Read Toby's Room for Free Online Page B

belly to where his penis lay, a shrivelled seahorse on an outcrop of wrinkled and sagging skin.
    Miss Duffy produced a sound midway between a giggle and a gasp. Of course, this would almost certainly be her first sight of a naked man. Elinor glanced at the other girls and saw from the slithering away of their eyes that the same was true of them. Mr Smailes smirked and suddenly, fiercely, Elinor hated him. But then at once she was back with the dead man. His skin glowed like a lit lampshade. Tiny moles and scars seemed to float on the surface where one quick flick of a palette knife would sweep them all away. She took a step back, and this movement seemed to break the stillness that had descended on them all.
    ‘Well, now,’ Mr Smailes said. ‘The first thing is to open the chest.’
    A suture line ran along the base of the neck and down the centre of the chest. Under Mr Smailes’s direction, Miss Duffy wormed her fingers into the incision and pulled the chest wall back. Miss Cunningham did the same on the other side. The halves lay across his upper arms, almost casually, as if he’d done this to himself, removing his chest wall as nonchalantly as he might a shirt. It was rather horrible. But then they got their first glimpse of what lay beneath: the pectoral muscles, glistening under a translucent layer of connective tissue, fanning out in two huge wings to cover the ribs. Itreminded Elinor of the roof of King’s College Chapel, though she had enough sense not to confide this thought in Mr Smailes, who would certainly have thought her mad.
    Somebody had to make the first incision. ‘Miss Brooke.’
    He was holding out a scalpel. She looked from him to the other girls, all of them training to be doctors, for God’s sake; she was an artist, no, not even that, an art
student
, she couldn’t be expected to –
    Fumbling, she took the scalpel from him.
    ‘Careful! You could have your finger off with that.’
    He placed his two index fingers on the cadaver’s chest, indicating the length and direction of the cut.
Look for the line
, she heard Tonks say. Oh, my God, how did he get in here? Evidently the honour of the Slade was at stake. Well, then. She positioned the scalpel, took a deep breath, and began the cut.
    ‘No, too hard. You don’t need to press.’
    He was right there. She’d never encountered a knife as sharp as this. Flakes of putty-coloured flesh rose on either side of the blade as easily as water round the prow of a boat. When the incision was long enough and – she hoped – deep enough, but not too deep, she straightened up and immediately her hand began to shake.
    She heard the other girls breathe out. Only one of them had held the scalpel, but all of them had followed its progress, inch by painful inch, and now they felt, with a great rush of blood to their faces:
Yes, we can do this
.
    By the end of the session Elinor’s brain was aching almost as much as her back. She was too tired to follow Mr Smailes’s summing-up of what they’d learned and merely pretended to listen while gazing around the room. There were three cadavers. She worked out that the one on the next table was that of a very old man, though the fatty deposits around his nipples looked exactly like breasts. Perhaps that was what happened in extreme old age, the two sexes growing to resemble each other more and more, so that finally, in death, the body became androgynous again, as it had been in infancy? But the cadaver furthest away from her was no more than middle-aged and definitely female, despite the shavedhead and sunken breasts. The width of the pelvis alone … Whatever tricks the flesh may play in death, the bones don’t lie.
    Instantly, she wanted to transfer to that group, to work on the female body. She knew, without being able to say how or why, that her business as an artist was with women. Women’s bodies held a meaning for her, a spark, which the male body lacked. Might it be possible to switch groups? After all,