True Stories

by Helen Garner

  Perhaps we ‘come of age’ rather late in Australia, or in my generation—but I never expected to find, in my fifties, this marvellous freedom. Women may be late starters, as artists, but perhaps a strength that develops late lasts longer. Where once you rushed at things like a bull at a gate, now you know how to be patient. Things still hurt, but you are stronger. At fifty, you are developing a steady nerve. You can discriminate. You can stop worrying about exteriors, and start to look inward for meaning. At fifty, the age when you thought you would be on the scrapheap, you find you are just entering your prime.

  1992

  PART THREE

  The Violet Jacket

  At the Morgue

  IN EVERYONE’S MENTAL image of a city there is a dark, chilled, secret place called the City Morgue. We know these exist because we’ve seen them at the movies. If you had asked me where Melbourne’s mortuary was, I wouldn’t have had a clue. I might have gestured vaguely towards the murkier end of Flinders Street—but like most Melburnians I had no idea that half a mile from the leafiest stretch of St Kilda Road, in there behind the National Gallery and the Ballet School and the Arts Centre with its silly spire and its theatres and orchestras and choirs, stands a wide, low, new, clean, bright, nautical-looking structure, with a cluster of slender steel chimneys and a crisp little landscaped garden: the Coronial Services Centre, which was opened in 1988 and houses the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology. This is where I found the mortuary.

  If you die in an accident, or unexpectedly, or by violence, or in police or state custody, or by suicide, or in a fire, or if no doctor is prepared to sign a certificate stating that you have died of natural causes, your death is called a reportable death. Your body is taken to the mortuary, where you enter the jurisdiction of the coroner. He, on behalf of the people of Victoria, wants to know exactly why you died. And until the cause of your death has been established to his satisfaction, in most cases by means of an autopsy, your body will remain in his care. You have become what is known as a coroner’s case—a coroner’s body.

  The first one I saw, from a raised and glassed-in viewing area, was lying naked on its back on a stainless-steel table in the infectious room of the mortuary. It was the body of a young man. Because he had been found with a syringe nearby, he’d already had a battery of tests. He was infected with hepatitis C, a virulent form of the disease for which there is no vaccination and which eighty percent of IV drug deaths are found to be carrying: thus, the lab technician was not only gowned up and gloved like a surgeon, but was wearing a hard clear perspex mask which covered his whole face and gave him the look of a welder. The other actor in this odourless mime-autopsy was also a man, a pathologist. He wore no mask but was otherwise dressed like the technician. Both of them moved around on the spotless tiles in big stiff white rubber boots.

  Before I could get my bearings (and my notebook was already hanging by my side, forgotten) the technician stepped up to the corpse’s head and sank a needle into its left eye. The first sample of fluid laid aside, he moved down to the dead man’s hip, plunged another syringe into his abdomen just above his pubic hair and drew out a sample of his urine. Then he picked up a scalpel and walked around to the right side of the dead man’s head.

  I would be lying if I claimed to be able to give a blow-by-blow account of the first autopsy I witnessed. The shock of it made me forget the sequence. Time slid past me at breathless speed. The pathologist and the technician moved as swiftly and as lightly as dancers. My eyes were too slow: they kept getting left behind. If I concentrated on one thing, another procedure would suddenly be launched or completed elsewhere. So this is not official. It is not objective.

  I saw that the scalp was slit and peeled forward over the face like a hairy cap, leaving the skull a shining, glossy white. The skull was opened by means of a little vibrating handsaw. The brain was lifted neatly out (so clean, perfect, intricately folded—so valuable-looking), but also, before I could contemplate it, the torso was slit from the base of the neck to the pubis in one firm, clean-running scalpel stroke, then someone seized a pair of long-handled, small-beaked shears and smoothly snipped away the arcs of ribs which protect the heart and lungs—and there it lay, open to view, the brilliantly, madly compressed landscape of the inner organs.

  It can’t be, but I thought that the two men paused here for a second, to give us time to admire.

