Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [2]
Greetings over, he led me in the direction of the mortuary. He asked how I was feeling, to which the answer was that I wasn’t sure. Nervous, nauseous, frightened and a whole other bunch of emotions that I suppose everyone experiences on their first day at a new job. But this isn’t your normal nine-to-five job, is it? I did wonder why they had offered me the post in the first place. I had found the post-mortem fascinating, but never before that had I seen a dead person, let alone spent all day with one. I still didn’t really know what made me apply for the job and could only suppose that I had felt I could do it.
While I was walking with Clive over to the mortuary (which to my surprise was actually very close – you could see it from A&E if you knew where it was), I wondered what the department would look like. I had seen the post-mortem in the mortuary in the sister hospital, which was only around seven-years-old. Big, light and with lots of room, the whole place was shiny stainless steel and smelt of a strong disinfectant. I wondered if this mortuary would be the same, or if it would be like the mortuaries you see on old horror films, water dripping down the walls, rats scampering in the gutters and a hunchbacked man hovering in the corner holding an eleven-inch blade.
Clive led me to a pair of large red double doors under a corrugated blue steel canopy, which hides the main entrance to the mortuary so that the patients and public don’t see bodies being loaded into hearses. He told me that it was on the ground floor of the pathology block, at the far end from reception. It was quite understated and not at all obviously a place where you would come across corpses, but easy enough to find. With a single key, Clive opened one of the doors.
As I entered the roomy vestibule, the smell that hit me was a mix of cleaning fluid, musty clothes and an odour I had never smelt before, which I could not even begin to describe but which for some reason reminded me of how my little brother used to smell when he came home from junior school, a sort of stale canteenish smell.
Clive led me into a small office that housed two desks. Sitting at the smaller of these was another silver-haired man, with rosy cheeks and glasses. Clive introduced Graham to me. Graham stood up and he, too, firmly shook my hand. ‘Hello, lovey,’ was his greeting, and he had a strong Gloucestershire accent which suited his appearance to a T. I vaguely recognized him and it turned out that I, too, struck a chord with him. We chatted and eventually concluded that he must know my father; Dad, being an ex-publican, has met a lot of people in Gloucestershire and, growing up in a pub, I, too, came across many faces.
I was offered a chair and a hot drink. Graham bent down from his chair to flick on the kettle, which was on the floor by his desk, and grabbed three cups off a bookshelf behind his head. A carton of milk was fetched from outside the double doors. Clive told me cheerfully that, until a few years ago, they would keep the milk in the bottom of the same fridge that held the bodies, but health and safety had put a stop to this. I decided then and there that I would stick with black coffee.
The office I was sitting in had seen better days. Standard hospital cream and blue paint was peeling off the walls, and the damp was rising