Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  “Geordie Geddes works for Glasgow Humane Society, who give him a rent-free house on Glasgow Green.8 His job is to fish human bodies out of the Clyde and save their lives, if possible. When not possible he puts them in a small morgue attached to his dwelling, where a police surgeon performs autopsies. If this official is not available they send for me. Most of the bodies are suicides, of course, and if no one claims them they are transferred to dissecting-rooms and laboratories. I have arranged such transfers.

  “I was called to examine the body you know as Bella soon after our quarrel a year ago. Geddes saw a young woman climb onto the parapet of the suspension bridge near his home. She did not jump feet first like most suicides. She dived clean under like a swimmer but expelling the air from her lungs, not drawing it in, for she did not return to the surface alive. On recovering the body Geddes found she had tied the strap of a reticule filled with stones to her wrist. An unusually deliberate suicide then, and committed by someone who wished to be forgotten. The pockets of her discreetly fashionable garments were empty, with neat holes cut in the linings and lingerie where women of the wealthier class have their names or initials stitched. Rigor had not set in, the body had hardly cooled before I arrived. I found she was pregnant, with pressure grooves round the finger where wedding and engagement rings had been removed. What does that suggest to you, McCandless?”

  “Either she was carrying the child of a husband she hated or the child of a lover she had preferred to her husband, a lover who abandoned her.”

  “I thought so too. I cleared her lungs of water, her womb of the foetus, and by a subtle use of electrical stimulus could have brought her back to self-conscious life. I dared not. You will know why if you see Bella asleep. Bella’s face in repose is that of the ardent, wise, sorrowful woman who lay before me on the mortuary slab. I knew nothing about the life she had abandoned, except that she hated it so much that she had chosen not to be, and forever! What would she feel on being dragged from her carefully chosen blank eternity and forced to be in one of our thick-walled, understaffed, poorly equipped madhouses, reformatories or jails? For in this Christian nation suicide is treated as lunacy or crime. So I kept the body alive at a purely cellular level. It was advertised. Nobody claimed it. I brought it here to my father’s laboratory. My childhood hopes, and boyhood dreams, my education and adult researches had prepared me for this moment.

  “Every year hundreds of young women drown themselves because of the poverty and prejudices of our damnably unfair society. And nature too can be ungenerous. You know how often it produces births we call unnatural because they cannot live without artificial help or cannot live at all : anacephalids, bicephalids, cyclops, and some so unique science does not name them. Good doctoring ensures the mothers never see these. Some malformations are less grotesque but equally dreadful—babies without digestive tracts who must starve to death as soon as the umbilical cord is cut if a kind hand does not first smother them. No doctor dare do such a thing, or order a nurse to do it, but the thing gets done, and in modern Glasgow—second city of Britain for size and foremost for infant mortality—few parents can afford a coffin, a funeral and a grave for every dead wee body they own. Even Catholics consign their unchristened to limbo. In the Workshop of the World limbo is usually the medical profession. For years I had been planning to take a discarded body and discarded brain from our social midden heap and unite them in a new life. I now did so, hence Bella.”

  Like most who listen closely to a tale told in a calm manner I too had grown calm, which helped me think sensibly again.

  “Bravo, Baxter!” I cried, raising my glass as if toasting him. “How do you explain her dialect? Is there Yorkshire blood in her veins or do the parents of her brain come from northern England?”

  “Only one explanation is possible,” said Baxter broodingly. “The earliest habits we learn (and speech is one of them) must become instinct through the nerves and muscles of the whole body. We know instincts are not wholly seated in the brain, since a headless chicken can run for yards before it drops. The muscles of Bella’s throat, tongue and lips still move as they did in the first twenty-five years of their existence, which I think was nearer Manchester than Leeds. But all the words she uses have been learned from me, or from the elderly Scotswomen who run my household, or from children who play with her here.”

  “How do you explain Bella’s presence to them, Baxter? Or are you such a domestic tyrant that your underlings dare not ask for explanations?”

  Baxter hesitated, then muttered that his servants were all former nurses trained by Sir Colin, and not surprised by the presence of strange people recovering from intricate operations.

  “But how do you explain her to society, Baxter? Are your neighbours in the Circus—the parents of those who play with her—the policeman on the beat—are they told she is a surgical fabrication? How will you account for her on the next government census?”

  “They are told she is Bella Baxter, a distant niece whose parents died in a South American railway accident, a disaster where she sustained a concussion causing total amnesia. I have dressed in mourning to support this story. It is a good one. Sir Colin had a cousin he quarrelled with many years ago, who went out to the Argentine before the potato famine and was never heard of again. He could easily have married the daughter of English emigrés in a racial hodge-podge like the Argentine. And luckily Bella’s complexion (though different before I arrested her cellular decay) is now as sallow as my own, which can pass as a family trait. This is the story Bella will be told when she learns that most people have parents and wants a couple of them for herself. An extinct, respectable couple will be better than none. It would cast a shadow upon her life to learn she is a surgical fabrication. Only you and I know the truth, and I doubt if you believe it.”

