The Cadaver

I wish I could live like a bird. Flap, flap flap, flap flap.

And die like a bird: flap, flap, flap… flap… thud.

Circling and diving, majestic and independent; unafraid of mortality or an afterlife. Even the humble, common birds still manage to be so wonderfully celestial. The ones filling my sky now are swifts: darting, glossy-brown harbingers of the start of summer.

It’s forecast to be a hot, humid one this year.

I back away from the windowpane and stretch my neck back and forth. A cramp has formed from straining too long to look up at the sky, with only a brief slice visible between the high-rise buildings. My neck clicks, and releases to one side but not the other, and I remain lopsided, jabbing my index finger deep down into the soft tissue to release the pressure.

From there my finger slides down from the base of my skull, counting down each of the individual vertebrae, touching each ring as I go. Each tiny bone has its part to play in supporting the head, and allowing our muscles to make movements both subtle and sudden. More than just sustaining the weight of the body, it’s those small nuances the spine allows - the nods, the rolls and bobs - that brings individual personality into our body’s movement.

But it’s so much more than that. The spine, for me, is the centre of life. It’s the first structure that forms inside the womb, and the root from which all else develops. Like everyone else I underwent that same process, but it’s strange to think back on that moment almost 30 years later, now a grown woman with a womb of my own, lying empty.

Outside the cry of the swifts reaches a crescendo. I admire again how their scythe-like tails cut through the air.

Birds have always been my first point of reference for as long as I can recall. Even after the unfortunate discovery of my mother’s body, submerged and lifeless in the bath, the first thing I did was look out the window and watch a busy chaffinch catching insects, the flash of white on her wings recognisable even through the bathroom’s frosted glass.

Birds tease us when in flight; they are in their element, and they are untouchable. Only when I had observed the bird about its business for a moment or two did I look back at the body, and cry for help.

That day, no-one had been in the house to hear me. My Dad I saw sparsely, returning as he did each day from the office well into the evening. Typically he’d ask me something about school as his dinner spun around reheating in the microwave, before settling down behind the newspaper, the broadsheet separating us like a curtain dropping at a theatre. When he was home, that was; being some hot-shot negotiator, employed by large supermarkets to negotiate rock bottom prices on imports, he was often in far flung regions of the world.

So, that afternoon, I was alone with my drowned mother, my Dad many hours - possibly continents - away. I cried out for help again, nonetheless.

Perhaps a neighbour would come. We lived in a tight row of houses, and even though my mother rejected their intrusions, I knew that everyone could hear through the walls, and was familiar with our business.

I looked down into the water. My mother’s eyes were lowered, her hair swam gently around her face. Her mouth, usually twisted in unknown disappointment, was pursed, peacefully closed.

If I screamed loud enough, would she wake?

I distract myself by observing people walking around the streets of my 1960s council block. Everyone seems busy. Phones are out. Some cry. Others simply go about their business; but all are disconnected, in my opinion, from their inevitable fate. Death: the predator sitting on top of the food chain for every living thing. I wonder which ones might be next on my cadaver's block.

It could be anyone. Before long, everyone who currently treads the earth will be dead. The heroes and the villains, the love interests, losers and comic personalities. People of the highest importance as the well as the forgotten, lonesome souls. You and I - who hover somewhere in the middle registers of significance - will have departed too. As our bodies perish, we dissolve once again to the elements. I take comfort in the completeness of the cycle, the certainty I will disband in entirety at the end of it all.

Death is a cloud: a transient formation of light, moisture and air. When I die I hope I’ll be absorbed into a cumulonimbus, releasing my energy in a million volts on the earth below with lighting strikes, pummelling torrents of air and pelting rain. Then the remainder of me will float off, corpseless, motiveless, expanding and contracting with whatever the laws of physics play upon me. The molecules which once made me will instead become anonymous and disowned, like vacated seats at the end of a performance.

I drum my blunt nails on the windowsill. I wouldn’t want to live forever anyway. Messengers of the religious devout don’t expect that, do they? As soon as they discover you are happy to die when your time is up, they have nothing to offer you: immortality is their only playing card. Nobody can sell you a promise you don’t desire.

Back at university, at my studies. Cadaver #14 lies beneath the strip lights of the basement lab. The heatwave has made the room unbearable, despite the fans and industrial chillers groaning overhead. The body smells of formalin and something faintly sweet—like decaying fruit.

I lift the sheet.

She is waxen, preserved. Her mouth slightly open. The comparison with my mother, is of course, instantaneous.

But this one has no name, no history. Her breastbone has been carefully split open, revealing a neat cavity. Her liver - once so full of purpose - now sits dull and greyish brown, a meaningless lump.

But I can’t help feeling a pulse of something more. I study her face and see remnants of expression - a tension in the brow, the faintest curl of lip. Ghosts of personality that no scalpel can remove.

I wonder what she loved. What her summers were like. Did she sweat through a hundred London nights, wishing for thunder? Did she hate the way heat sticks to skin?

As I work, the swifts outside are still screeching, dancing in the oven-like sky. This summer is breaking records, they say. Temperatures rising. Ice caps melting. Bodies failing.

Death looms louder in heat.

Drawn to university, my intention was to learn something truthful about physiology in the hope I could identify the root of all my emotions, needing to understand the mechanisms of my body and mind from the inside. That’s how my interest arose in anatomy, and in particular: cadaveric dissection.

