The Sweet on the Sacrum

The mortuary at St Bride's General did not have a window, which was the kindest thing anyone had ever said about it, and Nasrin Chowdhury had said it herself, to Mo, on a worse night than this one. No window meant no morning. No morning meant the dead were not waiting on the light to be dealt with. They came when they came, and you dealt with them, and the strip lights overhead held their hard white hum whether it was three in the afternoon or three in the morning, and at three in the morning that was a mercy.

It was nearer four now. The board by the door, the laminated one with the rows wiped and rewritten in marker so often the surface had gone soft and grey, showed every line of the cold store filled and four names crammed into the margin with arrows pointing nowhere, because there was nowhere. Bay twenty-five was overflow. Bay twenty-five was the hired refrigerated trailer in the car park, fogging quietly in the cold snap, and the porters hated the ramp and Nasrin hated the paperwork and the families, when they came, hated all of it, the having to claim a mother or a husband out of a lorry parked between the skips and the staff bikes.

The flu had not stopped. The norovirus had not stopped. Nothing in the hospital that was supposed to hold had held for about a year now, the way nothing in the building held, and Nasrin had learned to read St Bride's the way she read a patient who was not going to make it: the failing skin of it, the parts that had stopped trying to close. The roof above the post-mortem room wept a brown line down the tiles when it rained. The refrigeration plant for the main bank had a fault she had logged eleven times, a fault that made the compressors cycle wrong so that the drawers ran two degrees warm on the bad days, and estates said it was on the list, and the list was where things went to soften and not be finished.

She finished writing up the last admission from the surge, an elderly man off Lansbury ward, COPD, a peaceful death the nurse had written, peaceful, and capped the pen and laid both hands open on the bench and breathed.

This was the part she allowed herself. Not feeling. The opposite of feeling. The bench cold under her palms, the smell of formalin sitting low under the bleach, the tick of the bad compressor counting time it could not keep. She had built her whole life now out of cold benches and counted ticks. Up on the wards there had been hands to hold and eyes to meet and the slow unbearable arithmetic of a wound that was winning, and she did not do that any more. Down here the worst had already happened to everyone. Down here she could keep them. Wash them, when the families wanted her to and let the families when they wanted to themselves, wrap them, see them out fast and whole and facing the right way, into the ground within the day if the family was hers, hers in the loose way she meant it now, the aunties and the uncles she did not know who were still somehow her aunties and uncles, buried quick and whole in the section by the small mosque where her mother lay. That was the trade. That was, near enough, the faith. Keep the body whole and send it on to be finished. Nasrin had decided, six years ago, that she could manage the dead even though she had not managed the living, because the dead did not change while you watched.

The intercom rasped. "Doc." Mo's voice, doing the long-suffering thing he did with it. "One more coming down. Lift's playing up, give me a minute."

"I am not a doctor, Mo."

"You're more use than most of them." The intercom clicked off before she could answer, which was Mo's way of winning.

She heard the goods lift labour somewhere up the shaft, the cable singing thin, and she pulled a fresh apron off the roll and snapped two gloves on out of habit before she had even seen the trolley, the nitrile cold and powdery against her chapped knuckles. She had washed her hands so many times in twenty years that the skin across them had gone permanently a little raw, a little tight, and she did not mind it. Clean hands were the one thing she could always make true.

The lift doors shuddered back and Mo backed the trolley in, big and careful, the body bag riding the dip of the trolley wrong, sagging in the middle, and Nasrin clocked the sag before she had a word for why it bothered her.

That was the first thing.

A bag should ride flat or it should ride stiff. By four in the morning a body that had been up on a ward most of the night was cooling toward the room and would have begun, just begun, to set, the jaw, the neck, the long muscles, a body becoming a thing the way it always did, predictable as a clock. This one rode soft. It rode like a bag of something poured.

"Last one, I swear down," Mo said. "Veronica ward. Another peaceful one, they're all going peaceful this week, it's like a spa up there." He laughed, too loud for the room, the laugh he could not help, and it knocked around the tiles. "You all right? You've gone funny."

"I am fine." Her own voice came out level and far away, the work voice. "Help me across."

They slid the body to the table on the count, and Nasrin felt it through her gloves even before the bag was open, the give of it, the wrong easy yield under her forearm, and her stomach did something small and old that she ignored. She found the zip and drew it down.

The smell came up.

It was not the smell. She had been braced for the smell the way you brace for a step that is always there, the faecal-sweet low reek of a gut that had stopped, the iron, the under-note of a body beginning the only honest work it had left. That smell she could stand in for ten hours and eat her lunch over. This was not that.

This was sweet.

Her body knew before she did. The skin at the back of her neck drew up tight and cold; her breath stopped in her throat without her telling it to; her free hand had come up halfway to her own mouth before she made it go back down to the table. Only then, behind the flinch, did the naming start, the slow clinical part she trusted, the part that had a word for everything, and the words began to arrive and to not fit.

