Hands By Alex Munro

Part I: Dismember Me Fondly

It was during breakfast that I received the urgent telegram. Outside my window it was a crisp autumn evening in London. The moon was feebly attempting to push its way blindly through the smog with the same probability of success as an opium smoking kitten tied to a concrete block, wrapped in a burlap sack and hurled into the Thames. By candlelight I cursed my predilection for exceptionally long meals and began reading the contents of the strangely stunted telegram, putting all thoughts of feline murder from my mind. It began thus:

Hands severed. Stop. Aaaarrrgghhh. Stop. Bring aid. Stop. Time is of the essence. Stop. Graaarrrggghhh. Stop. Excuse me? Stop. Are you transcribing my screams of agony? Stop. Rrrraaarrrggghhhh. Stop. No, my good sir, I certainly wont pay for them. Stop. Id wring your neck if I could. Stop. Are you still writing all of this? Stop.

The telegram continued in this vain for quite some time, yet I managed to glean the salient facts. It was from an old acquaintance who had been the subject of a terrible and horrific accident. The nature of his misfortune was particularly grizzly and had resulted in both of his hands being severed at the wrist, mangled beyond repair within the gears of heavy industrial machinery before dropping into a carelessly discarded bucket of acid. With an overwhelming sense of alarm and great dismay I set aside my ham sandwich and sprang into desert with a ghastly gastronomic vigour as, the telegram rightly stated, time was of the essence.

During my rushed repast I recalled a lecture given recently by a brilliant young physician by the name of Dr Cavendish regarding the possibility of transplanting human limbs from indiscriminate donors. Admittedly it was not a lecture per se; it was more a drunken tirade of insults showered upon the pigeons in Hyde Park punctuated by huge gulps of brandy. Yet somehow his intoxicated zeal and unhinged passion touched the very core of my wallet. Petty larcenous attempts aside I was glad now to have dropped the charges as, despite his dubious character, he gave immeasurable impetus to an impossibly improbable plan. I thumbed through my pocketbook for his card, which I had accepted

Hands By Alex Munro purely on the basis that at some time in the future I may need assistance in frightening a multitude of birds, and set about the task of locating the mysterious Dr Cavendish.

Within the hour I had found my man, and within another hour had managed to coax him from his bushes by waving a ten pound note in the wind. He made no apology for his lack of social graces, nor clothing, instead inviting me inside his ancestral home where I wasted no time in convincing him to get dressed, then availing him of the predicament. At first he listened patiently, his fingers steepled under his chin denoting a thoughtful countenance, then suddenly his manner became agitated and with a disagreeably churlish snigger tried to challenge me to a duel with a leg of lamb. Eventually after staining my waistcoat repeatedly with mint sauce and yelling that he was the true heir to Belgiums throne he relented and said he would be prepared to help if I perused his lithographs of rats sewn to womens hats and stoats sporting handlebar moustaches. I was in no doubt that he was a remarkable man, but I was hitherto undecided as to whether he was a genius or an idiot. For personal satisfaction and to maintain equilibrium I came to the conclusion he was until further notice both. Reluctantly I agreed to his outlandish yet uncommonly cost effective demands as time was running short and my patience was running shorter.

Mere hours passed before circumstance; a good deal of providence and a bucket full of black coffee found Dr Cavendish in more helpful, if not sober, spirits. His numerous connections to furtive hunchbacked morticians with limps and speech impediments provided us with a miracle in the shape of two perfectly formed hands. The body from which they had been liberated had not as yet been located, and so our mysterious benefactor would remain devoid of both identity and digits. Cavendish, delighted by our outrageous fortune, could not stop giggling and repeating, but hell never play the violin again.