The first slice into the body is, of course, a milestone; a rite of passage for myself and every fellow anatomy student around me, and one that would never be forgotten. When I cut open a brain for the first time, I understood that everything is the sum of its parts, even feelings. Now I knew that it was possible to identify, dissect and overcome my emotional weaknesses. I just had to train myself to know that it all came down to physics and chemistry, there was no part of us that didn’t answer to those laws. There was no spirit or soul. Every feeling could be identified, rationalized simply by understanding that it was simply a reaction to a physical chemical event or the behaviour of a collection of cells.

Later that day, in a café, Dad watches me crash the avocado further into the crust of bread, my fork relentless until the fruit, which is actually one of those pretty dry and fibrous ones, eventually gives way into a paste.

With no newspaper dividing us there is an intensity to the table.

“It doesn’t even seem like they’ve given you a good one for the price…”

Throughout our lunch Dad hasn’t been able to get over the £12 price tag for the meal, and has made endless references to it.

“It’s fine Dad.”

“How can you afford London prices? Everything is inflated. If you’d come back home you could save up, and get your own place, get out of that dreadful, pokey flat.”

I take offence at this; I love my flat. True, it’s plain: nothing on the walls, no system or styling to the discordant furniture, it is functional and little else. It would be judged too small to live in by most standards, but it comprises billions of atoms and that’s enough for me. From my window down on the street to the painted wardrobe with books stacked on top, a mixture of edgy poetry I’ve never read, mingling with old academic texts and notebooks; across to my oversized bean bag – the one item of frivolous comfort I enjoy - I can take everything in with one eyeful. There are no hidden shelves, unmanned rooms, or invisible things to stimulate the dark parts of the imagination. But Dad insists I should consider moving home.

“I finally finished decorating you know, well there’s still a few little pieces to do, but your old room is an en-suite now.” He raises his eyebrows hoping to have made the case. But the blow falls flat.

I didn’t want to remember the family home, but there’s not much I can do to stop it flooding into mind. The curving arch over the lounge, the sliding doors to the conservatory. My room upstairs, lonely. Always quiet.

The spare room. Room for guests? Visiting family?

A sibling?

Never, in my memory, used.

“The bath is gone, now’s it’s just a big walk-in shower room…” - he gulps as he drains the rest of his coffee. The bathroom has never, and will never be, an easy place to discuss.

For the first few years after mother's demise I had to be taken around the neighbours for my Sunday bath, not willing to get in the doomed tub. What a sight I must’ve been, padding along the road in my dressing gown and slippers, with wet hair.

He catches my hand which I now realise had been tapping frenetically on the table, and gently presses it to stillness with his own. ‘It’s your home too, you know. come whenever you can. I still hide a spare key under the plant pot in the drive. You know which one?”

“Yes. I will.” I say, feeling no conviction, which he sensed. I tried harder.

“I really will, one day Dad”.

It had come up in our weekly therapy sessions how important he thought it was for me to reconnect with my family, my feelings. How my mother’s spirit lived on in the house and he was waiting for me to return and go through her belongings. How he felt that by ignoring him, and the house, that I was still yet to grieve.

Overall today’s session had been polite, and uneventful. I think dad didn’t want to push too hard and wanted to help smooth things along; I just nodded and said “right” and “okay then” and made various affirmative but non-committal sounds. The therapist was enthused by my seeming engagement, he no doubt had read our history, not to mention what had happened in previous sessions, and had expected the very worst of me.

As the waitress comes with some additional condiments I know what Dad is going to say before he even says it.

“Everything alright?” she asks, in the genial but banal way people do in hospitality, when they don’t particularly want an answer.

“Where are the avocados from?”

“Oh - our wholesaler, we just order them with all our veg - ”

“Country I mean, sorry to interrupt love. Country?”

“Oh! Mexico?..”

He touches his nose as if giving up a secret.

“Tell your suppliers to try Egypt” he offers, “their exports are around 30% cheaper and just as good quality. You could bring the price of the dish right down. Under a tenner, at the least.”

The waitress smiles but looks non-plussed.

“Or, well, use white bread instead of sourdough - then actually – even better - you can bring the whole dish in for even less. If it was listed for under a tenner you could expect a fivefold increase in sales and triple that in profit…”

“Stop it, Dad” I wince.

“Sorry, sorry.” He makes an apologetic sweep of the crumbs on the table. “You know I love cost saving and just…”

“It’s fine.” I stand, push back the chair to go.

His dark eyes follow me up.

“See you same time next week?”

Another hot, humid night. I sweated and shivered throughout, and a full moon tarnished my bed with a silver veil.

Sometimes my mother would disturb me in the dead of night, with a passionate frenzy of kisses that had no warning nor explanation. I could smell wine on her breath, but also knew that it wasn’t drunkenness that brought her to me, it was a different sort of inhibition, a sudden eruption.

But then that’s what she was like; fallible and loving.

I wish she hadn’t been so physical, because when she died, it was those things that were impossible to replace: the warm, knowing touch.

The living touch of one who has passed away, the warmth of someone long cold, the kiss of the lips which were now dust.

After a few stifling days: summer breaks.

After our therapy session, Dad comes for lunch at my flat, balancing gingerly on the bean bag as we listen to the rumbles of thunder.

The sky turns an unnatural orange-grey. The city pulses with electricity. Lightning cracks through the clouds, and the rain finally comes.

We watch from the window together as the water hits the pavement in silver streaks.

“You know birds fly lower when it’s going to rain?” Dad says. “Pressure change.”

I smile faintly.

Just an hour later, the downpour is over. The heat lifts and the smell of scorched tarmac and ozone fills the air.

The sky is clean. The air cool.

The birds stretch and reclaim their altitudes.

Somewhere, someone else has departed. And someone else has been born. I rise, stretch my neck, and feel the bones crack gently into place.

Beneath us, the building buzzes with life.

But I keep looking up.