Mr. Flood's Last Resort(79)

I follow Cathal’s impossibly tall form down the hall. His walk is faltering tonight, his body a little hunched in a suit older than days. His jacket swings short of his backside and his trousers end shy of his ankles.

The gap in the Great Wall of National Geographics is wider than ever. I can move through it touching the dusty strata on either side with my hands outstretched. Cathal has to duck his head and turn sideways.

He fumbles for a light switch and we are in fairyland again. Strings of tiny lanterns weave amongst the display cases, the instruments, and taxidermy. There is a clanking and a whirring of curiosities coming to life, welcoming their master. Stoats throw down losing hands, the raven, back on her podium again, ruffles her wings. The glass eyes spin delightedly and even the shrunken head looks happier: the sewn pout has become a smile.

We carry on past them and past the four-headed angel at the foot of the staircase who wrinkles her snouts in greeting.

We continue down the hallway, farther than I’ve gone before.

“Look at this wee fella,” he says.

Together we peer into a dimly lit fish tank—the face of a startling creature smirks back. The creature leans on one elbow in a sea of painted waves with its tail outstretched. It appears to be smoking a pipe.

“The Feejee Merman.” Cathal smiles. “Half capuchin monkey, half salmon: a work of genius; you can hardly see the join.”

“It’s something else.”

“Over here,” says Cathal. “Have you a strong stomach?”

“It depends.”

He pulls a string, and a set of curtains open.

“The Flayed Man,” he announces.

A life-sized man sits cross-legged in a glass case resting his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand. His skin has been planed away from the right side of his body. Gory ribbons of flesh are still attached to his wrist and ankle. In some places the cuts have gone deeper, revealing muscle, nerves, bones, and subcutaneous layer. One side of his face is unremarkable, on the other a naked jawbone grimaces and an eyeball lolls in an open socket.

“Merciful Jesus.”

Cathal looks at me proudly. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“In my fecking nightmares I have.”

He grins. “The Hunterian Museum has been after this for years. Made by an Italian master of anatomical wax modeling.” He opens a long wooden case. “But this is what started it all off.”

Inside, nestling in corresponding depressions of faded velvet, is a saw, knives, chisel, and tourniquet.

“This amputation kit belonged to my great grandfather, Thomas ‘Butcher’ Flood, a surgeon in the Crimean War.”

“That’s some heirloom. Did you not think of taking after him?”

“I drop at the sight of the real stuff.” Cathal frowns. “Will we go and see your portrait?”

He takes a bundle of keys from his pocket, searches through them, and opens the last door in the corridor.

*

IT’S A beautiful room. Long and narrow, with paintings ranged the length of it on forest-green walls. The gallery, Cathal calls it. The floor is polished wood, and the bigger paintings are lit with brass lamps attached to the wall. There are landscapes and seascapes and even the odd still life.

I turn to Cathal in surprise. “None of them are by you.”

He gives me a bitter smile. “These are Mary’s paintings; she bought each and every one of them.”

Something else strikes me. “And there are no portraits.”

“She didn’t like the eyes looking at her.” He gestures at the easel. “Are you ready?”

In the middle of the gallery stands a square ghost: the canvas on an easel with a sheet pinned over it.

Suddenly I feel nervous. I’m an unwitting Dorian about to face my true self captured in oil paint. I wonder what it will be like, my true self. Maybe it will be a wizened strip of a thing, as spare as a fell runner. Or maybe it will be like one of those nocturnal mammals, round-eyed and unprepared, shocked-looking and a little otherworldly. I glance up at the old man and nod.

*

MAUD STARES out of the canvas. She sits with one leg folded under her and her head resting on one hand. At first sight she is still, self-contained. But when you look closer you see the clenched set of her jaw. And there’s a rise to her shoulders as if her hackles are up. Her hair is half-pinned, half-falling, giving her an unraveled look. Her mouth plays with a tense smile. For all her wariness she is tired, dog tired and bone tired; I can see it in her eyes. Like a soldier who has never been told to stand down, she has kept it all at bay for so long.

I start to cry.

*

CATHAL UPSET is a broken toy, an old tin soldier, wound up and wobbly headed. His eyebrows waggle as he tries out different expressions. He fixes on a sad frown. He holds me awkwardly to his chest as I cry, patting my back as if trying to soothe a baby with colic.

I cry for the people who are dying from bowel obstructions and car crashes, heart attacks and lingering diseases, unhappiness and fluke DIY accidents. I cry for old rogues holed up in their clutter and brave souls too scared to go out. I cry for dead wives and bad sisters and disappeared schoolgirls. I cry for those who can’t remember and those who can’t forget and those who are stuck somewhere in the fucking middle.

As all the sadness in the world swells around me Cathal Flood holds on. But he is all smoke and mirrors, roar and bluster. For now I feel how fragile he is, how dry boned and thin-skinned, made from paper and dust. Just like those big blousy moths flailing in the Belfast sink in the pantry of the Bridlemere of my imagination.