had his hand out waiting for Kavanagh to pass the next one on.

  ‘Hey,’ said Kavanagh. Martin looked at what he’d been given. At first he couldn’t make it out. Then he realised it was a naked girl. She had her legs in the air.

  ‘She’s got tits on her like pouches,’ said Martin.

  ‘Have you got a magnifying glass?’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘Not every day you see stuff like that, eh? You wouldn’t get that in Playboy,’ said Blaise. Kavanagh was leafing through them. Another girl had her legs wide open. Others were close-ups. No faces. Guys were still banging on the door and shouting.

  ‘Hold it,’ said Martin, not sure what he was looking at. ‘Who took these?’

  ‘A gynaecologist,’ said Kavanagh.

  ‘What’s she doing?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘They’re not very good quality,’ said Martin.

  ‘Fuck off, Cartier-Bresson,’ said Blaise. ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘If they were good quality you could see more.’