But the clerk was not, yet, the sort to seem sincere even when his breath was sweet. He resented working in the morgue. It showed. He hated having to dispense his sympathy to strangers. Like most young men, he had no time for death or grief. The bodies had no poetry. He was too sharp and fun-loving, he thought, to waste his life on them. The duty doctors were a bunch of fools to think that lunch and cadavers do not mix well and that a belching clerk should not deal with the deceased and their bereaved. You’d think the duty doctors had never touched a cadaver. The dead don’t talk — but bodies belch for hours after death. A woman bends to kiss her husband for the final time. Despite the warnings of the morgue attendant — sweet-breathed or not — she puts a little weight upon his chest, and is rewarded with the stench of every meal she’s cooked for him in forty years. The morgue could sound, at times, as if a ghoulish choir was warming up, backed by a wind ensemble of tubas and bassoons. It could smell as scalpy, scorched and pungent as a hairdressing salon. The breath of these cold choristers was far worse than the onion breath of clerks. But no one said that bodies weren’t sincere. There’s nothing more sincere than death. The dead mean what they say.
The morgue clerk ran his finger down the register, as usual, not fearful of what he might encounter but half expecting and half hoping to find a name he recognized. Fish might oblige him with a neighbour, say, or some young man who’d been a good friend at his school, or one of his many neglected aunts. Anything to break the tedium of work. He’d find his own name on the list one day, one of the duty doctors had warned him. Enfin, a name to make his heart stand still. Sincere, at last.
It was the clerk’s job to record the deceased’s name on its last form, the place of birth, the date of death, the cause, a doctor’s signature, the registrar’s smudged stamp, a job number, a label, and then to check the disposition of the bodies on his charts so that he could allocate a storage space. It was full house, that weekend matinée, when Syl came looking for her parents, preceding them in fact. The refrigerated drawers, other than the ones that were being cleaned or serviced by the techs, were all occupied. Some would become empty again after two o’clock when relatives could claim their deceased and buy the regulation cardboard casket in which to bear the body home.
Syl and Geo were the first inquirers after lunch. The woman’s parents had gone missing, she explained, the usual dreadful trepidation on her face. They’d like to check amongst the dead, if that was possible. ‘Sent by the police,’ the man added, as if such information made a difference. The clerk ran his fingers down the list of dead again. No Joseph or Celice. Were any of the bodies in the morgue unidentified?
‘Plenty,’ said the clerk. ‘You want to look? Wait there.’ He popped another Go gum in his mouth and offered one to Syl. Not to the man ‘sent by the police’. He was attracted to the woman’s new-mown hair and her unruly face. A potent combination. The libertine, the nun. Here was a face that knew no bounds. He’d find the time and opportunity to go with her up to the fridge. Without the man, of course.
Syl and Geo sat and waited, without speaking, for more than half an hour until a woman in her sixties, with her two sons, arrived. She rang the handbell on the ledge outside the clerk’s room. ‘My sister died,’ she said, when he pulled back the glass. ‘They took her for an autopsy.’
He checked the number on her form against his charts. ‘She’s here. Upstairs.’
‘Where can we bring the van?’
The clerk told the brothers how to find the basement entry to the morgue, then called the woman and Syl to follow him. ‘Sorry, you have to be a blood relative,’ he lied to Geo. ‘She won’t be long.’ He led the women up the stairs, not speaking, to the storage rooms. He found the sister’s name again on the inventory but no one had written down the drawer number. ‘You’ll recognize her, will you? If we look. ’
‘She is my sister. ’
‘No problem, then. So long as you’re sure. Mistakes are made.’ He turned to Syl, and winked, complicitly. The young against the old. ‘And you can see if there’s anyone you recognize. OK?’
The clerk — Fish’s rakish protégé, its representative on earth — was in the best of moods, despite the work. Barbiturates and beer. He quite enjoyed his visits to the fridge. It was always interesting and often amusing to accompany a person deputized to identify a corpse. No easy task. Often distant cousins or short-sighted neighbours were sent rather than expose a wife or daughter to the trauma. A cousin or a neighbour can be a virtual stranger. You might pass one in the street and not be recognized. And so indeed, as the morgue clerk had warned, mistakes were made, the dead were sometimes misidentified. Death is a deep disguise. The eyelids of the body might be taped, perhaps, or the mouth tied shut with a crêpe scarf round the head. Or someone could have made the error, after the stroke or heart-attack had done its job, of taking out the fellow’s dentures. Rigor mortis had set in and now the man’s mouth had changed shape. The one-and-all-time fat man had become a hermit monk, thinned by prayers and fasting, hollow-cheeked. His facial muscles had collapsed. The teeth would not fit back. The morgue technician had either put the dentures in a plastic bag tied to the body’s thumb or simply hooked them round the dead man’s gums, covering the lips. A flesh and plastic tribute to Picasso for the cousin or the neighbour to identify.
Or else the corpse’s face, not helped by wads of cotton wool, was bloated. A man who’d been cadaverous for sixty years was now, in death, as full and smooth as a pumpkin mask.
Or else a bored technician might have shaved away a distinguishing moustache, just for the fun of it, or disguised a birthmark with his panstick.
For those deputed relatives and friends, the body’s face was never quite the one that they had known or loved. The displayed person could be anyone, in fact. We share expressions when we’re dead. All cousins look the same. So, yes, they’d try to recognize the corpse through their slit eyes as quickly as they could. They’d nod. They’d turn away. A tiny glimpse should be enough. They’d sign the forms provided by the clerk and, once in a while, take the wrong body from the morgue disguised and hidden by the cardboard coffin, almost convinced by what they’d seen.
‘I’ve known of people that’ve been buried by complete strangers,’ the clerk was always pleased to tell his friends. He had a hundred Gothic anecdotes of misplaced cadavers and comic funerals. Shocking and hilarious, but not for public airing. He had to save his embellished and unlikely stories for the bar: the one occasion, for example, when mourners at a spinster’s funeral had found an old man dead in the casket instead of the expected woman scarcely forty years of age; the time, ten years before, when a technician’s resourceful use of a condom and some orange garden string had gone expensively wrong — the relatives had sued the morgue; the story of the body that had snored for seven nights.
So the clerk was hoping to be amused when he took the two women to the robing room. He concentrated on Syl’s back and hair as she removed her jacket and put on the knee-length polymura coat he’d issued. Less than flattering, usually. But irresistible on her. Then he let them into the antechamber of the morgue. A thirty-metre fridge. A line of double sinks, with elbow taps and shelves of fluids, powders and cosmetics. A line of haz-mat bins. A metal tank. A row of hooks and hangers. A washing-line with dripping sheets. Beyond, through rubber doors, the cheerful music from a radio, and voices.