What Travels on Kind Hands

The smell reached the canteen before Nasrin did.

She came up from the basement at the dead middle of the shift, three twenty by the clock over the lifts, because the cold store had a smell she did not want to keep breathing and the canteen was the only place open. The corridor on the ground floor had gone a weak-tea brown under the night lights, and the air in it should have been the air she knew: floor polish, the iron note of old blood that never quite left a hospital, the cold draught off the ambulance doors. Instead it was sweet. Faint, but there, threaded through everything like sugar stirred into water, the smell of dates left a day too long in the bowl, of caramel cooling, of something rich and warm and just beginning to give. It got stronger the closer she came to the canteen, where the night porters and a knot of A and E staff sat over their trays, and it was strongest of all over the urn of leftover rice pudding that the kitchen left out for the small hours.

Her stomach turned, then betrayed her by watering.

She stopped in the doorway. Her mouth had filled, the way it did at her mother's table, at the first smell of shemai on Eid morning, and the wrongness of wanting to eat in this building, tonight, with that smell in her nose, made her swallow hard and step back.

It was in the vents. It had to be in the vents. The plant room and the cold store shared a riser, and a sweet volatile, a clostridial gas, some breakdown product she could name if she sat with the textbook long enough, was tracking up the shaft and bleeding out of every grille on the floors above. That was all. That was a containment problem and a maintenance fault and not a thing she had to be afraid of.

A young nurse at the nearest table looked up at her and smiled. It was a lovely smile, slow and easy, the smile of someone who has finally put down a weight they had carried so long they had stopped feeling it.

"You alright there?" the nurse said. "You look done in. Sit down, there's pudding."

"I'm fine," Nasrin said, and did not sit, and went back to the stairs.

She did not take the lift. She went down on foot, two flights, her hand on the cold rail, breathing through her mouth, and by the time she reached the basement her training had reassembled itself around the fear and given her something to do, which was the only mercy her training had ever offered. If it was spreading, she would map it. She would treat it the way she had been taught to treat every spreading thing on the wards, the way she had treated wound after wound after wound: find the margin, mark the margin, watch the margin. You cannot fight what you cannot measure. You measure first.

She let herself into the cold store with her swipe card and stood with her back against the closed door and made herself look at the wall of drawers as a chart.

She knew the order. She knew it the way she knew her prayers, without thinking, because she was the one who filed them. The surge had come in waves and she had logged each body as it landed, station by station, drawer by drawer, working left to right and top to bottom the way her mother had taught her to load a steamer so nothing got missed. Bay one to bay twelve along the top. Thirteen to twenty-four below. And the sweet ones, the wrong ones, the ones that did not smell of death and gave like ripe fruit under her gloves and held golden and warm for days, she could have pointed to with her eyes shut.

She got the clipboard. She got a fresh sheet. She drew the grid of drawers and she opened them one at a time, gloved, masked, breathing through the mask, and she scored each one. Firm and cold and honestly dead, she marked with a clean tick. Warm, giving, the over-ripe smell, the glaze coming up gold and smooth across the low points of the body where the blood had settled, she marked with a cross.

She had expected a scatter. A few crosses among the ticks, the handful she already knew. What she got was a shape.

The crosses ran in a line. Not the line of when the bodies had died, not by ward, not by age or cause or anything that belonged to the bodies themselves. They ran in the exact order she had handled them. The first sweet one, the old man off Veronica ward with the sacral sore glazed like a boiled sweet, sat in bay seven. The drawer she had opened straight after his, to file the next intake, bay eight, was sweetening now too, the chill of it gone tacky, a faint gold rising at the heel where the body lay against the steel. And the body she had moved after that, to make room, bay fourteen, a row down and across, out of all sequence with everything except her own hands, that one had a thread of gold along the line of an old surgical scar, fresh and bright as syrup, where three nights ago there had been nothing but a cold clean closure.

She stood very still. Her gloved fingertip rested on bay fourteen's drawer rail and she could feel, even through the nitrile, even through the steel, that it was not cold enough.

