by Tanya Moir
As for what happens next, though Jennings finds it so shocking, well — what is Harry supposed to do? He can hardly stitch Berkeley back together again.
I say it’s an act of kindness, the swiftness of his knife.
TWO
Beneath the infected muscle of Berkeley’s left ventricle — which, like the rest of the convict’s heart, is uncommonly large and heavy — Harry makes his brilliant discovery at last. Massive valvulae mitrales, the biggest he has ever seen: the organs of a giant. Through this deformed mechanism, Harry’s notes conclude, the robber’s body was assaulted by a surfeit of red blood. An overexcitement of corpuscles, a sanguine intoxication that led him, in his deluded state, to commit his crimes.
The deformity is clear to see in the watery April light, suspended in its glass jar. Harry puts the specimen back down on his desk with the rest, between the freakishly long fingers of Smythe the pickpocket and wife-beating Musgrove’s malformed spleen. It is the pièce de résistance, the centrepiece of his collection. He crosses his ankles, squeezes his knees. Above his head, unnoticed, a fine spray of Berkeley’s blood clings to the ceiling.
Harry’s exhibition opens tomorrow. But tonight, he is to give a lecture at the Royal College, to whose members he has been asked to present his eagerly anticipated ‘Organs of Criminality’.
Jennings gets up from scrubbing the surgery floor and Harry watches him set to work on an inventory of the bandage chest. He will miss the lad when he’s sent off to New South Wales next week; he doubts he will ever again have the luxury of a servant so discreet.
He glances back over his autopsy notes. There’s a lot to remember; they are copious and detailed. They conclude with Harry’s opinion as to the cause of the subject’s death, recorded more spartanly as ‘Fever’.
He’s rather sorry for this verdict, spoiling, as it does, his perfect record aboard the Repel. True, a handful of prisoners had, while going about their duties, suddenly dropped dead. But for over two years — since he amputated Smythe’s hand, now he comes to think of it — not a man on the hulk had so much as reported sick, much less died under Harry’s care.
Still, he comforts himself that he did all he could for Berkeley. The robber’s death was inevitable, with such a defect as his. A tragic flaw indeed. For such an abundance of blood there could be no cure.
Half a century later, it’s sheer coincidence that the News of the World’s Australian correspondent, while on sabbatical in London, should happen upon Harry’s death notice in The Times and recognise the name. Otherwise the scandal of Jennings’ diary, in common with much other ex-convict whining and muck-raking, would never have made the journey home from Botany Bay.
The resulting page-five story, headed ‘Repel Ripper dies at 89’, does its best to arouse the motherland’s interest with a wealth of choice detail. But England in 1915 has fatter fish to fry; for starters, there’s a war on. In this modern age, when heroes are eviscerated by the thousand every day, an atrocity so out of date can hardly hope to cause a lot of outrage. Particularly when all the participants are dead. And worse, there are no pictures.
The Harding name — a common one, luckily — is barely dented. True, things might have gone badly for any of Harry’s offspring attempting to practise medicine in Woolwich, but as a chemist in Kensington, Great-granddad Ted is quite safe.
Indeed, it’s possible that Harry’s second son remains ignorant of the whole affair. No one at the university reads the News of the World. And even if he should happen to come across it one day — left behind on the Salisbury train, perhaps, or in the waiting room at Porton — what would he make of such a story, sandwiched as it is between a werewolf sighting on Dartmoor and the birth of conjoined quadruplets in Cawnpore? Busy Ted has never read his father’s casebooks. And it’ll be another eighty years before anyone is forced to confront the inconvenient truths of Jennings’ digitised diary.
The story can be of no concern to Ted’s elder brother, Hal, who hasn’t lived to see this grubby, ink-stained day. Despite the care lavished on him, the healthful bleedings and purgings, Harry and Violet’s firstborn son was discovered dead in his cot, of causes unknown. (Though Harry, no doubt, would have tried to establish them, had Violet not called in the undertakers quite so quickly.)
