Dry Bones by Richard Beard

Author:Richard Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Calvin’s Hip

‘The imitation of the saints will be useful in shaping life, if we learn from them sobriety, chastity, love, patience, temperance, contempt of the world, and other virtues.’

John Calvin, Commentary on Romans 4:23

HELENA WAS ASLEEP on the side of the bed nearest the window, breathing deeply and evenly. Personally, watching the pale violin of her back, I was thinking I like this very much, but still I couldn’t sleep. The moonlight was taunting me, a thin silver line between the curtains. This and the ache at my earlobe and almost everything else was making me anxious.

I slipped quietly out of bed, and padded through to the living-room, wanting to make certain that no phantom power lingered in the bones of the dead. In the curtainless window, a three-quarter moon was high and bright, flouting the absence of cloud. The ghostly light picked out our skeleton, rigid on its back, arms stiffly by its sides. I lay down next to it, close but not touching, like a new and considerate lover. And then I waited for its energy to make itself known. Come, now.

Nothing.

I turned on to my stomach, hands between my legs, cheek crushed against the woodblock floor, and squinted side-on at our amateur solution to the human puzzle. A rib was actually a forearm, I noticed. And that finger was a toe.

If I just shuffle that rib. If I give a little more space to the elbow. I had a sudden flurry of ideas for radical new solutions, and I was soon on my knees making the changes, all of which ended in failure. I put the bones back how they’d been before, with only minor adjustments, still some way from all the bones in all the right places, making the best connections. I tinkered a little at the edges, made superficial alterations, always aiming at the perfect skeleton as a kind of universal answer, a summary of the entire universe.

And once I had the bones true, some time soon I hoped, then between the flat rack of ribs I’d project a veined heart the size of a small fist, a garnet-coloured thing, blinking, beating. I’d join its clutched rhythm by arteries like plastic tubing to other major organs, to lungs creasing and billowing, to a liver trembling, to a curved palette of lamb-of-God kidneys. Then skin, going over twice at the elbows and knees, the slack sexual organs, adding hair on the legs and the backs of the hands, leaving clear the rising and falling chest.

Finally, most delicately, the face, the mouth, the tender eyelids, the eyes. Blue. Blue-green. I stopped at the face, concentrating, using the contours of the bones as a guide, eager to make it right.

It was a thin face, about thirty-four, thirty-five at the most, a troubled face under darkish hair swept upwards in uncombed handfuls. The forehead was broad but the chin a little spent, the nose long and pointed from the pinch of three generations of vexed clerical fingers.

And I grimaced, gritted my teeth, and softly banged my clever forehead against the hard wooden floor.

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