  “Frankly, Baxter, the story of the railway accident is more convincing.”

  “Believe what you like, McCandless, but please go easy on the port.”

  I refused to go easy on the port. I deliberately filled the glass a second time while saying with equal deliberation, “So you think Miss Baxter’s brain will one day be as adult as her body.”

  “Yes, and quickly. Judging by her speech how old would you say she is?”

  “She blethered like a five-year-old.”

  “I judge her mental age by the age of children she can play with. Robbie Murdoch, my housekeeper’s grandchild, is not quite two. They crawled around the floor very happily till five weeks ago, then she began to find him boring and developed a passionate admiration for a niece of my cook. This niece is a bright six-year-old who, after Bella’s novelty wore off, finds her very boring. I think Bella’s mental age is nearly four, and if I am right then her body has stimulated the growth of her brain at a wonderful rate. This will cause problems. You did not notice it, McCandless, but you attracted Bella. You are the first adult male she has met apart from me, and I saw her sense it through the finger tips. Her response showed that her body was recalling carnal sensations from its earlier life, and the sensations excited her brain into new thoughts and word forms. She asked you to be her candle and candle maker. A bawdy construction could be put on that.”

  “Havers!” I cried, appalled. “How dare you talk of your lovely niece in that monstrous way. Had you played with other bairns when you were young you would know such talk is commonplace childhood prattle. Come-a-riddle come-a-riddle come-a-rote-tote-tote, a wee wee man in a wee wee boat. Willie Winkie runs through the toon in his night goon. I had a little husband no bigger than my thumb. Little Jack Horner stuck his in a plum. But how will you educate Miss Baxter if she outgrows this pleasant state?”

  “Not by sending her to school,” he said firmly. “I will not let people treat her as an oddity. I will shortly take her on a carefully planned journey round the world, staying longest in the places she enjoys. In this way she will see and learn many things by talking to folk who will not find her much queerer than most British travellers, and charmingly natural when
compared with her gross companion. It will also let me remove her quickly from attachments which look like becoming romantic in an unhygienic way.”

  “And of course, Baxter,” I told him recklessly, “she will be wholly at your mercy with no public opinion to protect her, not even through the frail agency of your domestic servants. When we last met, Baxter, you boasted in the heat of a quarrel that you were devising a secret method of getting a woman all to yourself, and now I know what your secret is—abduction! You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman. I will not allow it, Baxter. You are the rich heir of a mighty nobleman, I am the bastard bairn of a poor peasant, but between the wretched of the earth there is a stronger bond than the rich realize. Whether Bella Baxter be your orphaned niece or twice orphaned fabrication, I am more truly akin to her than you can ever be, and I will preserve her honour to the last drop of blood in my veins as sure as there is a God in Heaven, Baxter!—a God of Eternal Pity and Vengeance before whom the mightiest emperor oh earth is feebler than a falling sparrow.”

  Baxter replied by carrying the decanter back to the cupboard where he had found it and locking the door.

  I cooled down while he did this, remembering I had stopped believing in God, Heaven, Eternal Pity et cetera after reading The Origin of Species. It still seems weird to recall that after unexpectedly meeting my only friend, future wife and first decanter of port I raved in the language of novels I knew to be trash, and only read to relax my brain before sleeping.

  6

  Baxter’s Dream

  Baxter returned, sat down and looked at me with his lips compressed and his eyebrows raised. Maybe I blushed. Certainly my face felt hot. He said patiently, “Use your memory, McCandless. I am an ugly fellow but have you known me do an ugly thing?”

  I pondered then said sulkily, “What about Mopsy and Flopsy?”

  He looked hurt at this but not very hurt, and after a while spoke thoughtfully as if to himself.

  “Sir Colin, his nurses and dogs gave me more attention than most newcomers to this globe are given, but I wanted more than that. I dreamed of a fascinating stranger—a woman I had not yet met so could only imagine—a friend who would need and admire me as much as I needed and admired her. No doubt a mother supplies this want in most young creatures, though rich families often employ a servant to take the mother’s place. I formed no special attachment to those who fostered me, perhaps because there were so many of them. I was always a mighty big fellow and seem to recall at least three mature nurses feeding and washing and clothing me before I could do these things for myself. Perhaps there were more, for I think they worked in relays. I may be imposing on infancy an obsession of my later years, but I cannot remember a day when I did not feel inside me a woman-shaped emptiness that ached to be filled by someone stranger and bonnier than I ever met at home. This ache grew stronger with puberty, which happened with catastrophic suddenness. My voice, alas, did not break, and remains mezzo-soprano to the present day, but I woke one morning with the enlarged penis and heavy testes which afflict most of our sex.”

  “And then, as you told me before, your father explained how female anatomies differed from yours and offered to provide you with a healthy specimen in full working order. You should have jumped at the chance.”

