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By Root 204 0

umpteen times and broken wind loudly twice. They asked us what we thought of the way the candidates had eviscerated, and Clive gave his full opinion, then they watched silently as Drs Mirza and Merkovich finished. Both candidates had laid out the sliced and dissected organs on boards on the bench, but they had done so with varying degrees of success. Dr Merkovich had managed to display them in a neat, logical way and had wiped away most of the blood, but poor Dr Mirza’s display was to my eye a complete mess; and I think Ed and Peter thought so too. Clive had told Maddie and me to watch Ed and Peter’s faces as they walked over. I know I saw them wince when they were confronted by the random display of blood and organ slices that she had prepared for them. Each of the candidates had to present the case, including the clinical information that they had been given, their external findings and their interpretation of the appearances of the organs. We couldn’t really hear what was going on, because by then we were busy starting the reconstruction of the bodies after what felt like a lifetime of waiting, but I got the impression that things weren’t going well for Dr Mirza. Her nervousness had been obvious from the start, but when Peter and Ed moved in, she all but fell to pieces. She was shaking so badly that she was spraying spots of blood up the wall and even, to Clive’s disgust, on to the low ceiling above her. She kept apologizing and there were long silences after either Ed or Peter asked her a question. The low point came when she couldn’t find the spleen and there was a great deal of rummaging about in the steel bowls and even back in the body, which meant she had to push Maddie out of the way.

Eventually they moved on to Dr Merkovich and things appeared to go much more smoothly. He was still nervous, I could see, but he managed to get out some coherent answers and there were none of those long, embarrassed silences that Dr Mirza seemed to specialize in. Eventually Ed and Peter had finished, and went to the door where they pulled off their disposable gowns and overshoes. Outside, in the body store, they were just talking to Clive when suddenly Dr Mirza uttered a little squeak and, newly found spleen in hand, she rushed across the dissection room and barged into the body store, completely ignoring health and safety. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’ she cried.

They all recoiled and Ed said, ‘Yes. OK. If you could just take it back into the PM room, please . . .’ Clive nearly fainted. ‘NOT OUT HERE!’ he shouted at her. Even I jumped.

She withdrew, apparently delighted that she had found the spleen and completely unaware that she had done her chances great damage because of the way she had behaved. Clive followed her with the mop, cleaning up the blood splatters, shaking his head and mumbling, ‘Not a bloody clue; all brains and no bloody common sense .’

By the time the candidates had gone, the bodies had been reconstructed and returned to the fridge, the surfaces had been cleaned down and everything mopped and dried, it was after three o’clock and none of us had had a lunch break. Two PMs which would normally have taken three hours had taken closer to seven. Clive was in a bad mood because he likes his routine and doesn’t take well to having things disrupted. Over coffee, he kept on and on about how much trouble trainee pathologists were, and how things were going downhill. ‘Would you want your nearest and dearest PMed by one of those two?’ he asked Maddie, who shook her head. ‘Not a chance,’ he continued. ‘I wouldn’t trust the dumpy one to find her own backside with the lights out, let alone a cause of death.’

Maddie said timidly, ‘Everyone has to learn.’

Clive was taking no prisoners, though. ‘Some people can’t learn. Some people are untrainable.’

If we thought that by saying nothing we would calm him down, we were wrong. ‘And they’re getting so precious now. Do you know, we had one chap who refused to do autopsies if the body was too fat or a bit decomposed. Even got a bit of paper from the Royal College of Pathologists