Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [12]
Clive rang the Coroner’s office and got through to Neville Stubbs who was dealing with this case. I didn’t know it then but this was not good news; I couldn’t understand why Clive had such a pained expression on his face as he was explaining the situation. It turns out that Neville is a pleasant man, but not the sharpest tool in the box; he has a habit of typing post-mortem requests for email (badly) and then forgetting to press the send button, or even sending them to some random person in the histology laboratory. Now that we know each other, though, he is always pleased to hear from me, but I usually have to listen to a joke or two before I get to explain why I have rung.
Clive explained the situation to him and asked for the request for post-mortem by the end of the day so we could get this man done and dusted first thing Monday, and then back to the funeral parlour as soon as possible. Neville said he would get on the case and both Clive and Graham expressed some relief as the phone went down. This was only the start, though, as Clive went on to explain, because the next problem would be the autopsy – how the hell were we going to get the body on the post-mortem table?
As we locked up the mortuary that evening, I can’t say that any of us was filled with joy, but, as Clive said, at least we had done as much as we could for the time being; I wasn’t looking forward to Monday morning, though.
After finishing with Mr P on Friday evening, I went straight home, threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed some money, put the dogs on the leads and then the three of us walked the two and a half miles to my parents’ house; by six thirty that evening I was raiding Dad’s wine cabinet and informing them both that we were all staying the weekend and that Luke would be joining us as well a bit later.
What had stuck in my mind the most from the first couple of weeks in the mortuary was the huge confidentiality thing that went with working for the hospital. It was massive and really important to the Trust, as I knew from my previous job, but it seemed more real now and I felt protective of the patients in the mortuary, almost as if they demanded it now that they were deceased. It was a matter of respect. I wasn’t going to gossip about them; that was not my style, and I had not heard any of my colleagues do this. The dead had little left except dignity and some things needed to be left within the mortuary.
Another thing I had realized was that Luke was not fazed by what I had chosen to do with my life. I had fully explained my job role to him, expecting some sort of reaction – OK, to be honest, expecting him to look at me like I had two heads – but no, nothing apart from support. He did not pry, question or treat me any differently from the way he had before. Luke has a job as an engineer, requiring a lot of concentration, time and effort. We have been together a year or so, and I have yet to see him get stressed about anything professionally or personally (apart from bad drivers, that is). He just has this amazing ability to leave work at work and very rarely discusses it.
As the evening drew to a close, though, Mr Patterson started to enter my thoughts and I couldn’t help worrying about what I was going to walk into on the following Monday morning.
SEVEN
When I arrived in the gloom of an early spring morning after the weekend, if I hadn’t already had Mr Patterson on my mind the faint smell that came to me as soon as the door was opened would have reminded me swiftly. It was still relatively new to me in those days, but we had already had a body through the mortuary that was starting to go off, so it wasn’t completely unknown to me. It was still faint, but it is like nothing else on earth and, no matter how many times you breathe it in, you don’t ever get used to it. I murmured a few silent swear words and went quickly into the office where Clive and Graham were already sitting, the door shut tight in a fruitless attempt