  Out come the organs now, neatly scalpelled away from their evolved positions. The technician, working blind in the hollow cave of the torso, lifts them out in glistening slippery handfuls. I recognise small and large intestines, liver, kidneys: but there is plenty more that I’m ignorant of, an undifferentiated collection of interior business. The technician lays it all out beautifully on the steel bench for the pathologist, who is separating, checking, feeling, slicing, sampling, peering, ascertaining. Each organ is put on the scales. Its weight is scribbled in blue marker onto a whiteboard on the wall. The contents of the dead man’s thorax are heaved out: his lungs, his heart, his windpipe, even his tongue, the topmost muscle of this complex mass of equipment: to think he used once to talk—or sing! Now his neck looks hollow and flat.

  His intestines, his organs, all his insides are examined and then placed between his legs on the steel table. I can’t believe all this has happened so fast. But the technician is scouring out the hollow shell of the skull, using the same rounded, firm, deliberate movements of wrist and hand that my grandmother would use to scrub out a small saucepan. At this moment I think irresistibly of that action of hers, and her whole kitchen comes rushing back into my memory, detailed and entire. I have to shove it out of the way so I can concentrate.

  The technician balls up several pages of the Age and stuffs the cleaned skull with them. He slots into its original position the section of the skull he removed earlier, and draws the peeled-down scalp up off the face and over the curve of bone where it used to grow; he pulls it firmly back into place. He takes a large needle and a length of surgical thread, and stitches the scalp together again. He stuffs the hollowed neck with paper, forming and shaping skilfully and with care.

  He places the body’s inner parts into a large plastic bag and inserts the bag into the emptied abdominal cavity; then he takes his needle again, threads it, and begins the process of sewing up the long slit in the body’s soft front. The stitch he uses is one I have never seen in ordinary sewing: it is unusually complex and very firm. He tugs each stitch to make sure it is secure. The line of stitches he is creating is as neat and strong as a zip.

  At some stage, without my noticing, the pathologist has left the room.

  During the sewing, most of the watchers in the viewing suite drift out of the room. Only two of us are left behind the glass, standing in silence, keeping (I suppose) a kind of vigil: it would be disrespectful, having witnessed this much, to walk away while he is still half undone. The stitching takes up more time (or so I calculate, in my semi- stupor) than all the rest of the process put together. The meticulous precision of the job is almost moving: the technician is turning an opened, scientifically plundered coroner’s body back into a simple dead one, presentable enough to be handed back to the funeral directors and to his family, if he still has one—his family who are presumably, at this very moment, somewhere out there in the oblivious city, howling or dumbly cradling their grief.

  It’s almost over now. Outwardly, he is whole again. The technician turns on a tap and hoses the body down. With wet hair the young man looks more life-like and more vulnerable, like someone at the hairdresser. But the water flows over his half-open eyes which do not close. Yes, he is dead: I had almost forgotten.

  His fingertips and nails are black. As the technician raises the body slightly to hose under it, its right arm flips out and protrudes off the edge of the table in a gesture that makes him look more human, less like a shop dummy, less obedient. The technician replaces it alongside the torso, and once more the young man is docilely dead. The technician dries the young man’s fac
e with a small green cloth. This closes his eyes again. His mouth moves under the force of the cloth just as a child’s will, passively, while you wipe off the Vegemite​ or the mud; his lower lip flaps and then returns to a closed position.

  The technician removes from under the young man’s shoulders a curved block of wood which, yoga-style, has been broadening out his chest and keeping his chin out of the action throughout the autopsy. His head, released, drops back onto the steel surface. The table is tilted to let the water and a small quantity of blood and tissue run down the plug-hole near the corpse’s feet. His genitals are long and flaccid. His hands are scrawny. He is very thin. As the technician pulls the trolley out of the dissection bay and swings it round towards the door, the sudden turning movement displaces the young man’s hand so that it flips over his genitals, covering them as if in modesty or anxiety.

