Walking to the science lab for the rat dissection this morning, I remembered Venn describing her experience of it in Year 10 as if it was something for me to look forward to. She’d cut up both a rat and a sheep’s eye, and had thoroughly enjoyed the process. Years earlier, the first time Pop Locke had taken us out fishing on his tinnie, he was gutting a kingfish and I couldn’t watch – but Venn was transfixed by the ritual. By the time she turned eight she was gutting and filleting her own fish. She would first thank the fish for giving up its life, then perform the operation swiftly, with a light but respectfully firm touch.
Not sharing her constitution, I was apprehensive about today’s session.
I was partnered with Starkey, who, after ignoring Miss Keenan’s demonstration, sliced through our rat’s skin, membrane and rib cage in one go. He urged me to ‘get stuck in’ but, overwhelmed by the sight of exposed innards, I froze, convinced I was looking into something that was never meant to be opened. Starkey pushed me aside and removed the rat’s organs one by one, mostly with his bare hands, and laid them around the carcass. ‘First!’ he announced to the class, wiping his glistening fingers on his trousers.
Then he dragged me to the front of the lab to watch Pericles and Tibor, who was wearing a green surgical gown and mask, and using instruments borrowed from his father. After cutting and separating the rat’s rib cage with meticulous care, Tibor leant down – for a closer look, it seemed. But then he fainted, face first into the splayed rat. Seconds later, his head suddenly surged back with enough force to lift his body clear off the stool and sent him crashing onto the floor, where he thrashed about, having some kind of fit. Pericles moved everybody back and cleared the stools. Before anybody had raised the alarm, a woman with bright-red hair, cut in a short and practical style, arrived. She wore a badge that said ‘Nurse Nola’. Her swift action added weight to my suspicion that we were under video surveillance. She took Tibor’s vital signs then called an ambulance, which delivered him and Miss Keenan to the hospital.
By mid-afternoon, I was still feeling shaken up because Tibor hadn’t returned for Mr Field’s English class. I’d liked Mr Field from the first moment we met last week, primarily because I’m certain he had Swiss Valley Hair Pomade™ in his hair – the only styling product that Pop Locke ever used. At the end of class today, Mr Field reminded us to get cracking on our reading list, so I dashed to the library at 2.45 pm. There were three nineteenth-century books on the list, which I searched for on the shelves, but all the copies were on loan.
We were also required to read one of our own choosing and, as I made my way through the shelves, a navy-blue, leather-bound book with faded gold embossing on the spine caught my eye. As I pulled the volume from the lower shelf, it released a musty smell, asserting its vintage by making me sneeze three times before I could read the title:
My One Redeeming Affliction
The Mysterious Tale of a Runaway Prodigy Edwin Stroud
The electronic glockenspiel sounded, followed by Mrs Deacon on the PA. >ATTENTION, STUDENTS. THE LIBRARY WILL BE CLOSING SHORTLY. PLEASE BRING ANY ITEMS YOU WISH TO BORROW TO THE LOANS DESK IMMEDIATELY.<
I scoped out the queue and saw Isa Mountwinter approaching me with intent. ‘Hide it!’ Homunculus said, so I knelt and slid the book back onto the shelf.
‘Looking for Jekyll and Hyde?’ she said. ‘Out of luck, it’s gone. So are Dorian Gray and Frankenstein.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did you enjoy slaughtering rats today?’
‘The experience wasn’t exactly pleasurable.’ I stood up.
‘Pericles told me you thought it was funny that Tibor passed out and fitted?’
‘It was ironic because he wants to be a doctor.’
‘He said you laughed.’
‘Maybe just a nervous titter. Nads and Starkey laughed.’
‘Schadenfreude.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Google it when you get home. Why are you even friends with those pathologically morbid creepsters?’
‘They’re not that bad.’
‘Really?’ Isa shifted her head sideways. ‘Evan Starkey offered to help clean up after Miss Keenan left in the ambulance with Tibor. While Raymond was out in prep, he cut off the rats’ tails.’
‘How do you know if there was nobody else there?’ I said, wincing from a sympathetic twinge that shot up the length of my spine.
‘At lunchtime he went around the playground selling them as good-luck charms to Year 7 boys.’
‘Some would call that enterprising.’
‘Trust me, those boys are serious trouble and you should stay away from them.’ She raised an index finger as if about to add something, but instead withdrew it and said, ‘That’s all,’ and left.
Mrs Deacon announced the library’s closure. I retrieved the book from the shelf and ran my fingers over the paler blue part of the leather, which had been softened and smoothed by more than a century of other readers holding it. Pop Locke once told me that the best books make you feel like they were written just for you. Without even reading the first page, I had the strangest feeling – almost a certainty – that this would be one of those books. My One Redeeming Affliction. The oxymoron intrigued me. My nub, an affliction of my own, had resulted in both pain and harm, yet there was nothing redemptive involved. Perhaps the book could help me come to terms with it?
But the library was closing. ‘Put it in your satchel and walk out,’ Homunculus said. So I did.
Tonight, I had a stack of homework to get through and didn’t crawl into bed till almost midnight. Too late for reading, but I could see My One Redeeming Affliction sitting alone on my new shelving unit, its gold lettering catching the light. In a room furnished entirely with mass-produced flat packs from IKEA, the book smelt like the promise of another world.
It was Pop Locke who got me into reading. His favourite quote was from a French dude called Balzac. ‘Reading brings us unknown friends.’ With the hope of meeting a couple, I took a deep breath and opened to the first page.
