Birdman

17

Early 1980s. UMDS. Gross anatomy 1.1. B stream lab rotation.

Standing in a class of ten, dotted amongst the green-shrouded shapes on stainless-steel gurneys, the sweet tang of formaldehyde deep in his nostrils, 19 years old and Harteveld knew that something life-changing was happening.

He was paired with a young female student, and assigned to the corpse of a middle-aged woman. For the next year she would be stored at night, in a stainless-steel cadaver tank, and wheeled out in the daylight hours under her green cotton sheet, to be dissected, mulled over and rearranged by his trembling gloved fingers.

She was sharp-featured with small yellow pouches for breasts, thin pubic hair, razor-sharp hip bones jutting up under papery skin. Her dark blond hair was smoothed back over the scalp.

'Doris awake and ready?' the girl student would call cheerily to the technicians as she entered the lab, pulling on her gloves.

'She's overslept this morning, look at her, can't get a thing out of her.' They'd wheel her out. 'Hey, Doris, wake up. You're on.'

And she'd be delivered to Harteveld, who stood trembling and silent, not joining the joke, sweating at the thought of the inspired frigid stillness which waited under the green sheet. Sometimes he found himself shaking so much next to her supine body that the scalpel fell from his fingers.

'You haven't the stomach for it,' his co-student murmured, nudging him in the ribs during peritoneal and upper GI topology. 'Get it? You haven't the — oh, forget it.'

He'd saved the allowance made to him by his parents and bought a flat in Lewisham — a ground-floor flat with a square garden and brick wall in front. After class he lay in the bedroom, curtains closed, and fantasized about the corpse so often that it seemed to have rubbed part of his brain raw. She took on the proportions of a goddess in his mind: waxen, motionless white face; serene and cool, a marble muse, blue veins showing in her lips, her blond hair fanned out on the pillow for him. Waiting in infinite stillness. It was the stillness and pallor which attracted him: so unlike the plump, wriggling Lucilla.

Panic-stricken, he made clumsy attempts at self-administered aversion therapy. He wrote to researchers in the States asking for supplies of Depo-Provera. When they refused he tried injecting himself with diamorphine before anatomy class. But it made him too nauseous to get to his feet. Worse, it offered no relief from the fantasies.

It was only six weeks later, almost at the end of his first term, just before Christmas, when disaster truly struck.

The lab technicians had overstayed their welcome in the Standard, and hadn't returned the anatomy specimens to the cadaver tanks in the anteroom. Harteveld, sick and shaking with the possibility this opened to him, loitered behind after the last anatomy class of that term, crouched in the corner, at eye level with the polished pneumatic valves used to raise and lower the dissecting tables.

It was 2 p.m., and already the flinty northern light was fading from the sky. The old heating system creaked and shuddered in the belly of the building, but in the lab the air was chill and stale. Harteveld wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked himself gently. The bodies lay silent in the weak hibernal light, skin stripped in neat sections from the arms, clamps, haemostats, retractors sprouting like small spines from their gelid grey stomach meat. She was in the centre of the room. From here he could see the dun fall of her hair.

And then the big door at the far end of the lab opened.

Security.

Harteveld's heart stilled. He mustn't be found here. He should stand up and pretend casually to be collecting something. Quickly now. But his legs were trembling, useless. A cold sweat broke out across his scalp. He was trapped.

And then something happened which changed everything.

The security guard locked the door, from the inside, and pulled the blinds.