FEEDBACK
WRITING
QUALITY: PLACE:
REFERENTIAL ELEMENTS Hunterian Museum Writer /
UNFORGOTTEN LIVES
6
‘Three week old foetus of a frog’
The brightly lit room was a welcome contrast to the dull, slate grey London skies that she had just left behind. This was a place that she had never been to before, and she was only here now, by chance, because of the rain and because the streets were so empty and bereft of people. And she needed people just now. Not their conversation, nor even their acknowledgement, just their presence.
And then the second;
The clinic had only been a short walk away and, although her clothes were wet through, she hardly noticed. What had happened allowed her no space for any other emotion or sensation.
‘Five week old foetus of a macaw.’
It had been the right thing to do of course. She knew that. It was the logical, sensible and practical thing to do. She had made a mistake and now she had dealt with it. It was done, finished with, over and she could, should, put it behind her. Now she could start to re-build her life; begin again as though nothing had happened. But it had happened and, even if she wanted to, it was too late for her to reverse that decision. It was gone forever, there could be no second chance, no going back. She looked up. The room was large and freshly painted. In spite of its contents, it felt clean and safe and warm. There were perhaps two dozen other people there with her. That was enough. She was not alone. Some were seated cross legged on the floor with sketch pads and pencils, peering purposefully into the cabinets, intent on capturing the precise details of their subject. Others, seemed to wander from display to display with a bored, ambivalent aimlessness that made her question why they had come here in the first place. Perhaps, like her, to shelter from the rain and perhaps to try to marshall their thoughts in this place of quietness and learning. She, however, determined that, since she was here she, would not be like that. She would give the exhibits the attention they deserved. Besides, it would help to distract her from what she had just left behind. The first case contained the large mottled brown bones of a man. She read the notice that said it was one of the museum’s early acquisitions and that the donor had insisted it be on permanent display. It was some way of achieving immortality she thought. Artists do it with their paintings, writers with their books, this man with his mortal remains. The thought, for some curious reason, comforted her. She moved on. The next case contained an array of early medical instruments, some of brass, others of iron, others still of wood. She shuddered. What strange demon of chance, she wondered, had brought her to this place at this time? She hurried on quickly trying to extinguish the thought of these vaguely familiar objects of so recent memory from her mind. She turned a corner. Line after line of glass cases, each containing row after row of glass shelves, each packed full of sealed glass cylinders of varying sizes and differing contents. All bore their original labels with their fading, brown copperplate handwritten inscriptions. She read each one with care and studied the contents of the jars intently, starting with the first;
Chris Fenwick
‘Near term foetus of a rabbit’ Then the third;
And so on down the line and up and down on every shelf until she had read every label, seen every creature bleached, white and whole and still recognisable in their jars of formaldehyde. She stepped back taking in the scene as a whole. Through a window she noticed that the sun was breaking through the clouds. She could feel its warmth upon her face. The bored, aimless people had left now that the rain had stopped, but the sketchers with their drawings were still there, shading in every bone, every muscle, every sinew. She looked again at the cases and walked back to the start of the display. Turning round she carefully, but more quickly, studied at each jar and their contents once more. But as she did so, each one was brought to life in her mind. Frogs and toads were now sitting by a sweet lake, their true colour and vitality restored, croaking and chirping contently in the morning spring sunshine. Rabbits and hares were running and jumping and clawing the air in vain attempts to catch elusive moths and mayflies in richly coloured meadows. Countless birds of every size and hue circled high above in a cloudless azure sky seeking out their prey. Gone were the jars and cylinders, gone were their sad, shrivelled and colourless contents. Instead, the cabinets were filled with every kind of living creature, snakes and sheep, foxes and fawns, beavers and butterflies each, in their own perfect habitat, each doing exactly what God had intended them to do, had intended them to be. How long she stood and watched that glorious scene she could not tell. She felt a sense of joy and warmth and comfort knowing that, in her mind at least, she had given them the life they had been denied; the opportunity to live out their potential and the chance to take their place in the world, in the natural order of things. And then, in a moment, that vision was gone and she was once again staring at those creatures, frozen again inside their liquid cage, immortalised for benefit of tired visitors to amuse themselves over a wet lunchtime or for students to sketch. She pondered the irony of it all. That stark but beautiful choice between immortality or a brief, happy but soon forgotten life. Both, in their different ways, had meaning and purpose. But then, with a slow and dreadful, numbing realisation she understood for the first time that day, that the decision she had made had provided neither of those choices to that which she had left behind.