Five(24)

“How did you get him?” Matilda asks, worried, not asking why, or how could you, or what will happen to us next.

“Look at the body. You tell me. Silly, stupid girl. Don’t you see evidence of the cause of death?” Gerald says, washing his hands in the kitchen sink and speaking to her over his shoulder.

She looks at the unnatural angle of the creature’s neck. “Don’t look so appalled, child. Good old Rusty had it coming to him. Mrs. Endlesham wouldn’t put a stop to him urinating on my rose, so I did it for her. It’s half dead by now, the plant I mean, not the dog. He’s very dead, but it only happened today, still fresh, so a good one for you to work with. It seemed a good opportunity.”

Matilda shudders. “What’s the matter?” Gerald demands. She senses a new fatigue, and his voice is stretched, covering something.

“Has something happened, Papa? Are you well?” she asks as gently as she can.

“Stop your dithering and get to work,” he says, bluntly, coldly. He is shutting down, turning away from her. She approaches the table and notices that the body is not in a Royal Mail sack. It is in a burlap bag for potatoes. She looks at the clock and notices that he is home quite early from work.

But Gerald is not in the mood for questions. Matilda proceeds with a heavy heart, and echoes of the old nausea she used to feel are rising as she pulls on her gloves and prepares to make the first incision.

The day after Rusty’s necropsy, as Matilda walks home from school, she sees Mrs. Endlesham walking with her children, looking for their small Jack Russell. “Rusty! Here, boy!” Mrs. Endlesham’s little boy, about nine years old, cries out. He is visibly distressed. The family catch Matilda looking at them from across the street. She looks away quickly, her heart racing as she hurries home.

“Papa, you must never do that again, I know Rusty was a nuisance, but he was a pet, and the little boy was so upset. Please, Papa,” she pleads with Gerald at supper that evening. They are eating on their laps in the front room because Rusty’s corpse is occupying the kitchen table. It is a warm day, and he is decaying rapidly, the flypaper hanging from the kitchen ceiling is coated with bugs, but Gerald has insisted that they cannot dispose of him yet. They have not finished the work.

“Disapproving, are we now, Matilda? Concerned suddenly about all God’s creatures great and small?” he says, as he chews a vicious forkful of lamb stew, a slight trail of its juices clinging to his chin. “That’s rich coming from you, Papa’s little surgeon. How many have you logged in your notebook there? One hundred? One hundred fifty?”

Matilda puts her fork in her bowl, her dinner untouched. He never used to get angry with her. Silent, morose, annoyed, but never angry. She does not know how to respond, but she does know that he must never do this again.

“One hundred forty-two. But that’s not what I’m saying, Papa, I just—I’m worried—”

“Worried? You should be. If they catch you, silly, stupid girl, if they see what you’ve been up to, you have no idea what they’ll do to you. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let me worry about the details. You just keep at the work and do as you’re told.”

Matilda does not know what he means, who they are, who will catch her, but she is too afraid to ask.

To her great relief, Gerald brings nothing home in the sack for the next three days. The work on Rusty has been extensive and she is still cataloguing and recording his organs and their findings. But she has to repeat her plea when Gerald brings home a French bulldog who nipped at his ankles once on his route, and then a miniature poodle who used to bark at him every day when he delivered the post to her elderly owner, and then a ginger cat who hissed at him on one occasion when his shaking left hand caused him to lose his grip on a parcel and drop it, breaking the glass inside. He tells Matilda these things as though they have just happened, but he no longer comes home in his uniform. She knows he no longer has a route.

“Papa,” she says, putting her hand on his arm, after they dispose of the last of the cat. “I think it’s time to stop now, I think that’s as far as we can go. I’ve learned so much from you, Papa, but we can’t go on like this.”

He wrenches his arm away. “Like what, you horrid little ingrate,” he says, quietly, almost snarling, with anger in his eyes. “I’ll do as I please. And if you don’t want to help, then you just stay out of my way.”

That is when a curtain comes down in Gerald’s eyes and Matilda cannot see him past it. He withdraws further and further. He leaves less and less money every week for her to do the shopping with, and more and more jars fill the cupboards. He no longer asks her to prepare the table or sterilize the instruments. He does this himself now, or, more often than not, does neither. She finds the kitchen table wet and fluid-stained in the morning, her father’s scalpels and forceps strewn about the surfaces, dried with blood. When she looks closely at the new jars, she notices that his handwriting on the labels has grown jagged and illegible and that the specimens are nicked and tattered, their severed blood vessels frayed at the ends.

Matilda goes only to school and back and stays in her room when her father is in the house. She eats little. She waits to hear the key turn in the lock, his uneven step on the floorboards, the thud of a sack. She waits to hear him call for her, but he never says her name. In the rare moments when they pass each other in the house, he seems surprised to see her, as though he has forgotten that she lives there. She knows it will be better for them both if he does. The months wear on. When Matilda leaves for school in the mornings Gerald is still in bed, and she finds him bent over his work in the kitchen when she returns home. He leaves in the night without saying where he is going. She hears him returning in the early hours. His steps grow heavier. So do the sacks. The house no longer smells of disinfectant the way it once did when they were scrupulous about their cleaning methods. It reeks of rotten flesh and formaldehyde.