A Blessing, Hodan Calls It

The daughter's words followed Nasrin up out of the viewing room and along the basement corridor and did not stop following her. You look so tired. You can stop now. She walked faster. The strip lights ticked overhead, two of them dead, one stuttering, and her trainers squeaked on the lino in a rhythm she could not break, and somewhere behind her, in the small carpeted room with the qibla mark she had taped to the wall herself, a young woman with gold at the rim of a paper cut sat smiling at nothing with her hands folded in her lap like a woman waiting for a train that was never coming and did not mind.

Nasrin stopped at the lift and pressed the button and pressed it again and held her own wrist to take her pulse before she had decided to.

A hundred and ten. Fast. Her body knew something her mind was still drafting a polite memo about.

She let go of her wrist. The skin where her fingers had been stayed white a moment past when it should have, then filled. Normal. She was normal. She was a forty-year shift away from normal, that was all, three nights deep into a death surge with a fridge plant that should have been condemned in the spring, and she had let a frightened daughter and a sweet smell and her own grief sit in the same room together until they had started to braid. That was what this was. That was all this was.

The lift came. She did not take it. She took the stairs two flights up to the bereavement office because she needed, very badly, to hear a sane person say a sane thing, and because Hodan Warsame was the sanest person in St Bride's, and had been for as long as Nasrin had worked the dead. The surge had made the bereavement service a night service too; Hodan had been sleeping on a camp bed behind her filing cabinet for a fortnight so that no family would have to wait for morning.

The office door was open. The kettle had just clicked off. The room smelled of the kettle and of the cheap teabags in the chipped caddy and, under those, faint and warm and threading in from the vent in the corner, of dates. Medjool dates, the dark ones her mother had soaked and stuffed, and caramel, and something floral going soft at the back of it, and Nasrin felt her stomach turn over with hunger before it turned over with fear, and she hated that the hunger came first.

"There she is." Hodan looked up from her desk and her whole face opened. She was tall even sitting down, her headscarf a deep marigold today, her hands very still on a folder she had been writing in. "Nasrin. Sit. You look like the building's been chewing you."

Nasrin did not sit. The chair was right there and her legs wanted it and she did not sit, because sitting felt, suddenly, like the first thing.

"Hodan. The families." Her voice came out flatter than she meant. "The ones from the surge. The Pearce woman. The Mensah daughter. The man whose wife came down on Tuesday."

"What about them, love."

"How are they."

Hodan smiled, and it was a beautiful smile, and that was the trouble. "They're well. They're as well as I've ever seen anyone, I'll be honest with you. I've been doing this nineteen years and I have never had a run like it." She set down her pen. "You know what it's usually like. The denial, the bargaining, the ones who scream at you in the corridor because you're the nearest thing to God they can reach. The ones who go quiet and you know the quiet is the bad kind. And this last fortnight." She shook her head slowly, marvelling. "They come in broken and they go out at peace. Genuinely at peace, Nasrin. Not putting it on. Not the brittle thing that cracks in the car park. They sit with their dead and they let go, just like that, like a hand opening, and they thank me, and they mean it. The Mensah girl held her mum's hand for an hour and then she stood up and she was light. I've never given anyone that. I've spent nineteen years trying to give people that and it's just, it's just arriving, on its own, like rain."

The smell from the vent thickened while she spoke, or Nasrin only now let herself measure it. Her mouth was watering. Her shoulders, which she carried up around her ears every shift of her life, had come down. She noticed them down. She noticed how good it was, how the dread that had been wound through her since the viewing room was loosening at the edges like a dressing that had stopped trying to hold, and the noticing frightened her more than anything had yet, because she knew that loosening. She had a name for the moment tissue stopped fighting to stay closed. She had watched it on a chart for months over a man's foot.

"Hodan." She made herself say it. "I don't think it's a blessing."

"What's that?"

"The peace. The calm. I don't think it's grace." The words sounded mad coming out and she heard them sounding mad and kept going because the only thing worse than sounding mad was stopping. "The bodies are wrong. They're not decomposing. They come down sweet, they hold gold for days, the sores glaze over instead of breaking down, Dr Vane's findings make no sense, there's something travelling between them, drawer to drawer, along the order I handle them in, and now the families who washed them are coming back wrong too, the daughter downstairs has it in a paper cut, she's gone soft like, like the bodies, and she told me." Her throat closed. She forced it. "She told me I could stop now. In the exact words. Hodan, it's not peace. It's not them letting go healthy. It's something getting in through the letting go. Through the comforting. I think it's spreading through us. Through people who care for them. I think we're carrying it."

She stopped. Her heart was going. She had said the true thing out loud for the first time and the room had not changed at all. The kettle steam still rose. Hodan still looked at her with those steady kind eyes, and the eyes were full of nothing but love and a sorrow that was entirely, professionally, for Nasrin.