  Now, because of the danger of hepatitis C infection, the technician must manoeuvre the body feet first into a thick, white plastic bag. It’s hard for someone working on his own. It’s like trying to work a drunk into a sleeping-bag. It takes a lot of effort and muscle. At last he has the body and the head encased in plastic. He draws up the neck of the bag, grabs a bit of it in each hand, and ties it in a neat knot. He slaps a sticker onto the outside of the bag. It’s big and I can see it from here. It reads: BIOLOGICAL HAZARD.

  The technician opens the door of the infectious room and wheels the trolley out. The room is empty. I look at my watch. I have been standing here, completely absorbed, for forty minutes.

  On my way home I would have liked to jabber to strangers about what I had seen in the mortuary, but at the same time I felt I should keep my mouth shut, probably forever. I stopped off at the Royal Women’s Hospital to visit some close friends whose baby daughter had been born early that same morning. The labour had been long and hard, and they were all exhausted, but calm. The baby was still bruised-looking and rather purple. Her struggles to be born had left her head slightly lop-sided, an effect which the doctors said would soon correct itself. Somebody said, ‘Her head is shaped like a teardrop.’ We all laughed.

  I didn’t tell my friends where I had spent the morning. I stood beside the baby’s cot and gazed down at her. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were clasped near her cheeks. Her mouth moved constantly, and small waves of what looked like expression kept passing over her wrinkled face. The baby and the corpse did not seem to be connected to each other in my mind. They inhabited separate compartments, and my thoughts skipped and slithered from one to the other and back again.

  The people who work at the mortuary are not used to being interviewed. They know that the picture the general public has of them is a macabre cliche. But they are not the skulking ghouls of legend. Far from it: they are as ordinary as can be. And they are young. Except for the coroner himself, Hal Hallenstein, a sombre, chastening man in a dark suit, I am at all times the oldest living person in the room. The more time I spend with the manager, the scientists and the technicians, Rod, Jodie, Barry, Kevin and (although she is a Bachelor of Science) ‘Little Alex’, the more impressed I become.

  Just as well. You need somebody trustworthy for a guide when you’re taken into the big storage chamber called ‘the fridge’ and confronted with a long row of dead bodies, twelve or fifteen of them, laid out on steel trolleys.

  I experience an atavistic urge to make a sign of reverence.

  Only one of the bodies is covered: a very small baby, wrapped up, as firmly as if it were alive, in a pastel cotton blanket, and laid on a metal shelf at eye level.

  A dead body, stripped of clothes, makes perfect sense of itself in no language but its own. It packs a tremendous wallop. In its utter stillness it seems preoccupied with some important matter that you are ignorant of. It has an authority, in its nakedness, which transcends whatever puny thoughts you, the stranger, may entertain about it. It has presence. And yet it is no longer a person.

  But it takes me more than one visit to realise this. At first I keep pestering for each body’s story. Oh, what happened to this poor man? Look at this lady—oh, poor thing—what have they done to her? To the technicians and the pathologists, these matters are of academic interest only. They are patient with me and, because I’m their guest, they oblige me by calling up the details of ‘the circumstances’, as they call them, on the computer. Fell off a truck, they say. Suspected heart failure. Looks like a suicide. MVA (motor vehicle accident).

  But their tone is abstracted. They can’t afford to dwell on the personal or the tragic. They get at least one suicide a day—‘we’ve got bags and bags of ligatures out there’, somebody tells me. They have to perform autopsies on dead babies and murder victims. Their detachment is very highly developed and they have to maintain it. It is precious to them. It is their only defence.

  So after a while I control myself and try to copy them. Some of their composure begins to rub off on me. It’s amazing how quickly you can get used to the company of the dead. Of course, I am in the privileged position of an observer. Later, Barry, a brilliant dissector who worked and studied his way up from being a porter at Charing Cross Hospital in London to his current position as senior technician, remarks to me, ‘You never get completely detached. I’ve been in this work for eight and a half years. Every now and then I say to myself, “Well, now I’ve seen everything”—and then next day a case will come in that’ll shock even me. You never get used to the homicides—what people will do to each other.’

