by Manda Scott
If my faith in humanity could have fallen any further, it would have disappeared through the floor.
Seven
Anatomy is the department they left behind when they moved the medical school to the West End in the late 1970s. The anatomists never really considered themselves to be part of the medical fraternity and saw no reason to disrupt the habits of several lifetimes when they were all happily fossilized in their insulated time-warp of a building. So when Physiology and Biochemistry and all the other pre-clinical departments moved into the shiny new labs in the hospital complex, the Anatomy Department sat tight as a single, immovable mass and suggested that if Mohamet wanted to know the secrets of the human frame, then Mohamet in the shape of 200-odd medical students a year, could put on his shoes and walk. Or, rather, hop on the Underground and pray for a fast train.
It took our class less than two weeks of shuttling backwards and forwards across town between lectures to realize that the timetable had not been designed taking basic geography into account. By the end of the first month, the class had split: some went to anatomy, some attended physiology and biochemistry and each group swapped notes. In the middle were the few entrepreneurs who attended no lectures at all and borrowed everyone’s notes on the night before the exams. None of them made it through to the second year.
In our particular pairing, Lee, the budding surgeon, had picked anatomy, while I sat at the feet of the physiologists and dreamed dreams of internal medicine. At the time, it had seemed like an obvious choice. Fifteen years later on, as I fought my way out of the southern exit of the Buchanan Street Underground through the crowds of drenched commuters, I wished I had paid more attention to the route.
I found the place eventually, guided by half-remembered images of street corners and old advertising hordings, in a dead-end street two blocks away from George Square. A huge Victorian sandstone edifice, the pale red stone blackened to ebony with age and a century’s worth of car exhaust emissions. In its day, it was the gold-standard of imperial values, designed to remind the good citizens of Glasgow that the Empire reached north of the border and the Scots had made their due contributions to the forward march of progress.
Now, the alley was filled with unemptied rubbish bins, and the stink of household garbage joined the background flavour of wet pavements. A sodden copy of the Sunday Sport was plastered to the step just outside the revolving door and a handful of loose pages had been trampled inside, jamming the base. I gave up trying to push the thing round and took a small side door round the corner instead. From the look of the trail of footprints leading across the marble floor into the hallway, everyone else that morning had done the same.
I was standing in the doorway, shaking the rain out of my hair, when I was accosted by Mr Archibald McNeill, the Anatomy caretaker. McNeill is a small, anxious mouse of a man with a permanent drip of serous fluid hanging suspended from the end of his nose – the product of a long and fruitless battle between his nasal passages and the allergenic effects of the formalin that pervades the atmosphere. He has been a permanent fixture of the department since long before I was a medic, but he tends only to remember the students who have been to more than two lectures and, of those, only the ones who have finished the Herald crossword before they arrive for the first class at ten o’clock. That made me safe on both counts.
He left the safety of his cubbyhole and scuffled over as I did my best impression of a dog out of water.
‘May I help you?’ He cocked his head to one side and peered round the edge of his glasses.
‘Mhaire Culloch. You should be expecting me.’ I held out a hand.
He ignored it and scurried back to consult his notes.
‘That would be Dr Adam’s research assistant?’
I suppose it would.
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘You’ll be needing the files first then. They’re on the fourth floor. If you’ll follow me?’
For a moment, I thought we might actually be going to use the lifts. But no one in Anatomy uses the lifts, not even Archie McNeill. Life is too short to spend large portions of it suspended in a disaster of Victorian engineering that takes twenty minutes to travel a distance that could be walked in five.
On the other hand, taking the lift means you don’t have to walk past the specimens on the stair. Formalin-filled cases on black marble plinths sit in gaps along the wall at intervals up the wide, spiralling marble stairs. Each one has a small brass plaque stating the name, age and date of death plus a single word or phrase describing the clinical condition that brought it there. Things that have been engraved on my stomach wall since the first time I tried to walk past them.
Siamese twins, foetal stage. Two pre-infantile heads, joined at the neck, sharing one body. A single umbilical cord coursed up and round the left side of the neck to float, rigid, in the enfolding yellow formalin.
Anencephalous – neonate. A body and a face with a vague rictus grin, but no head behind it.
Ventricular septal defect. A hole in the heart. Or, in this case, a hole with a bit of heart muscle vaguely wrapped around it. Date: 1894. Long before cardiac bypass and open-chest surgery.
Once, in the dim and distant past, someone thought these were exciting and interesting and that the gentlemen of anatomy should be able to review them in the course of their daily work. But for generations now they have functioned as a simple and effective method of career selection. If you can make the long walk up to the lecture theatre on the top floor without reviewing breakfast en route, then there’s a fair chance of surviving the real-life equivalents in the surgical theatre. Everyone else had better stick to medicine. This is the real reason Lee did anatomy and I did not. I could never make it past the Siamese twins with my eyes open.
It took me six months on the wards to learn the secret of the Anatomy Department myth. Anatomical variations are correctable by surgery. Even perfectly normal faces can be moulded to suit the fashion of the moment. The effects of gravity, time and overindulgence vanish in a single, highly paid sleight of hand, leaving an entire generation with a permanently juvenile frown. It’s the changes inside the head, the ones you can’t see and can’t get at with a knife, that make the nightmares real.
