The Underground Man (23 page)

The whole of Edinburgh was poured into the bowl before us, as if we were ringside angels, yet was conjured out of nothing more than a couple of lenses and a small hole in the roof.

When we emerged blinking into the daylight I honestly felt as if I had sat in the lap of the gods. And for the rest of the day, as we carried on with our sightseeing, I found I had to keep the odd giggle from slipping out.

‘Professor Bannister,' I say, holding out my hand.

‘Come, come,' says the tall fellow, and waves a finger in my face like a metronome. ‘William, if you please.'

I was in the very bowels of the University's Anatomy Department, meeting the man around whom this whole trip had been arranged and, judging by the deference bestowed upon him by his students and colleagues outside his office and the capaciousness within, he must be a singularly important chap, for he had sofas and armchairs and an aged chaise, not to mention a vast writing desk with a green leather top.

The Professor set about impressing upon me what old friends he and Mellor were. And, for a while, we juggled between us the pleasantries such occasions demand, regarding
train journeys and the dampness of Edinburgh, before we returned to our mutual friend.

‘Is he still round?' asked Bannister.

‘Very round,' I replied, which seemed to please him no end.

‘Excellent,' he said most earnestly, and ushered me into a chair.

I should, I think, make some reference to my host's extraordinary height, as this greatly occupied my mind at the time, in that having taken his own seat he proceeded to cross his long legs with such far-reaching swiftness I worried he might inadvertently cut me down.

‘Heads, is it?' said William Bannister, waving my letter of introduction at me. ‘Mellor says it's heads you want.'

‘Information, rather than the heads themselves,' I replied, rather lamely. ‘I am … working on a project to do with heads.'

He smiled at me, slid down into his chair a foot or two, made a church and steeple with his fingers and perched his chin on top. In retrospect, I appreciate that his silence most likely denoted a man who was ordering his thoughts (for I soon discovered he had no shortage of them), but at the time I wondered if he hadn't simply drawn a blank. The only animation about the man was the huge foot which balanced on the kneecap and waggled madly, as if all his energy had congregated there. He sized me up for another minute, pursed his lips, then finally let loose.

And I must say he turned out to be about as full of head-information as a man could possibly wish: how a head might be judged and measured, for example, or how it might be broken and repaired. In fact, it soon became clear that, like his old friend Mellor, Professor Bannister was a wordy fount and once his tongue had properly got into its stride it left me struggling far behind.

Unfortunately, his monologue seemed to me quite tedious, being marred in two different ways. Firstly, the
tone
, which was academic and totally humourless (no anecdotes, which will often keep my interest up). Secondly, the
sheer magnitude
of the thing for, stored in his skull, he seemed to have information equivalent to several dozen regular headfuls and in no time my own rather small, unacademic head was filled right to the brim.

After twenty minutes I was so thoroughly saturated I began to wonder if he did not perhaps have some work he should be returning to and my only participation had been whittled right down to the odd nod or grunt, to signify I was still awake. Then, right in the middle of this very erudite and thoroughly boring flood of words, my ear caught hold of a vaguely familiar term. A phrase I must have come across in one of my medical dictionaries.

‘Trepanning?' I said (putting something of a stick in the Professor's spokes). ‘Now what is that all about?'

Well, at first he was quite floored by my interruption. He looked like a man who had just been snapped out of an hypnotic trance.

‘A hole in the head, Your Grace,' he said. ‘A man-made hole.'

And an arm reached out to a distant desk, scrabbled among the papers for a second or two, before scissoring back and dropping into my lap a yellowed, jawless skull.

‘Well held, sir,' said Bannister.

I turned the thing cautiously in my hands. I was beginning to understand why Bannister and Mellor are such firm friends – both are such wordy fellows and both enjoy sporting with bones.

Having a dead man's head rolling in my hands made me feel a little strange, but I was determined not to be outdone and managed to gamely ask, ‘And who is this fellow, then?'