Untangling the mystery of how I became the man I am today would necessitate travelling back untold generations – perhaps fortunately for you, dear reader, that would be an impossible quest. I only ever met one of my grandparents, my maternal grandfather, Walter Hunnicutt, and he was far from forthcoming with the family history. But this doesn’t matter a jot, because my goal is not so much to explore the origin of my affliction as to tell you the story of how I turned it to my advantage. My mother, Esther, was a committed diarist and in her advanced years was still able to recall stories from her youth with crystal clarity. So I shall begin with the early lives of my parents and the fascinating story of how they came together.
Esther, by her own account, was a precocious child, and having three brothers demanded inventive methods of competing for her father’s limited attention. From the age of five she would escape her nanny and scamper down to Fernleigh’s conservatorium to watch him eviscerate and stuff animals. Walter Hunnicutt, chief taxidermist at the Australian Museum, was famed for his meticulously crafted mounts, and Esther’s visits were the single disturbance he tolerated. After three years of silent observation, the young acolyte began to paint watercolours of his finished pieces. Eventually she was allowed to assist and at thirteen, having mastered the fundamental skills of taxidermy, she began stuffing her own small marsupials.
Her mother, Martha, though not sharing her daughter’s fondness for dead creatures, encouraged Esther’s scientific curiosity, hoping an interest in more feminine pursuits would soon follow. Tragically she never witnessed the transition, for shortly after Esther’s fifteenth birthday, Martha Hunnicutt was taken by consumption. Walter attempted to smother his grief beneath a show of fortitude, but it refused containment, the great oak doors of Fernleigh barely muffling his fits of rage and bouts of sobbing. Then, turning from the bottle to excessive doses of Chlorodyne and Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, both containing sufficient morphine to subdue a rhinoceros, he descended into shuffling stupefaction.
Three years later, Walter, now a shadow of his former self, went to a Spiritualist meeting in Stanmore, purportedly to prove the séance nothing more than the orchestrated histrionics of charlatans preying on the desperate and easily deluded. But on entering the home of professional medium Olive Bell, he was disappointed to find the parlour well lit by gas, making the concealment of any contraption beneath the table impossible. Worse still, the other three participants all appeared respectable and of pleasant disposition.
Once they’d all settled at the table, Olive’s whispered invocation to the spirit world – and specifically Martha, at Walter’s request – elicited no response. There was no rapping or tapping, no disembodied moaning or clamour. Nobody was prodded. Nobody pinched.
Undaunted by the lack of evidence, Olive declared Martha’s spirit to be present and encouraged Walter to pose a question for confirmation. He asked his departed wife to reveal her favourite colour. The participants placed their fingers on the planchette and waited. Slowly the wooden heart rolled on its tiny bone wheels, its pencil scribing what at first appeared to be a looping ‘P’ on the paper tablet, then ‘u’ and ‘r’. Purple? No – the first letter was in fact a ‘T’. It was Turquoise. Correct.
Olive asked if the spirit was dwelling in a peaceful place, and the planchette quickly spelt out ‘yes’. But, remaining unconvinced, Walter accused the assembly of manipulating the planchette. Olive advised him to ask another question without vocalising and he complied. A strained minute of silence passed before Walter cleared his throat and stated his intention to leave. The medium urged him to tarry a moment longer, and Walter curbed his rising indignation.
On returning his finger to the planchette, a strange frisson passed through the group. The wooden heart wrote ‘Lady’, then paused before adding ‘bird’ – ‘Ladybird!’ Walter felt his lungs compress, and an invisible band tightening around his temples. His whole body trembled. He lifted his fists and brought them crashing down on the board, flipping the planchette into the air. His head dropped to the table and he wept openly for the first time since his wife’s passing. The boulder had been rolled away from his entombed heart. He’d asked Martha’s spirit to reveal the last word she’d heard. ‘Fly away home, ladybird,’ were indeed the words he’d whispered in her ear as she’d drawn her final breath.
Listening to her father recount the night’s events in an uncharacteristic babble, Esther wondered who or what had persuaded him to abandon all scientific knowledge. On being told that later in the night her disembodied mother had also communicated her wish for him to remarry, Esther surmised that her father had unconsciously moved the planchette himself – the ideomotor effect. She recorded his observations and her hypotheses in her diary. But weeks later, when Walter began taking tea with the spinster Althea Beauclare, Esther’s own rational thoughts were to become plagued by a fear that some dark and mysterious force was at play.
It seemed unlikely that a scientist would believe his dead wife had spoken to him, but grief does strange things to a person. After all, I’d checked the mail for a month, hoping for a message from Pop Locke from beyond the grave.
As I was starting to nod off, I dreamt of the planchette spelling out ‘Ladybird’, with Walter’s hand subconsciously guiding it.
L-A-D-Y-B-I-R-D
Each letter appeared in my mind’s eye then rearranged themselves into
B-R-A-D I-D-L-Y
and I remembered the crossword clue from last Friday, outside Dr Limberg’s office.
1 Across: Brad idly arranged insect displays (8 letters).
The letters from ‘Brad idly’ could be rearranged to display an insect – the ladybird! AND a ladybird had landed on Dr Limberg’s jacket, AND she’d quoted the same nursery rhyme as Walter Hunnicutt.
Goosebumps spread over every inch of my skin – even the nub. I lay awake for another hour, trying to persuade myself that this was all nothing more than a coincidence.