‘Take up your bone saws, please, and remove the top of the skull, starting on the forehead just below the hairline. I want us to take a look at the outer cortex.’

Francis took up the white-handled instrument with the same look of pity in his eyes, and the serrated blade whizzed into the bone. At the sound of contact I closed my eyes.

The doctor left the podium and stalked the rows, conducting her lesson and asking questions. It meant that for the most part, it was impossible for me to talk to Francis, or to vent my anger or disgust on him. I was forced to play the role of the cold clinician, and delve with tongs when required. The texture of the cold body I recognized from cookery – not the moisture of fresh meat, but the rubbery grey feel of strips boiled too long for school meals. It was the downy feeling of his white hair between my fingers that was strange. It appalled me. Despite my shock, I found myself admiring the dexterity with which Francis’s fingers accomplished their grisly business. They danced the way his feet danced when he fought, with instinctive logic. Sounds echoed in that cavernous mortuary. The metallic click of the knives on stainless steel ricocheted off the walls. He risked a whisper only once, when we had peeled back the fibrous protective layers beneath the skull, and broken into the vaults of the brain proper. Dr Fitzgerald had her back to us, and was walking down the opposite row, discoursing on blood flow. When she stopped to answer a question, he leant in to my ear. When he spoke, I felt the warmth of his breath on my cheek, and caught its scent through the harsh reek of formaldehyde.

‘Do you see here, in these neat little grey pleats? This is where the fugitive “I” hides. This is where you are, and where I am. When I first saw this, on a young man, I couldn’t stop thinking, Where has he gone too? He was right here . . .’

‘What the fuck are you doing, Francis?’ I hissed back.

He didn’t answer, and the doctor came back towards our table. Even through my fear and confusion, I was impressed by Francis. He knew the anatomy of our subject better than any of the other medics there, and he fielded the doctor’s questions with intellectual grace, never giving any more than the perfect answer required. I had no idea where he had accumulated the knowledge, nor the source of the skill and precision with which he took apart the head. When he severed a part, he placed it in a small wooden box slung underneath the trolley. When I later asked him what made people give up their bodies to the students, he said that many of those who did were too poor to pay for their own funerals. The small wooden boxes that housed the bits would be buried by the university at the end of the year, in a modest ceremony that all the students would attend.