Two Removals

I got the trolley for the body out of the van while Rhonda, at the nursing home’s front door entry console, buzzed the night staff. In the daytime we’d go to a side door, but it was after 11 p.m. and the elderly were unlikely to be around.

Rhonda leaned close to the speaker. “Hi, funeral home staff here to remove a resident.”

A young Filipina woman—more like a girl—met us at the door. I looked at her badge: Maria, Registered Nurse. I pushed the trolley as we followed her through the quiet corridors. The ancient citizenry were tucked safely in bed. The occasional room had a television on; I could hear the murmur behind the closed doors.

“Any family?” Rhonda asked, sotto voce.

“One brother. He’s arriving tomorrow from Canberra.”

Maria tapped lightly on a door, and we went in. I glanced at the name on the door. I closed the door behind us.

The room looked a little like a shrine: on a dressing table there was a half-metre-high plastic statue of Mary, lit from the inside. A wooden cross was mounted over the bed-head, and a statuette of Christ, crucified, was on the bedside chest of drawers. An older woman, small and neatly dressed in black slacks and a green cardigan, rose from a chair on the other side of the bed. She closed a book; it looked like a collection of prayers or psalms. She bent over the deceased, kissed her forehead, said “Adieu, Sister,” smiled at Rhonda and me, then left the room.

Hanging from the back of the door, in a dry-cleaner’s plastic wrap, was a grey skirt, white blouse, grey jacket and headscarf.

“Was this woman a nun?” Rhonda asked Maria.

“A Josephite Sister.”

The deceased woman was old and pale. Her eyes were closed. Her shoulder-length white hair had been parted in the middle and brushed smooth, wisps of her long fringe tucked girlishly behind her ears. I guessed that her face had been washed and maybe a little face powder had been applied. If she had false teeth, they were in, which helped the face to look normal. Her pale pink nightie had long sleeves and her hands were clasped on her chest, outside the clean blanket and the crisp white sheet. A rosary was entwined in her fingers, together with a crimson hibiscus flower. She looked merely asleep, yet ready at an instant for a rigorous inspection or a defining appointment.

Maria had her hand on the dead woman’s shoulder.

“She looks beautiful,” Rhonda said.

I was glad Rhonda was good at the personal stuff; it freed me to focus on the physical work.

I put on disposable gloves and passed a pair to Rhonda. I wrote the nun’s name on a plastic band and wrapped it around her wrist. There was still a little warmth in her arm. Rhonda lifted the nun’s collar: there was a silver necklace with a silver cross set with blue stones.

“Any other valuables?” she asked.

“No, the rosary and necklace is all. She wanted to be buried holding the rosary and with the necklace.”

I wrote those details on our form. Maria gave me a post-it note with the brother’s name and telephone number. I stuck it to our form. Tomorrow, Baz, our boss, would contact him and start arranging the funeral. We wouldn’t take the clothes with us tonight; they could be picked up, or delivered to the funeral home, in a day or two.

I unzipped from end to end the trolley’s tough velour cover, took out the grey plastic body bag and moved the trolley parallel to the bed. Maria—a smart girl as well as pretty—had anticipated what we would do and raised the bed so it was just slightly higher than our trolley: it’s easier to shift a body across and down than across and up. Rhonda and I spread the open body bag on top of the trolley. Rhonda pulled the bedclothes aside. The nun wasn’t obese or big, but her weight was concentrated around her midriff, hips and thighs.

“How about we move her to the side of the bed first, then go from there?” I said.

Rhonda, at the end of the bed, clasped the nun’s white fleshy ankles. Maria stayed on the other side of the bed, but got partly up on the bed to gain leverage. I pushed away the pillow as I extended my arms under the nun’s neck and shoulders. I was careful to cradle her head so it didn’t flop. It was like I was giving her a hug.

“On three. One, two, shift.”

That was easy enough. I pulled the trolley hard against the bed and put my knee behind it so it wouldn’t move. “And after three, onto the trolley.”

It was smoothly done. Maria was slim but strong.

I zipped up the body bag and strapped it firmly to the trolley, then zipped closed the velour cover while Maria and Rhonda checked details on the Life Extinction form.

“Good to go,” Rhonda said to me. She turned to Maria, “We’ll take good care of her.”

We went back through the quiet corridors and out the door. Rhonda opened the van’s back door and I pushed the heavy trolley hard inside so the trolley would collapse but still slide fully into the van. I drove, and Rhonda organised the forms to be left on Baz’s desk.

“That was straightforward,” Rhonda said.

“Yeah. It makes a difference when the death is expected and everyone is organised. I assume the funeral service’ll be a High Mass.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’ll have communion with the service.”

“Are you Catholic?” Rhonda asked.

“No, but I’m heading in that direction.”

Rhonda didn’t comment. After a minute or two, she said, “You don’t see nuns around any more.”

“There’s one less now. Unfortunately, they’re dying out—literally. Can you imagine today’s young woman taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience?”

“Is that what they do?”

“Yep. That’s real counter-culture. I admire her.”

“You could tell she was loved by the way they’d cared for her body. You don’t see that very often.”

“I noticed that too.”

We drove to the funeral home a few kilometres away. We opened the rear gates and unlocked the service doors as quietly as we could so we didn’t wake the neighbourhood. I got the nun out of the van and pushed the trolley to our desk beside the coolroom. We filed the paperwork to be attended by Baz in the morning. I used a black texta to write, in large letters, the name on the body bag and then added a sticker on which I detailed the valuables: a silver cross necklace and rosary beads.

In the coolroom, a low shelf was vacant; there were seven other bodies in their bags keeping cold on the tiered metal shelves. We lifted the nun off the trolley into place. A final push on the hips slid her fully onto her “bunk”. Rhonda passed me a plastic block which I placed under the nun’s head to prevent egress of fluids from the lungs or stomach. Her head was next to someone else’s feet.

