Toby's Room by Pat Barker Page B

of bones, each with a label attached. With a thud of the heart, she guessed the labels would have names on, and walked across to read them, but no, there were only numbers. Number three was hers, the little that was left of him. He looked like a Christmas turkey the day after Boxing Day, when all the bones have been picked clean.
    She looked around for solace, for something, anything, to make this bearable, and her eye fell on a green ledger. The corners were furry with use and so smeared by greasy fingerprints they looked black.
Of course
: they’d have to keep records because these pitiable piles of bones had to be given a proper burial – and presumably they’d be kept under the names they’d borne in life. She picked up the book and, fully aware that she was breaking every conceivable rule, began shuffling through the pages. The last entry should give her three names, one of them female. That would still leave two possibilities, but, irrationally perhaps, she felt she’d know his name when she saw it.
    ‘Miss Brooke! Can I help you?’ The usual sneer.
    ‘I was looking for my bag.’
    ‘Well, you’re not likely to find it in here, are you?’
    She tried to push past him, but he wouldn’t step aside. She was totally in the wrong, she knew that, but she didn’t take kindly tobeing bullied, and instinctively she went on the attack. ‘Why do you dislike me so much?’ she asked.
    ‘Because you think you’re the lily on the dungheap.’
    So direct, so uncompromisingly contemptuous, it shocked her. ‘Well, somebody has to be and it’s never going to be you.’ How childish that sounded. How embarrassingly childish. ‘I just wanted to know who he was.’
    He took the ledger away from her. ‘I think you’ll find your bag’s in the changing room.’
    He waited till she reached the door. ‘It wouldn’t have done you any good anyway,’ he said, holding up the ledger. ‘He was one of the unclaimed. Nobody knows who he was.’
    ‘The unclaimed?’
    ‘Found in a shop doorway, I expect.’
    She nodded, took one last look at the heap of bones, and went in search of her bag.

Seven
     
    That evening Elinor sat alone in her lodgings. She’d had a bath, washed her hair, put on her dressing gown and curled up in front of the fire. Only now, when it was over, did she realize how much the work of dissection had taken out of her. She stared at the blue buds of the fire, listening to its hissing and popping, but saw only the nameless man as he’d been on that first morning: the huge, yellow-soled feet and the flat plain of the body stretching out beyond them. What a dreadful end. Even Daft Jamie had had a name.
    She ought to make the effort to go out, if only round the corner to Catherine’s. A few of the girls had started to meet and do life drawing away from the college, taking it in turns to pose. They were supposed to be meeting tonight, but nobody would show up in this weather. Still, an evening alone with Catherine – the little German girl, as Kit Neville rather patronizingly called her – would be good too. Cocoa and gossip, that’s what she needed. But how bad was the snow? The way it was falling when she came in, it might be impossible to get out.
    She couldn’t see much from the window, so she went downstairs and looked out into the street. Snow was still coming down fast, six inches at least had piled up against the door; it must have been falling steadily ever since she got home. Looking up into the circle of light around the street lamp, she could see how big the flakes were. Whirling down from the sky, each flake cast a shadow on to the snow, like big, fat, grey moths fluttering. She’d never noticed shadows like that before. Mesmerized, she stood and watched, trying to follow first one flake and then another, until she felt dizzy, and had to stop.
    When she looked up again, she realized she wasn’t alone. A man was standing at the foot of the steps, only five or six feet away fromher. The snow