‘That is
Homo erectus amazonas,
Your Grace. We found him down in Brazil.'

I had a good long look at what was left of him – I had never met a Brazilian before – and gently ran a finger along the fine fissures where the different continents of the skull had merged.

‘If you care to look at the crown,' Bannister told me from the depths of his chair, ‘you'll find a hole about three-quarters of an inch wide.'

Indeed I did.

‘Now, while we medical men find these holes very handy for carrying old skulls about the place – one's middle finger fitting so snugly inside – there are a good many in our profession who claim that such holes are, in fact, the result of primitive surgery …'

‘But why would a Brazilian consent to having a hole made in his skull?' I asked.

‘Well now, Your Grace, that's a fair question, for there's no evidence that the fellow consented to any such thing. But it is commonly held that such operations were undertaken in order to release Evil Spirits.'

I looked down at the dried old husk in my hands. Whatever once possessed it had long since upped and gone.

‘Tell me, William,' I said, continuing to look down at the skull, ‘are men still trepanned today?'

‘O, plenty. Plenty of them. I should say there are several hundred people currently walking about with some sort of hole-in-the-head. Though not for spiritual reasons, of course, but to relieve a haemorrhage perhaps or to allow us to have a poke around. But, to answer your question … Yes, Your Grace. We still like to make the odd hole or two.'

Bannister was now so far down in his armchair he was practically horizontal, with his legs stretched out before him and his feet crossed neatly at the ankles. I was anticipating
another verbal onslaught when, quite without warning, an arm swung out from his body and came at me like the boom on a boat. I had to duck down out of the way as it swept around the room. When it finally came to rest I saw how the finger at the end of it was pointing towards a glass cabinet on the other side of the room.

‘Have a gander at my old John Weiss,' said Bannister.

So I made my way over to the cabinet and found behind the glass a slim case, about ten inches by five. In its open mouth lay a row of evilly-gleaming instruments.

‘A trepanning kit, Your Grace,' said Bannister, coming alongside. ‘A little out of date, but beautifully made, wouldn't you say?'

It certainly was. Like terrible jewellery; each piece very snug in its own velvet bed. The centrepiece resembling a small carpenter's drill – but not so modest – with a finely turned wooden handle at one end and all glinting metal at the other. Its own little army of apostles lined up on either side. But I was baffled by a tiny brush and a phial of oil which lay in their own little concavities.

‘For lubrication,' Bannister explained.

I was so completely taken with this macabre machinery that I asked the Professor where one might purchase such a trepanation kit. But he was quite emphatic that such things were not commonly available to non-medical folk, so I said no more on the matter.

Bannister took me out to his dining club for luncheon, which was entirely unexpected and very kind indeed. I have had very little appetite lately, the food in the hotel being far too fancy, but when we were seated and served and Bannister launched into another incomprehensible monologue (something to do with carbon this time, I think) I rather found
myself tucking in. We had a thick broth, grilled trout, spicy plum pudding and a bottle of sweet red wine. I was sleepily spooning the plum stones in the bottom of my bowl when some sort of rumpus went off at the table to my right.

There was the scraping of chair legs, the clatter of abandoned cutlery and the sound of conversations being hastily brought to a halt – in other words, that particular atmosphere which usually precedes some sort of fight. I was still trying to identify the protagonists (and praying the mêlée would not spread and engulf any innocent by-standers, such as myself) when Bannister suddenly sprang up from the table, sending his chair skittering off across the floor.

I had not the slightest idea how he had been drawn into it. Perhaps looks and glances had been exchanged. But in a couple of strides he was at the next table, had a fellow by the throat and was pushing him right back in his chair. The chap with Bannister's hands clamped on his windpipe was flat on his back in no time at all, whereupon Bannister jumped on top of him, sat on his chest and pinned his arms down with his long legs. Then his hand went hard down into the fellow's face. Screams now came from all parts of the room and one woman (who I took to be the fellow's wife) tugged vainly at Bannister's shoulder as he drove his fingers down into the fellow's throat.

