Toby's Room by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page A

deep, though perhaps their mother had told them that to stop them going so far in.
    On the way home, Toby insisted he should carry the jar, which was heavy now, full to the brim with murky water that slopped over on to his chest with every step. They’d got masses and masses of frogspawn, and minnows too,
and
they’d remembered to put in a clump of reeds for food and shelter. They didn’t know that lurking in the reeds was a dragonfly larva, the most voracious of all pond creatures. Over the next few days it had devoured every other living creature in the jar.
    ‘Don’t they get on well together?’ one of the aunties said, watching them walk up the drive.
    They did. They were about as close as any brother and sister could be. Dragging herself back to the present, Elinor found herself staring at the cadaver’s shrunken genitals, feeling again a spatter as of hot candle wax on the back of her hand. When had it become the wrong kind of love?
    ‘Miss Brooke, if we could have your attention, please?’
    They were about to remove the lungs. Despite their increasing skill with the scalpel, this rapidly degenerated into an undignified tug of war. So much for treating the cadaver with respect. The chest cavity just wasn’t big enough to get the lungs out. Elinor gritted her teeth, tried not to think too hard about what she was doing, and pulled. At last they were out, lying side by side on the still-intact abdomen, like stillborn twins. Stillborn,
black
twins.
    ‘Why are they black?’ Miss Duffy asked.
    ‘I expect he was a miner,’ Mr Smailes said. ‘You might like to think about that the next time you’re toasting your toes in front of the fire.’
    Elinor needed no urging to think about the cadaver away from the Dissecting Room. After a night out with Kit Neville, dancing or at a music hall, she’d return to her lodgings and lie in the darkness, sniffing the tips of her fingers, where, mysteriously, the smell of formaldehyde lingered. Gloves, scrubbing: nothing seemed to help. Sometimes she dreamt about him, hearing a hiss of indrawn breath as she made that first incision. Always, in the dreams, she avoided looking at his face, because she knew his eyes would be open. Even by day, he followed her. She didn’t know how to leave him behind in the Dissecting Room, where, session after session, the slim girls swarmed over him like coffin beetles, reducing him to the final elegance of bone.
    She and Kit Neville had become close friends and spent a lot of time together. Kit was London born and bred, and he enjoyed showing her his native city. They went to Speakers’ Corner on Sunday mornings, sat in the gods at the music hall, danced the turkey trot till sometimes well past midnight or simply wandered along the Strand,tossing roasted chestnuts from hand to hand till they were cool enough to eat.
    Away from the studio and the Dissecting Room, she lived a life almost obsessively devoted to triviality. She’d turned into a pond skater, not because she didn’t know what lay beneath the surface, but precisely because she did.
    At the end of their evenings, Kit would escort her back to her lodgings, but he never tried to kiss her goodnight and he never asked to come in. They were both rather proud of their platonic friendship. She knew he had a life apart from her, that he was having an affair – if you could call it that – with one of the models, in fact with the same girl whose name had been linked with Tonks.
    Laura, her name was. When she sat for the women’s life class, Elinor settled down to draw her with a painful sense of invading Kit’s privacy. Laura was beautiful: she had the milky white skin that sometimes goes with dark red hair. She was a wonderful subject. And yet Elinor produced a bad, weak, timid, insipid drawing, far below the standard of her recent work. She couldn’t seem to grasp the pose at all.
    That night, when she’d finished undressing, she tilted the mirror to show the bed and lay down in the