The disintegration of the relationship was so certain on her part that she would never replay any of their days together. She had been fooled by energy and charm; he had wept and burrowed under her intelligence until she felt she had none left. Venus, as Sarath would say, had been in her head, when it should have been the time of Jupiter.
She would return from the lab in the evenings and be met by his jealousy. At first this presented itself as sexual jealousy, then she saw it was an attempt to limit her research and studies. It was the first handcuff of marriage, and it almost buried her in their small flat in Ladbroke Grove. After she escaped him she would never say his name out loud. If she saw his handwriting on a letter she never opened it, fear and claustrophobia rising within her. In fact, the only reference to the era of her marriage she allowed into her life was Van Morrison’s ‘Slim Slow Slider’ with its mention of Ladbroke Grove. Only the song survived. And only because it referred to separation.
Saw you early this morning
With your brand-new boy and your Cadillac…
She would sing along hoping that he did not also join in with his sentimental heart, wherever he was.
You’ve gone for something,
And I know you won’t be back.
Otherwise the whole marriage and divorce, the hello and good-bye, she treated as something illicit that deeply embarrassed her. She left him as soon as their term at Guy’s Hospital was over, so he could not locate her. She had plotted her departure for the end of term to avoid the harassment he was fully capable of; he was one of those men with time on his hands. Cease and desist! she had scrawled formally on his last little whining billet-doux before mailing it back to him.
She emerged with no partner. Cloudless at last. She was unable to bear the free months before she could begin classes again, before she could draw her studies close to her, more intimately and seriously than she had imagined possible. When she did return she fell in love with working at night, and sometimes she couldn’t bear to leave the lab, just rested her happily tired dark head on the table. There was no curfew or compromise with a lover anymore. She got home at midnight, was up at eight, every casebook and experiment and investigation alive in her head and reachable.
Eventually she heard he’d returned to Colombo. And with his departure there was no longer any need to remember favourite barbers and restaurants along the Galle Road. Her last conversation in Sinhala was the distressed chat she’d had with Lalitha that ended with her crying about missing egg rulang and curd with jaggery. She no longer spoke Sinhala to anyone. She turned fully to the place she found herself in, focussing on anatomical pathology and other branches of forensics, practically memorizing Spitz and Fisher. Later she won a scholarship to study in the United States, and in Oklahoma became caught up in the application of the forensic sciences to human rights. Two years later, in Arizona, she was studying the physical and chemical changes that occurred in bones not only during life but also after death and burial.
She was now alongside the language of science. The femur was the bone of choice.
Anil stood in the Archaeological Offices in Colombo. She moved down the hall from map to map. Each one depicted an aspect of the island: climate, soil, plantation, humidity, historical ruins, birds, insect life. Traits of the country like those of a complex friend. Sarath was late. When he arrived they would load up the jeep.
‘… Don’t know much en-tomology,’ she sang, looking at the map of mines-a black scattering of them like filaments. She glanced at herself reflected vaguely in the map’s glass. She was in jeans, sandals and a loose silk shirt.
If she were working in America she would probably be listening to a Walkman while sawing off slim rings of bone with the microtone. This was an old tradition among the people she’d worked with in Oklahoma. Toxicologists and histologists always insisted on rock and roll. You stepped in through the airtight door and some heavy metal would be bumping and thrashing through the speakers, while Vernon Jenkins, who was thirty-six years old and weighed ninety pounds, studied lung tissue mounted on a slide. Around him it could have been civil war at the Fillmore. Next door was the Guard Shack, where people entered to identify dead relatives and friends, unaware of the music because of the airtight room, unaware of the shorthand descriptions circulating over the transistor headset intercoms: ‘Bring up the Lady in the Lake.’ ‘Bring up the by-herselfer.’
She loved their rituals. The people in the lab would traipse into the greenroom at lunchtime with their thermoses and sandwiches and watch The Price Is Right, all of them in awe at this other civilization, as if only they-working in a building where the dead outnumbered the living-were in a normal world.
It was in Oklahoma, within a month of her arrival, that they established the Fuck Yorick School of Forensics. This was not just a principle of necessary levity but the name of their bowling team. Wherever she worked, first in Oklahoma, then in Arizona, her cohorts ended the evenings with beer in one hand, a cheese taco in the other, cheering or insulting teams and scuffing along the edges of the bowling alleys in their shoes from the planet Andromeda. She had loved the Southwest, missed being one of the boys, and was now light-years beyond the character she had been in London. They would go through a heavy day’s work load, then drive to the wild suburban bars and clubs on the outskirts of Tulsa or Norman, with Sam Cooke in their hearts. In the greenroom a list was tacked up of every bowling alley in Oklahoma with a liquor license. They ignored job offers that came from dry counties. They snuffed out death with music and craziness. The warnings of carpe diem were on gurneys in the hall. They heard the rhetoric of death over the intercom; ‘vaporization’ or ‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.
Meanwhile, bright tungsten bulbs gave the labs a clear optic light, the music in Toxicology was perfect for sit-ups and stretches when you found your neck and back had become tense from close-focus work. And around her was a quick good-old-boy debate and an explanation of a dead body in a car.
‘When’d they report her missing?’
‘She’s been gone, lo, these five or six years.’
‘She drove into the lake, Clyde. She already had to stop the car once to open a gate. She’d been drinking. Her husband said she just took the dog and left.’
‘No dog in the car?’
‘No dog in the car. I wouldn’t have missed a Chihuahua, though it was full of mud. Her bones had demineralized. Car lights were on. Skip the photo, Rafael.’
‘So-when she opened the gate she let the dog free. She already had a plan. It’s a by-herselfer. When the car started filling up, she lost it and climbed into the back seat. That’s where she was found. Right?’
‘She should have knocked off her husband…’
‘He could have been a saint.’
Anil would always love the clatter and verbal fling of pathologists.
She had arrived in Colombo directly from working in sparse high-tech desert towns of the American Southwest. Although her last location, Borrego Springs, hadn’t seemed, at the start, enough of a real desert to satisfy her. Too many cappuccino bars and clothing shops on the main street. But after a week she was comfortable in what was really a narrow strip of civilization, a few mid-twentieth-century luxuries surrounded by the starkness of the desert. The beauty of the place was subtle. In the southwestern deserts you needed to look twice at emptiness, you needed to take your time, the air like ether, where things grew only with difficulty. On the island of her childhood she could spit on the ground and a bush would leap up.