As for Violet herself, she is long gone by 1915, having faded away a lonely ten years before Harry. There’s a park bench dedicated to her on the heath, where Harry sat with his paper every Sunday. Watching the couples walk by arm in arm, and the dogs run in the grass.
So all in all, it’s not until 1978, when the story reaches Invercargill, that it succeeds in shocking any one very much. Here, it creates an awkward silence in Bradbury Street, lasting — to all purposes — for some months, until transcripts of the 1896 Gazettes are obtained from Sydney.
Maggie probably shouldn’t let me read them. But we’re in this together, after all. And it’s not just misery — trepidation, shock, disgust, they all enjoy a party. (Why else would I be telling you this, after all?) So my mother passes the stories over, one by one.
When we’ve finished remaking Harry, she puts the transcripts away in a pink shoebox. For the next ten years, the box lives at the back of the shelf in the spare room wardrobe, next to the plastic Christmas tree, and we don’t mention it again.
After I’ve spent a couple of extra-long Thursday nights under the rubber plants in the brown waiting room, modern medicine prevails, and my mother is able to shrug off Harry Harding. What’s one black sheep ancestor? They may not have been as fashionable in 1978 as they are today, but everyone had them just the same.
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I hear her tell someone breezily on the phone. ‘The things they used to do in the name of science!’
I hope she isn’t talking to Susan Fisher’s mother.
It’s about now that I become afraid of the dark. More precisely, I’m afraid of the dark in the spare room wardrobe, the void on the other side of the bedroom wall behind my head. I have nightmares in which a blackened human heart (courtesy of Britannica’s anatomy chart) crawls out and comes to get me, pulsing wildly. It doesn’t help that the first sound I hear on waking is invariably a heartbeat. And for some reason, it isn’t much comfort when I realise it’s my own. So close to the surface that anyone could just reach in and pull it out.
I don’t tell Maggie any of this. I just ask her to leave my bedside light on. She comes in and turns it off every night, of course, when I’m asleep. So that I wake to blackness, and a pounding heart. And if I stretch out my hand in the dark for the switch, who knows what it might feel?
THREE
‘You should get a dog,’ Jake says to me on Friday night.
Pete having drunk all the beer at his leaving shout last week, we’re down to the chardonnay, Jake and I. He doesn’t seem to mind. He swirls it round and holds it up to the sun, looking through the oversized glass at my tangle of a garden.
‘This’d be a great place for a dog.’
I wasn’t allowed a pet as a child. Maggie could never see the point. All that work and mess, when you could be doing something constructive. The habits of cats offended her. Fishbowls were unhygienic. Rabbits were noxious pests, and anything in the rodent line was completely out of the question. I was the only kid in school without so much as a guinea pig to bring to Pet Day.
Dogs, naturally, were the worst of all. She claimed she was allergic, but I’m pretty certain she just couldn’t stand them. (The feeling was mutual, in fairness — butter-soft Hector erupted into heart-stopping barks every time my mother went near the Cousins’ fence. You have to get over yourself to get on with dogs, and through the years, Maggie came to think herself a lot of things, but never unimportant.)
I raise my eyebrows at Jake and smile, in the way you do when you have no intention of talking about a subject. I’m a bit surprised, therefore, when he turns up on Monday with a greyhound.
‘She belonged to a mate of mine,’ he explains. ‘He’s had to go into a home.’
>
I refrain from telling him that this is not my problem. ‘I can’t look after a dog.’
‘Yeah you can, it’s easy.’
‘That’s not what … I meant I don’t have time.’
He just looks at me. I remember, uneasily, that he’s watched me for three months now, and knows how my days are spent. Thinking. Staring at a computer screen. Drinking chardonnay in the afternoon. I can see it wouldn’t look like much from the outside.
‘If you don’t take her, she’ll be put down.’
‘Why don’t you take her?’
‘I’d love to.’ Jake pulls the dog’s blue-grey ears. ‘But it’s against body corporate rules. No dogs in the apartments.’
