Viscera

VISCERA Thomas Corfield

Panda Books Australia Sydney — New York — Tokyo — Berlin

This edition copyright 2015 Thomas Corfield All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Science arose from poetry.

When times change, the two can meet again.

On a higher level. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Viscera

1 London, A grey and cold February.

H

e stood tall and distinguished, his hands buried deep in his overcoat to counter the morning’s chill. His breath swirled, broke and dissipated and he watched it, wondering whether death could ever be as painless. It was living that brought pain, he decided, death was always relief.

Being a professor of anatomy, his deliberations regarding death were understandable. But having a dying wife had rendered them all-consuming. He glanced at the hospital’s entrance, its glass doors and old brick: the building having endured more plastic surgery than those who’d passed through its theatres. The University College Hospital was his haven. His asylum. It was his world. The students - 1-

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he taught in it went on to help turn the world and mend its broken parts. But on this morning, Cantar Ethanual Holt would not enter the place as a teacher, but as moral support. His chest tightened at the prospect: having endured her death once, it seemed even his own anatomy couldn’t stomach it a second time. He looked away. This hospital was sacrosanct. It had kept him sane when his world had fallen apart. And to know his wife waited for him inside, left his world teetering again.

Two students, weighed with satchels, greeted him as they passed. He smiled absently and watched them enter the hospital’s warm clinical sterility. He was unable to follow. Despite his prestigious position within the place, Cantar felt unworthy. He felt to be nothing.

He felt scared.

Guilt did that.

“Canty?”

The professor turned. “Morning, Stefan.”

“Are you quite alright?”

Cantar nodded.

“Are you certain? You look rather distracted.”

“I remain out here, Stefan, merely to savour the organic before entering the sterility in there.” He tried a smile, but it felt cracked in the cold.

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Stefan put a finger to his glasses. He was stout and round, impeccably dressed with his pocket watch and bowtie on show, both suggesting a determination to retain an era that although having passed, still defined him.

Towering above, Cantar felt sallow and gaunt in comparison.

“After all these years?” Stefan asked, “You still ponder such things?”

“It is the dilemma of our profession,” Cantar said.

“No, my friend, it is the dilemma of yours.”

It was said with a smile, but Cantar found it did nothing to lighten his despondence.

Stefan peered closer. “Canty? Are you sure you’re alright?”

He nodded. “I’m fine, really.”

“Nothing good comes of pondering alone, you know. The problem with pondering is that it prevents one relinquishing the past.” He patted his ample paunch. “And the past only ever weighs us down.” His amusement faded. “If there’s anything you find yourself dwelling upon, you would tell me?”

Another nod. “Honestly, I am fine. You just caught me during a moment of reflection.”

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Stefan put a hand on his colleague’s arm.

“What has been endured, should not be exhumed.

You know that.”

Cantar nodded again and fought back tears, hoping the chill might be an adequate excuse for their arrival.

“And Vedra. Is she well?”

“She is well, yes. Quite well.”

Either satisfied, or knowing not to press matters, Stefan released his touch and studied his friend.

Decades ago, the two had laughed at their irony: both men considered medical academics to be either failed clinicians, or socially incompetent individuals, both of which impeded the practice of medicine. But Stefan and Cantar had no such deficiencies. They taught because they wanted to.

Their friendship spanned twenty years, but it had been cemented three years ago during Vedra’s treatment for ovarian cancer.

Since then, Vedra had been in remission.

Cantar looked away.

In recent months, however, she’d become fatigued. And despite his concerns, Cantar had said nothing to Stefan. If Vedra was ill again, he wanted the hospital to remain a sanctuary rather than a refuge.

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He didn’t want support.

He didn’t deserve it.

Stefan left, waving at students who bid him good morning. Alone again, Cantar released breath he’d been holding.

He watched his colleague enter the hospital, and the students he’d permitted through first, wondering why life burdened him with illness when all he’d ever wanted was to keep it from the world.

But still he couldn’t follow.

Even the smell of the place seemed ominous.

Out here, the world was crisp and new. Born of dew and fragrant air. But not in there. The hospital was man-made and sterile. Once, its fragrance symbolised all he’d desired. Now, it only proved what he no longer had.

He looked up at rows of windows and thought of Vedra inside, waiting for the consultant. He loved his wife beyond the female demands for proof. His loyalty was unconditional, marriage sanctity enough. Words of affection, he felt, were no more than noise, and reassurance is required only in the realm of doubt. Aware of this, Vedra demanded nothing of him, content with what was un-said. Or perhaps she had no choice.

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His daughter, however, thought differently.

She was turning twenty-three shortly. During her mother’s illness, Natalie had grown closer to her and further from him. Which was fortunate, as she provided Vedra with the support he could not.

Cantar managed grief by withdrawing. Which his daughter saw as cold and heartless. When Vedra had been first diagnosed, both wife and daughter had suffered. The more ill she became, the less Cantar could offer either women.

He took a deep breath, held it and then watched its steam dissipate, wishing he could do the same. After another glance above, he strode towards the doors.

