The Seven Corporal Works of Mercy

When his boss telephoned him with a job to do, Brad was getting dinner ready for himself and his wife. She’d soon be home from work. Brad got changed, and sent a text message to her. She’d have to eat by herself. He’d have dinner when he got home.

An hour later Brad and his work-mate, Rev, were in the van and close to their destination. The autumn dusk had turned to night in the time it had taken to drive there. The streetlights were inadequate. The two middle-aged men cruised slowly, both peering at the dark buildings to their right.

“There they are, at the end of the block,” Brad said. He was driving, and pointed at the police vehicles, a paddy-wagon and the forensics’ van, partly obscured by other parked cars.

They turned into the driveway.

“Dingy, old flats,” Rev said. There were eight fibro and brick units in one continuous line. Some had their front door open and inside they looked very basic: one bedroom, a small lounge room and kitchenette. No garages or even carports, just a parking space where a few cars, the roofs and bonnets faded by the sun, were sitting. Nobody with any money lived here.

“Yeah, but no stairs,” Brad said, and he stopped the van beside the paddy-wagon. “Easy access.”

Beside the front door of number seven, sitting back in a chair, the forensic policeman was twirling a yellow plastic body tag. His cap was pushed back on his balding head. He rubbed his eyes; he looked exhausted. Another policeman was in conversation with an older couple, probably neighbours since the adjacent unit had its lights on and the door open. The policeman there was grey-haired and ruddy-faced.

Brad and Rev greeted the two officers; they knew one another from dozens of coroner’s jobs. Sometimes the cops had been there for hours doing their careful forensic work, even if it was an elderly person and it was highly likely to be a natural death—a heart attack or stroke. Still, the work had to be done just in case there was something amiss. And then they had to stay at the scene until the undertaker’s men had collected the body. You couldn’t blame them for getting a bit jaded at times.

The forensic cop, a likeable guy, rose from the chair. “He’s inside, a thin, older bloke. We don’t think there’s anything suspicious, but still gotta be checked out.”

Rev put on his glasses and started the paperwork with him. Brad went to the front door: the flat was a hoarder’s rats’-nest. There was stuff everywhere. He went inside and saw the deceased lying in the doorway where the kitchen, lounge room and the bedroom met. Beside the body, the kitchen garbage-bin overflowed with rubbish.

Brad edged between piles of books and the bundles of newspapers, magazines and shopping catalogues that came up to his waist. A gap had been left between the piles to get to the lounge and watch TV. There was no way they could get their trolley inside. The place smelt sour with grime, urine and unwashed humanity, but nothing worse.

The dead man, aged about sixty, lay face up, wearing only underpants. He hadn’t shaved for days. He had sky-blue eyes. A broad smear of blood ran across an ear and temple. Probably he’d hit the floor hard when he died.

Brad glanced into the bedroom and the attached bathroom to see if there was a clear space to bag the body. Not a chance—there was more junk: an unmade and sweat-stained single bed, garbage bags of filthy clothes, cardboard boxes of video-cassettes and plastic tubs of tangled fishing gear. And more piles of newspapers, books and shopping catalogues. The bedroom window and blinds were open. Brad saw and heard the neighbours talking with the ruddy-faced policeman.

“Lake Cathie is nice,” the woman said in a bright voice. “Especially this time of year when the tourists have gone.”

“Not far either. ’Bout an hour’s drive,” added her husband.

“I like open water fishing,” the policeman said. “Get my boat out there and get into ’em.”

“I’m sure the lake’s got a boat ramp,” the woman said.

The couple were probably pensioners. They looked like twins: same size chest and soft, bulging bellies, same short hair-cut, same silver-framed glasses and matching knee-length denim shorts. Both were in polo shirts, although hers was pink and his was white. Their feet were in thongs.

Brad stepped over the dead man into the kitchen. No room to work there either. The floor was almost covered with boxes of empty beer and soft drink bottles, more bags of clothes, more crates of fishing stuff together with discarded litter and maybe a dozen dusty, battered boogie boards.

“I do a fair bit of beach fishing when I can,” the husband declared.

“Yep, that’s relaxing,” the policeman said. “But the type of fish you can get is a bit restricted. It’s great if you like whiting and bream.”

“I caught a good-sized shark once,” the husband said. “And only had half a prawn on the hook.”

Brad went outside. Rev and the forensic cop had completed the paperwork. Brad said to Rev, “There’s no way we can get the trolley inside. It’s a mess. We’ll have to bag him inside, then bring him out to the trolley. You have a look, see what you think.”

He was back in under a minute. “It’s the only way. Just as well he’s a smaller man.”

They got the trolley out of the van and left it on the landing. They put on disposable gloves and took a body bag inside.

“How about I grab his arm, pull him on his side, we push the edge of the bag under him and let him roll back into it,” Brad suggested.

“Yep. I’ll just do one thing.”

Rev grabbed a broom—it obviously hadn’t got much use—from beside the fridge and swept away most the rubbish that overflowed from the bin so when they rolled him on his side they didn’t roll him into litter.

Brad took the right arm—there was still some flexibility—and pulled the dead man onto his left side. There was a chocolate bar wrapper stuck to his upper thigh and a Centrelink letter stuck to his buttock. Rev pulled them off. Brad peeled an Overdue Rent notice from the man’s shoulder blade.

“I hope they’re not crucial evidence,” Brad said.

“They’re evidence of a disordered life.”

They attached the yellow tag to his wrist.

“We once went fishing at Manning Point. That was nice.” It was the wife talking. “What’s the name of the river there?”