“It’s getting crowded in there,” Rhonda said as she turned off the light and shut the door.

“We’ll all be in trouble if they start fussing and fighting.”

We put the trolley back in the van. We turned off the lights, locked the doors and shut the gates. It was after 12.30.

Rhonda’s phone rang, loud in the quiet night. She saw who the caller was and swore. I waited, sure it was Baz with another removal for us. I listened to Rhonda’s responses and put the scene together: we had a coroner’s case, in a unit in a suburb with lots of older Housing Commission houses and flats.

“Giddy-up, cowboy, here we go again,” Rhonda said, as she put the address in her phone. We got back in the van and left for our next job.

“I prefer removals like we just did,” Rhonda said. “The coroner jobs make me anxious.”

“Don’t worry, Rhonny. We can handle it.”

Rhonda was older than me; late middle-aged. She was a softie but competent and professional. I liked her and thought we made a good team.

We drove through the night and arrived at a street where people had multiple dinged-up cars in their front yards but, apparently, no lawn-mowers. We went slowly and Rhonda spotted a police van outside an older, red-brick two-storey block of flats. There was no front fence or garden, so if we needed to we could drive the van right up to the doors.

“We’d better see if the police have finished their work first,” I suggested.

“They must love it when we arrive: we take the body and they can leave the scene.”

“This late in the night they’ll be so excited to see us they’ll fire their guns in the air.”

As we walked to the open double-front doors I saw a woman lying face down in a hallway. A policeman was taking photographs of her hands; another policeman was writing in a blue folder.

Rhonda introduced us. The police were expecting us; they said they were nearly finished. The forearms of both young officers were covered in tattoos.

The unit wasn’t a mess, but had worn-out furniture and far too much of it. We’d have to move a torn lounge chair and a pile of Hollywood blockbuster DVDs to get the trolley beside the woman. The police had already put a yellow plastic tag on her wrist. She didn’t especially smell. I watched as they checked her arms and ankles for needle marks. The woman was wearing a big man’s T-shirt and a pair of grey grubby trackpants. She was barefoot.

“Anything we need to be careful of?” I asked.

“We haven’t found needles, but probable hepatitis.”

“What’s her story?” Rhonda said.

“Long-term addict. We know of her. Put anything into her body she could get her hands on. The bloke who rents the place said he met her at the pub, asked her back here. He says he went to work this morning and came back in the evening to find her lying here. He’s at the station. We can’t rule out foul play so we treat it as a crime scene and she goes to the coroner for investigation.”

“Any family to contact about the funeral?” Rhonda said.

“It seems not, but we’ll explore that further at the station.”

The police pushed her shirt up—no bra—to her armpits and her trackpants and underpants down to her knees. They took photographs of her back, buttocks and thighs. I assumed sexual assault was part of the foul play they couldn’t rule out. They pulled her clothes back into approximate place and rolled her over.

“Oh, she’s young!” Rhonda said.

“Thirty-five,” one officer said. They took a few more photographs.

The woman had brown shoulder-length hair, a slim figure, and could have been good-looking, but her face and neck had a crimson pallour that concerned me.

“Why is she that colour?”

“She’s been lying face down for six to eight hours. The blood has pooled and started to break down.”

The two policemen stood.

“I think we’re done for that part of it.”

“Yep, she’s all yours.”

Rhonda conferred with one of the policemen and got our paperwork started. I went to the van, drove it across the grass to get close to the doors, unloaded the trolley and pushed it inside. I didn’t see any of the block residents but I’d noticed lights upstairs and thought for sure we’d be watched once we were outside. I closed the doors behind me so anyone walking or driving past wouldn’t see the indignity of the woman or us at work.

Rhonda and I put on gloves.

“Can we move this chair?” Rhonda asked the police. We didn’t want to mess with their crime scene.

“Yeah, no problem.”

We made room for the trolley and lowered it. We spread an open body bag along the length of the woman. I took hold of a cold arm and rolled her onto her side as Rhonda pushed the bag under her shoulders, ribcage, hips and legs. I let gravity roll her back and with a little more lifting and shifting we had her centred, face up, on the bag. We zipped it up, making sure the zipper was near her head to make access easy for the hospital emergency doctor who would inspect her and provide the death certificate. We lifted the bag, using its tough loop handles, onto the trolley and strapped her in.

A policeman gave Rhonda a Search Form that stated there were no valuables on the deceased. We loaded her and drove across town to the hospital where we’d start the process that allowed us to leave the woman in their morgue before she was moved to the coroner’s. We wouldn’t get back home to our beds before 2.30 or 3 a.m.

In the van, Rhonda asked me, “How’re you going?”

“I’m tired.”

“Dead tired?”

I put my hand on my cheek and then the side of my throat. “Nah. I’m still warm and I’ve got a pulse.”

“Let’s hope they’re not busy at the hospital and we can get in and out quickly.”

“Even when they’re not busy some of them seem too busy to help us,” I said.

“The police are busy. Those cops told me they’ve all been flat out with assaults, domestic violence, burglaries, home invasions, ice freakouts, drug busts and drug deaths. This is the third one that team’s done today.”

“The third? Jeez, they’ve got a tough gig.”

“Makes you wonder where our society is going.”

I tapped the sealed panel that separated the cabin from our cargo. “This part of society is going to the morgue. In a way, we’re witnesses to the consequences of a growing confusion about life.”

We drove through dark streets where people, mostly asleep, were oblivious to our presence, our work, and the things we saw.

Rhonda yawned as we pulled into Emergency. The good old girl was tired too.