Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

So I am in the Whitby Antiques & Collectables Emporium when, instinctively, I realise that I am receiving a signal. A small girl is standing in front of one of the nearby cabinets, transfixed by an item that is inside. Her father is calling her impatiently from the shop’s doorway. Outside, the family is about to move on but her dawdling is holding them all back.

The father stumps over to the cabinet to see what is casting such a spell. He then turns to the counter assistant, who is fixed up panopticonically in the very middle of the store. “I’m sorry, she’s obsessed with that taxidermy mouse,” he chuckles. Next he is at the doorway again. “Come on! We’re all leaving!” The small girl remains rooted to the spot and so totally still that the taxidermy could be beginning to creep over her. Now the father is on his phone, negotiating. They will catch the family up.

Instinctively, I know that I am being directed to this cabinet. I have been looking for a subject to write about over the last couple of days, for a travel piece, but so far Whitby hasn’t been in a giving mood. I continue to drift along, from cabinet to cabinet, waiting for the girl to be prised from her mouse.

It is a wonderful store. It is much more like an interactive museum than a shop. Each cabinet is overflowing higgledy-piggledy with old things, some of them paste jewellery and others stone-cold treasures. Ah, but which is which? There is also that paradox in play that characterises all large antiques centres. Half the people here are bargaining ferociously to chip a tiny edge off each price. The other half, people like me, would freely pay an admission charge just to walk around and look at the items.

I can imagine becoming a crabbit old man in Yorkshire, the sort who keeps coins under his tongue, and then getting caught up in the antiques game. I would buy trinkets and strands of cobweb from antique stores and then hop on the bus to the next town to sell them on to other antiques stores. At the end of the day I would be in my mouldering bedsit rejoicing, over the six pounds and nine pence profit that I had made from all of this idiotic work.

All at once the girl has bolted away. She is probably out in the sunshine running around and she will never think about the mouse again. I move over to install myself in front of the cabinet. This is Cabinet 20 and I congratulate myself that I might have finally come across something that is in a giving mood. Cabinet 20 stands out as the Bad Taste Cabinet. It is stacked with dead and grotty things, like a miniature temple, and there is an empty hilarity fluttering over the whole jumble like a flag.

The corpses of mice are poised in haggard displays. One is performing a magic trick, another is a clown and two more are a wedding couple. For me, this is so unholy because the value of a mouse surely lies in its movement – in how it trickles about on the floor and sensitively washes its face – and yet here a single mouse’s motionless remains have raised the dramatic price of £55. The bad taste does not stop at mice though. A bat is stuffed into a coffin and a vampire tuxedo for £95. A grey squirrel is tearing open the fur on its chest to reveal the Superman logo underneath, for over £200.

The small girl must have been transfixed by the mouse rather as when a computer crashes and automatically shuts down. Is the mouse cute because it is a mouse or is it appalling because it is dead? Is it playful because it is dressed as a clown or is it solemn because it has died? I don’t see how any small girl could ever get to the bottom of such a mystery.

Then I understand what it is that I am being directed to. This cabinet isn’t just an open graveyard for mutilated animals. There is a human jawbone on sale for £125. A few of the teeth are still attached, here and there. A spongy shoulder blade (presumably from a separate human being) is on display opposite it and this is going for a similar figure. The small girl must have been so enthralled by the mouse that she had never noticed these items.

So many questions – I honestly do not know where to begin. But this is what I have been directed to and this is what I am now obliged to write about.

My first question is easy enough to answer. It is legal to sell the remains of somebody’s jaw, so long as the jaw is really very dead. There are many historical medical specimens in circulation and freely on sale on platforms such as Instagram. There is meant to be a finite supply of these materials since they can be now only donated, consensually, to medical schools and they have to be disposed of with respect after use. There is a darker hinterland to this market, however, in which bones that have been stolen or illicitly obtained from abroad are lurking behind the tolerated medical items.

There has been some alarm across the media of late about the scale of the UK’s bones trade. Supposing, for example, that I decided to kill my postman, purely recreationally, and that I then boiled him down to a skeleton. Supposing that I next sold his bones on Instagram, for hundreds and hundreds of pounds. Is the infrastructure really in place to identify my bones as being recently deceased? I have a feeling that if I kicked them around the streets for half an hour to make them look old, and maybe notched a couple of fake surgical saw marks into them, it would be my bad luck if anybody queried where they had been sourced from.

 My second question is also easy to answer. The jaw costs £125 because the store believes that somebody will pay that for it. My third and fourth questions are the difficult ones. Who would buy a human jawbone? And why?

Our prospective purchaser must be somebody who either has an incredibly stunted imagination or too much of one. For anybody with an average imagination, the jawbone is a maddening object. It is both a person who is reduced to the rawest of human materials and an utterly depersonalised thing. All that is known about the individual who had worn this jaw is that she was female. What century she lived in – what country – what position in society she held – even what language had flowed every day through the jaw – have all disappeared from historical knowledge. So blank is the jaw now that it is more akin to a toenail clipping than an item of any human importance.

This collapse in value is clearly reflected in the jaw’s knock-down price. In many places today it is possible to have a really good, single meal for the same price as this lady’s jawbone. And what would the average person do with the jaw? They would put it on their mantelpiece. They would glance guiltily at it, sensing that their ownership of it may be more awful than slavery. After all, a slave can always escape again.

Only a person with a very stunted imagination could have any fun with the jawbone. They could use it as a decoration on top of a cake. They could fit it in as a letterbox opener in their front door. This, the innocence of Adam when he was frolicking beneath the bored gaze of the snake.

Somebody with a tremendous imagination could use the jaw in rituals, to summon demons with. They could grind it down into a powder and smuggle it into their victim’s presence, to place a curse over them. In some subcultures, ingesting powdered bones can help with conceiving a child.

Perhaps witches have limited purchasing power these days, given that £125 seems like a rather sorry price for an item with such potentially awesome magical properties. Or maybe the jawbone is likely to be used only in the altogether more trivial form of nonsense. With the cake or the letterbox and their wretched nostalgia for a long-lost barbarism.

I was speaking with somebody who trades in antiques and he ventured an interesting comment about the jaw. It is impossible to remove this item from the market simply because there is no way of doing this that feels sane. It would be horrific to throw human remains into a bin, as if they were a dead pigeon; on the other hand, it would be silly to hold some formal commemorative event to dispose of a mere jawbone. At a loss, therefore, we continue to allow the jaw to circulate.

[Previously on Tychy: “Did Bram Stoker Suffer from Fleas?“]