IN WILLIAM'S SKIN

They were awaiting my dying, although I was only 34. My extinction
was
less
important than the surgeons' desire to possess my body, and they vied
to
cut
me up. In spite of stout locks and guards, on the night preceding
my
funeral, they lifted my skin and extracted my skull.
Behind the locked doors of the hospital morgue I waited. I had no
means
of
knowing what time it was, for I had moved beyond such
considerations.
There
was a scuffling, then hammering, an alteration in the density of
silence,
and footsteps clunked nearer and stopped close by.
Mr Crowther, his caution and competence befitting a member of the
Royal
College of Surgeons, prised the skin carefully from my face, and
wrenched my
skull from its moorings. After a pause, he inserted a somewhat
ill-fitting
replacement and with little pattings of his hands and muted
grunts
secured
the scalp and made his retreat.
Another pause and I was lying in my coffin, the lid open to assuage
any
suspicion among my friends that my body had been tampered with. They
and
the
official mourners alike having expressed relief at seeing me intact,
I
was
buried with all ceremony according to the Anglican rite.
But before the quiet of the grave could grow over me came the sound
of
footsteps and murmurs. If this was Mr Crowther, he was no longer
alone.
The
coffin lid opened and there was a coldness of steel against my arms
and
legs
before I was pulled and heaved into a container less warm than the
wood
of a
cheap coffin. My resurrectionists bounced me over rough terrain to
the
background noise of their intermittent squabbling.
I was on a table in the back room of the pub where I had died, a
sailor
home
from his ship, destined to die in the Dog &; Partridge in Hobart
Town. I
never did find out what I died of, since that wasn't their interest.
Dr
Stockell of the Royal Society,
Mr Crowther's great rival for my bones, clinked his instruments,
and
they
muttered over their prey as they sawed.
When they had finished I was left with a sense of lightness. My
hands
and
feet were later found at the premises of the Royal Society in London.
As
a
black man and the last of my race, I was an object of study, a
possible
missing link, with traces to be found, presumably, in the head,
hands,
feet.
It being some 40 years before the invention of the motor car, and
rather
longer before the coming of the roof rack, the good doctors had to
find
a
way of disposing of the mutilated leftovers of my body. Too near dawn
by
now
to risk returning to the cemetery, but where else to go?
Soon what was left of me was bundled into something coarse-textured
but
quite soft. The door opened, I was lifted over a man's shoulder, and
we
tramped out. I never discovered where they took me, but perhaps it
was
to
the grave of the man whose skull had been exchanged for mine, as
some
years
later they retrieved my skeleton and displayed it in a museum.
Stockell also did something that I have been too embarrassed to
report
until
now. After he detached my hands and feet in the interests of science,
he
helped himself to a little souvenir: sufficient testicular skin to
make
a
tobacco pouch. This too ended up in the Royal Society in London.
A
novelty
receptacle for what turned out, long after I was bones, to be a
deadly
indulgence.
My head was never found.
ENDS