Sweet. Over-ripe. The smell of the fruit bowl on a Friday when you had forgotten it, dates gone past themselves, the dark sticky edge of caramel left too long in the pan, and under all of it, faint, roses, the brown soft roses at the bottom of a vase three days on. It was, and this was the part she could not make her mind hold, almost lovely. Her mouth had watered. That was the worst small fact of the whole night, that for half a second, before the cold came up her neck, her mouth had watered the way it did at her mother's kitchen door.

"Bloody hell," Mo said, behind her, not laughing now. "Is that him? That's not, that's not a dead smell, that's like, what is that."

"Air's bad in the trailer," Nasrin said, which was not an answer, which was the kind of thing you said to keep a porter from thinking too hard, and she heard herself say it and despised it a little. She bent to the body.

An old man. Eighties. The notes would say more in a moment. The face had not set; the jaw lay loose and the cheeks had a fullness to them, a faint translucent fullness at the edges where the light caught, gold almost, like the rind of something candied, and she told herself oedema, she told herself the warm drawers, she told herself a dozen true things in a row and not one of them was the thing she was looking at.

She pressed two fingers to the sternum, lightly, the test you did without thinking. The tissue took the pressure and held the dent a moment too long, the way a peach holds your thumb, and then eased back, and it was warm. Not the cooling almost-warm of a recent death. Warm like a hand. Warm like something kept.

"Help me turn him," she said, and her voice did not shake, she made sure of that. "I want to see the back."

They logrolled him toward Mo, and Nasrin parted the gown at the sacrum, where an old man down a long bad ward two weeks with no nurse to spare would have a pressure sore, and he did. The notes would have it as a grade four, she would put money on it, a deep ugly crater over the tailbone, the kind that did not heal, the kind she had spent a career holding the line against, the broken-down anchor of a broken-down body.

It was not broken down.

The wound was there, the size of it, the shape of it, the undermined edges, all the geography she knew by heart. But the floor of it, where there should have been slough and the wet dark business of tissue coming apart, was smooth. It had glazed. It lay under the light like the back of a spoon dipped in toffee, a golden seal drawn taut and shining across a hole that should have been weeping, and at the rim, where wound met skin, the gold went thin and clear and beautiful, and it did not stink, it breathed out that warm sweet date-and-rose breath, and Nasrin stood with her gloved hand a few inches off it and could not make herself put her hand down.

Clostridial, she thought, fierce and fast, reaching for it the way you reach for the rail on the stairs. Gas gangrene. Saccharolytic species, they ferment, they make that sweet butyric reek, and the warm trailer, the warm drawers, the surge holding people too long, a febrile man dead with a deep wound and the heat working him, that is gas, that is a known thing, that is in the textbook, that is on the list of things that are allowed. The fridge is faulty. I have logged the fridge eleven times.

It was a good list. She had built it in seconds, the way she built every wall, and she leaned on it and it held her weight and she breathed out.

She had smelled this before.

The thought came up from underneath the way water comes up through a floor, with no warning and no asking. Once before, years gone, a smaller smell, a fainter sweet, caught under a dressing she was about to change at the end of a double shift with her hands tired and her mind on the next bed, a sweetness she had registered and set aside for three hours because there were eleven other beds, a sweetness she had not named in time. She put the thought back down. She put it down hard, the way you hold a door against a draught, and she did not let herself see the rest of it, the leg, the climbing, the three days, the gentle voice telling her she could stop.

"I'll log it as a query clostridial process," she said aloud, to the room, to Mo, to herself most of all. "Refrigeration's running warm again. I'll flag it for Dr. Vane in the morning. Get the trailer doors checked when you're up, yeah?"

"Yeah," Mo said. He had gone quiet, properly quiet, and his big tattooed hands were resting on the trolley rail and not moving, and he was looking at the golden thing on the old man's back the way you look at something you are not going to mention to your daughter. "Doc. It's not bothering you, that smell? It's, I don't like it. It's too nice. There's something off with a smell down here being nice."

"It's a chemical process," she said. "It is a known thing." She believed it almost all the way.

She bent close, lowered her face toward his, to take the smell once cleanly, deliberately, the way you confirm a finding so you can write it down and be done, in and out, a professional act, and the gold seal of the wound shone under Mo's steadying hands, and the sweetness rose to meet her, warm against her lips, and from the body on her table, dead six hours by the ward clock and listed cold and still, came a long slow breath.

A sigh.

Out through the loose jaw, soft and contented and unhurried, the sound a person makes settling at last into a bed they have wanted all day, and it stirred the fine hairs at the corner of Nasrin's mouth, and it smelled of dates, and of roses, and of home.