Being Dead

by Jim Crace

  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.

  ‘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 cam
e, 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.’

  Syl held the woman’s arm, to steady her for the descent. The clerk kept well away until they reached the basement. Then he took charge of the gurney again, and helped to lift and slide the casket into the brothers’ hired van. They slipped him money, for his help. ‘Good luck,’ he said, and muttered, ‘Give her a decent send-off.’ The woman and her sons were almost smiling when they drove away. Everybody was relieved to have the body in the house the night before the burial, lying in its own bed in its own home, amongst its things.

  ‘What should we do?’ asked Syl.

  The clerk, standing at the elevator gate, just shrugged. He’d like to have her warm and naked on a slab, his scissors slicing through her polymura coat. ‘We’ve looked,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else. Go to the police. Check up at all the hospitals.’

  ‘We’ve done all that.’

  He closed the gate and pointed through the concertina’d bars up the ramp to the street. ‘That way.’ And then – you could never know your luck with a woman like her – he added, ‘Do call again!’

  By the time that Syl was half-way up the ramp the clerk had already found the little bag of Eden pills. He popped a couple underneath his tongue. They were as easily absorbed as sugar. So once he’d reached the morgue to log out the woman’s body from his register, the new pills had begun to have their topping up effect. Nothing mattered any more. His little pills could conquer all the stench and tedium of death. They shrank the afternoon.

  ‘She’ll not be long,’ he said to Geo. The idiot was still sitting on the waiting bench, as chained and patient as a dog. You’d see more vigour in the fridge, the morgue clerk thought, and spent a mean and happy half-hour before the couple finally found each other and departed from his life if not his fantasies.

  That night, Syl conquered death by sleeping with her driver once again. It had been a wearing day. She could not spend the evening alone. She’d rather tolerate
his proprietorial love-making for a second time, his too-long fingernails, his inexperience, his lack of enterprise. It was a necessary sacrifice, and soon dispatched.

  This time – an awful and pre-emptive sin – they took her mother’s bed. Dry sheets. More space. But as she prepared to let her ferryman help himself to her, the phone rang in the hall. Her chest went tight. She had to gasp for breath – what had become of her disdain for family? – and run out on to the landing. She could only stutter nonsense when she picked up the receiver, trembling and naked in the moonlit house. Good news or bad? Please let there be a parent on the phone. It was the police, of course. They’d found the car, downtown, abandoned in a bank car park. A thief had taken out the radio-cassette, but otherwise no damage. No sign of any accident or forced entry. No keys. There was a receipt for parking on the dashboard, timed and dated Tuesday noon, for the open ground next to the visitors’ centre beyond the airport road out at Baritone Bay. ‘Is there any reason you can think of why your parents would go there?’

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