Читать книгу Keeping Faith - Roger Averill - Страница 15

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As the Labour Ward Attendant it is my job to assist the Emergency Porter in the transportation of corpses from the wards to the morgue.

Last Saturday, working the night shift, the Emergency Porter paged me; there was a body to collect in Ward 63. We met by the sinks at the back of Emerg. Rodney’s the union rep and he made a point of telling me I’d find an extra ten dollars in my pay packet as compensation. ‘They should call it the death penalty,’ I joked. But then I thought how absurd it was that it was in my financial interest for a patient to die. It felt like I was being paid off, as if the hospital and the union were bribing me to keep quiet, to act like no one had died, to pretend death never happened.

I didn’t blame Rodney. I liked him. He’s about thirty-eight, with light brown hair, so fine you can see through to the scalp, and the pale complexion of a night worker. We don’t talk much and when we do it’s usually about football. His first passion though is horse racing. I can’t hold a conversation on that and only ever ask how he went, if he backed a winner. Usually he says he’s broken even, which probably means he lost a bit. One day last spring his face broke into a smile as he told me he’d won $700 on a $5 bet. He offered to buy me a drink after work, but we were working nights and, not fancying a beer first thing Sunday morning, I let the offer slide.

Pulling an operation trolley away from the wall, he said, ‘You’ll be all right then, doing this?’

I said I thought I’d be fine and began mentally preparing myself for the sight of death.

Grabbing the front of the trolley, I helped steer it towards the automatic sliding doors. Before I reached them, Rodney yelled, ‘Hang on,’ and ducked into an alcove at the back of the nurses’ station. ‘Give us a hand.’

I found him struggling with what looked like a long, rectangular steel box. ‘Goes on top,’ he said, jerking his head towards the trolley.

When we picked it up I discovered it wasn’t a box at all but a kind of cover that tapered towards the top and had four handles, two on each side. It fitted snugly over the trolley’s thin vinyl mattress, making it look like an immense silver serving tray.

Rodney grabbed a towel from the bench and wiped away the dust, giving the stainless steel a quick polish. ‘You take this end,’ he said, directing me to the trolley’s rear. ‘I’ll check no one’s out there; they don’t like the public seeing this thing.’

The electric doors made an inhaling sound as they opened. Rodney poked his head out into the corridor. Signalling the coast was clear, he helped me manoeuvre the trolley down the empty hall and into the staff elevator. He took similar precautions when we reached the sixth floor. Ward 63 was in darkness except for the nurses’ station which glowed at its centre. Rodney spoke in whispers to one of the nurses, who, leaving her paper work, led us to a curtained bed.

As we guided the trolley between the beds and serving tables, I imagined the face of the woman lying behind the curtain, her skin already waxy, her eyes and mouth neatly closed; the pain of death erased. The nurse ran the curtain along the rail, revealing something I hadn’t expected — a body wrapped, mummified, in bright yellow, industrial plastic.

The parcel was small, but when we went to lift it, me taking the feet, Rodney the head and shoulders, it sagged in the middle. Thinking about it later, I decided I now knew what was meant by the phrase ‘dead weight’ and wondered if it was the presence of death or the absence of life that made a corpse so heavy.

The plastic was warm and slippery. Lowering the bundle gently onto the trolley I had to remind myself it was a human body I was handling, one that an hour ago had lived and breathed and even now had relatives and, most likely, grieving children.

The trolley was hard to manoeuvre with the added weight. Silently, we pushed it back into the elevator and down the steep ramp leading from the laundry to the open-air breezeway connecting the hospital to the pathology building. A misty rain swirled about the courtyard and after the air-conditioned warmth of the hospital my skin pimpled with the cold.

Parking the trolley out by the furnace stack, near the machine shop’s graveyard of broken I.V. poles and mangled beds, Rodney asked if I minded being left with the body while he ducked around to the main entrance and opened the door from the inside. I shook my head. While he was gone I thought how glad I was that Rodney took his job seriously and didn’t try, as I might have done, to make it easier with jokes or casual conversation.

Still trying to picture the face beneath the plastic shroud, the life it had lived, I felt an urge to say something, a word of consolation, to pass some sort of benediction. Instead, I heard Rodney stumble and say, ‘Shit!’ and seeing the yellow light slide beneath the door I took up my position and readied myself to push the trolley inside.

I had expected it to be neat and clinical, but the morgue was a clutter of abandoned trolleys and crowded benches. Rodney cleared a derelict wheel chair out of the way, clanging a set of scales. He opened the freezer. The cold air grabbed at our lungs. I helped him slide out the metal tray. On the count of three, we transferred the corpse. Rodney motioned for me to push the tray back in. The yellow bundle glided into the cold cavern of the freezer. Unexpectedly, Rodney spoke. ‘Twenty-three she was — bloody tragedy. That’s it, though, isn’t it? We just never know.’ He snapped shut the grey freezer door. ‘All we know is that one day, sooner or later, we’re going to end up like that, in one of these.’