The Night Shift

Morning came to the rest of St Bride's and not to the mortuary, the way it never had. No window. No light to wait on. But Nasrin knew it was morning because the building above her had changed its sound, the lifts running honest errands again, and because, when she turned the compressors back on, the cold store answered her with nothing but the plain mechanical hum of a thing doing its dull job, and not one other sound underneath it.

She stood with her hand on the controller and listened the way her mother had listened to a pot.

No sighing.

Her body registered it before her mind would let her have it. The skin at the back of her neck, which had stood up tight and cold every night for a fortnight, lay flat and warm and ordinary. And the breath went out of her, long and slow, and for one bad half second she flinched at the sound of it, because it was the sigh, the settling sound, the one the old man had given over her gloved hand on the first night. She held the end of it behind her teeth and made it stop being that. It was only a woman breathing out. She was allowed, now, to breathe out.

The smell was gone too. Not masked under bleach, not driven thin and waiting at the edges of the vents. Gone. The cold store smelled of cold steel and disinfectant and the old iron under-note of a place where the dead are kept until they can be given back, and nothing in it was date or caramel or rose given in, nothing wanted anything from her.

She went along the drawers with her torch. Bay seven, where the first sweet man had lain, the old man off Veronica ward with the sore glazed like a boiled sweet, was empty and scrubbed and cold. Bay eight held a body that had come down in the small hours, an honest death, the skin under her torch the plain grey-yellow of dead flesh beginning, slowly, decently, on schedule, the only true work it had left. It had begun to rot, and she stood over it a long moment and felt something she had no clinical word for, because the small honest stink of a body coming apart toward rest was, this morning, the most beautiful thing she had ever smelled.

She went down the whole grid like that, drawer after drawer of the genuinely, mercifully dead. The ones who had been kept were gone, or finishing, the gold drained out of them, the seal broken on every glazed wound so that it could weep its thin honest fluid and stop being beautiful and start being only what it was, a hole in a body that had finished trying to close.

She came to the empty drawer low in the bottom row, bay twenty, the one that had run warm under her hand with no name and no paper and held the wrong man. It was empty. She put her hand on the rail. The steel was cold, the proper hollow cold of a drawer with nothing in it, and she let her hand stay there the way you keep a hand on a grave.

Tariq was not in it. Tariq was not anywhere in the building, and he was not in the section by the small mosque under the line of cold black text on her own careful spreadsheet, because that had never held him either. For six years she had thought the burying was the apology, the one mercy she managed, a true ending, washed and wrapped and whole and facing Mecca. She had buried a shape. She had wept in the cold January mud over cloths that held no one she loved, while the thing that took him kept the true him, sweet and content and conscious, all this time, and the keeping had not been a kindness, and it had never once let him stop.

But it had stopped now.

She made herself remember it plainly, because she would not soften even this. Down among the warm golden drawers, with the contented sighing all around her and Tariq's gold-edged hand closing around her wrist, she had refused. Not the fight. She had spent six years thinking her sin was that she let him go too easily, that the thread of relief she felt when he stopped fighting was a failure of care. She had been wrong about her own wound the whole time. The failure was never the letting-go. The failure was that his letting-go had been stolen, dressed up as peace, turned into a leash, that the man had said it does not hurt and you can stop now and been made to mean it forever, kept, denied the plain dignity of coming apart into rest.

So she had given him the thing the sweetness never could, and could not bear. She had refused the comfort. She had held herself hard and whole and unsurrendered, a splinter of no in the perfect preserve, and she had insisted, with her whole faith and her whole trade, on finishing the dead, on letting them rot and end and be allowed at last to be properly and mercifully gone. And the refusal had spread back along the same lines of care the rot had ridden in on, drawer to drawer, an infestation of finishing, the cold hard mercy passing where the warm sweet one had passed, until the keeping came apart in her hands.

