‘This way,’ he said, backing into the doors and touching both women lightly on their polymura’d elbows as they passed through. ‘Don’t mind the smell.’
The smell, in fact, was tolerable — not death, but industry — some solvents, disinfectants and detergents and the tinny odour of wet floors. The five men working here were clones in surgical gowns, green gloves, thick rubber aprons, their faces hidden by white masks and splatter glasses. Each had a body on a marble table with metal guttering. Preparing them for burial. For one, a gentle massage of the arms to break down rigor mortis. A second body dipped and whitened to the soft attentions of a disinfectant swab. Another had small puncture holes, and its attendant was poking in a trocar tube for drawing off the fluids from its cavities. The fourth was being beautified: his wounds and half-formed scabs were masked by theatrical cosmetics, panstick and rouge. It wasn’t right to bury him if he was looking dead. The last body was being silenced for eternity; the morgue’s best seamster drew needle and thread through the jaw and nostril to close the dead man’s mouth.
‘Try not to look,’ the clerk said, sweeping ahead into Left Luggage, a room packed floor to roof with metal lockers. ‘Now take your time.’
Starting with the bank of drawers behind the door, he began to slide the corpses into view, feet first, like mannequins. Most of the bodies had labels tied round their toes with their names, the date, time and cause of death printed on them. But some were anonymous, and then the clerk had to pull back the paper shroud to show the face. ‘Just shake your head,’ he said. ‘Is this one yours?’ He knew that people were not used, as he was, to the smell. They would not want to speak and taste the air.
How could anybody, except a writer of bad songs, think that death was sweet, soft as a petal when it came, and ‘bathed in perfumes of sad joy’? The only perfumes that the techs employed were disinfectants or the mix of lime and alcohol with which they swabbed the bodies to remove the mess and to close the pores. No lime or alcohol was strong enough to make hem sweet and soft. The orifices and the vents, the bodies’ doors and windows, had not been closed by death. The smell was sweat and pickles, bacon rind and eggs, toilets, rubber, cordite and volcanoes.
As Syl and her companion were discovering, bodies defecate and piss while they are dying. They continue to smell badly till there’s nothing left but bone. Relatives should not — as many do — remove the cotton from the rectum or the vagina when they’ve reclaimed their body for its lying in, the clerk explained with the tones of a helpful shop assistant detailing fabric care. That would be to take the stopper from the drain. Nor should they touch whatever they discover in the penis. It has been put there for a good purpose, not a joke. The clerk would not pull back a sheet to show them what he meant but they could imagine, he was sure. The penis is a comedy when it is dead and best kept hidden. ‘Not erections, funnily,’ he said, made reckless and loquacious by Syl’s wild face and by the Eden pills dissolving in his blood. ‘But. ’ a lowered voice, to demonstrate discretion ‘. the waste.’ He had sense enough to bite his tongue and say no more. The women could not be so easily amused as his male friends — though it was a tempting prospect just to show them one of the morgue’s little plastic stoppers. ‘Made for the purpose,’ he could say. ‘Reusable. Fits all sizes.’ That’d cause a stir.
The women, though, did not even notice that the clerk was smiling to himself. They were too overawed by the clank and contents of the body-heavy drawers, by all the different ways and shapes of death. This was not the town nor was it the season for plagues or viruses. The weather was too salty. But as the clerk’s two visitors browsed — in silence now — amongst the men and women in the morgue that Saturday afternoon and read the labels wrapped around the ankles of the cadavers, they should have found a pattern to the deaths. The heart-attack was suspect number one. Early morning was the favourite time of death. Then midnight and pneumonia. Next suspect killer was the motor-car. And then the cancers, mostly caused by drink or cigarettes or by the sea-swarf in the wind-borne salt. Stop breathing if you do not want to die. Don’t drive, don’t smoke, don’t cross a road, don’t drink, don’t go to restaurants, don’t eat the region’s heavy specialities, the crab and suet casserole, the lardy nut quadroon, the egg liqueur, the blue-cheese sauce.
At last — the sixty-seventh drawer — they found the woman’s sister. There was no label on her toe. But she was certain who it was, though shocked to see how wasted she appeared: ‘I’d been speaking to her just before she went. She sounded absolutely fine.’
The clerk came forward and put his arms around the women’s backs. Their opportunist comforter. He hardly touched the sister’s sobbing shoulders, but he spread his hand quite heavily across Syl’s waist. His lifted thumb could feel her body and her shirt through the thin polymura.
‘It’s not an easy time,’ he said. His little finger pressed her back.
‘Have we checked everything?’ Syl said. She shook his hand away.
‘Not quite.’ He led them to the coroner’s examination room where there were twelve more refrigerated drawers. These were the murders — only one ‘in stock’ that day — and, of course, the suicides that had outwitted Fish’s damp embraces. Eleven suicides. More than was proper for a town this size. There’d been an epidemic of self-loathing. Better to kill than to die. There was a woman rattling with pills. Two gassings. A poisoning. A short attempt at flight from the roof of an office building. A student hanging on her rope. This one had made a tape-recorded message regretting all the trouble she had caused. She’d left the cassette, now with the coroner, on a table top, level with her swinging knees. In the drawer below her — once, briefly, the penultimate resting place of the Academic Mentor — was a policeman who’d been caught shoplifting. A pair of trousers. Hardly worth the risk. He knew he’d be dismissed, no doubt of that. Imprisoned, even, as an example to any of his colleagues who might be similarly tempted. He’d lose his pension with his job. So he’d climbed the steps to the naval monument in his green parade uniform and finished himself with a shotgun, a bullet through his cap and head. The rumour was that someone long wanted by the police had been arrested for the death.
There were the bodies of two euthanasists, as well. And what remained of a young man and his wife who had set light to their small room.
The clerk pulled open the last remaining drawer for Syl. This was the murderee, a rich young man with narrow lips and the tussock hairstyle that had been fashionable five years before. She shook her head. Nobody had resembled either of her parents.
‘Then they’re not dead,’ he said. ‘If they were dead they’d have a drawer by now. Come on.’ He took them to the discharge room and called into the Tannoy for someone to bring a gurney and a cardboard casket for the sister’s body. He filled in a release form and, when the body was brought in, accompanied the women and the corpse into the service elevator. He let the sister speak. They always wanted to speak as soon as he pulled back the railing doors to make the draughty, ponderous descent to the loading bay. He only had to smile and nod. He didn’t have to listen.
‘She was my only sister,’ the woman said to them both, but mostly fixing Syl with her wet eyes. ‘She’d only taken a toothbrush from its cup. It must have weighed like lead. Tore the muscles in her arm and chest.’ They’d heard her cry in pain, she explained. It took her down. She’d hit her chin on the sink, and almost bit her tongue in half. Her niece saw her body, on the floor, then her bloody mouth. The niece had been a nurse, so guessed the aunt had had a brain haemorrhage. She did not try to activate her lungs or heart. It was too late, anyway. They couldn’t even prise the toothbrush from her grip. There was the blood. Then the dreadful smell of Fish. And everybody realized that she was gone for good. ‘To think, she never had a day off sick in all her life. And then, fuff, fuff, she’s. you know, done for.’