Anatomy

Inside me is a secret; I am keeping it calm, soothing its splinters and bones among my intestines and a warm soup of blood. When I walk, it balances perfectly.

My secret likes the campus, and I take it here often, even though the people that I used to know have all gone now. All except for Finn. I drink hot chocolate in the refectory, and when it's warm, I sit on my coat on the lawns. I bring my textbook everywhere I go, and when the afternoons are sunny, the pages are bright enough to blind. The students sit in gangs of five, or else they come alone and try to read. Some have secrets of their own: you can tell by the way they hold their heads.

I keep my secret underneath my skin. It nestles there behind my liver, piercing a membrane, and to pass the time, it ticks in time with the tocking of my heart.

Inside the gentle squish of fat, my secret is growing, my alien child. A stethoscope might find it, diagnose its jaggy pulse, but there is no one to diagnose but me.

I spend a lot of time at the Pathology Museum. It's always quiet, except when they do lessons in here; they don't let the public in off the streets, you understand, it's not a freak show. They think I'm a medical student: I was, in point of fact, but not for very long. Still, I showed the man at the desk my student card the first few times, and after some weeks he stopped asking to see it. I nod to him every day, and smile; he always says, Good morning.

I come to stand among the jars, and breathe the clean air among the cases and wax models. I spend a lot of time drawing, too. Often, I will lean my back against an empty wall, and crook my arm until it makes a sort of shelf for my sketchpad. It would be more comfortable to sit on the floor. But I wouldn't want to disturb my secret, because if I move too quickly then it digs me, jabs with its corners. It doesn't want me to forget it; my secret wants to hurt.

My tutor was a prophet, you know, with silver hair. He said we were to call him Finn: no standing on ceremony. At the first dissection class I was worried that I might disgrace myself somehow, vomit perhaps; the thought had scared me. But, when Finn's long hands laid out the digestive tract, I was euphoric, having glimpsed the universe.

The open body is a rare flower, with thick peeled petals, and yet more petals within. I heard once that the mother of a god looked down his throat and found that all the universe was there: stars and shopping malls and death and horses, all quivering and vulnerable, trembling like an epiglottis.

At half term he asked to see me. There was something in his look, something peculiar; at the time I misread it. I was anxious, of course, convinced that I had done something wrong. I barely slept that night; I passed the time in bed with my textbook, revising, as if I might get through 'til morning, if only I could learn enough. I dreamed of Finn, for just a moment. His teeth were very white. I woke, startled, with my cheek against a diagram, when one of my housemates flushed the toilet.

When I stand before the mirror naked, I can see the beauty tracing though me: the deep and shallow colours, and the calm, soft masses. My secret sets off my organs like an expensive brooch, asymmetrical and daring.

When Finn came past today, he didn't see me. I saw him though: he was glistening red and grey and blue; the bones in his face were the soft yellow of piano keys. I saw the jump of his oesophagus as he swallowed, and then I ducked behind a lime tree.

The affair was brief, if you could call it that. He adjusted his tie, clawed his fingers through his hair. He seemed to have forgotten that I was there. I gathered up my coat and stuff, and left. He didn't look up, just picked up a biro and began to drum the table with it.

I didn't go home right away. My housemates would all be there, arguing and eating toast and watching children's TV. I found myself at the Museum instead, hunting among the jars and plastic anatomical models, frantically looking for something. It got dark and the cleaner came in and cleared her throat, but I still hadn't found it, so I went to the house and crept up to my room.

Later, in the bath, I spread out my hand, covered in bubbles, and then I dunked it, splash, and pulled it out again. As the water streamed away, I recited my fingers like a poem: the bones, tendons and major nerves. At the wrist was the tender bloom of a bruise.

That first night, the secret formed; it sang like a gale through a cracked window. By the weekend I was afraid that I was pregnant. I took tests, dozens of them, until the people in Boots and Superdrug started giving me weird looks. I wasn't, of course; no baby is made of blades and edges and bits of tooth enamel.

I didn't attend any tutorials after that. As the months wore on, I found that I didn't have time for lectures anyway; I'd hit on something new, undiscovered: the physiology of a secret. When they sent the letter to say I'd failed the year, I didn't care.

I sent drawing after drawing to Finn, always to scale, showing the cartilage and claws and locks of matted hair. I didn't need a scalpel; my secret was so painful that I could feel its contours underneath my skin, just as if I had swallowed needles. After the third one, the envelopes started to come back unopened. I sent them anyway.

Sometimes I would creep into the Lecture Theatre and sit at the back. Sometimes, Finn would catch my eye, and then flick quickly back to the whiteboard. For a long time, I wondered why he didn't just have me thrown out; then it dawned on me that he was afraid of me, of the secret.

These days I'm much more discreet. I wouldn't like to be banned from the university; there isn't really anywhere else to go. So, I'm polite, friendly to the refectory staff; I give them cards at Christmas. They think I'm rather sweet.

There is death in the museum, and order too, that gives it balance. Every pain is catalogued, lined up, made pure and clean in glass cases and belljars, until it's hardly a pain at all. There is every syndrome here except my own; I have looked: carefully; scientifically; systematically. There aren't any secrets in the Path Museum. Even so, it's nice inside, and out of the rain on wet days. I am at home here. My secret belongs here too.