I think I could handle almost anything anatomy could produce these days, but as I followed the little man up the stairway, I kept my eyes on the pattern of the marble steps as a matter of habit.
The Anatomy archives are kept opposite the lecture theatres on the fourth floor in a vast room running the whole length of the building. McNeill wheezed and huffed his way to the door and bent down over the lock, rattling his keys noisily in case I should think the place unlocked, then pushed the door open and poked his head inside.
Nobody around. He coughed into the back of his nose and backed away.
‘All the files are in here, Dr Culloch. If you need any help, I’ll be at my desk.’
Which is four floors down and barely worth the walk.
‘Thank you.’ I flashed an earnest smile. ‘If I need anything else, I’ll call.’
That removed any inclination he might have had to hang around. He gave a single curt nod and vanished round the corner. I listened while his footsteps skipped down the stairs, half a flight at a time, then I opened the door, stepped inside and sneezed violently. It’s the dust that does it, more than the smell. Formalin is everywhere in anatomy. Harsh, eye-watering and noxious, it seeps through wood and metal and human flesh and clings to the back of your throat for days. In the archives, it is mixed with the dust of centuries and the musty smell of old paper, crumbling in forgotten files, and it feels like walking into a room full of snuff.
I stood just inside the doorway, breathing shallow breaths through the floor of my nose, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom.
They never believed in real light in Anatomy, it spoils the effect. They go for dark wood panelling and forty-watt bulbs that give out just enough light to illuminate the ubiquitous specimen jars so that they glow like gian
t, bulbous candles, lighting up their leering occupants.
The whole place gives me the creeps.
There was a lurid green glow on one wall, next to the skeleton of a giantess. I made my way over, skirting racks of files and tables with piles of index cards, and found that it was indeed the Anatomy computer. Or, at least, a terminal thereof; the mainframe sits somewhere in an underground cavern, powered by valves and steam turbines.
The log-in signal blinked sleepily, waiting for the next enthralling set of instructions to wake it up. If McNeill had any initiative at all, he would teach it how to do crosswords.
I pulled out the file card Lee had given me and began to type.
For the next ten minutes I had a largely fruitless but very satisfying conversation with the skeleton regarding the parentage of the programmers, the archivists, the Anatomy Department and, most particularly, the motherless son of an unknown father who had removed Malcolm Donnelly’s data from the file. I found his name and the date he had been transferred from Pathology to Anatomy, but beyond that nothing else. Somewhere in four floors of specimens and slides lay the disparate remains of Dr Malcolm Donnelly deceased, genetic engineer and friend, but without an identifying serial number to trace the various bits, I had no chance at all of finding him, or of finding how he had died.
The skeleton stood in polite silence while I invoked the aid of a number of ancient and malevolent deities and listened attentively while I described the hopelessness of the current situation. She heard me out while I ran through all the very good reasons why I could not possibly ask my recently departed lover for help, and understood completely when I explained what would happen to both myself and my close friend and companion Dr Adams if the forces of law and order were to connect us to the recent raid on a certain medical research establishment. When asked what she would do in my place, she obeyed the one solid rule of crisis counselling and left me to make my own decisions.
Everyone should have a seven-foot skeleton to talk to once in a while.
I left her in peace and went downstairs to find a phone. Before I left the room, I cleared a couple of desks out of the way so that she had a clear view through the window. It seemed the least I could do.
Janine was at work and not in the right frame of mind to talk over the phone, but she did agree to a lunch date provided I could pick her up at the office. I did some rapid mental arithmetic, calculating time and distance, and agreed when to meet her.
My paramour works in an open-plan office designed by an interior decorator on crack. Grey and pink geometric shapes on the carpet clash with the rigid black metal furniture which, in its turn, stands out brilliantly against mauve-on-white rag-rolled walls. Square white ceiling lights cut out all the nasty shadows that might otherwise render the overall effect somewhat less nauseating.
Everyone who works there keeps their eyes fixed on their computer consoles and all of them have tight crows’-feet at the corners of their eyes and the tense, nervous look that sells aspirin by the bucketload. Just walking in through the door is enough to inspire epileptic fits and I swore the first time I went there that I wasn’t setting foot across the threshold ever again. Times change.
Janine has the only sane desk in the room. She sits next to a floor-to-ceiling window with views out into the real world of office blocks and tenements and passing buses in the street below. Spontaneous variety is supplied by a row of pigeons that sit on the sill just the other side of the glass. There were six of them when I arrived. Plump and bright-eyed, sheltering in the lee of the building, away from the rain and the hammering wind.
I sat on the edge of the desk and watched her work. The image of the office woman. A phone was tucked under her chin and she talked into it, staring blankly out at the pigeons while her fingers, independent lifeforms, typed copy at several dozen words per minute.
A sideways flick of the head showed she had seen me. Her fingers tapped at the screen and a message flowed up in mid-paragraph: WON’T BE LONG.