‘You live in an apartment?’ I realise I’ve been picturing him in a bungalow — ex-state, perhaps — somewhere off the Southern Motorway, with an eighties sofa he’s had from new and posters of supercars on the wall. Do single men still have houses like that? It’s a long time since I’ve been in one. ‘Which building?’
‘The Match Works, off Quay Street.’
I know it, of course. A warehouse conversion down by Queens Wharf, all iron beams and exposed brick and mock-industrial kitchens. A wood-fired pizza oven on the roof terrace. I sold three of them myself, off plan. It was one of my better months, if I remember — the sort paying Jake’s bills now.
‘There must be someone else.’
Jake shakes his head. ‘Her time’s up at the shelter. Nobody wants her.’
We stare at the dog in silence.
‘She’s old,’ he explains. ‘Has trouble with her joints. People don’t want the vet’s bills.’
The dog shivers a little in the twenty-five-degree heat, and looks down her long nose at me with a deeply hopeless expression.
‘Her racing name was Out of the Blue,’ Jake adds carelessly. ‘Mike called her Ella.’
‘You can’t just bring me a dog.’
‘Just take her for a few days. Till I find someone else. I can’t take her back to the shelter.’
At six, he knocks off and goes home, leaving me with the dog. I’ve given her one of Maggie’s old blankets to lie on. All evening, she looks up at me from it with the sort of expression Dalmatian puppies reserve for Cruella de Vil. I shut her in the laundry when I go to bed. She howls until three-thirty.
In the comfort of my king-size bed I listen to her cry, and think about Ted Harding.
In December of ’78, Maggie decides it’s time to clamber back up on the horse and set off in pursuit of another Ghost of Hardings Past. Blame Christmas or Dickens or her new bi-weekly hypnosis. Personally, I don’t want to go anywhere near this particular beast. One shoebox is enough. And as Annabel Miller will prove to me in a year or two more, some ponies shouldn’t be remounted. I’ve no choice, though, but to watch my mother take it for a canter.
The services of our London researcher, guilty of the News of the World affair, are no longer required. Maggie has her eye on a softer target this time. One she can observe from the safety of living memory; a man who conducted his life in the sanitary glare of enlightened times. In short, she wants her Granddad Ted.
Crunch we go up the pink shell path. And we’re in luck! Sarah’s having a good day.
‘Like?’ she says. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What’s your father like?’
Maggie, checkmated, sips her gin. At the back of the house, William Biggs slumbers on behind his blackout curtains.
‘He was old,’ decides Sarah ruthlessly. ‘People always thought he was our granddad. He was on his deathbed for such a long time. My poor mum had to nurse him.’
We stare at a photograph of Uncle Eddie on his father’s knee. Sarah’s right, Ted does look old. Maggie works it out. He’s fifty here; unseen Evelyn, already a mother of two, would be barely thirty. Ted has very short salt-and-pepper hair and a rugby player’s neck and — we must presume, since they are not Harry’s — Violet’s eyes. Eddie has them too. They stand out, both sets, black as the glass eyes of my old wooden doll, long-lashed and twinkling.
Maggie turns the pages back, to a wedding photograph in an oval mount. Just the two of them, Ted and Evelyn. Her white hand curled around his arm. The new Mrs Harding is dark-eyed too. The wrong side of twenty-five, but no longer a spinster. Before you know it, she’ll be in a mock-Tudor semi in Kings Close with her four children and gas oven.
Oh yes — and a pear tree.
In his crisp black suit, Ted looks — what? Confident. Self-conscious. Optimistic that whatever judgement he’s waiting for must surely go his way.
‘What do you remember about him?’ My mother presses Nanny Biggs.
Sarah thinks for a while. At last, she waves her glass at us in triumph.
‘He used to come home sometimes,’ she says, ‘with rabbits in his pockets.’
‘Have you ever been married?’ I ask Jake.
He shakes his head. ‘I lived with a girl for a few years. Didn’t work out though.’
We drink in silence. I refill our glasses.
‘How about you?’ he asks me.
‘Divorced.’
He looks slightly alarmed.
‘Six years ago,’ I reassure him.
‘Must be tough.’
