inculcate that knowledge of the great civilisations of Greece and Rome which seems to have escaped you, and they will instil merely by example, shall we say, a more urbane demeanour, a lighter touch, a wittier—oh well no, perhaps not.” Wullie turned away. “We must be realistic in our expectations, must we not? But try, brother John; do make a little curtsey in gentility’s direction. You are too much the North Briton still.”
John thought: I see you every night in your bed, fockin a skeleton.
At Oxford he lasted all of two months, and he made sure that, even at two months, he outstayed his welcome. He cracked Wullie’s scheme like a louse; what, make a canting professor of him? All he knows, all he needs to know, he feels under his hands, or through the knife’s blade. Flesh and steel; they are their own encyclopedia.
Yet did they not give him a post at St. Georges’ Hospital, and a little house to go with it? Later, St. Georges’ elected him a governor, but by now he was possessed by a great interest in gunshot wounds, an interest that he found hard to indulge, so near to Hyde Park. It was a defect, in Londoners, that they did not shoot each other enough. “Why, why, why,” he asked (his face reddening, blood thudding through his system, ker-clunk, ker-clunk, ker-clunk), “why do you insist on treating a gunshot wound as different from any other?” “Because it is,” was all they could say. Because it is. Because it is, because we believe it is. Exasperation drove him to the post of army surgeon. William flared his nostrils. “A step retrograde, I’d have thought?” Wullie by now had got his dainty fingers up to the wrist in the cunt of the queen of England, who was puffing and squeezing out of her innards a prince of Wales.
But later John was able to publish a treatise on gunshot wounds, which owed nothing to Wullie at all, and brought him the wholehearted esteem of the profession. In the year 1767, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, an honour which came to him a full three months before it came to his brother. In that same year, while dancing—an understandable reaction to good news, though a rare one, for him— he snapped his Achilles tendon. (“Really, John—what Hibernian romp was this?”) Another St. Georges’ appointment put some money in his account, and by the time Wullie vacated Jermyn Street and he took over the lease he had surgeon-apprentices bound to him at five hundred guineas for their five years, and live-in students who paid a hundred per annum for their board—surprising, when it comes to it, what a student can bring in when it’s one hundred pounds minus cost of porridge, meat but sparingly, linen-wash extra, and always use yesterday’s milk.
In 1771 he published a first part of his treatise on the teeth—his knowledge, again, thanks to his presence on the battlefield, because the dead don’t squeal and scream when their teeth are drawn, and in order to write in this speciality what do you need? Teeth, teeth, a plentiful amount of teeth! That year also he got married to Anne, the daughter of Robert Boyne Hume, a surgeon of repute who had helped him in his career. It was ten years since he had met her father, and it was true he had dallied, after his initial proposal, but women cost so! Lace and musical evenings, the scraps for covering screens and what-all, minced chicken-liver for lapdogs, and accoutrements for their heads! It is Anne’s fancy—and she had one of her relatives execute it—to paint a gallimaufry of cupids on the panels of their bedroom wall; there they bob and gambol, in and out of season, bare pink flesh bubbling and seething among the fair-weather clouds.
Since 1780, Wullie and John are no longer on speaking terms. They have quarrelled about the structure of the placenta.
So raise a glass. Here’s a toast to London, where the Hunters live and thrive, and where their prey survive as tripe-makers, spinners of catgut, coal-heavers and vinegar-brewers, industrious pencilmakers and ballad-singers, soap-boilers and cobblers, drovers and match-sellers and dealers in old clothes, where cobblers sleep under their stalls and milk- walkers in the cellar with the cow, where the cow is dying from lack of light and air, where the people are dying of dropsy, quinsy, tisick, measles, croup, gout, canker, teething, overlaying, mold-shot head, thrush, cough, whooping-cough, duelling, surfeit, pleurisy, dysentery, lethargy, child-bed, king’s evil, and unknown causes: and some from grief, and some from a footpad’s ball, some double-ironed in dungeons and some from the bite of a mad dog, some from French pox, cholic, gripes, flux, scurvy, fistula, worms: and are buried at St. Andrew above Bars and St. George the Martyr, at St. Saviour, Southwark, and St. Paul Shadwell, at St. Giles without Cripplegate and St. Botolph without Aldgate.
Joe Vance was visibly cheered when daylight came. “It’s just as the people said last night,” Slig told him. “They’re crying out for giants. They’re also extremely keen on two-headed calves, so if you have—”
“One wonder at a time,” Vance said. He turned to O’Brien. “I have made up my mind on it. We
five
“Gentlemen, you will recall that my experience in this matter reaches back some thirty years, ever since, a young lad fresh from the farm, I was charged by my illustrious brother William to bring him the suitable and neccesary materials for his great work. And you will know that I stand before you not as some sniggling schoolmaster with his text and rule, but as an honest man like yourselves, who has digged and delved and dirtied his hands.”
Fresh from the farm. John Hunter looks about him, at their blackguards’ faces. It is night, and the room is chilly, so they sit muffled in the clothes they will wear when out and about. He has shown them his stock, and watched their faces for signs of levity and mirth on the one hand, or sickening on the other. Neither will do for him. Getting corpses is not for the queasy. It is not a sport either and yet …
“Those years are behind him, you’ll say. He is grizzled now and bowed, not fleet as formerly, his hearing not so sharp; fitter for the laboratory, you’ll say, and the lecture room. And yet there are nights … there are some black nights when I find myself restless, and I would wish to be out again with a swift and sober crew, with our dark lantern and our wooden shovels, our cords and sacks and crowbars.”
Wooden shovels make no sound. (Grunts of effort, even, must be suppressed.) A stout canvas is needed to receive the earth. The hole is made at the head’s end. The hooks, the crowbars, are to insert under the coffin lid. The earth at the foot acts as a counterweight, so—breath indrawn, and held—the lid snaps across. With experience, it is possible to predict—with a thrill that runs from the palms to the elbows—the very second when the wood will crack.
The corpse then is roped beneath the arms, and hauled out, head first, like a difficult birth. Flapped onto dry land, it is straightened and stripped. The grave clothes are thrown back. The gaping sacks are drawn over the flesh, the knees pulled up, the head forced down, the whole returned—as if after birth comes conception—to that economical package in which we spend our nine months in the womb. And lashed with cords. A compact bundle: looking no bigger than a dog, or a few pounds of jostling turnips.
“You will need ladders, of course, to scale the cemetery walls. May I advise you that a rope ladder is more discreet? Yet even then, if stopped in the street with it, you will find questions are asked, and so I advise you that a sexton with a well-oiled palm is more discreet still. Cultivate such men. Drink with them. Get to know their habits and their cant. Sympathise with them in the trials of their trade. Ask after their wife and babies. But when I say drink with them, I mean in your own time. Never take strong drink on a night when you mean to exercise your profession. You will do very well in this trade if you keep sober. The chief reason of bungling is strong drink.
“You will need a table showing the phases of the moon. This I will provide.
