The facility had recently undergone a renovation so, small as it was, it was fairly modern inside. Our single post-mortem room had two stations for autopsies but I would later discover that many had three, four or even six, and that didn’t include perinatal (baby) autopsy benches. The fridges, as in most modern mortuaries, were double-sided which meant that they formed a dividing wall in the building. Behind their pristine white doors the heads of the deceased pointed into the PM room◦– the so-called ‘dirty’ or ‘red’ side◦– which is where I’d extracted this morning’s patient; and the other side was the ‘transition’ or ‘orange’ side where the decedents were originally received from out in the community.[2] Although opening the door on that side would usually mean you were greeted by several sets of pale feet, they didn’t have the proverbial toe-tags on them as you see in the media◦– we don’t label our dead like we label our luggage. Plus the area was only for staff, never family or friends of the dead. There was also a staff office, a smaller doctors’ office, a waiting room and a connecting viewing room which had the typical curtain to pull back in order to present the deceased to the next of kin.
Most mortuaries in the UK have a similar layout, particularly if they were erected in the same period. There was a spate of local authority mortuaries built in the 1950s and 1960s and they look totally unassuming from the outside, with their sharp angles, bricks and concrete. But they weren’t the first mortuaries, not by a long shot. According to a paper by Pam Fisher entitled ‘Houses for the Dead: The Provision of Mortuaries in London, 1843–1889’ (which I consider a gripping read), the need for places to store the recently deceased was first noted in the mid-1800s. At that point London’s population was booming and many families occupied only a single room, so when a family member passed away, the decaying body was simply kept in that same room with everybody until the burial; there was nowhere else to put them. The deceased might remain there for a week or more, particularly if poorer families had to scrape the money together for a funeral, and anecdotally these corpses were said to be making the population sick. According to press from the time, learned men concluded that London’s dead were killing the living, and eventually facilities were created which were to be ‘houses for the immediate reception, and respectful and appropriate care of the dead’. The facilities were known as Waiting Mortuaries or Dead Houses.
When I opened the door of our own Dead House in answer to the bell, I was surprised to see someone else on the step in place of the pathologist, who was still standing at his Volvo, searching for something in the boot. It was a young police officer who appeared far more surprised to see me. He stared at me wide-eyed and in silence, looking a bit pale.
‘Yeees?’ I asked, slowly and deliberately, eyebrows raised, trying to encourage him to speak. It was nothing new to me: I’d been told before that first-time visitors to the mortuary expect to come face to face with a lazy-eyed male hunchback when the door creaks open, not a petite blonde Marilyn Munster. It probably caught him off guard for a second, although it didn’t explain why he looked so pale. I suddenly became worried that perhaps I had a blob of fat or smear of blood on my face, so my hands involuntarily flew up to my cheek and started rubbing.
He eventually found his tongue. ‘Is this the morgue?’
I took a deep breath. ‘No, it’s the mortuary,’ I corrected him, unable to hide my annoyance.
Tiny pet peeve here: mortuary literally means ‘house of the dead’ (hence Dead House) and has been in use for that purpose since around 1865. Morgue, on the other hand, comes from the French verb morguer which means ‘to look at solemnly’. It hails from Paris in the late 1800s, when the deceased were on display at the Paris Morgue in Notre Dame for the locals to come and stare at or, I suppose, look at solemnly. Initially, this was so that the many decedents pulled from the River Seine or those who’d died elsewhere in the city could be identified by their family and friends, either physically or via their apparel. But this public activity became so popular that it could attract up to forty thousand visitors a day until it closed in 1907; to put that into perspective, it helps to know that the London Eye accommodated only fifteen thousand visitors a day in its heyday. (Not a lot to do in Paris back then, I take it?) While it’s true that the terms ‘mortuary’ and ‘morgue’ are interchangeable, most UK technicians will never use the latter, though it’s more common in the US.
After I’d put him right, the young policeman informed me he was escorting the funeral directors who were bringing in a deceased man from his home. I finally understood his pallor and assumed the scene had been pretty grim.
‘There’s a Volvo in the way at the moment, though,’ he explained. ‘Thought we’d just let you know.’
Five minutes later, when Dr Jameson had moved his car, he stood with me, Jason, the pale policeman and the funeral directors as we checked in the fridge’s newest ‘resident’. He’d been found in quite a common way: neighbours had begun to complain about a smell and flies had congregated in the area so the police had broken down his door. This didn’t bode well as it meant he was very likely a recluse who had lain undiscovered for a long time, which in turn meant severe decomposition. The undertakers were complaining profusely, and one of them was particularly vocal.
‘As if it’s not bad enough that he’s massive and green,’ he grumbled, ‘he was one of those◦– what do you call ’em?◦– hoarders.’ He pronounced it ‘orders’. ‘Couldn’t fuckin’ get to him cos of all the piles-a-shite everywhere. Nearly broke me back, the son of a bitch!’
Hearing this, Jason turned to me and roared with laughter. I was hoping he’d forgotten my earlier mistake now that the pathologist was here. No such luck.
‘Eh, Doc, you won’t believe what Carla said this morning,’ he chuckled, at exactly the same moment the man’s body bag burst open and a spectacular wave of dark brown fluid hit the clean linoleum floor.
I put my head in my hands. This day was going to be longer than I thought.
One
Information: ‘Media Most Foul’
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media. I ask in my writing, ‘What is real?’
I have never been close up to a fake corpse before. I’ve seen thousands of genuine cadavers in different shapes and sizes, their bouquet of smells and spectrum of colours all competing for my attention. But, in a bizarre inverse to the experience of most of the population, it’s the fake corpses I’m unfamiliar with.
The prosthetic dead body now in front of me is quite pleasant despite being very realistic: she’s a slender female with ivory skin and a tiny waist which I find myself envying, in the same way a young girl may envy the curves of a Barbie doll. Her long, tousled, chestnut hair is splayed around her head on the post-mortem table like a dirty halo. Her chest has been opened via the usual Y-incision, causing her loose skin to cascade over her breasts like two bloodstained pink and yellow petals, and the pearly white of her intact breastbone is just visible in the gap. She is a fake cadaver at the phase of the autopsy in which she is not quite open but merely on the cusp◦– just at the point where I’d relinquished my PM40 to Jason during my first case. As a result, she is still easy for me to identify as a young female and therefore identify with: the tangles of her hair immediately make me think of the struggle I have when blow-drying mine, and her fingers, curling gently up from the surface of the metal, have such a realistic human quality I’m glad they’re not painted with nail polish as it would only add to the illusion. She looks so real I feel there should be an odour of blood, day-old perfume and sweat about her. There isn’t, of course.
2
Things weren’t actually dirty on one side and not on the other, they’re just relative terms we use for ‘places where autopsies happen’ and places where they don’t. We also have ‘clean’ areas which never have any contact with the deceased, such as the office or break room. Those areas, in the ‘traffic light system’, are described as ‘green’.