Bronia Kita

The Following Signs of Visible Injury

    Malcolm Glass was feeling out of sorts. Last night’s curry sat heavily on his stomach, and he suspected bad breath. Fortunately such breaches of etiquette went unremarked in his profession; the girl whose body he was about to dissect would not be offended.
    As they were celebrating their wedding anniversary he’d suggested to his wife that they might go somewhere in the West End, make a real occasion of it, but Jane had preferred to stay closer to home. He wondered now whether he should have insisted, if there had been something in his voice that suggested a lack of enthusiasm. Politeness was the bedrock of their marriage; they were both well-mannered people, and even after twenty-four years together Malcolm still wasn’t always sure that what his wife said was indeed what she meant. He sometimes felt like a mountaineer tentatively shifting along a ledge of ice, moving with great care, fingertips probing the way and blinded by the whiteness surrounding him.
    At times he envied his friends with more tempestuous marriages. He had heard raised voices, even seen things thrown – including once a vase, with the roses still in it. On that occasion Jane had been there, too – it was a less-than-successful dinner party – and as their eyes met a slight shudder had disturbed her narrow shoulders. Secretly, though, Malcolm wondered what it was like to have a woman that angry with you, to see her eyes flash and her mouth distort as she shouted abuse.
    He wondered, too, if Jane had similar feelings. Would she have preferred a husband who came home late without telling her, who sometimes drank too much and called her names?
    These were guilty thoughts, though, inappropriate for a man who regularly saw where violent emotion could lead. When people found out what he did they often said he must be tough to do his job, must have nerves of steel, but they were wrong. It was his very reticence that had led him to choose pathology over other branches of medicine. He could never have managed all the talking that was required of ordinary doctors: the endless streams of questions, diagnoses, suggestions, consoling words. The cheerful demeanour needed when dealing on a daily basis with the sick and the injured would have been quite beyond him.
    Worse than all that would be the possibility of inflicting harm. Malcolm Glass couldn’t imagine how he would cope with knowing that he’d failed to spot something, or been unable to save a patient. The bodies he dealt with were beyond harm; they couldn’t bleed or cry. No patient would ever look at him with reproachful eyes; the guilt lay elsewhere.
    He knew most people wouldn’t understand, but he saw what he did as peaceful: whatever struggles his corpses had faced in life – against an illness, an attacker, or simply the daily erosions of age – were done with now. All their efforts to better themselves – get a different job, lose that extra stone, meet the one who was really the one – were irrelevant, had evaporated with their last breaths. What he had to do was write the final chapter, give each life a final full stop   
    Of course it wasn’t easy; some days – days like today – it was hard to approach the job in the right frame of mind. On days like these it was hard to turn from his instrument tray and face the body without crying, ‘Oh, your poor face!’ But that would be ridiculous, and he owed it to the newly-dead not to be ridiculous.
    The girl on the table, for instance: her life had been ended with such ferocity that Malcolm felt especially obliged to treat her delicately. He took a deep breath against a stab of heartburn and began:
    ‘The body is that of a Caucasian female probably aged between twenty and thirty. She was 5’ 7” tall and appears to have been well-nourished. The body shows the following signs of visible injury: a large contusion to the right side of the head…’

    Laura’s head swung back in response to the blow. The force of it unbalanced her and she fell against the fireplace, her skull cracking audibly as it made contact with the cold marble. It was over so quickly, the change from noise and struggle to complete silence so sudden that Nick wasn’t ready for it, his blood was up and he was still spoiling for a fight. He became aware of his own breathing, harsh and ragged, his chest rising and falling as though he’d just finished a race. Rather than look at her his line of vision stayed where it had been, on a level with her face as she stood before him. Now he was staring into the evening sky and the horse chestnut tree that screened the house opposite from the road, overlaid with his own reflection. He noted with only mild curiosity that he looked thwarted, incomplete. He turned away and went into the kitchen. He needed a drink.
    As he reached up into the cupboard his hand shook so that the glass he was holding chimed against the one beside it, making shocking music. He placed it on the counter and leaned with his fists against the sink. What had they been arguing about? For a moment he couldn’t remember. It was about buying a new flat. He wanted to move to Docklands, but she had said she couldn’t bear to live in one of those gated communities, like colonials in a compound, trying to keep the natives out. He hated it when she spoke like that, as if she were mocking him, treating him as if his attitudes were stupid just because he wasn’t as educated as she was.
    He felt as though he couldn’t get enough air, he was panting like a cornered animal. To remind himself that he was human he poured himself a beer and drank it in great gulps. Then he took his car keys from the hall table and went out, slamming the door behind him, as if she could hear.