Once upon a time, as a surgeon mending broken lives, he’d found the smell of disinfectant his oxygen and the porcelain sheen his light. Once upon a time, he was obsessive and brilliant. Once upon a time, medicine had parted in reverence before him and closed stronger in his wake. But he walked now with a stoop, feeling too dark for the hospital’s white, and pretended to be deep in thought to avoid staffs’ smiles. What a difference from his epiphany thirty years ago, in St Petersburg, when he’d been excising a mass of fibrous meat from a woman’s belly: having removed death from her vehicle of life, he’d held it aloft and sobbed silently behind his

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mask, convinced healing involved something beyond his instruments: that a magic had flowed from him to her. Cantar had been young and impressionable, perhaps, but his hands had mended that which had lay broken and to this days his palms tingled with the memory.

He strode the corridor and looked at them: they were old, with creases he’d never have imagined. He’d once thought they’d become so from countless surgical scrubs, but he now knew it was age. Dropping them, he watched his shoes stab the floor. Someone passed. They may have smiled.

He had been a gifted surgeon and his vocation for it had him riling against the pompous grandeur the old establishment had been rife with. To this day, surgeons’ degrading attitude to students infuriated him, and in his mind contradicted their principle of helping others.

But Cantar was no longer a surgeon, and hadn’t been for twenty-five years. And despite his prestigious position as Professor of Anatomy, he felt none of the vibrancy he once did. His battles against the older, ingrained egos of medicine had long since dissipated upon realising he was now one of them.

Battles still raged in the world of academia, however, the rift between practice and teaching was a schism no surgery could mend. Tensions often ran

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high between the medical school and the hospital board, and Cantar found it ludicrous that the two sides could not agree on a common goal of healing.

At the end of the corridor, he ignored the lifts and took the stairs. Four floors higher, he emerged into the Oncology Department, swish in its grey, lifeless pastels and sheets of expensive glass. His department of Anatomy, in contrast, was old and shabby, being part of the university and had little say in budgetary concerns and facility sharing. Gene mapping, oncology and biomedical engineering were departments receiving generous funding.

Anatomy was known. It was old medicine. The cutting edge was now far beyond the gross pattern of form, and delved instead into that which cannot be seen without expensive equipment and corporate funding.

He looked at his palms, wondering what he might have achieved if he hadn’t abandoned surgery, and they tingled at the memory of dissecting living flesh.

But it could never be.

A quarter of a century had passed, and the world had turned far from anything he could offer.

He was old, and medicine was newer than it had ever been.

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He pushed against grey glass and stepped into a waiting room. Its chairs were vacant. Vedra hadn’t yet arrived. A woman behind a desk smiled and gestured that he take one. He did so and stared at the door, waiting for the shadow of his wife to arrive behind its glass.

“Can I get you anything, professor?” the woman asked, her voice so soft and reassuring that she’d probably obtained it from a seminar.

He shook his head, tried a smile and looked at his palms. He felt like a poorly folded umbrella and adjusted his posture.

The glass shifted when Vedra arrived. She smiled at him and did not look tired, and he surged with hope that her fatigue were echoes of what they’d already endured, rather than what was to come. She’d been busy, perhaps. That was all. Busy because she was well. She had a tendency to take on more than she should, and despite always managing, he’d often worried she was inadvertently cramming an entire lifetime into one that would be cut short.

He wanted to say hello and ask how she was, but it seemed trite. She sat beside him, her breathing unlabored. She looked ahead but with eyes cast downwards. He watched her profile, remembering their meeting as students. He’d been holidayed in St

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Petersburg during his final year, and had attended a gathering of students in the basement of the School of Medicine and Humanitarian Studies. It had been cold and the electricity intermittent, so the place had brimmed with candles. It had been more than her beauty that had captivated him: she’d burnt with a vitality that outshone any flame—a vitality he later worried was burning too brightly to last. In the years since, should he catch her glance, smell burning wax or certain European cigarette, he’d be plunged back into that smoky, musty, vodka soaked ambience to an era seething with youth and hope, love and lust.

Smiling, he looked at his hands again, remembering Boris’ attempts at impressing the girls present with appalling Russian; something about the pharmaceutical impact of emerging drugs on hepatic tissue. Cantar had tried to stop him for his own good, to no avail, so he’d given up and left him to drown in humiliation—the aftermath left Boris both revisiting not only his phrase book, but several of his anatomy lectures. Cantar, having retreated to the bar, had spied Vedra through the smoky haze over the rim of his eighth shot. And while the liquor had burnt his throat, her beauty had set fire to the rest of him. With a fortitude only youth permits, he’d then approached, tripped and inadvertently

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doused another girl in vodka while upsetting a tray of candles. That was the wonderful thing about university, he mused, mixing with students from elsewhere at an age when the only thing that exists in the world is promise and potential. He thought of his students now, and their enthusiasm being as unmarred as his had been a generation prior. The excitement of discovery remained as contagious and timeless as it had ever been. In their hope he clung, finding it numbed the frustration of having surrendered surgery.