Although some would brand our actions rash and our dabbling with the laws of nature ghoulish we saw this as the perfect opportunity to give a man back the gift of ability and to stop his life slipping through the emptiness where his fingers once resided. Such was the gravity of the situation and the profoundly ethical dilemmas that had to be faced that fateful evening. We pondered onerously, should we play modern Prometheus a new board game as popular and entertaining as monopoly, or prevent a friend

Hands By Alex Munro

being spoon-fed and wearing a bib for the rest of his natural life? Since our freshly forged acquaintance was based solely on being saviours to a mans dignity and his fate alone rested within our curious union it seemed in poor taste to play board games so we played two quick hands of gin rummy then prepared to operate.

Part 2: Kill or Manicure

The operation itself was a rousing success. Firstly we picked up my friend, quite literally, from the floor of the telegraph office on Euston Road where he had been bleeding slowly to death for the last four hours. Cavendish pointed out with an air of deft professionalism and daft colloquialism that if he had been bleeding rapidly then he would have snuffed it bleedin rapid. We hailed a cab to the doctors private Soho surgery where, surprisingly, we encountered absolutely no hindrance lugging an unconscious semi-dismembered blood soaked carcass through the streets. Dr Cavendish toiled feverishly into the night, his brow glistening with sweat, his own shaky hands skillfully giving hope to a broken man. He only stopped his miraculous ministrations intermittently to mop his forehead; dust his tastelessly displayed family heirlooms and take long swigs from a jug of morphine. He also insisted for the duration of the procedure that I call him Betty. As unorthodox as he was, Cavendish proved his brilliance by making my friend whole again, and by dancing a tempestuous military two-step when most mortals should be capable of a merely adequate tango.

Certainly both Cavendish and myself foresaw difficulties with the possible physiological and psychological scarring involved with an operation of this magnitude. We argued long and hard on a suitable solution, and ultimately settled on summering somewhere warm this year; perhaps a quaintly rustic farmhouse overlooking a vineyard in the South of France where the smell of freshly baked bread wafts seductively on the breeze. As for my distinguished disfigured friends recuperation, I recommended that we purchase some moderately priced gloves and book a weekend at modestly frugal lodgings in Brighton overlooking the sea where the smell of burnt toast clings tenaciously to the furnishings. Cavendish however preferred his theory for convalescence insisting that a rat stapled to a pair of hobnailed boots and a night on a potato farm in Aberdeen would work equally as well. He assured me that this was within our budget as he could provide his own rat and staples, in addition to this his estranged aunt owned such a farm. It was the prospect of psychological scarring that caused

Hands By Alex Munro alarm and baffled us both, after all, you cannot make gloves for the human brain, or for that matter staple a rat to it. We tried nevertheless, but the glove maker was particularly unresponsive to our request and the rat escaped through a hole in the wall when Cavendish ran at it with a stapler.

And so it was that we saved the life of my friend, Mr Henry Bakersfield. Cavendish and myself shook hands and vowed never to set eyes on each other again, albeit in the future I was to receive a number of vexing love letters from Betty.

Three full months passed before I visited upon Henry at his family home. I had been otherwise engaged cultivating my facial hair as any discerning Victorian gentleman might and now exhibited quite exceptional sideburns complemented by a splendid moustache. During the ensuing discourse I naturally enquired as to Henrys satisfaction with his newly acquired appendages. Henry, his complexion that of bad porridge, broke down and confessed to a past of loathsome acts of viciousness and murder. And how, in light of recent events, frustration had taken a firm hold of his tortured soul. It appeared that every time he contemplated unspeakable devilry his possessed hands would take control and perform a delightfully rendered piano concerto. Even as we conversed conspiratorially his fingers drummed out what could only have been Moonlight Sonata on the table, although I could not ascertain the key. Under these most curious of circumstances we made a pact. I vowed never to utter a solitary word of the depraved deeds that had transpired thus far, while Henry pact and left for the Crimea the following morning, never to be seen again outside of polite social gatherings and civil garden parties.

As for myself, I returned to my law practice endeavouring to earn an honest crust with the hope that time would erase all memory of Henry Bakersfield and that one day I may accumulate enough clients to secure an entire loaf.

The End