    Malcolm Glass was finding it hard to concentrate. He really should have taken an antacid tablet before he started – Jane had put some in his jacket pocket as he left for work. Now he’d have to wait another two hours before he could do anything to calm his churning stomach. He sighed and forced his thoughts back to the matter in hand.
    ‘There is a contusion on the left cheek, and a small cut on the lower lip which has partially healed…’

    She hadn’t seen it coming. Nick seemed to be feeling expansive that night: he was cooking dinner, had poured her a glass of wine while she waited at the table. He was a good cook, better than she was, and when the mood took him he seemed to enjoy it. In the days when they’d still invited friends for dinner, he was in charge.
    Laura had taken the newspaper out of her bag; she’d been reading an article on the train and she wanted to finish it before she forgot. The writer had spent a night in an ice hotel in Lapland, and she thought she’d like to go there some day.  She was miles away, imagining herself snuggled under furs in a bedroom hewn entirely from ice, pretending to be Helga in the Snow Queen, when he tore the paper from her hand and hit her across the mouth, his signet ring cutting her lip. She had tried to get up and go to the bathroom, but he’d gripped her by the wrist and forced her down into her chair.
    ‘If I can go to the trouble of cooking for you, the least you can do is show some appreciation!’
    He unfurled his napkin with a crack and talked about his day as he ate, as if nothing had happened. She sat in silence and watched the blood drip slowly onto the white plate.
    Laura was sure that people were beginning to notice. She’d forced lipstick into the cut on her mouth, enduring the sting in the hope of disguising the damage, but when they went out into the sunshine at lunchtime the next day she had sensed Angie looking at her profile for a little too long before she forced her gaze elsewhere. Laura had waited for a comment, but when none came the feeling was more complicated than simple relief.

    Malcolm made a point of never taking his work home with him. It would be unfair to burden Jane with the things he saw. She was a speech therapist, so she was accustomed to people who were damaged, either physically or emotionally, but those she worked with could be fixed, or at least their lives could be improved. Sometimes she would give him a quizzical look, as if wondering whether to ask him about his day, but she was very discreet, and he owed it to her not to drop some appalling image into her brain, lodge it there forever. People might say that a trouble shared was a trouble halved, but in his view it was more likely to be doubled.
    He rarely cooked nowadays, not because he believed it was Jane’s responsibility, but because sometimes, standing in the kitchen, he found himself suddenly befuddled, unable to think clearly. The bread knife was so like the one he used on skulls, the ladle hanging on the wall so closely resembled a blood ladle that the similarity alarmed and confused him and he no longer knew how to operate. So he avoided the kitchen as much as possible, and he’d never told her the reason.
    He began the Y incision that would expose the internal organs. He had an unusually acute sense of smell, and as he leant over the body he caught the faint aroma of shampoo, incompletely masked by the dried blood. He tried not to think of this girl showering, dressing, making up her face (trying to conceal the split lip?), completely unaware that this was to be her last ever day. As soon as he revealed the ribs he could see evidence of past fractures…

