Pat Barker: Toby's Room

December was unusually cold and foggy even by the standards of London in winter. Day after day went by with no glimpse of the sun and it never became really light, not even at midday. Whenever someone came through the doors of the London Hospital, wisps and coils of sulphurous smoke followed them in. The air on the ground-floor corridors tasted metallic.

These mornings Elinor went straight to the cupboard where the heads were kept. By now, in this final stage of dissection, the face had become unrecognizable. She identified him only by the name tag clipped to his right ear. Not his name, of course — officially he had no name — but hers. At the start of each session she looked into the pallid eyes, still in place inside the dissected orbits, and once again became possessed by the desire to know who he was. The need to name him, to understand how and why he’d come to this, grew in her with each stage of his disintegration.

As soon as she started work, however, this obsession with his identity fell away. Under Mr Smailes’s appraising eye, they teased out layers of muscle and exposed nerves and tendons to the light. He encouraged them to explore their own and each other’s faces: to feel the skull beneath the skin. It made sense to test what they’d learned against the living reality. All the same … Elinor couldn’t help noticing how Smailes’s lips parted as he watched their fingers probe and delve.

She hated these sessions of ‘living anatomy’, but they were probably more useful to her as an artist than the actual dissection. Certainly, she felt her growing knowledge was now feeding into her drawing, though for a long time she’d been unable to make a connection. The cadaver hadn’t helped her see the model on the dais more clearly. If anything, the dissection had become linked in her mind to the passion, bewilderment and pain of that night in Toby’s room. As if it were his body on the slab: familiar, frightening, unknown.

And then, one morning, it was over. Elinor left the Dissecting Room determined she would never go back. Next term the other girls would start work on another cadaver, the second in a long line, but for her there would only ever be this one. She lingered for a moment in the doorway, trying to squeeze out the appropriate emotion, whatever that might be.

As she closed the door behind her, one of the attendants was sluicing down the slab.

It was snowing when she left the hospital, as it had been, on and off, for the past two days; the sky above the rooftops had a jaundiced look that suggested more was on the way. The pavements had been trodden to a grey sludge. She stopped outside the main entrance to watch the flakes whirling down. Before the end of term — and that wasn’t far away now — she’d have to see Tonks and explain that she didn’t want to go on with dissection. She’d say she’d learned a lot and she was very grateful to have had the opportunity, but … But . Still planning what she’d say to Tonks, she set off to catch the bus home, walking fast, head down, arms swinging, away, away, away …

And then, just as she reached the bus stop, she realized she’d left her bag behind.

It was Friday afternoon, and the Dissecting Room would be locked up over the weekend. It was no use: she’d have to go back. She ran most of the way, a blundering, impeded canter through slush and icy puddles, slipping and slithering across patches of black ice. As she pushed the doors open, cold air rushed after her into the building. She waited impatiently for the lift and then ran all the way down the top-floor corridor.

The Dissecting Room smelled different: less formaldehyde, but enough bleach to make your eyes sting. The lights were still on, so somebody must be around. In the harsh glare, the organs in their display jars glittered like jewels. Forgetting her lost bag, she stood at the foot of the slab where she’d worked and slowly recreated the man who’d lain there, surrendering himself to their scalpels through the long hours of dissection. She remembered the shock she’d felt when the covers first came off; the glow of his uncut skin. Now, when there was nothing of him left, the full force of her desire to know who he was, who he’d been, returned.

The door at the far end of the room had been left ajar. Normally, it was kept locked. This was where the mortuary attendants disappeared to at the end of each session; access to students was strictly forbidden. She walked across the room, hesitated, then pushed the door further open. Nobody spoke, nobody demanded to know what on earth she thought she was doing, so she went in.

To her left, a trestle table ran the full length of the room. On it were three bundles of bones, each with a label attached. With a thud of the heart, she guessed the labels would have names on, and walked across to read them, but no, there were only numbers. Number three was hers, the little that was left of him. He looked like a Christmas turkey the day after Boxing Day, when all the bones have been picked clean.

She looked around for solace, for something, anything, to make this bearable, and her eye fell on a green ledger. The corners were furry with use and so smeared by greasy fingerprints they looked black. Of course : they’d have to keep records because these pitiable piles of bones had to be given a proper burial — and presumably they’d be kept under the names they’d borne in life. She picked up the book and, fully aware that she was breaking every conceivable rule, began shuffling through the pages. The last entry should give her three names, one of them female. That would still leave two possibilities, but, irrationally perhaps, she felt she’d know his name when she saw it.

‘Miss Brooke! Can I help you?’ The usual sneer.

‘I was looking for my bag.’

‘Well, you’re not likely to find it in here, are you?’

She tried to push past him, but he wouldn’t step aside. She was totally in the wrong, she knew that, but she didn’t take kindly to being bullied, and instinctively she went on the attack. ‘Why do you dislike me so much?’ she asked.

‘Because you think you’re the lily on the dungheap.’

So direct, so uncompromisingly contemptuous, it shocked her. ‘Well, somebody has to be and it’s never going to be you.’ How childish that sounded. How embarrassingly childish. ‘I just wanted to know who he was.’

He took the ledger away from her. ‘I think you’ll find your bag’s in the changing room.’

He waited till she reached the door. ‘It wouldn’t have done you any good anyway,’ he said, holding up the ledger. ‘He was one of the unclaimed. Nobody knows who he was.’

‘The unclaimed?’

‘Found in a shop doorway, I expect.’

She nodded, took one last look at the heap of bones, and went in search of her bag.

That evening Elinor sat alone in her lodgings. She’d had a bath, washed her hair, put on her dressing gown and curled up in front of the fire. Only now, when it was over, did she realize how much the work of dissection had taken out of her. She stared at the blue buds of the fire, listening to its hissing and popping, but saw only the nameless man as he’d been on that first morning: the huge, yellow-soled feet and the flat plain of the body stretching out beyond them. What a dreadful end. Even Daft Jamie had had a name.

She ought to make the effort to go out, if only round the corner to Catherine’s. A few of the girls had started to meet and do life drawing away from the college, taking it in turns to pose. They were supposed to be meeting tonight, but nobody would show up in this weather. Still, an evening alone with Catherine — the little German girl, as Kit Neville rather patronizingly called her — would be good too. Cocoa and gossip, that’s what she needed. But how bad was the snow? The way it was falling when she came in, it might be impossible to get out.