And Tariq's hand in hers had gone from sweet warmth to honest cold, and his face, gold-edged and content for six stolen years, had broken open at last into the face of a man finally and truly let go, and he had said, not as bait and not in the borrowed gentle voice the thing had worn but in his own, low and astonished and free: thank you. And then he was gone. Properly gone. The chip in his tooth and the scar through his brow and the wound on his shin all given over at last to the second law, the one law Vane had spent her life able to count on, coming apart toward the only peace there had ever honestly been.

Mo had gone the same way. There had been no version left where Mo lived; the gold had gone marrow-deep in him in the hours she had spent kneeling among the drawers, deeper than any instrument would ever reach, and the only mercy left to give him was whose he would be at the end. She had found him on the back stair, halfway between the living floors and the dead, gold at the rims of his ears and along his jaw, his quick restless eyes gone still, and she had not been gentle, because gentle was a door. She had said his name like a person driving a stake, Mahmud, you do not get to stop, not soft, you fought forty years and you do not get to be eaten for resting once, and somewhere far down under the gold the real Mo had heard her, and the stillness had broken into the old animal terror that was also, she understood now, the old animal life. And she had taken his turn into herself and let Mo finish. He had laughed at the very end, one short bark, his real laugh, too loud for the room, and then the plain ordinary cooling of a big gentle man allowed at last to be only dead. His daughter would have a body to bury. Whole. His, not a sweet golden shape that smiled and never stopped.

Hodan she had finished in the viewing room, by the qibla mark Nasrin had set into the wall herself for the families, and that had been the hardest, because Hodan was awake by then. The finishing had reached her along the lines of care and woken her, screaming, into the knowing of what she had been, of every door she had held open with her own best words, and the gold had gone too deep in her to be survived; there was no version left where Hodan lived either, only a choice of what she would be at the end. And Hodan, who had spent nineteen years teaching the grieving that letting go is not defeat, had stopped screaming, and dried her face, and straightened the marigold scarf, and asked, in her own true wise voice, steady over the wreck of it, for her gospel back, true this time. It is all right, she had said, to let me go. And Nasrin had answered her with the one thing the sweetness had never given those words: an ending. Yes, she had said. It is all right to let you go. Not into keeping. Into rest. Into the ground before sunset, whole and washed, the way the dead are owed, the way you spent nineteen years teaching the grieving and never once, until now, were allowed for yourself. And the gold had drained out of Hodan's steady eyes, the marigold scarf had been only cloth again, and the kindest woman in the building had been, at last, only and honestly dead, washed and wrapped with Nasrin's own hands.

Vane had been untouched. Of course she had. Vane, who refused on principle to be soothed by anything, a closed door in a building of open ones, the cold unconsolable mind that had been a kind of immunity all along. She had stood at the top of the basement stairs through the worst of it refusing to come down and be told to rest, and when it was over she had said only, in her dry scraped voice, that she would have a great deal of trouble writing any of it up, that she did not propose to try, that Nasrin looked terrible, and should she put the kettle on. The offer of tea, plain and unsweetened and asking nothing, from a woman who never softened, had been the first comfort in a fortnight that Nasrin could safely take.

And the ones the gold had only touched, it turned out, woke. The daughter who had washed her mother with her own bare hands was found in the viewing room at dawn crying like a woman whose mother had died, which was the sound of a person given her grief back, and the paper cut on her thumb had gone an ordinary angry red and begun, honestly, to scab. The nurse from the canteen went home shaking and could not say why. All over the building the loosened faces of the night staff tightened back into their old exhausted lines, and Nasrin had never been so glad to see anybody look tired. The finishing did not kill what was still alive. It gave everything leave to complete what it was: the dead their dying, the living their fight. Only the ones the gold had taken all the way down, the ones more kept than alive, had gone with the kept. There had been, in the end, exactly two of those, and she had loved them both.