    Laura came home late that night, and more than a little drunk. She’d been to a bar with some of the crowd from work, not intending to stay long, but enjoying the company so much she forgot the time. By then anywhere was better than home. It was dark and she’d relaxed, thinking he’d gone to bed. She was trying to take off her shoe and giggling at her lack of balance as she came through the door, so she didn’t notice him at first. He was standing just inside the living room, waiting for her. The only light was from a table lamp, and she imagined him sitting there all evening. How could she have been so stupid, so thoughtless as to believe she’d get away with this?
    He didn’t speak, so she, completely sober now, said, as naturally as she could manage,
    ‘Hi Babe. What are you doing there in the dark?’
    He answered by coming over to her and pressing her against him so that she could hardly breathe. She felt the hard plate of his chest, and the heart beneath. She could no longer feign casualness; she thought that maybe this was it, he’d really kill her now, and part of her welcomed it because at least then it would be over.
    ‘Where have you been?’
    The hissed words burned her cheek.
    She struggled to take in enough air to give herself breath.
    ‘A drink. I just went for a drink with Angie and some of the other girls.’
    ‘Oh yes? And who else was there?’
    ‘No-one, just a few of the girls.’
    She pushed against him, trying to make some space between them, but he only held on more ferociously, crushing her until the room began to go black.
    Her ribs were sore for weeks. Every time she reached for something she had to make an effort not to wince. She was fairly sure Angie was watching her, maybe some of the others, too. She could have told them, asked for help, for a sofa to sleep on, but she didn’t. Partly it was shame, partly it was pride. She didn’t want pity, didn’t want to be told what she should do, should have done. So she said nothing and hid the bruises as best she could. She preferred to act as though nothing were happening and walk through her life as if balancing on a tightrope. After each incident she tried to convince herself that it hadn’t been so bad, that there was a way for them to live together without the violence if only she could understand what she was doing wrong. If only she could crack the code they’d be all right.

    Malcolm Glass bent over the face and gently lifted each eyelid in turn, tasting his sour breath as he spoke. Her eyes were brown. They would have been pretty, but no part of the body is altered so visibly by death as the eye. A dead eye was sinister, even to him.
    ‘There is no sign of peticheal haemorrhage, nor other evidence of asphyxia.’

    It was when he came up behind her as she sat at the computer and read the email over her shoulder that she experienced the first real feeling of panic.
    ‘Who’s Ben?’
    ‘A friend from college – you remember, the one who’s been travelling, I told you about him.’
    She was aware of a false note of jauntiness in her voice, as if she were trying to conceal something
    ‘Another one of those over-educated ponces who can’t be bothered to get a job?’
    The savagery of his words shocked her, and she spoke a little shakily, ‘He was doing V.S.O., now he’s seeing a bit of the world before he comes home and settles down. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’
    ‘Not if you think life’s all about self-fulfilment and “finding yourself.”’ He clawed the air to indicate inverted commas. ‘If you believe you have a duty to get off your backside and help the economy, then maybe there is!’
    He turned and stalked out of the room, making her feel as though she were guilty, somehow, and should make amends.
    After that Ben became a focus for increasingly frequent outbursts. Nick seemed to think he had the right to read not only her emails, but the occasional letters she received from friends, at Christmas, or on her birthday. She would find them lying on the table, envelopes carelessly discarded and wait for the comments as if bracing herself against a flight of arrows.
    ‘So God’s gift to Africa’s coming home, I see. Going to grace us with his company, is he? Don’t you dare offer to put him up – I couldn’t stand listening to the sanctimonious little prick going on about Third World debt and how it’s all the fault of people like me!’
    Laura couldn’t understand why he was so angry with her all the time. It seemed as if every day she did something new to upset him.