It stayed long enough for me to read and then disappeared, to be replaced by more crisp chunks of techno-copy.
I nodded and carried on counting the pigeons, wondering whether my epileptic threshold had changed since my last visit and how long it would take me to find out. All I needed was for a couple of the fluorescent ceiling lights to flicker and I would be on the floor, foaming at the mouth.
Two of the pigeons deserted, flying off to a more desirable sill. Four to go. If they all left, someone would have to go out on to the ledge to replace them.
Me, for instance.
We were down to three, all of them restless, when Janine finally hung up, laying the receiver off the hook on the desk.
It gave a high-pitched whine, the auditory equivalent of the office decor, and I felt the seizure patterns forming at the back of my skull.
I dragged my eyes away from the window to look at her. ‘Lunch?’
‘Good idea.’
If she was less closeted at work, I would have hugged her, but I settled for a stunning smile instead.
‘How do you work in that hell-hole?’
‘I know all the pigeons by name, rank and number. If they ever leave me, I’ll go completely barking mad.’
‘But will you notice?’
‘That’s what you’re there for.’
‘Thanks.’
We were sitting in a wine bar two blocks along from the offices. A journalistic watering hole, packed full of hacks talking shop, swapping stories, inventing new exclusives and reliving past scoops.
Janine was well known. Both barmen nodded as she shepherded me across the crowded floor to a quiet table at the back. A lass with a neat black uniform and neat black hair appeared as soon as we sat down and brought my other half a tall wine glass with a twist of lemon curved over the rim and tiny beads of condensation forming on the sides.
The girl raised her eyebrows ever so gently in my direction, I nodded and another glass with an identical twist arrived while I was still draping my jacket over the tall stool by the wall. Mineral water. Wonderful. A glance at the menu showed that it cost almost as much as the real thing.
‘I ordered a couple of salads,’ said Janine. ‘Is that all right?’
‘Sure. Whatever.’ I looked around. Not one of the waiting staff was paying us any attention whatsoever. ‘The barmen are psychic, right?’
‘Ex-auctioneers.’ She suppressed a smile and tipped her chair back against the wall, studying me and saying nothing.
We sat like that, watching each other in silence while the waitress brought us the salads. Executive lettuce torn into strips layered on neatly carved celery chips with wafers of tomato and mozzarella cheese. A meal designed to keep the mouth occupied without adding calories. I picked a particularly enticing piece of lettuce and nibbled it experimentally. It tasted much like ordinary lettuce. Disappointing.
Janine tipped her stool back to the ground and browsed methodically across the plate, hunting out the olives and piling them in a heap at the side.
It was the kind of meal that could easily have provided mindless distraction for the rest of the lunch hour and we would have been no further forward. One of us had to break the deadlock.
I put down my fork and pushed the plate to one side. Janine raised one eyebrow and savoured an olive.
‘I need your help.’
The eyebrow slid higher. She selected a slice of tomato and studied it.
Malcolm’s disks were in my pocket. I lifted the package out and laid it on the table.
‘These came from the lab where Malcolm Donnelly used to work. They’re protected and I don’t know how to read them. Would you try? Please?’
She took out a disk and held it up to the light: a counterfeiter studying the latest foreign currency. To me, it looked square and black, like any other disk. She put it back on the table.
‘How did you get hold of them?’
I shook my head. ‘Pass.’
She speared a circle of cheese with her fork
and ate it slowly. ‘It’s not legal to hack other people’s disks. You know that?’
Neither is murder.
‘I know. That’s why I didn’t ask you last night.’
‘What’s changed?’
‘Someone is closing doors on us, fast. These are the only lead we have left. And the only one the opposition don’t know about. The original is still in place. These were copied.’
‘On Friday night?’
I studied my glass of water and said nothing.
‘Look at me, Kellen.’
I looked. Her eyes were clear and self-contained. She lifted her drink so that it obscured the eye contact for a moment, then swirled the water slightly so that it fizzed in the glass. When she put it down, she had made some kind of decision.
‘Give me one good reason why I should do this for you.’
I searched. There were a lot of reasons why she might want to help, but I wasn’t sure that any of them could be classed as good. Especially not from her point of view.
It took me a long time. A lot more than the disks rested on the answer. The waitress came back and cleared the plates while I was thinking.
In the end, there was only one thing that really mattered.
‘Because I need to know who killed Bridget.’
‘So you can kill them too?’
Pass. An unanswerable question, even when one is not in a room full of active journalists.
‘No. I only need to know. To make an ending.’
She nodded heavily, considering. Then she picked up a disk, spinning it over and over between her fingers.
‘I really don’t count in this, do I?’
Honestly?
‘No.’
If she had walked out then and never come back, I would not have been surprised. But she didn’t. She gave a small rueful laugh and threw up an arm to sweep a hand through her hair.
‘It’s honest, at least. If you had said anything else, I wouldn’t have believed you.’
She sighed and shook her head so that her hair fell back down round her shoulders. ‘Rae’s right, you know. I really have to learn to let you go.’
