David Atkinson - The Second Life of Nathan Jones

By the end of the day I felt more like a waitress and a chambermaid than a nurse. I also wondered why patients were called ‘patients’ as they were anything but, constantly pressing buzzers and shouting for anything and everything.

I could have probably put up with all that and carried on but for me the final straw came on the last week of my first placement. Whilst I was escorting an elderly male patient to the toilet, he suddenly turned and grabbed both my breasts in his bony (but surprisingly strong) little hands, thrust his head into my cleavage, sighed and expired on the floor.

Enough was enough, so I dropped out and began a medical internship at the local mortuary. Dead patients didn’t grope me, or demand things, or speak to me, or stare at me, or assault me. In fact, they rarely did anything at all – except lie still. They occasionally stink a little, but you soon get used to that.

I applied myself and with the help of day release and evening courses I qualified as an anatomical pathologist practitioner, better known as a mortuary technician. I suppose given my view of the world and my relatively serious and introverted nature, the work suited me. I’d been working in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary for nearly six years now and there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen, or, more pertinently perhaps, smelled.

Initially, my mum reacted in horror at my relatively unusual career choice and couldn’t understand my motivation. Over time, however, she came to recognise that I enjoyed my job – as weird as that sounds – and never complained about it, the way many people did.

Monday, 23 November started out like most other early shifts. My alarm woke me at 5.45 a.m., I showered, ate cornflakes whilst drying my hair and staring at BBC News with the subtitles on, so I could understand what the presenters were jabbering about over the noise of the hairdryer. My thick hair always takes ages to dry.

After that I applied my Manic Panic foundation. If I was honest I liked the name more than anything as pretty much any pale slap worked for me. However, for the last ten years I’d only ever worn three shades of Rimmel lipstick: black, purple and, for special occasions, RockChick Scarlet but today being a work day meant boring Black Diva.

I then applied my black liner and smudged some light pink blusher on to contour my cheeks and make me look slightly less like one of my charges. In truth, as I’d got older I’d toned down the Goth persona. I supposed I’d got nobody and nothing to rebel against these days, but still liked the fact it made people wary of me.

I then pulled on my clothes, left my tiny rented flat in the Duddingston area of Edinburgh and drove to work. My workload scheduled for that morning should have been light as we had no post-mortems booked until the afternoon, so my plan had been to sort out a load of paperwork I hadn’t bothered finishing on Friday. Another plus would be that I’d be working with Sid.

Sid’s actual title was Dr David Ingles but his idol growing up had been Sid Vicious, so he’d taken the nickname. My only issue with this was that, in my opinion, Taylor Swift bore more resemblance to Sid Vicious than David did with his soft round face, big lips and gentle grey eyes. There was also the slight problem that as David, being only thirty-six, wouldn’t have been born when the Sex Pistols were at their zenith but then who am I to criticise? Sid was my favourite forensic pathologist, which was a bit like saying he was my favourite teddy bear, given his nature. He started at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary around the same time as me and although much more senior he didn’t have the ‘lording over’ attitude some of the other doctors have and we got on brilliantly.

He was on my wavelength with so many things, and as we had absolutely no interest in each other physically it was easy to talk to him. I suspect he might be gay – in fact I’d stake money on it – but whenever I broached the subject (usually on a night out after a few drinks) he changed the subject of conversation immediately. He was firmly in the closet as far as I was concerned, so far in that he’d locked the damn thing and thrown away the key.

On this Monday, I managed to arrive before anyone else and opened the door to the large basement room where all the recently deceased were stored. Then, something made me stop in my tracks. I’d heard something. I didn’t move for a moment, hardly breathing, then decided I must have been mistaken. I’d been alone down here hundreds of times before, both during the day and at night, and it didn’t bother me any more. It had been a little creepy at first, but I’d soon come to realise that the dead couldn’t hurt me (barring any kind of zombie uprising, of course), and life had taught me well that it was the living I needed to be wary of.

I quickly scanned the log, noting only one new entry, and as I turned to go and get changed I heard something coming from one of the drawers. How strange.

I cautiously approached the section where the banging emanated from and thought for a second that one of the medical staff might be playing a trick, but that sort of stuff was usually only reserved for ‘newbies’. I slowly pulled out the offending drawer and peered down at the pale and bruised but incredibly cute face staring up at me. It blinked its bright blue eyes and I was immediately smitten. It had finally happened – I’d fallen for a corpse.

Once I’d made sure my rather attractive ‘corpse’ was alive and not a figment of my too often fertile imagination, I called upstairs and got them to send down some of the intensive care staff. My ‘patient’ (I thought that sounded better than ‘corpse’ on the phone) hadn’t been dead for long, if indeed he’d been dead at all. The doctors were understandably confused and fired loads of questions at me, most of which I couldn’t answer.

Fifteen minutes after I’d discovered the patient – Mr Jones, according to his label – had been moved to an intensive care bed, wired up to the moon and subjected to all manner of poking and prodding. After they finished their tests, they loaded him up with painkillers and left him to sleep. The IT consultant told me that, ‘Nathan Jones is a medical curiosity, a walking miracle – well, he will be. Currently, he’s a lying-down moaning miracle.’

At the end of my shift I pottered upstairs to see how my first ‘living corpse’ had fared. He intrigued me but, more than that, he’d unsettled me. I’d never developed feelings instantly for anyone before, alive or dead or maybe somewhere in between, as Mr Jones appeared to be.

I knew I’d stepped onto dodgy ground but couldn’t help the way I felt.

I stopped by the nurses’ station on the way and got an update from Jan, the staff nurse on duty. We’d known each other for years. She’d ‘taken me under her wing’ (her description not mine) when I’d first started in the hospital, and even confessed to me one night when we were both a bit drunk that she suspected she had bisexual tendencies but didn’t want her husband or teenage son to find out. Given that new information, I hadn’t been sure at the time whether her ‘taking me under her wing’ might be a sign that she liked me or a sign that she liked me, but – to my relief – nothing more than her drunken confession had happened.

She filled me in on what she knew and that he remained asleep. I slipped into his room and sat staring at him for a while, wondering how on earth he’d managed to get pronounced dead and yet still be alive.

I’d just decided to get up and head for home when his eyes flickered open. ‘Hello there,’ I said brightly.

‘Can you say anything else?’ he mumbled with an English accent, running his tongue around dry lips. I poured him some water and handed it to him. His left arm had been encased in plaster but his right one seemed fine and he took the beaker from me.