    Dr Glass could find no evidence of disease. It seemed she’d been a perfectly healthy young woman. One of the many things he’d never told his wife was that he would have liked a daughter. They had two sons, tall and gangly just like him, both at university now. All the same, he’d have liked to have a little girl to call him daddy. The girl on the table made him think again.
    He weighed each of the internal organs, carrying them carefully to the scales as if he might break them. An examination of the uterus showed that she had never been pregnant…

    Nick liked the idea of having children; he’d mentioned it soon after they met, but for Laura that was something in the future, which, if she looked into it at all, was as clouded as her bathroom mirror before she stepped out of the shower and wiped it clean. She wasn’t ready for life to get serious yet; she was too busy enjoying herself.
    Their early days together were good. He liked to surprise her with weekends in the country, a trip to Paris. Once he roused her before dawn and drove her out of town so that they could see the sun coming up from the basket of a hot air balloon. Nick liked big gestures, he was ostentatious. A few months after they met he took her with him to help choose a new car, and she stood in the showroom feeling awkward as he tried to involve her in choosing colours for the paintwork and fabric for the upholstery. It was all too extravagant for her; she’d have preferred something small, secondhand and slightly bruised. She knew she couldn’t tell him that, though. She would spoil his enjoyment of having the salesmen at his beck and call, and it would seem like a criticism, so she smiled encouragingly whenever he looked over at her, and said what she hoped he wanted her to say.
    She hadn’t intended to move in with him so soon, but when her landlord decided to sell the flat Nick had persuaded her.
    ‘Why put yourself through the grief of looking for somewhere else? You’ll only end up trudging from one depressing dump to another, and even if you find somewhere you like - and get in before someone else grabs it – why pay rent when you could live here for free?’
    She’d smiled at him as if she were pleased, but she had doubts: she’d be on his territory, on his terms, with nowhere to go if things didn’t work out. Everything in his world had to be perfect: the flat should always be spotless, his car without a scratch, his suits immaculately pressed. There was no room for doubt or hesitation or ordinary human fallibility with Nick.
Once she’d moved in it became evident that there were elements of her life he disapproved of, too: she was too untidy, her clothes took up too much space – and he didn’t like her seeing friends from her college days. He said the word ‘student’ as if it were a term of abuse, not caring if it upset her. She didn’t understand it: he worked as a broker in the City, earning far more than she ever would in PR, but still he seemed to be growing to resent the very things that had first attracted him to her.

    Dr Glass lifted the heart free of the rib-cage. It was perfectly healthy, as you would expect in a young woman of this age who was not overweight and probably not a smoker. Even now he sometimes had to fight against the non-doctor part of himself – the Malcolm part – that would suddenly see what he was doing with untrained eyes. He was holding a human heart. A heart that until a short while ago had been beating, strong and steady, for 25 years.
    This is just an organ, he told himself, a redundant organ. Muscle and blood and connective tissue, nothing to get sentimental about.

    Laura had that feeling in the pit of her stomach, the one you have when you’re apprehensive about something but looking forward to it, too. She’d been set up with dates before but not felt like this; usually she dreaded it. What she’d heard about Nick had intrigued her, though: a self-made man, someone who’d had to leave school to support his mother and sister when his father walked out on them, but with a sensitive side. He liked opera as well as football, went running, was learning Italian. Good-looking, too, so her friend Kate had told her.
    It was cold that night; frost was already sparkling on the ground and as soon as she got out of the car she could see her breath freezing on the air in front of her. She liked nights like these, clear nights when you could see the stars and your senses seemed heightened as if the cold crystallized your thoughts and feelings.
    She parked the car and walked the short distance to the pub, staring upwards as she went, looking for the North Star. She thought she’d found it, shining brighter than the rest, just as she reached the door. She was thinking that she really should learn the names of the stars as she walked in and was enveloped by the fug of heat and alcohol. She’d almost forgotten why she was there, until she looked across the bar and caught sight of Kate and Jonathan. And then she saw him: he had dark hair, high cheekbones, a sharp, intelligent face. Kate had seen her, too, and must have told him, because at the same moment he looked up at her, and as their eyes met Laura felt as if something leapt inside her, as if her heart were trying to escape.

* * * * *

Biography

Bronia is British/Polish, lives in South London and has two children who do their best to prevent her writing anything much. When she gets a chance she mostly produces short stories, but is currently working on her second novel.

bronia@bkita.freeserve.co.uk