When his hand came back up it had a piece of pork fat dangling from the fingers. It was very white and very wet. Bannister dropped it into a nearby saucer, then helped the unfortunate diner back to his feet.

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you,' said the red-faced fellow. ‘The damned thing got caught right under my tongue.'

But Bannister merely bowed a restrained little bow and returned to the table, while the rest of the room babbled admiringly.

‘Some people simply refuse to chew their food,' he confided in me, wiping the grease from his fingers with his napkin.

The dining room slowly restored itself. The conversation
settled, the broken crockery was cleared away. The chap who had got the chop fat lodged in his gullet came by to shake my companion's hand and heap yet more praise on him.

When he was finally out of the way Bannister got to his feet.

‘Well, onward and upward,' he announced. ‘What says Your Grace?'

I said that ‘onward and upward' sounded like good advice. So we collected our coats and hats at the cloakroom and went out into the already-darkening day.

That morning Bannister had suggested I look around his Special Collection, the implication being that this was something of an honour for a layman such as myself. By the time we emerged from the dining club, however, I would have been happy to go back to my hotel and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. But, as I have already mentioned, William Bannister is very keen on remembering those details others might be inclined to forget. So, with his long arm around my shoulders, I found myself escorted back to the Anatomy Department and being led left and right and right and left and eventually down into the deepest depths of the place.

At the bottom of the steps stood a pair of doors with frosted windows which I thought very pretty indeed, and I might have stood there admiring their wintry sparkle a good while longer had Bannister not given me a smart shove towards them.

‘You should find everything labelled,' he told me. ‘Enjoy yourself,' and disappeared back up the steps.

It was not long before I was regretting having eaten such a substantial lunch or, come to that, having lunched at all. The vast white room was much too brightly lit and the bottles and jars and glass cases all gleamed like great chunks of ice. But as I made my way among them I recoiled not from the piercing
light and its many reflections but from the overwhelming, all-pervading smell. The air was awash with formaldehyde – was warm and sticky with the stuff – so that, advancing down that first aisle of exhibits, I wondered if, by the time I came to leave the place, my own organs might not be as pickled as those on show.

That atmosphere of profound liquidity encouraged in me the notion that I made my way through some underwater world, for I found myself in the company of entities so wet and strange they would have looked more at home on an ocean bed. I could have read my
Gray's Anatomy
cover to cover a thousand times without preparing myself in the least. The lasting impression was of my having come upon an awful carnage, the result, perhaps, of a terrible explosion, which had scattered its victims into several hundred jars.

Handling the bones of an Ancient Brazilian may be fairly gruesome but coming face to face with his descendants' bottled brawn is something else again. Man had never seemed to me so mortal, had never seemed so sad. For as I slowly padded through that vast stinking room the voice which spoke to me most intelligently was a melancholy one – seemed to seep right through the thick glass jars.

Having never previously come across a man's vitals I was hardly likely to recognize them. Thus, here (the label assured me), suspended in alcohol, was a human heart, looking like nothing but a soft black stone. Here was a sectioned kidney, like a mushroom ready for the frying pan. All around me the innermost, most secret pieces of man were laid bare, hanging slack and horribly sodden in their prison-jars.

A Cumberland sausage of intestine.

A single eyeball dangling in fleshy mid-trajectory.

A human tongue, long enough to choke a man, coiled up like an eel.

And a brain – a man's brain, for goodness' sake! – with all
the contours of a bloated walnut. And not the ocean-blue I had always imagined but a dismal, pasty grey.

A curious construction, marked ‘broncho-pulmonary', sat atop a pedestal in a fancy bell jar and which, after much puzzled label-reading, I finally understood as being an intricate representation of the interior of a lung. Again, I found my own picture of a body's mechanics well wide of the mark. The inside of my lung is apparently less like the branches of a leafless tree and more like a coral bouquet. Yet even this beautiful, bizarre lung-tiara, I thought, seemed to sparkle in a mournful way.