The Idler

Dancing with the Dead

To earn some extra money while studying I worked in an old people’s hospital as an Aid. Basically, I was assigned to a ward where it was my duty to clean everything from the kitchen to the toilets, as well as serve hospital food to the toothless old gummers.

Of the five wards, mine held the most terminal cases, unfortuneately, as well as the most mad. One old chap, unable to grasp the concept of the modern toilet - having been on the streets for 25 years - insisted on curling one off on the floor of the matron’s office every night. When I got to know her, I began to suspect that he may not be as mad as I’d thought.

Then the day came when I was asked to cover for a porter. This normally involved wheeling the dead to the morgue. When someone died the curtains were pulled round the bed and the body wrapped in a shroud by the nurses. This has to happen fairly promptly otherwise the shock of loss can trigger a little epedemic of clog-popping as the other ward residents get themselves in a tiz.

It was up to me to manhandle the body off the bed onto a wheeled trolley. The trolley was covered by a coffin-shaped tent of material with a velcro flap on one side to slide the body in through. The body I had to deal with that day was that of a little old lady about the size of Yoda. Even then, in death, she was suprisingly heavy. So much so that I stumbled while manhandling her from her bed to the trolley. The trolley scooted away from me, shot through the curtain, and I stumbled after it with the corpse in my arms. This immediately set off a whirlwind of panic as the other patients began screaming and fainting, while nurses rushed around trying to ensure that no one died.

THEN, when I finally got the body onto the trolley and to the morgue, rigor mortis had begun to set in. The tightening of the muscles meant that it slowly began to sit up on its stainless steel bench. In order to slide the bench into the freezer I had to put my knee on the legs and lie across the body to push the upper torso back onto the bench. At this point my supervisor turned up to see how I was doing. Having heard reports that I’d been ‘dancing round the ward with a corpse’ and now finding my sprawled across it in the morgue, I was immediately asked to leave. I have never been so glad to be sacked.

Frazer Payne