Preez - Dr James Barry

Beyond the open window, London sweltered under a July heatwave. The traffic in Margaret Street racketed past with intolerable noise iron-shod hoofs pulled iron-shod wheels over the stones, heading for the press of Oxford Market; passers-by and loiterers shouted to make themselves heard, and the shrieks of street-hawkers pierced the whole cacophony. It was hard for a human to bear at the best of times, but for the sick it was an exquisite hell.

The heat and the familiar symptoms of the disease awakened memories of the tropics where hed spent so much of his working life: the hospital wards filled with groans, and lonely rooms whining with nocturnal mosquitoes. He knew how the disease would progress, like a conductor knows the movements and motifs of a concerto and what a hideous composition, of pain, dizziness and rushing, watery efflux, as if the body were trying to eject its innards in one frantic torrent; the sagging, blue-tinged skin and sunken eyes. Soon the last dissonant chords; then the shadow must fall.

There was something he had to do before the end something important. But in the heat and noise, with his mind wandering on the edge of delirium, it eluded his grasp.

At last the old gentlemans chest stopped rising and falling, and the fluttering of his closed eyelids ceased.

Sophia Bishop heated a large copper of water on the range, under the supervision of the ill-tempered charwoman. This person, old enough to be the young housemaids mother, came in once a week to help with the laundry, but today she was here in her other capacity, as layer-out.

The water boiled, and Sophia lifted the steaming copper off the range while the charwoman gathered up cloths, soap and a calico winding-sheet. As had once been common in England, this woman earned part of her living from a dual career as a midwife and layer-out of the dead, usually working among the poorer or more parsimonious members of society (the prosperous days were long gone, the mortal end of the trade having passed into the hands of undertakers). She was a hardened creature who cared mainly for money, and like her literary counterpart Mrs Gamp she went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and relish.

Sophia carried the copper up to the death room. It was she who had found him dead and reported it to the authorities. That had been as much involvement as she wanted; she set down the copper and left the older woman to her business. The layer-out was an old friend to death; shed attended the corpses of many a person in her life. One more old fellow was nothing out of the ordinary.

In the heat, the smell in the room was enough to unsettle even her strong stomach. Still, the proper obligations must be taken care of and she must get her due payment; perhaps something extra to cover the unpleasant circumstances and the lack of help.

The old man had been a slight, stooped figure, narrow-shouldered and short; in death, his large nose and pointed chin were accentuated by the sunken flesh, and the dyed red hair had been slicked back from the domed forehead by the sweat of sickness. The layer-out peeled back the bedclothes and raised the body to remove the soiled nightshirt. After dipping a cloth in hot water, she gave the corpse a melancholy glance before beginning to wash it and paused.

Something wasnt right. She glanced again at the hollowed-out face. That was the old gentleman all right Dr James Barry. The layer-out had seen him about the place before he took sick, and would recognise him anywhere. And yet those were certainly not a gentlemans private parts. Indeed, the gentlemans whole body, though thin and dilapidated by age, was unmistakably female in every way the genitals, the deflated breasts and the hairless face. And there was more distinctive striations on the skin of the belly. The layer-out had marks like those herself; they came from childbearing. Moreover, in all her experience, she had only ever seen them quite as pronounced as that in girls whod had babies at a very early age.

How could this be? She knew that Dr Barry had been an Army man, and served a long career. How was it possible for a woman to get away with being a surgeon , let alone in the Army? The puzzle was too great and shocking. Suppressing her amazement, she carried on with the laying out. Soon the body was cleaned and enveloped in its shroud, looking the same as any other.

She was so bewildered, she couldnt even speak of it at first; but then her native acumen told her that it might be profitable to hold on to this secret. The body, unexamined by any other person, went off to the undertaker, and it was only when a couple of weeks had gone by and Dr Barry was cold in his grave that the layer-out finally spoke of what she had seen in that deathbed.