Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [56]
Boy, did I go red at that. Luckily, the mask hid this, and I kept my eyes down so that he couldn’t see how furious I was. How dare he? I just carried on working and after a couple of minutes, changing to the other leg as well, I had about 20 ml of blood, which would be more than enough. I made sure that everything was correctly labelled while Professor Twigworth made notes, then he packed up and moved off to the changing room. ‘Right,’ he said loudly. ‘I’m finished now, Bill.’ To me he said with a wink, ‘I’ll be ready to have my back scrubbed in about five minutes, Michelle.’
It was the first time he had called me by my name, but I wished he hadn’t. I was dead embarrassed again but there was no way I was going to show it. I looked around the PM room, at the blood on the walls and the floor around where he had done his dissection, at the two bowls of sliced organs, at poor Mrs Taylor-Wells who was still a mass of cuts and skin flaps, and at her opened body cavity. In a loud voice, I said to him, ‘You’d better get Bill to do it, Professor. I’ve got a lot of work to do.’
Once everyone had left, it was about nine thirty in the evening, and I knew that I would be there for a few hours longer. The porters were in and out bringing a couple of bodies from the wards – and thank God they were, or I thought I might start getting cabin fever.
It was just gone midnight when I rang Luke to come and collect me from the mortuary. I was tired and my body ached. The fact that I had to return in seven hours was not a nice thought either. I think I was asleep in the car before we even left the hospital car park.
TWENTY-NINE
Luke and I were at Mum and Dad’s when Clive rang me one Sunday afternoon in late autumn. It wasn’t unusual to get a call from Clive over the weekend, but this time he had some bad news.
‘Graham’s in hospital.’
I knew that Graham had had some health problems in the past, not helped by smoking since he was thirteen, drinking like a thirsty fish and eating a fry-up for breakfast most days, so I immediately assumed he’d had a heart attack. However, Clive soon put me right. ‘Stupid git fell down a steep riverbank while he was out shooting. He’s broken his hip. Lucky he didn’t shoot himself
‘Oh, crap. Is he all right?’
‘Yeah he’s all right, the clumsy sod. They’re going to operate this afternoon, but he’ll be out of action for months.’
His voice told me that he was seriously concerned. The winter was nearly upon us – which was our busy time what with pneumonia and a sudden increase in suicides – and I knew enough to realize we wouldn’t be able to cope. I asked, ‘What about a locum?’
Clive laughed. ‘I’ll ask, Michelle, but because of the money problems in the Trust, I bet they turn us down.’
‘Surely they know how busy we’re going to be? They wouldn’t think twice if it was the wards.’
He said at once in a voice I was coming to know well, ‘We’ll cope, Michelle. We always do.’
Later that evening, when I was alone with Oscar and Harvey, Maddie phoned for a chat and I had a brainwave. She had shown an interest in what went on down in the mortuary, and had also hinted that she was getting a bit bored with emptying out the processing machines, filling them up again, taking dictation when it came to describing the small biopsies, and being a general dogsbody. She had said more than once that if the right job came up she might go back to Wales, so I knew that she was seriously disgruntled. I took the plunge. ‘Suppose you could do a spell with us in the mortuary? Do you think you might like that?’
She was a bit taken aback, but it was only a few moments before she said in her sing-song voice, ‘I could give it a go, Michelle.’
Clive was a bit sceptical when I told him the next morning as we sat in the office (me in Graham