Tom McCarthy - C

“The ovaries,” she mumbles over her shoulder to him. “Here’s where the pollen grains and utricles get into them, into their cavity.”

He peers forwards, and sees where her scalpel has sliced through the corolla, pegged back its flesh and let the pistil stand out stiff and long. She scrapes the prostrate membrane, gathering its secreted essence on the blade’s side, then smears this onto a slide-plate. She looks up to the wall; Serge follows her eyes, and sees spelt out above the dissection table the word uterus. Above it, ripped from today’s Daily Herald, the headline “Young Turks Target Armenians.” Beside the printed text, Sophie has written, in brackets, Anatolia.

“ Anatolia,” Serge reads aloud. “Is that what you were-”

“Shh!” Sophie holds her hand up, and the two of them freeze for a few moments: she sitting with the scalpel in her hand, mouth open and ears pricked up as though listening for something; he standing behind her, head above her shoulder, breathing in the sleepless odour wafting from her hair and body. After a while she turns to him and says: “Come find me tonight.”

“Here?” Serge asks. “Or in the Crypt Park?”

She waves her hand across her giant diagram, as though to say “Wherever,” then signals for him to leave again.

That night, as he trawls through the ether, he pictures spiracles and stamen rising upwards, prodding at the sky like hungry aerials, and shellacked setae wound like tuning-coils around segmented abdomens. From time to time he looks out of the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sophie drifting silkily across the Mulberry Lawn, but never does. At three or so he makes his way towards her lab. It’s empty, and now smells of stale sandwiches, old lemonade and flower- and insect-secretions overlaid with the odour of the chemicals stored on the shelves’ jars. Serge half-recognises this last odour from the days when he and Sophie would mix compounds in this very room-but only half: these chemicals are more sophisticated, real ones, loaned from cupboards at Imperial, cases guarded by white-coated men who commune with Sophie in a language too complex for him to follow. They’d understand her chart, Serge thinks, looking at the wall whose web of lines and vectors has grown still larger and more complex since this afternoon: they’d look at it and know immediately what the letters meant, the links, all the associations…

He finds her outside, in the Mosaic Garden. She’s moving among the flowers, pacing from one spot to another, back again, then onwards to a third spot, a fourth one, as though following a strict set of instructions. As he comes near, she leaves the path and starts moving around the flower bed itself, her lower body lost among tall iris-stems, like some giant grasshopper.

“What are you doing?” Serge asks.

She motions to him to be quiet. He treads softly as he walks across to join her. She takes two steps forwards, then one back, then one to the side, then stops, her whole body tensed up. She seems, once more, to be listening out for something. With each hand clasped around an iris stem, she looks like a tethered radio mast.

“Why did you want me to come out here?” he asks.

She’s silent for a while, then turns to him and says:

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“Tell me, then,” he tells her.

She stands in silence for what seems like an age-then, just when he’s about to turn away and give up in frustration, says:

“I’ve got a lover.”

Serge is overtaken by a sudden sense of vertigo-as though the surface of the path he’s standing on, and of the lawn and flower beds around it, had all turned to glass, affording him a glimpse into a subterranean world of which he’s been completely unaware till now although it has been right beneath his feet: a kind of human wasp-nest world with air-filled corridors and halls and hatching rooms. More to regain his bearings than for any other reason, he asks Sophie:

“Who is he?”

“He’s my instructor in-” she begins; then, cutting herself short, says: “He’s secret; it’s all secret. But he’s made me sensitive. He’s done stuff to me. I can see things that…”

“That what?”

“See things. What’s coming. When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments.”

“What bodies? Where?” asks Serge.

“In London, Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me. Look.”

She takes his hand and lays it on her stomach. Her skin, through the cotton of her thin white dress, is soft and pliant. Serge can feel a rumbling beneath it. She must feel it too, because she adds:

“It’s not the same as hunger.”

He takes his hand away again. He knows what lovers do: he’s seen photographs, in a magazine he found lying on a bench in Lydium. There was a woman kneeling on a sofa, in front of creased curtains, and a man standing beside her on a carpet, sliding down her dress with one hand while in the other he held his own huge fleshy mast, which rose from the open fly-gap in his trousers; the woman was looking at it, smiling in a fiery, complicit way, as though she belonged to that subterranean world as well, was intimate with its cells, its alveolae, and could look out at the normal world from inside, mocking and unobserved. Does Sophie kneel on sofas in front of curtains? Does her face have that look? Right now, she’s looking straight ahead of her, but her eyes have emptied-or, rather, seem in the process of being filled from somewhere else. She’s muttering:

“… when the bodies… and more bodies come, the parts… a bug massacre in Badsack, Juno Archipelago… above Buc, France: Pegonde-Reuters…”

She looks as though she were tuning into something-as though she had somehow turned herself into a receiver. Is that possible, Serge wonders-like Bodner’s spade, the house’s pipes? He’s read in Wireless World of a girl in America who picked up experimental stations on a filling in her tooth-but via insects and news headlines, flowers? The notion seems ridiculous. And yet some kind of transmission seems to be coursing through her body. As he watches her, her eyes grow brighter, which makes the sunken parts around them, their ridge-shadowed sockets, darken and become more cavernous.

“You really should sleep,” Serge tells her. “Why don’t we go back to-”

“He’s coming soon,” she interrupts him.

“Who?” Serge asks.

“Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll come back.”

“Oh, Father. Day after tomorrow, yes. Why don’t-”

“Father!” she snorts. “He’s not your… It’s the other one. Monarch. Didn’t use paraphylectic.” She pauses, then continues: “He taught me the transpositions. Then he’ll slink into my dormitory, and wreak carnage.”

Serge feels a chill. The air is cold, but it’s not that that makes him shiver: it’s the sense that Sophie’s talking about things he’s simply not equipped to understand, an apprehension that gulfs as wide as frozen interstellar distances are opening within her words, expanding beyond measure the gap between her and him. He asks her:

“What dormitory? The one where you sleep in London?” She stays in a boarding house for young ladies in South Kensington, just opposite the Science Museum.

“No,” she answers. “That’s not where. I’ll have to kill him in me, or there’ll be more bodies: segments, on the battlefield.”

“You’re crazy,” Serge says. “I’m not listening to this rubbish. Go to bed, or I’ll wake up Maureen and she’ll haul you inside.”

Sophie looks at him bewilderedly, then around the garden. Dawn is breaking. Birds are singing in the bushes and the trees over the wall. A couple are hopping in the grass’s dew. To his surprise, she releases the iris stems, acquiesces with his order and walks slowly beside him to the house. When they arrive there, she goes to her room, he to his. He sleeps all day. He dreams of Sophie’s innards, her stuffing: of organs sensitised by passion while, on the outside, hinged limbs twitch and fletch and signal, current-galvanised, against creased backdrops, both inner and outer body shaken by transmissions. In his dream, the divan turns into a dissecting board; Sophie becomes a bird, cat or insect whose stomach has been opened; heart, gizzard and other nameless parts are spilling outwards in a long, unbroken tapestry, a silken shawl-and spilling up into the air, sticking to wires. He wakes up sticky himself, and ashamed.