Taxisdermaphobia

Happy (belated) Halloween.

The walrus is as tall as the ceiling and as wide as the wall. I am small, tiny, barely five years old and a few feet tall. To this day I wonder whether he was quite as large as I remember for the purposes of my tale, but to my mind he was the largest being that I could comprehend.

He doesn’t say anything but just sits there lazily in his box with that blue lining that appears to wallpaper all similar boxes. Perhaps it is there to remind him of the sea, along with the fine layer of sand and shell scattered about below him like a seaside holiday scene. He stares straight ahead with the diligence of a soldier standing to order, solemnly sworn not to move an inch. Even dancing around in front of him, or breathing on the glass to write ‘hello’, does not raise a reaction, not even a bat of the eye. His long yellowing moustache droops down like an old man’s and his brown leathery skin betrays the telltale liver spots of age. Maybe one hundred years.

I do not think that I truly comprehended that he was dead, because he was sat up with his eyes open, which defied my five-year-old definition of death, and I was far too young to concede such a point. So we sat for a half hour in a harmonious arrangement where I told him about myself and he just listened.

My younger childhood was spent being hauled from one appointment with a walrus (or a crocodile, a polar bear, a gorilla, a sheep) to another in daunting, crypt-like museums and sprawling stately homes. Someone should have warned my parents that such educational generosity was bound to have an affect on the psyche.

Mine finally snapped one day in Noah’s Ark. Two by two of every animal you could ever imagine had been, decapitated, hollowed out, packed with sawdust and mounted on a wall in a colossal homage to the Victorian love of trophy hunting. Giraffes’ necks stretched long and taut with all the litheness of a plank of wood. Great majestic cats, leopards and lions and tigers, snarled sinister sharp-toothed smiles with eyes that lacked all the necessary animal instinct. Antlers protruded in irregular angles from stags, wilder beast, a giant moose, plus the giant spiral horns of the gazelle and springbok. Birds paused mid-flight with wingspans spread in full beat.

But the worst things were always the eyes, eyes everywhere; anatomically correct in the finest minutiae. Those glassy, vacant eyeballs that gaze, into the distance wetly, fearfully, silently imploring you for freedom from their eternal corporeal shell. I would rather think of them fetid and rotting down, full of organs and death, going back into the earth, rather than being reformed in a kind of man-made semi-nature. Some dignified man’s prize reminder of the natural order of things. The ultimate insult is, surely, to not let a thing die a death but to make it live on in oblivious humiliation on your wall, in a place it would never have experienced in its natural life.

This mortal, albeit animal, crisis impacted on my being so much that it all but refused to cooperate with the situation. My body collapsed first. My head curled into my chest and my legs curved up to meet them at the point where my breath stopped flowing and my heart blood congealed in a gooey panic. Then my eyes screwed shut in some kind of ineffectual act of sympathy for all the fake ones that surrounded me. If they could not, I could not see, and I simply would not open my eyes until someone picked me up and dragged my lifeless body away from my waking nightmare and into the light.

In the light I am safe from my fear. These grim beings do not live in the bright or the outdoors. They live in glass cabinets in dimly lit rooms and occasionally on the walls of galleries and bars, waiting to surprise and embarrass me in company with my phobia that has no name and apparently no other sufferer than myself (believe me I have looked).

I search for a name so I don’t feel so... odd. If there were an official register of phobias then I would lobby them for a classification. I would ask them to tell me that I’m ok. But until then I make up my own. Taxis comes from the Greek for "arrangement", Derma from the Latin for "skin". This would mean that I am afraid of arranged skin, which lacks the necessary meaning because I am afraid of death, and fur, and animals and reanimation and size and scale. I am afraid of man’s need to claim what is dead and own its form. I’m afraid of this egotism and its giant hairy manifestations that assume to be something they are not.

In the pub where I sit, there is a small head on the wall, a fox or a small sharp-eared dog. Moths have bitten away its form so much it’s hard to tell. The fur is chafed away almost to skin and stuffing, like a teddy bear worn down to the weft. Loved to death, is the phrase that springs to mind, though more likely shot to death and kept as a bit of fuzzy memorabilia. Or perhaps he died of natural causes and someone thought enough of him in life that they wanted to preserve him in death. Like I say, it’s hard to tell.

I surprise myself because I can look at him; he is the only one I can face off. Though he is wearing a large pair of sunglasses over whatever little beady glass eyes may be fitted into that space where his eyes would once have been, so I am cheating myself.

I feel like I am being strong, overcoming my fear. But I know that if he were to take off the dark spectacles then I would once again stare into the same hollow, viscous blackness that steals my breath and strangles my arteries and makes me ask myself the terrible question, what must they do with all those eyes?