I stare across the lawn. We’re a bottle down — what the hell. ‘Actually, I like it.’
‘He’s just the same as your father,’ Maggie told me, the first time I brought Greg home. I pretended it was a compliment — Greg was steady and open and kind. But I knew it wasn’t. And even back then, I think, I felt more hurt for long-dead Roger than I did for my new fiancé.
It didn’t matter, really, what Greg was. He loved me. Such a nice surprise! It would have been churlish not to love him back, and I truly did. Not Harry-love, the insatiable kind that grows and fills your guts and eats you out from the inside. Oh no, we were better than that. Greg loved me — and I loved him back — in a sane and easy way, the way you love a piece of fruit or a bacon sandwich. I was proud of myself, of us. Our moderation.
I wanted to show Maggie, back then when I still thought I could say or do things that would make a difference. When I thought that people could change. See, Mummy? This is how it’s done. So the day after Greg and I got back from London, I took him round to meet her.
‘He’s just like your father,’ she said, in the bedroom at Bradbury Street, perched on the precipitous candlewick edge of my old spring-base bed.
And I realised, then, that my mother didn’t believe in Harry. Tapeworm Harry, the one who loved Violet, I mean. She’d made him up for us, a fantasy, our parable and excuse. Our lie. See, Janine? That’s where loving someone too much will get you. Cutting out strangers’ hearts. Blood on the ceiling. Not to mention all over your hands. But there’d been no worm in my great-great-grandfather’s head at all, not that Maggie saw, just the helical squirm of our DNA as it made its calculation. Add opportunity to desire, then subtract risk — if the sum’s above zero, put in the knife. They can’t do their times tables, our Harding cells, but this is the kind of maths we’re good at.
Across from her, on the opposite bed — the one no one ever came to sleep in — I twisted the new diamond on my finger. Greg was good for me. Everybody said so. And I could feel it myself. I was smoother with him, more finished off. He made such a neat job of hiding my rough edges. I ran him round my life like a tube of No More Gaps and I was very grateful.
I swore to myself, then and there — and again, six months later, to him and to God, to all of our friends and, especially, my mother — that I would never leave Greg. I hadn’t bargained, of course, on how long it would take him to leave me.
One of our arguments — not the last, not the first — always sticks in my head, though I can’t recall its subject. Some point of etiquette, no doubt, the usual ticking of cogs below the pivot point of power. At the stage I remember, it’s getting late, and his voice is a mosquito whine in my head, and I can’t be arsed with the game any more.
‘Why don’t you just leave t
hen.’
‘Jesus! Do you have to be such a bitch?’
The sixty-four thousand dollar question. Do I?
‘Fuck off,’ I say, ‘if you don’t like it.’
It takes another two years and an audit temp called Cheryl, but in the end he does.
It was unpleasant, of course. The division of things. Like unpicking a jumper. No matter how badly the pattern is turning out, you’ve still got something before you pull the thread, and nothing when you’ve finished.
But it’s better now. Better here, a thousand miles north. Freer, you might say. There’s nothing as heavy as the touch of a man you used to love.
Besides, the breaking up doesn’t matter a lot. Endings can happen to the best of couples. People don’t judge you for being divorced any more — the ones who don’t know you, at least. It’s almost something to be proud of. As if you’ve attained a higher level of consciousness, beyond the happily-ever-after, above the expectant yammer and bleat of romantic love.
‘So you’re planning on staying alone?’ Jake says, with a little smile like he doesn’t believe it.
‘Yep.’
‘You don’t worry …’ He stops.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ He looks around and sips his wine.
‘About getting old, you mean? Dying alone?’
‘Well, you are a long way from help here.’
I shrug. ‘So they won’t find me for a few months. So what? It makes no difference to me.’ I prod the dog with my foot. ‘Although now, thanks to you, I’ll probably be half-eaten when they get here.’
Jake laughs in a shocked sort of way, and I wonder how old he is. If he’s scared of dying. He’s put on a clean shirt after his swim; I can see a fine crust of salt drying on his skin. I could have offered him a shower. Should I have? Is that what nice people do?
