Jim Crace - Being Dead

‘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 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.