The Sea Inside

phocoena
, a common enough animal around our shores. Until a week ago, this small cetacean was swimming around Cardigan Bay, feeding on small fish. Now it lies in a basement of the Zoological Society of London, quite calmly, almost as if asleep.
    The fluorescent light is reflected onto its flanks by the dull sheen of the stainless steel. It is subtly marked, brown with greyish striations. Its tail is elegant, on a small scale; its dorsal stubby. The animal is plump. In fact, it looks remarkably healthy, and one might almost imagine it could swim away – if not for the fact that its eyes have been eaten out of its sockets, and its side has been pecked by gulls, leaving dents like those made by a pencil point in an eraser. And when I walk around to the other side, I discover that one half of its face has been entirely eaten away. Yet the carcase – probably about four and a half feet long from its curved flukes to its snub head – has the dignity which all dead things have, from birds to humans. Death wipes away fear, leaving beauty behind. I feel guilty as I photograph it, invading its privacy; an animal out of its element and laid on cold metal, instead of being suspended in water. The images I take are forensic; I suppose that’s what my body looked like when I was photographed for medical science. I take one last look at the animal, whose wholeness is about to be destroyed.
    Rob talks me through the cetacean’s dimensions, and what he is about to do. Picking up the scalpel onto whose handle he has just snapped a new blade, he cuts through the flank with deft and unerring swiftness. The dark skin opens to show the glaring white beneath – the colour of coconut. With an adeptness a sushi chef would envy, Rob slices out a long sliver of the blubber. He lays out the section like a bacon rasher, and carefully measures it. ‘It’s a healthy layer,’ he says. ‘It gets thicker in the winter, to keep the animal warm.’ Already, he has spotted something anomalous: a cavity in the blubber, filled with blood, big enough for Rob to poke his finger in. It is the first internal sign that this animal did not die of natural causes.
    ‘See – the ribs are snapped, here, and here,’ says Rob, whose own movements are, ironically, compromised by over-adventurous paragliding at the weekend which has left him with cracked ribs. Matt is summoned to cut out the ribcage with a long-handled pair of cutters. The bones are loosened and laid out, like spare ribs, sticky with sweet and sour sauce. ‘Porpoise meat is good eating, you know,’ as Ishmael says.
    Turning his attention to the animal’s underside, Rob removes two identical organs from its interior. They resemble a pair of elongated plums: the porpoise’s testes. Given the size of the animal, they’re remarkably large, I say. ‘It’s because they’re so sexually active – like dolphins,’ Rob says. ‘The testes of a dolphin can weigh two kilograms.’ There they lie, by the side of the porpoise. No use to him now.
    Slowly Rob works his way through the rest of the animal, carefully excising each organ. It’s like taking apart a three-dimensional, bloody jigsaw. The rest of the blubber is peeled off in large white slabs and tossed into a large yellow plastic sack. cites, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, demands that every part of a protected animal such as this one – even though there may be half a million porpoises in British waters – must be bagged up and taken away to be incinerated. Matt stands by with small plastic containers for the tissue specimens Rob saves for later analysis.
    Soon the steel is awash with blood, its surface strewn with offal like a miniature whaling station. Even Rob and Matt admit to each other, after a beer or two, an occasional sense of revulsion at their work, although it reveals something miraculous: the essential secrets of the cetacean, so like us that it might be a child lying there on the slab, deconstructed and, bit by bit, dumped in the bin. I realise that the animal is as beautiful inside as it is outside; I ought to put down my camera and paint it instead. Digital images only heighten the lurid quality, and lose the subtle colouring of what lies inside; nor can they convey the faint but evocative smell of the sea that still hangs about the carcase.
    The largest organ of all, lying across the others, is the liver. As Rob cuts into it – its interior still crackling with ice like a