It was a novel experience, the relief Cassie felt on seeing Dr Curzon’s name on the PM list the following morning, but today she’d prefer seeing even him to Archie. She’d spent a sleepless night replaying the evening’s encounter and how it had ended, constantly picturing Archie’s face closing down as he got up to leave.
She felt wrecked today – but not because of the MDMA. Jerome had delivered her pills within thirty minutes of her call. But before she’d had a chance to take any, her neighbour Gaz had come knocking with a bottle of Jameson’s. Gaz had got seriously messed up on heroin when he was a roadie, so it didn’t feel right doing Class As in front of him. Instead they’d ended up rolling a few spliffs and putting away the best part of the bottle.
Now, she reflected that if she’d stuck to the pills she probably wouldn’t be feeling quite so rough this morning. In the loos, she pulled a comb through her hair, which was showing an inch of lighter-coloured roots, and realised she hadn’t even washed it for what, four, five days?
The prospect of not having Archie in her life hurt more than she could have imagined. But she told herself it was better to hurt now than suffer worse – far worse – down the line. Because deep down she knew that she’d never be able to hack a settled relationship. She remembered something her ex had once thrown at her: You give so much of yourself to the dead, there isn’t much left over for the living.
Except now even the dead weren’t speaking to her.
The face that stared back at her from the mirror was pale and waxy, like it belonged to one of the bodies. Which one day it would. It struck her that the average human heart beat around two and half billion times in a lifetime. Maybe life was just a matter of counting the beats.
Going into the autopsy suite, she started marking up the big whiteboard attached to one wall with the names and d.o.b.s of the deceased on one side, adding columns headed ‘heart’, ‘lungs’, ‘liver’ and so on, ready to record the weight of each organ – an abnormal weight could indicate disease and require further microscopic analysis. With six bodies on the PM list it was going to be one of those days.
Jason surveyed the board, shaking his head. ‘No peace for the wicked, eh? Can I grab a ciggie before we start?’
‘There’s no time for that. Let’s get the first two out.’ Judging by the surly look on his face, she’d spoken too bluntly, but in her current mood she couldn’t give a toss.
She and Jason eviscerated their bodies more or less simultaneously at their tables, before delivering the viscera from each to Dr Curzon’s bench for separation. Then they took the individual organs over to be weighed on a set of hanging scales, before returning them for dissection, and recording their weights on the whiteboard. The final step of the process was collecting the dissected viscera from Dr C’s bench and packing them into a blue plastic bag to be repatriated to their owner before closing the midline incision as neatly as possible.
They made good time and less than three hours later they were on the last two bodies – Cassie taking Lily Peck, a lady in her sixties who’d been knocked down by a car on the high street, leaving Jason with Michael Kavanagh, an obese middle-aged man who’d suffered a cardiac arrest after post-operative complications.
Cassie managed to plod through it, working like an automaton, and was now cleaning up Mrs Peck’s eviscerated body, washing away the blood with the flexible hose, the water gurgling down the drain at the foot of the steel tray.
Curzon called out ‘Service!’ – a joke he never tired of – and she went to collect Mrs P’s dissected organs from his bench. A minute later, she was manipulating the bag containing the organs back into Mrs P’s body cavity. It was a bit of a squeeze, but then viscera always seemed to expand with dissection. After finally getting the bag in, she took the curved needle, ready-threaded with linen twine, and started sewing her back up.
Ten minutes later she was wheeling Mrs P back to the body store when something struck her. Lily Peck had been a slender woman, but now her abdomen seemed out of proportion to the rest of her, almost as if she were pregnant.
Cassie felt a sickening chill run up her neck. Turning the trolley around she went back to the autopsy suite before going over to Jason’s table where he was about to sew up Mr Kavanagh.
‘Jason, don’t close him up just yet.’
Going to the whiteboard, she cast an eye over the organ weights, feeling nauseous, her heart beating double time. Michael Kavanagh – liver weight 1610 grams; Lily Peck – liver weight 1350 grams, which was just as she’d expect – women’s organs weighing significantly less than men’s.
Back at Jason’s table, she told him, ‘We need to weigh Mr Kavanagh’s organs before you sew him up. I think I might have put his viscera back into Mrs Peck.’
Wordlessly, Jason reached into the body cavity, pulled out the bulging blue bag and handed it to her.
Please, please, please, she muttered to herself, nursing the fervent hope that she was fretting about nothing. But as soon as she put what was supposed to be Mr Kavanagh’s viscera on the pan beneath the scales she knew. They didn’t weigh nearly enough for an overweight guy in his forties.
Dr Curzon had already disappeared to get changed so she pieced together what had happened with Jason. It turned out that Dr C had dissected Mr Kavanagh’s organs before Mrs Peck’s, so when he’d called for ‘Service’, Cassie took the pile at the end of his bench without thinking, not realising they were the wrong organs.
‘I got ahead of you, remember? When you had to go change your blade?’ Jason said, eyeing her – clearly enjoying the know-it-all girlie getting her comeuppance.
She nodded grimly. Putting the wrong organs back in a body? You heard about it happening, of course, but never to her, not even on her watch. How could she have made such a terrible error? The fact that they were working under pressure was no excuse.
‘Listen’ – Jason threw a conspiratorial look over his shoulder – ‘nobody needs to know about it. I close this guy up and we both keep schtum. What the family don’t know can’t hurt them, right?’
She looked at Jason’s moon-like face with its ill-concealed expression of Schadenfreude. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The idea of delivering any of her charges to their families with a stranger’s heart, liver, brain – that was unthinkable.
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m going to reinstate the organs into the right bodies. You go off home. I’ll close them both up.’
‘Fine, if you want to waste your time, it’s your funeral,’ he said with a surly shrug, starting to strip off his gloves.
Half an hour later, she was closing up Lily Peck for the second time. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Mrs P,’ she said, cutting the thread on the last stitch. ‘I’m so sorry I let you down. Right now, if I could swap places with you I would.’