Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [21]
‘What did you do?’
‘I argued, but it was no use. She knew that it wasn’t her hubby, and she wasn’t about to listen to me. She insisted that we had substituted an actor who looked exactly like her husband. Didn’t seem to think it odd that we happened to have had a dead actor identical to her hubby on hand, just when required.’
Graham added, ‘She got really worked up, too.’
Clive nodded. ‘Took me forty minutes to calm her down and get rid of her, but she didn’t leave it there. A week later, Dick got a letter. It wasn’t in green ink, but it could have been. She insisted that, as head of department, he was the one who had substituted an actor for her husband, and she demanded to know what he had done with him.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He put the letter in his desk drawer and tried to forget about it.’
Graham laughed again. ‘He did the same with the next one . . . and the next.’
Clive joined in with the laughter. ‘He was still getting them ten years later when he retired.’
TWELVE
I had been working at the mortuary for a couple of months when I arrived in good time one Monday morning, feeling like an old hand now and thinking I knew what to expect; it had already become evident to me that Clive had a stable morning routine that rarely altered. I rang the doorbell and he greeted me with a smile. I could hear the usual Radio 2 blasting out in the background from the PM room and walked into the office just as the kettle had clicked off. Clive had all the cups ready for the hot drinks, but I couldn’t help noticing that the smell was definitely not the usual disinfectant smell. This was different. This was rotten; it reminded me vaguely of how Mr Patterson had smelt by the time he left us, only much worse. Clive didn’t mention it, so neither did I, but I did begin to question if he could actually smell it; I wondered whether, after so many years in the business, he had become used to stenches like that, or even lost the ability to detect them altogether.
Graham arrived and instantly said with a grimace, ‘How long has that been hanging around?’
So, I wasn’t going nuts, and there really was a foul smell in the air. Clive said that he didn’t know because he had not yet had the pleasure of opening the fridge. Graham turned around and went straight to the body store mumbling something about getting it over and done with and out the way. I followed him.
Four trays on the left-hand end of the twenty-eight-fridge bay were larger than the rest. These were for obese patients, which back then were very few and far between, so they were also used as an isolation bay for decomposed bodies. Because most of the time they were empty, we didn’t have to open the door very often, so that the smell wasn’t able to leak out and contaminate the whole department.
When Graham opened the fridge, the smell hit me like a ton of bricks, and then proceeded to do over and above its duty by further smacking into the back of my throat with an almost physical punch, and that was while the body was still concealed inside three body bags. I waited in dread-filled expectation for these to be opened, wondering just how it could get any more offensive. Graham approached the tray which the body lay on without thinking twice, and for the first time since I had started, I saw him wearing gloves.
If you can picture the goriest horror film you have ever seen and double it, then you’re just beginning to have some idea of what he exposed when the final body bag was unzipped. When he did this, although the stench – by now even more potent and eye-watering – would normally have wiped everything else from my awareness, what lay in front of me vied for attention and won; it was a slimy, green, moving body. Layers of skin falling away, huge blisters waiting to spill their watery contents, lips and eyelids eaten away so that the teeth and eyeballs were exposed in the most horrific manner. The reason it was moving