Jon McGregor - Even the Dogs

This was the same day Laura got Danny in her room for that one last hit. Which her worker had warned her about hadn’t he. Giving it all It’s so important that you stick to your script, Laura, you need to be clean when you start rehab, there’s no such thing as one last go, it doesn’t work like that, you know it doesn’t work like that. So then she was all panicking and crying and everything. After she’d kicked Danny out and after she came down off her nod she was all in a panic because she thought she’d fucked it all up again. Trying to phone her worker and explain and they kept going He’s out of the office now. Getting the hostel staff to find him, asking them to call the rehab and sort something out. Asking them to help her now. Thinking she’d blown her only chance and when she managed to speak to her worker the first thing he said was Listen, Laura, there’s always another chance. But let’s try and make this one work. And he must have made some calls because next thing was she was sat in the room with him and one of the hostel staff, what was her name, Ruth or someone, and he’s going Okay here’s the plan. They’re still going to take you, and they’re going to take you early, you can go up there tomorrow, they’ll put you on a detox before you start the course. And until then the best thing you can do is stay in your room, watch the television, don’t talk to anyone, don’t answer the door. Ruth’s going to bring you up some food, and she’s going to look after your mobile, and you’re going to sit tight until a taxi comes for you tomorrow. Do you think you can manage that? Laura crying and everything and nodding yes and then what. Climbed in the taxi with a couple of bags of clothes and drove out of town to the rehab, to the house in the country with the tall trees and the long sloping lawn. Into the, fucking, sunset and that. Easy as that. Stopped at Robert’s on the way, said her goodbyes and whatever else. And what else.

The doctor turns away from the cutting board and says Jenny, I think we’ll move on shall we? Jenny nods, and moves back to Robert’s body, to his head. She takes a new scalpel from the tray of polished tools and slices a long line across Robert’s scalp, slipping through the matted black hair and the raw reddened skin and the thin layer of flesh, the tip of the blade scraping against his skull. She takes the incision right across the crown, from ear to ear, and then peels back each segment of scalp like the skin of a bloody orange. She picks up the electric saw, and leans forward to brace her feet, and cuts a circle around Robert’s skull, the growl and grind of the saw once again filling the room. She puts the saw to one side, and she lifts off the top of Robert’s head.

We look at his brain, Robert’s brain, creamy-white and glistening, soft and heavy, fold upon fold of interconnected flesh which once fizzed with electrical code, with memories and visions and language and everything learnt in his short and thwarted life. We look at the doctor’s fingers moving around it, squeezing, prodding, tracing lines and shapes as he talks to the others, making comments, asking questions. We watch his fingers catch on something as he pushes down into the skull, and we watch him delicately work loose a dull-coloured fragment of metal the size of a fifty-pence piece. He holds it up to the light, and the photographer takes pictures, and they pass it between them, turning it over and over in their gloved palms. The doctor combs through Robert’s hair, above his ear, behind his ear, further round to the nape of his neck, and finds a faded scar, crescent-shaped, slightly ridged, about the length of a fifty-pence piece. The detective knocks on the window, and we hear his voice coming through a speaker overhead. Something interesting? he asks. I don’t know, the doctor says. Looks like it might be shrapnel of some kind. Looks old though. How old? the detective asks. Too old for you, the doctor says, and the detective goes back to his newspaper. The technician takes a long-bladed knife and slips it down into the skull to slice through the top of the spinal column. She takes Robert’s brain out of his head, places it in a plastic tray, and carries it over to the cutting board, where they weigh it and measure it and slice off samples to be stored in small plastic containers for further examination. The technician’s assistant places the fragment of metal into a plastic pouch, and the doctor dictates more notes.

Brain: normal appearance, softened by decomposition. No evidence of haemorrhage. Brown discoloration and glial scarring to small area of the surface around the lower mid-point of the left cerebral hemisphere, this appears to have been caused by the ingress and or the remaining presence of a metallic fragment whose composition and origin is unknown. Fragment sent for analysis. Medical records of subject, once identified, may provide further information. Fragment appears to correspond with a scar around the left side of the base of the subject’s skull, immediately above the hairline; possibility that this marks the original entry wound for fragment.

He backs away from the brain on the board, peeling off his outer layer of gloves and moving over to the whiteboard. He looks at the notes which have been written up, and asks his junior for any further comments. The detective’s voice comes out of the overhead speaker again, saying We’re done then are we? and the doctor says Sorry, Chris, there’s nothing criminal here. Not unless the toxicology comes back and it turns out your gentleman’s been poisoned by arsenic. In which case it’ll probably be the butler what done it. Jenny finishes labelling all the sliced samples of Robert’s organs and tissue and blood, slipping them into labelled plastic bags marked with biohazard stickers. She puts the slices of his brain into a red plastic bag lying open beside her. She packs cotton wadding into the scooped cavity of his skull, positioning the skull cap over it and pressing the two peeled-back flaps of scalp into place. She takes a needle and thread from the tray and stitches the scalp back together, stooping closely over it, taking her time. When she’s finished she carefully brushes Robert’s hair across the dotted threads, and as she stands back his head looks almost untouched. She smooths a stray hair back into place. She goes back to the cutting board, and places the rest of Robert’s organs in the red plastic bag with his brain. She puts the intestines and bowels into another bag, and nestles them both into the bare-ribbed cavity of Robert’s chest. She takes the sawn-off section of ribcage from the table and settles it back into place, and she folds the fatty flaps of flesh and skin back down together, picking up the needle and thread and stitching his body shut, working slowly and patiently while the others talk by the whiteboard, and when she’s finished there’s only a delicate Y-shaped seam to show he’s been cut apart at all.

Someone else comes in, and we move closer to the table where he lies. We light more candles, rest our hands upon his body, and wonder what more we can say. Someone asks about the funeral arrangements. Mike says Eh now there’s something you should see. I think youse had all best come and look at this. We look at each other, and we stand and follow him out through the door, out into the cold cracked dawn, walking along the empty streets and looking into alleyways and open garages, railway arches, tunnels, derelict buildings, the backyards of offices and pubs, the basements of multi-storey carparks, the locked rooms of hostels, the squatted flats above shops, the wasteground by the Miller’s Arms. And Mike says, There you go, there’s Danny. Slumped on the piss-wet floor of the phonebox. Einstein barking and yelping and hurling herself against the door. The bloody pin still in his hand, and his lips turning white, and his fingers folding over into claws. Curled up on the floor of the phonebox like a dog in a basket. Going over. Which we’ve all come close to doing before. Come close to that edge which is like no edge at all just a falling away of the ground. Always trying to get close to that, back to that peaceful place. To that, fucking, heaven. To be lifted, and held. Keep taking more and more to get back to that, to get past just feeling well again and all the way back to that peaceful place, and the more and more only takes us closer to going over. Which is like. What. Like, fucking, what was it, take the best orgasm you’ve ever had and multiply it by a hundred. And multiply it by a hundred again, and again, and it don’t stop, and you keep coming and coming until you can’t breathe, you can’t think, you can’t see or feel or hear nothing and your life goes pounding out of you in these great awful ecstatic thumps. And like, fucking, you’re still nowhere near.