  “Did you not hear me, McCandless? Must I say everything twice? I needed to admire a woman who needed and admired me. Will I say it anatomically? Spermatic ejaculation can only induce homoeostasis in me if accompanied by prolonged stimulation of higher nerve centres whose pressure upon the ductless glands changes the chemistry of my blood not for a few spasmodic minutes but for many tingling days. The woman I imagined stimulated me like that. I found her picture in Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare: a book that must have been left here by one of Sir Colin’s patients—it was the only work of fiction in the house. Ophelia was listening to her brother, an insipid looking lad despite his fierce little beard. He was saying something she was only pretending to take seriously, for her eager face looked toward something wonderful outside the picture, and I wanted it to be me. Her expression excited me more than her lovely body in a flowing violet gown, because I thought I knew all about bodies. Her expression excited me more than her lovely face, for I had seen women with such faces in the park—when they walked toward me their faces froze, grew pale or bright pink and tried not to see me at all. Ophelia could look at me with loving wonder because she saw the inner man I would become—the kindest, greatest doctor in the world who would save her life and the life of millions. I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would be quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love.

  “Daydreams like these, McCandless, accelerated my heart and changed the texture of my skin for hours on end when I was not busy with my studies. A prostitute procured for me by Sir Colin would have been a contrivance of his, a clockwork doll driven by money instead of a spring.”

  “But a warm living body, Baxter.”

  “I needed to see that expression.”

  “In the dark—” I began to say, but he bade me shut up. I sat feeling more of a monster than he was.

  After a while he sighed and said, “My daydream of becoming a kindly popular beloved healer proved impossible. I was the most brilliant medical student the University has known—how could I not be? As Sir Colin’s most trusted helper I knew by practice what many lecturers taught as theory. But in Sir Colin’s operating-theatre the only patients I touched were anaesthetized. Look at this hand, although of course the sight pains you, this cube with five cones protruding from the top, instead of a kipper with five sausages stuck to the edge. The only patients I am allowed to touch are too poor or unconscious to have a choice in the matter. Several well-known surgeons like my assistance when operating on celebrities whose deaths would damage their reputations, for my ugly digits and (to tell the truth) my ugly head are better than theirs in an emergency. But the patients never see me, so that was no way to win the admiring smile of an Ophelia. But I have nothing to complain about now. Bella’s smile is happier than Ophelia’s was, and makes me happy too.”

  “So Miss Baxter does not dread your hand?”

  “No. From the moment she opened her eyes here these hands have served her food, drink and sweetmeats, placed flowers before her, offered toys, shown how to use them, displayed the bright pages of her picture-books. At first I made the servants who washed and dressed her wear black woollen mittens in her presence, but I soon saw this was pointless. The fact that others have different hands does not stop her thinking me and my hands as normal and necessary as this house and our daily meals and the morning sunlight. But you are a stranger, McCandless, so your hands thrill her. Mine do not.”

  “You hope this will change, of course.”

  “Yes. O yes. But I am not impatient. Only bad guardians and parents expect admiration from young brains. I am glad Bella takes me as much for granted as the floor under her: that floor on which she enjoys the music of the pianola, yearns for the company of the cook’s grand-niece, and thrills to the touch of your hand, McCandless.”

  “May I see her aga
in soon?”

  “How soon?”

  “Now . . . or this evening . . . at any rate, before you leave on your trip round the world.”

  “No, McCandless, you must wait till we return. Your effect on Bella does not worry me. Her effect on you does, at present.”

  He ushered me to the front door as firmly as the last time I visited him, but before shutting me out he patted me kindly on the shoulder. I did not flinch from the contact but said suddenly, “One moment, Baxter! That lady you spoke of who drowned herself—how advanced was her pregnancy?”

  “At least nine months.”

  “Could you not have saved the child?”

  “Of course I saved it—the thinking part of it. Did I not explain that? Why should I seek elsewhere for a compatible brain when her body already housed one? But you need not believe this if it disturbs you.”

  7

  By the Fountain

  Fifteen months passed before I met her again and they were unexpectedly happy. Scraffles died and astonished me by leaving me a quarter of his money—his widow and legitimate son divided the rest. I became a house-doctor in the Royal Infirmary with a wardful of patients who seemed to need me and some who pretended to admire. I hid how much I needed them under a smooth, lordly surface broken by unexpected flashes of genial humour. I flirted with the nurses under me to the usual extent—that is, with all of them equally. I was invited to smoking-concerts where everyone had to sing something. My songs in the Galloway dialect were laughed at when comic and applauded when pathetic. I mostly thought of Bella during unoccupied moments, especially in the half hour before going to bed and falling asleep. I was trying to read through the novels of Bulwer-Lytton at the time, but his characters seemed conventional puppets when I recalled her arms flapping above the pianola like ravens’ wings, her smile of continual delight, her jerky walk and swaying stance and arms outstretched as if to embrace me as nobody else had done. I did not dream of her because I never dream at all, but when we next met I believed for almost a minute that I was in bed dreaming although I was wide awake in a public park.