“Doctor Holt?”

Both he and Vedra stood, Cantar recalling, as he always did, the line from Fawlty Towers when Basil asked the doctors, “How did you manage that then? Did you take the exams twice?” When they were married, he’d suggested Vedra keep her surname professionally. But she’d delighted in becoming a Holt, teasing him that should he ever decide to leave her, she’d ensure part of him remain.

The oncologist who addressed them was short and bald, quite the opposite of Cantar, who, at just over six feet had an additional inch of thick brown hair that Vedra teased likened him to a pagan saint.

She’d insisted it was the first thing she had noticed when he’d staggered toward her through that smoky basement. Cantar didn’t believe her,

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convinced it had been his suave, aristocratic charm.

‘You fell in love with my smouldering good looks,’ he’d remind her on occasion. ‘No,’ she’d say. ‘I remember only your chaotic mop of hair flailing when you stumbled into that girl, doused her in vodka and set her on fire.’

The man smiled clinically and ushered them into a room, introducing himself as Anton Giate, an oncologist who’d taken over from Vedra’s previous doctor who’d died of heart failure the year before— a peculiar tendency Cantar had witnessed often: medicos paying less attention to their own advice than their patients did.

Three years ago, Vedra was given the all-clear after six months of aggressive chemotherapy following surgery for an ovarian malignancy.

Following her into Anton’s room, Cantar felt two decades of pain blister out of the box he’d stuffed it into, and it oozed like thick tar, eager to suffocate.

His breath caught and he wondered how they’d get through it a second time after it had almost killed them once already. Cantar looked at his wife. When life has already been lost, the threat of losing another should pale. But it didn’t, and just gives more credence to guilt.

After her treatment, Vedra had taken no more than six weeks off work. Cantar and Natalie had

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insisted she not return to the university for six months at least, but he knew she needed her work as much as he needed his: to feign a normality. To nourish denial. For both of them, work was therapy, It healed. It helped distract both from what Cantar was convinced had contributed to her illness in the first place. When he’d taken his Natalie aside to explain this, he realised it was the first time he’d spoken to her properly for years, and taking a seat beside his wife, he winced at how little they’d spoken since. Natalie hadn’t forgiven his derisory support for her mother, and when they did converse, their exchanges were heated and unconstructive.

Natalie was very much her mother: fiery and passionate, with a stoicism arising from blood cultured from hardship and curdled by sufferance.

Natalie had, as a consequence, admirable resilience and ambition to succeed in the world, and had risen to direct a lucrative fashion magazine. In contrast, Vedra held a beautiful, aching romanticism: a dire need to love and be loved. Cantar stared at his hands again, knowing his attempts at both had never been adequate.

When Anton took a seat behind a desk, Cantar glanced at her. Her beauty went beyond appearance, evident in her desire to make a

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difference, which was why she’d become a doctor.

And it was cruel irony that her need to love had been met with nothing but pain and loss, and, it seemed, there was more to come.

She deserved so much more.

Having flicked through casenotes, Anton removed his glasses and studied them both.

“Considering your history, Vedra, I’d suggest routine hematology. With the previous malignancy, there’s always the possibility of recurrence.” He replaced his spectacles to check the notes. “Your fatigue, as you know, is always significant in these situations. But I understand how busy you are.” He looked at Cantar. “Perhaps you’d like me to organise a routine CT and screen today?”

“It’s not likely to be work related?” Cantar asked.

Anton thought. “You’re particularly busy at the moment?”he asked her.

Vedra nodded.

“Well, It’s possible. But we won’t know until tests are done. I’d rather have the results and see, rather than hope and risk things deteriorating.”

Cantar glanced at his wife. She said nothing, but waited as she had in the room outside: composed, eyes cast downwards, as though

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thinking about something else—which, under the circumstances, proved she wasn’t.

Anton leafed through the papers. “Your tests aren’t due for another three months, but I’d suggest doing them now.” He looked up again. “I can pull some strings for this afternoon?”

“That’s very good of you,” Vedra said. “But I’m afraid I can’t today. It’s quite impossible.”

A wonderful, warm Russian accent, and despite the circumstance, Cantar’s blood ran warm.

The French were renowned for having the most sensual accent. But he thought otherwise, finding it too soft and floral. Russian, on the other hand, was thick, domineering and non-negotiable. And after thirty years in England, he was relieved hers hadn’t lessened.

Anton looked at Cantar for support. “As you wish, but by the end of this week?”

Cantar nodded for her.

Blood was taken nevertheless, the nurse taking her while Cantar returned to the waiting room. The receptionist smiled another of her warm clinical versions, which Cantar was forced to return. He sat again and tried folding himself into something less gangly. Despite Vedra’s quips about his pagan saintliness, he saw himself as gaunt, rather than tall, and certainly not handsome. Were he not a

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professor, he’d feel to be nothing at all. Stefan used to tease that when female nursing and reception staff came and went, Cantar had been both the reason for their arrival, and the reason for their leaving.

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