  ‘It’s not such a different job as other people think it is,’ says Jodie, who at twenty-five is senior scientist in the mortuary. ‘Often I think our lab’s just the same as any other, except that our specimens are bigger.’ She is sitting in the manager’s office in her blue surgical gown and her socks, having left her huge white boots behind at the mortuary door. Like all the tech nicians who spoke to me, she has a very direct gaze, and an air of unusual maturity and calm.

  ‘I was the first woman here,’ she says. ‘The guys taught me everything. The first day I was here I went home all worked up, I’d had such an interesting and exciting day. Day two, it caught up with me. It was the smell, maybe, or the blood. They were doing eight post-mortems at once and everyone was busy; they were all gloved and gowned up, and someone looked at me and said, “Jodie, you’re going pale.” I walked into the change room and passed out.

  ‘But the techs were fantastic. Someone said, “Come over here. I’ll make you concentrate on one small area.” I did, and then I was all right. But it took me a while till I could step over that red bench into the lab without thinking, “What am I doing here?” ’

  She laughs, sitting there quietly with her hands folded in her lap. She is not what you would call tough: she’s got a rather sweet, open face, with intelligent eyes; but she has the firmness of someone who’s had to work out a few important things earlier than your average Australian twenty-five-year-old. She commands respect without having to try.

  ‘Staying detached,’ she says, ‘is hardest with the kids that come in. The cot-death babies, or kids that die in accidents or fires. It’s terrible. With every grown-up case you can manage to convince yourself that there’s a reason, but with kids—they’re innocent. They haven’t done anything. One day I was working with Barry, who’s got young kids. We opened up the little coffin, and when we saw the baby in there, so young, wrapped up and holding a furry toy, we looked at each other and we both had tears in our eyes.’ She shrugs, and drops her glance to her lap. ‘We quickly started work. You can’t afford to feel those things. You’d go crazy.’

  ‘With the SIDS babies we take extra time. We wash and powder them. And during post-mortems we’re really careful not to damage them. You feel they’ve been through enough. We rebuild and reconstruct them really carefully. Funny—when you’re holding a dead baby in your arms, you know it’s dead, but you still have the instinct to support the head, and not to let it drop back.’

  ‘You’ve got death at the back of your mind all the time,’ says B
arry. ‘Like when you’re backing out of the drive, you’re extra conscious. The child that gets crushed by a car in the drive is always after a toy that was under the car. It’s always a toy.’

  ‘You realise how easily death can happen,’ says Jodie. ‘And there’s a certain case for each of us—something you see that you relate to in a way you don’t…like. It might be a shoe on someone that’s brought in, a shoe like ones you’ve got at home, or the sort that your brother wears. Only a small thing…but it can trigger something in you. You have to keep a split between your natural feelings and what you do.’

  Everything the technicians say stresses their mutual respect and their sense of being a team. I ask why they appear to be doing all the cleaning of the mortuary, as well as their scientific work. ‘There’s a lot of weird people in the world: says Jodie. ‘People you wouldn’t want to trust around dead bodies. And other people refuse to come in here. Sometimes we can’t get tradesmen to do maintenance work. They won’t come in unless we can guarantee they won’t see anything upsetting. Still, our floors are shinier than the ones in the rest of the building—did you notice?—shinier than the ones the contract cleaners do.’

  To spend hours in the eight-bay lab, standing at the elbow of Barry as he works in silent absorption, or beside David, a pathologist and assistant director of the institute, is to realise that it’s a place of study, of teaching and learning, of the gathering and organising of information. David is a natural teacher. He chatters to me as he works on a body, wanting me to notice the creamy-yellow, waxen globules of subcutaneous fat, or the weak, exhausted-looking muscle of a damaged heart, or the perfect regularity and beauty of the striations of windpipe cartilage. ‘Exactly like reinforced garden hose —look!’

  The radio is on softly in the far corner of the room, spinning out a long, dated guitar solo. Someone in the corridor whistles along to it. Somebody else, going to the shop, calls out for lunch orders. It’s not so different from the outside world after all.