"Oh, sweetheart," Hodan said.

Two words, and Nasrin understood that she had not been believed, that she had been received, the way Hodan received the bargaining and the screaming, the way you receive a symptom.

"How long since you slept proper," Hodan said. "Not the on-call cot. Slept."

"That's not." Heat came up Nasrin's neck. "I'm not."

"I'm not saying you're not seeing what you're seeing. I'm saying look at what you do, Nasrin. You're down in that freezer every night with the worst of it, no daylight, no people, the whole weight of every family's worst day passing through your hands, and you carry it like it's nothing because you won't let anyone help you carry it, you never have, six years I've watched you not let anyone in." Her voice was so gentle it was almost unbearable. "You think the peace is a sickness because you've never once let yourself have any. That's not the dead being wrong, love. That's you. You've got so used to holding the line that the line's all you are, and now the line's tired, and the tiredness scares you, so you've made it a monster."

It was so nearly true. That was the thing that took the floor out from under Nasrin, that it came so very near to being the truest thing said to her in years. She did hold the line. She had made the line her whole self the night the rot went up Tariq's leg faster than the knife. And somewhere far down, under the fear, under the hunger, under the loosening shoulders, a voice that sounded like her own and like Hodan's and like a man saying it is alright, you can stop now, I am so tired, was telling her that she had been holding for so long, and that she was allowed, finally, to put it down.

"You're allowed to rest," Hodan said softly, and the word rest came across the desk on the sweet warm air from the vent and went into Nasrin like syrup into bread.

Nasrin's eyes stung. For one terrible swimming second the office was the most reasonable place in the world and surrender was the most reasonable thing in it, and she wanted, with a want that came up from her marrow and not her head, to sit down in the chair that was right there and let her face come apart and be comforted by the kindest woman she knew, to stop fighting the dead and the smell and the six years, to just, God, just stop.

Her involuntary self moved before her reasoning did. Her hand went to the strap of her bag and her thumb found, through the canvas, the hard round shape of the little bleach spray she kept for the trolley handles, and the plastic was cold and ridged and stupidly ordinary, and she pressed it until it hurt, and the small clean pain held her up.

Cold. Bleach. The thing did not like cold and it did not like bleach. She did not know how she knew that, except that she had seen the glaze go sluggish on the drawer she had over-chilled by accident, and she had smelled how the bleach cut clean through the sweetness for a minute on Vane's bench before it crept back. She knew it the way she knew a wound. You did not reason with a wound. You debrided it, you packed it, you kept it cold and clean and you did not, ever, comfort it into closing.

"I have to get back," Nasrin said. Her voice was not steady. She did not try to make it steady. "There's a release in the morning. The Pearce woman, she's Muslim, the family want her by the afternoon, washed and shrouded and in the ground before sunset, whole. That's, that's the thing, Hodan. That's the whole thing. Whole and fast and finished. They don't want her kept. Nobody should be kept."

Something moved behind Hodan's eyes, very small, and was gone, smoothed over like a sore glazing shut. "Of course, love," she said. "You do your job. You always do your job." She smiled again, marigold and gold, and Nasrin could not have said, would spend the rest of the night not being able to say, whether the warmth at the rims of those steady eyes was the office light or something else catching there, something honeyed, faint, beginning. "Go careful on the stairs. And Nasrin. The offer stands. Whenever you want to stop, there's a chair here, and there's nothing in the whole world wrong with stopping."

Nasrin went. She did not run, because running felt like the second thing, but she went fast, and she did not breathe in until she was back in the stairwell with the door shut and the cold concrete air in her lungs, free of dates, free of caramel, free of rest, and she stood with her back to the wall and made herself plan, because planning was hard and clenched and unsweet and therefore safe.

Drop the cold store another two degrees, past spec, let the compressor scream. Bleach every drawer, every handle, the floor channels, the bench. Do the ghusl on the Pearce woman the way her mother had taught her, fast and fierce and reverent, and get her out, into the ground, finished, before the sun. Refuse the kettle. Refuse the chair. Refuse the smell. Refuse, refuse, refuse, and hold the line until daylight, because the line was tired but the line was hers and she was not, she was not, going to let go.

She turned to start down, and the stairwell door had a long pane of wired glass in it, black with the night car park behind, and her own face hung there in the dark like a body in water, pale and small and round and very still, the grey hijab, the shadowed eyes, the mouth she kept shut to keep everything in.

She almost looked away. She made herself look, the way she made herself look at every wound, because not looking was how you missed the sweet smell under the dressing, how you lost three crucial hours, how a man softened and surrendered and died telling you it was alright.

She looked at her own mouth in the dark glass.

And there, at the corner of it, where the lip met the cheek, in the cold black reflection where there should have been only shadow and skin, was the faintest, smallest, loveliest gleam of gold.