Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [77]
Three hours later and he was done, so that the mortuary emptied with quite astonishing speed; by three o’clock Maddie and I were alone, tired and depressed as we looked at the work that was still to be done to clear up. We set to with energy that came from an overwhelming desire to be up and out of there, and managed to get things fairly clean and tidy in forty-five minutes.
I got out of the taxi outside my parents’ house at five thirty on Boxing Day morning ready to drop and not get back up again. I tried not to make too much noise as I let myself in, then crept up to the spare room where Luke was snoring to himself. I climbed in beside him without waking him up.
FORTY
Clive summed it up. ‘Whose stupid idea was it to have two bank holidays in a row?’
Both Maddie and I could only agree. Because I’d been the one on call over the New Year, I’d had to go into the mortuary after a busy social weekend and, accordingly, had been feeling like a corpse myself; it was unseasonably warm and that somehow made it worse. This year was proving a nightmare because the bank holiday period was even longer than usual and bodies were piling up after several days of only the porters having access to the mortuary. Because all the porters are able to do is take them from the place in the hospital where they died, or give access to undertakers bringing in Coroner’s bodies, then put them in a fridge and shut the door, it means that eventually we run out of space, and then they ring one of us, at any given time of the day or night, to say that there’s only one fridge space left. So what are we supposed to do? Take the dead home with us? Do I prop them up on my dining-room chairs till the holidays are over? So, at three-thirty in the afternoon on the Tuesday after New Year, I had to make my way into work.
Over my first few months in the slightly tatty mortuary, I had learnt to enjoy coming into work. Despite what we have to do in there, despite the terrible things we see, and the sadness and tragedy that inevitably accompany death, the people that I work with – the sense of teamwork and comradeship – and the knowledge that we are doing an important job mean it isn’t always a bad place to be.
Coming in alone on a winter bank holiday, though, was different. Then the mortuary was empty and cold and forbidding; it was made worse by the fact that I had a huge hangover – something that I would normally never allow myself to do – and that I only had a dyslexic undertaker for company; he dotes on me and had willingly volunteered to give me a lift in. What I had to do was to figure out which bodies needed to be moved to our sister hospital (which has more fridge space). The only ones that would be able to be transferred would be those that had had a post-mortem where a natural cause of death had been found, and therefore the paperwork accompanying the body would be complete.
I finally got to return to my parents’ an hour or so after the New Year’s meal my mother had been looking forward to cooking since Christmas Day was over. On my return, Dad asked brightly, ‘Many in, love?’ as he had taken to doing. I replied with an exhausted grunt and collapsed on the sofa in my usual fashion.
I spent the rest of the evening worrying about the stress that the next day was going to bring for all three of us technicians and about how co-operative the pathologist was going to be feeling. I had a suspicion that I was not going to get much sleep that night.
Most of the hospital tends to wind down over Christmas, with the operating theatres shut and as many of the patients as are well enough to go sent home. As Maddie explained, this means