“The Manning, dumb-bum,” her husband replied.

His wife roared with laughter. “Well, whatever, it’s a lovely holiday spot!”

Rev said quietly, “I don’t think this man’s going to be greatly missed by his neighbours.”

Brad nodded. “I get that impression. They’re probably fed up living next door to a hoarder. If cockroaches, fleas, flies and mice had interior designers, this place’d be a prize-winner.”

The two men often worked together; they formed a good team, solving the problems confronting them. They focused on the physical challenges of their work: how to get this body into this bag, onto the trolley and into the back of the van, all done as discreetly as possible, without busting their backs.

They soon had the dead man in the body bag.

“I’ll lower the trolley and bring it close to the front door. We can go straight out onto it.” Rev did that and returned.

“We can drag him between the piles of junk,” Brad said. “There’s just enough room for that.”

Rev hesitated. “Can we at least carry him out? He’s light enough. Let’s give him that little bit of dignity.”

Rev got his nickname because before getting this job he’d been an Anglican minister. He’d been bullied out of his position because he was too High Church for a low parish, or too low for a High Church parish, Brad couldn’t remember which. Rev had explained it to Brad once, but it didn’t make much sense to him; he put it in a mental file marked Weird Church Stuff. Rev said he came to undertaker’s work because decently attending to the dead was one of the seven corporal works of mercy. Brad hadn’t heard that before, but he liked it because it added something worthwhile to their sometimes difficult work.

They carried the dead man between the piles of his useless stuff and placed him gently on the trolley, strapped him in securely, then lifted the trolley and placed it in the van with almost exaggerated care. The forensic cop had already left. The husband and wife had retreated to their flat. They had the football on TV.

The remaining police officer was resting in the driver’s seat of his paddy-wagon.

“We’re done here. We’ll get going,” Brad said to him.

“Good-o. Hopefully, we won’t meet again soon.”

Brad and Rev drove away to the morgue at the base hospital.

“Where do you like to holiday?” Brad asked.

“Port Macquarie. My sister and her husband have a granny flat attached to their house and we stay there for a week in March and November each year.”

“This bloke is going for a short stay with the coroner, then a much longer stay somewhere else.”

Rev was quiet for a minute. “I hope there’s someone who’ll give him a funeral and properly mourn for him. He was a person, an embodied spirit, not a piece of … human detritus.”

Brad listened without comment. An embodied spirit. That was a strange concept. Rev was digging deep and getting mystical.

Rev added, “And I hope he has someone who’ll pray for the repose of his soul.”

Brad didn’t say anything. He repeated to himself, pray for the repose of his soul, savouring the phrase. It had a lilting rhythm, old-fashioned and poetic. He wouldn’t bet on it happening, not these days.

Three hours later, Brad was back at home. He and Rev had spent an hour and a half at the hospital, working through the paperwork and waiting for a doctor to provide a death certificate.

His wife asked him, “How was it?”

“Straightforward, except for being stuffed around at the hospital.”

If it was a bad job—a decomposition or an incineration case—he would shake his head at her and go straight into the shower, thoroughly scrub himself and then throw his soiled clothes into the washing machine and start the cycle.

“Do you want dinner now or a shower first?”

“I’ll have a shower. It was a grubby place.”

Later, his wife sat with him and sipped wine while he ate. He told her about the hoarder, and the matching pensioners. He asked her, please, never to dress like him or try to look like him.

She smiled. “That won’t be a problem. I don’t plan to go bald, or to dress all day every day in rugby shorts, rugby jumper and thongs.”

“That’s a relief.”

He then told her about Rev’s hope that someone would pray for the repose of the dead man’s soul. “What do you think that means?” he asked.

“Isn’t it a Catholic thing about”—she waved her hands to summon an answer—“the period immediately after death? I dunno, ask Rev what he meant.” 

His wife finished her wine. She sat in silence for a minute, then yawned and stretched. “I’m off to bed. Will you be long?”

“Not long, I just want to look up something.”

Brad refilled his glass of wine, went to the spare room and pulled from his bookshelf one of the few art books he owned. Nearly all his books were about World War One, especially the Dardanelles and Palestine campaigns, his main areas of interest. The book he flipped through was Nolan’s Gallipoli. He’d bought it years ago in a second-hand bookshop because it was cheap, not because he’d especially liked the paintings. But fragments from a passage in the book now buzzed in his brain. He found the quote—by John Ruskin—the only text on a page opposite a combat painting. It had inspired Sidney Nolan’s series:

“It made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war, whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead down a certain quantity of red clay into a level line, as in a brick-field; or whether out of every separately Christian-named portion of the ruinous heap, there went out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of battle some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released.” 

Brad realised why the paintings were so diaphanous, fluid and odd compared to most military artworks. The tangled paintings of fighting soldiers also portrayed the dead soldiers’ souls released by that combat. Brad sat with that idea, looked through the paintings once more and gained a sense of what Rev meant by embodied spirit. And then Brad grew alarmed: he was ambushed by intuition in cahoots with logic. He drank his wine to give himself a moment to think. He didn’t consider people so much red clay that could be blandly levelled, and he could attend to the dead with something amounting to reverence, but could he see himself, his wife—and then it got a lot more difficult—everybody else, as embodied spirits?

“Huh!” he said to himself. “Now who’s getting mystical?”

Yeah, he thought, but what was the alternative—red clay and human detritus?

Gary Furnell, who lives in rural New South Wales, is a regular contributor of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent story was “Renovation at Old Bar” in the November issue.