Tamam Shud Read Online Free Page A

in a cargo shed on the docks, which had been fitted out as a recreation room. I have always loved waterfronts. Apart from all their other fascinations they never sleep, and at that age, according to my mother, neither did I. So I used to tag along after my father, as unnoticed and accepted as a little dog, while the men played cards and gossiped. Yarned. Told stories. I would sit quietly in my chair with my orangeade, ears flapping, and I remembered it all. At eight years old I had a memory like a sponge. I could reproduce whole conversations and if I didn’t understand them, I stored them for future reference. I learned primitive Greek in the same way, just by being around Greeks. It’s like cooking rice by the absorption method, only where rice sucks in water I took in information. Voices. Accents. Clothes. Scents.
    One old man, Harry, saw me looking at his wrist. It was the third time I had seen those white scars and I was curious. Harry explained that they were gurry sores and told me how he got them. Several other men had them too and they stripped back their sleeves to show me. The same Harry taught my father a very complex knot called a star knot and showed me his other scars – wide, flat bands across the palms of his hands. He said that as a boy he had been reefing topsails in a windjammer going around Cape Horn and his hands had frozen to the lines. He toldme he had been lucky and when I expressed surprise, he chuckled and said that if he hadn’t been secured by his icy grasp, he would have fallen either into the sea or onto the deck and, thus, he would be dead. In those latitudes, he said, it wouldn’t make much difference which one you hit. Deck or sea would be equally fatal.
    It never occurred to me, not once, how privileged I was to hear those stories.
    The other scars on Somerton Man meant nothing to the examiners and they don’t mean a lot to me either, unless that boil mark was an injection scar. He was missing most of his back teeth and the remaining ones were stained from smoking. His hands and feet were smooth and well cared for. He had no bunions or callouses on his feet, even though he had forced them into wedge-shaped shoes. His nails were short and neat, cut and filed, not gnawed. His toenails had been neatly cut. His hair had been neatly cut. He was a fine presentable corpse.
    The pathologist said that he had a ‘fine Britisher face’ and my mother thinks he looks Baltic. But he also looks dead, which is not helpful. Physiognomy is not an exact science, despite Lombroso, or indeed a science at all. Anyone involved in the legal system has seen little angels who like nothing more than torturing their classmates, and ugly old men with hearts of pure gold. If there is an art to find the mind’s construction in the face, we don’t have it.
    But as to Somerton Man’s body and internal processes, there was a lot of information. Several doctors were involved in the investigation of the cause of death. The first was John Barkley Bennett, a legally qualified medical practitioner (or LQMP), who declared life extinct in the first place. Rigor was established and he thought that death had occurred within eight hours of his examination, at about 2 am.
    By the time that John Matthew Dwyer LQMP saw Somerton Man, rigor was intense. The post-mortem lividity behind the ears and neck was deep, indicating that the body had not been moved. There was a patch of dried saliva on his cheek, which had run out of his mouth as he slumped to one side and the cigarette fell onto his lapel. Dwyer said that ‘His pupils were smaller and unusual, uneven in outline and about the same size. Certain drugs may be associated with a contraction in the pupils. Even barbiturates may do it, but it is by no means a distinguishing point.’
    He added:
    Sunburn marks were present up to the level of the crotch, and they were probably from the previous season. The fingers were cyanotic [bluish skin