The hospital, this morning, was recording a strange cluster and moving on. A run of deaths in the surge, an oddity in the decomposition records that infection control would log where the fridge fault had gone, into the soft grey place where things went to not be finished, and then forget. Nobody upstairs had been unkind, and that had been the whole door, the year of logged faults gone nowhere, the I hear you that meant let go, and the thing fed on exactly that. So it was not destroyed. It was refused. Starved of willing surrender, driven back from a basement full of the finishing it could not bear, pushed out to wait for the next tired carer leaning lovingly over the next coming-apart. It had the patience of a thing that thinks rot is mercy and means it.

But it would not find a door here. Not while she stood at this one.

Because it had not let her go untouched either.

She had taken their turns into herself to finish them, every one, Tariq and Mo and Hodan and the grandmother and the bus driver and the frightened daughter and all the rest of the kept, and she had refused, with her whole will and her whole faith, to let it complete. It was in her now, down under the plain tired flesh of a small strong-handed woman of forty, far below where any of Vane's instruments would reach, the sweet patient coming-apart that wanted to relax the clenched fist of her, to keep her content and golden and grateful and awake forever. It would lean against the inside of her every day for the rest of her life and offer her rest, real rest, the truest offer she had ever been made, the only one that had ever once been a lie and a truth at the same time.

And she would refuse it. Every night. On purpose. Hard.

She did wudu at the chipped sink before fajr, the cold water going up the right arm to the elbow and the left, the wet hand over the crown of the scarf, the right foot and the left in the awkward strong fold, and the cold was the one honest thing in the building and she loved it for asking nothing. She prayed on the thin mat in the on-call room, and she asked, as she always asked, that the dead in her care be kept whole until they could be given back, and this morning, for the first time, she understood the asking all the way down. The mercy was never the keeping, and never the softening, and never once the sweet surrender that looked, at the very end of a long dying, almost like peace. The mercy was the ending. And to give it, she would have to be the one thing the patient kindness could never have, a woman who chose the hard, fighting, finishable wholeness over the soft forever, with open eyes, and stayed that way to the last day of her life.

She got up off the mat. Her knees ached. Her hands were chapped and raw the way they had been for twenty years, and she did not mind it, because clean hands were the one thing she could always make true. There was a release for the morning, a Mrs Begum off the medical ward, an honest death, a family who would want her by the afternoon, washed and shrouded and in the ground before sunset, whole, the way it was owed.

She drew out the drawer, and the body rode flat and stiff and cold the way a body should, no sweetness on it at all, only the plain beginning of the only honest work it had left. She filled the basin and turned the water cold, then made herself turn it warm, because this was not a night for fierceness, this was an ordinary death, owed the ordinary tenderness, and she was allowed, now, to give it. Three times, the right side then the left, her hands gentle again because gentleness was no longer a door, the Sylheti coming low and steady under her breath. Food is care and care is keeping people whole, her mother had told her in the tiny carpeted room behind the caff, and keeping people whole, she understood at last, meant whole all the way to the end of them, and then letting them be finished.

Somewhere far down inside her the sweetness leaned close, and breathed dates and caramel and roses given in, and offered her rest.

No, Nasrin said, without heat, and she did not stop washing the dead.

She had done the opposite of the night she lost Tariq. That night she could not stop the rot, and worse, had half wished she could let him soften in peace. This night she had stopped it the only way it could be stopped, and it had cost her everything. The man she loved was gone, properly gone, and that was the mercy and the cost both. Mo was gone. Hodan was gone. And she was alive, and marked, and whole, the one unfinishable wound left in the world, so that everyone she loved could finally, mercifully, end.

She wrapped Mrs Begum in three plain white sheets, clean and tight, the wrapping only care now, and she said the words soft because they could be soft again. At noon she would hand the body out into the daylight, finished, on time, whole, beyond keeping, given back, and she would think: there. Ended. As it should be. And then there would be another, and another after that, each one sent on whole and finished and into the ground before the sun, the way her faith and her trade and her mother's hands had taught her, for as long as there was a Nasrin to do it, the sweetness always faint at the edge of her own breath, and always, hard, forever, on purpose, refused.

She would do it again. That was the last true thing, and she let herself have it, and it did not soften.

She would do it again.