Not the air. Not the vents. Not a gas tracking up a shaft and bleeding out indifferently into every room. The smell upstairs was the symptom, not the cause. The thing moved the way she moved. It went from the body she had touched to the next body she had touched, in her order, by her hands. It travelled the line of her care.

The thought arrived without drama, in the same flat clinical register she used for everything she could not afford to feel, and that was what made it unbearable. She had been the vector. Every gentle thing she had done down here, every body she had turned with two careful hands so the skin would not tear, every drawer she had eased shut so it would not slam on the dead, she had carried it along that tenderness from one to the next like a nurse going glove to glove down a row of beds without washing in between. Except she had washed. She had washed until her knuckles cracked. And it had not mattered, because the thing did not ride on dirt. It rode on the touch itself.

She lifted her hand from the drawer.

It rode on the touch itself, and she was not the only one who touched them.

The families touched them. In her community, in half the communities St Bride's served, the dead were not handed over in a bag to be dealt with by strangers. They were claimed. They were washed by their own people, by daughters and sisters and the women of the mosque, washed with warm water and their hands, three times or more, gently, lovingly, because the body was owed that, because care for the dead was the last care you could give and you did not flinch from it. She had stood in the viewing room beside a hundred such washings. She had marked the qibla on the wall herself so the families would know which way to turn.

Hands that washed a sweetened thing. Hands that then went home, and held a grandchild, and cooked for the living.

She put the clipboard down because her own hand was not steady enough to write.

There was a sound from the corridor. Not the plant, not the fridges. The soft scuff of a chair being moved in the viewing room next door, where there should have been no one at three in the morning, where the lights should have been off.

Nasrin went out into the corridor. The viewing room door stood ajar, and warm light came through the gap, the lamp she kept low for the families, and the sweet smell was thicker here than anywhere, dense as syrup, and under it, very faint, a note she knew so well that she was cold before she had named it: the give-smell, the turned-tissue smell, the smell she had spent six years refusing to think about, the smell that had been under a dressing on a leg she could not save.

Her skin went cold from the scalp down. Her hand found the doorframe.

She pushed the door open.

A young woman sat in the viewing room, in the chair angled toward the qibla mark, her hands folded in her lap. Nasrin knew her. Three days ago this woman had stood at that same table while Nasrin brought out her mother, and the woman had washed the body herself, refused all help, dipped the cloth and wrung it and washed her mother's grey face with her own bare hands while Nasrin stood back and let her, because that was the woman's right and the dead woman's due. The daughter had wept then until she could not stand. Nasrin had brought her water and a chair.

She was not weeping now. She sat with a stillness that had nothing of grief left in it, none of grief's clench, none of its exhaustion. She looked rested. She looked the way the nurse upstairs had looked, the way the families had been looking all week, content past anything Nasrin had ever seen comfort do, and when she turned her face to the door the lamplight caught her eyes and there was a sheen in them, a warmth, a gold at the rims like the gold rising in the drawers.

On her thumb, where she had folded her hands, there was a paper cut. A small thing, the kind everyone gets, the kind that should have been a red line and a flake of dried blood. It was not red. The edges of it had glazed over, smooth and bright and golden, like sugar drawn across a wound and set, and it was not closing the way a cut closes. It was sweetening the way the drawers sweetened.

"Oh," the daughter said, and smiled at her, and the smile was kind, genuinely kind, the kindest thing in the room. "It's you. You were so good to me. I wanted to say."

Nasrin's mouth was dry. She made herself speak gently, the way you speak to keep someone calm while you decide what is wrong with them. "You shouldn't be down here, love. It's the middle of the night. How did you get in?"

"The door was open," the daughter said, which it had not been, which Nasrin had locked. "I couldn't sleep, and then I thought, why was I not sleeping. There was nothing left to be afraid of. So I came to sit with her. She's so peaceful now. She told me not to worry." She tilted her head, and the gold at her thumb caught the lamp, and she looked at Nasrin with a tenderness that reached all the way across the room and laid itself, soft and warm and patient, against the worn-thin place in Nasrin that had been holding the line for six years without rest.

"You look so tired," the daughter said. "You can stop now."