When we picked it up I discovered it wasn’t a box at all but a kind of cover that tapered towards the top and had four handles, two on each side. It fitted snugly over the trolley’s thin vinyl mattress, making it look like an immense silver serving tray.
Rodney grabbed a towel from the bench and wiped away the dust, giving the stainless steel a quick polish. ‘You take this end,’ he said, directing me to the trolley’s rear. ‘I’ll check no one’s out there; they don’t like the public seeing this thing.’
The electric doors made an inhaling sound as they opened. Rodney poked his head out into the corridor. Signalling the coast was clear, he helped me manoeuvre the trolley down the empty hall and into the staff elevator. He took similar precautions when we reached the sixth floor. Ward 63 was in darkness except for the nurses’ station which glowed at its centre. Rodney spoke in whispers to one of the nurses, who, leaving her paper work, led us to a curtained bed.
As we guided the trolley between the beds and serving tables, I imagined the face of the woman lying behind the curtain, her skin already waxy, her eyes and mouth neatly closed; the pain of death erased. The nurse ran the curtain along the rail, revealing something I hadn’t expected — a body wrapped, mummified, in bright yellow, industrial plastic.
The parcel was small, but when we went to lift it, me taking the feet, Rodney the head and shoulders, it sagged in the middle. Thinking about it later, I decided I now knew what was meant by the phrase ‘dead weight’ and wondered if it was the presence of death or the absence of life that made a corpse so heavy.
The plastic was warm and slippery. Lowering the bundle gently onto the trolley I had to remind myself it was a human body I was handling, one that an hour ago had lived and breathed and even now had relatives and, most likely, grieving children.
The trolley was hard to manoeuvre with the added weight. Silently, we pushed it back into the elevator and down the steep ramp leading from the laundry to the open-air breezeway connecting the hospital to the pathology building. A misty rain swirled about the courtyard and after the air-conditioned warmth of the hospital my skin pimpled with the cold.
Parking the trolley out by the furnace stack, near the machine shop’s graveyard of broken I.V. poles and mangled beds, Rodney asked if I minded being left with the body while he ducked around to the main entrance and opened the door from the inside. I shook my head. While he was gone I thought how glad I was that Rodney took his job seriously and didn’t try, as I might have done, to make it easier with jokes or casual conversation.
Still trying to picture the face beneath the plastic shroud, the life it had lived, I felt an urge to say something, a word of consolation, to pass some sort of benediction. Instead, I heard Rodney stumble and say, ‘Shit!’ and seeing the yellow light slide beneath the door I took up my position and readied myself to push the trolley inside.
I had expected it to be neat and clinical, but the morgue was a clutter of abandoned trolleys and crowded benches. Rodney cleared a derelict wheel chair out of the way, clanging a set of scales. He opened the freezer. The cold air grabbed at our lungs. I helped him slide out the metal tray. On the count of three, we transferred the corpse. Rodney motioned for me to push the tray back in. The yellow bundle glided into the cold cavern of the freezer. Unexpectedly, Rodney spoke. ‘Twenty-three she was — bloody tragedy. That’s it, though, isn’t it? We just never know.’ He snapped shut the grey freezer door. ‘All we know is that one day, sooner or later, we’re going to end up like that, in one of these.’
I had heard the story many times before, but was told it again when Dad decided to build the aviary around the remains of my tree.
When I was born Mum wanted to mark the occasion by planting a tree; giving me a kind of floral twin, something to grow up with, to measure myself against. Dad thought the idea slightly idolatrous and argued the only mark I needed was a watery cross dappled on my forehead, a christening.
Five days after my birth, the day after Mum was released from hospital, Dad came home from work and, walking around the back of the house, noticed a spindly wattle tree planted near the paling fence. Wattles were Mum’s favourite. ‘It’s like having a tree of daffodils,’ she would say.
I don’t know if they argued about it, but if they did, Mum won, because the tree stayed and each year on my birthday she took a photo of me standing beside it. The day I turned six the wind had blown the blossom from the branches, the photo showing me standing ankle high in a drift of yellow flowers. By my eighth birthday the tree was fully grown. Rather than stand in its shadows, Mum suggested I climb it and photographed me perched on one of its lower limbs.
In the August of the year I turned eleven a fierce storm lifted four tiles from our roof and tore two branches from my tree. Inspecting the jagged stumps, crumbling a shard of wood between his fingers, Dad announced my tree was dying.
Apparently Mum hadn’t known that wattles grow fast, die young. Dad wanted to chop the tree down, saying it was dangerous, that a branch could fall and break the fence, hurt someone. Mum said he could prune it, making him leave the trunk and three of the larger branches.
The tree continued to die and on my twelfth birthday Mum took two photos: one of me cutting the cake, the other, slightly off centre, shows me straddling a new pushbike in front of the garage.
‘Pass another nail.’ Dad’s body was jack-knifed at the waist, his face red from bending down. ‘Hold the wire … a bit over … That’s it. Watch your fingers.’ Thwack! Thwack! The wood gave no resistance as the fencing nail bit, then sank into the grain. Dad stood straight and stretched his back. Gracie was sitting on a patch of dirt behind him, making mountains from the sawdust, picking up the nails we had dropped, the ones that had gone skew-whiff when he miss-hit them. Dad turned to see her test one with her tongue.
‘Gracie!’
He lunged and ripped the nail from her. Stunned, not knowing what she had done wrong, Gracie began to cry. Having hauled her first to her feet, then into his arms, Dad swung round to me and said, ‘I thought I told you to watch out for her?’
‘I was, but …’
‘She could’ve choked. Couldn’t you, Gracie.’ Gracie was burrowing her head into his neck. I hated the way he blamed me for her mistakes. Carrying her to the house, calling back to me, he said, ‘Pick them up and put them in the garage.’ When he wasn’t watching, I grabbed a nail, bent like a boomerang, and threw it as hard and as high as I could. I heard it land and roll on the metal roof of the garage next door, then bent down, collected the other deformed nails and put them where he had said.
The idea of building the aviary around my wattle tree had excited Dad when he first thought of it. He figured it was a way of prolonging its usefulness. But now, trying to make it work, to please everyone, he had decided it was more trouble than it was worth. First he’d had to convince Mum it wouldn’t harm the tree’s recovery, reassuring her by promising to draw up plans that showed how it could be done. Later, when Mum left the room, slumping his head into his hands, he muttered, ‘Pray tell me, how can a dead tree recover?’
We worked on the plans one night after tea, at the desk where Dad wrote his sermons. The desk, a roll-top, had been a twenty-first present from his parents; he had already told me that when I turned twenty-one he and Mum would give me one just like it. It looked out of place in their bedroom, flanked on one side by a small, three-tiered bookcase, and on the other by Mum’s dressing table. Sitting at it, Dad could reach back and touch the crocheted quilt covering the bed. It hadn’t always been like that. I could remember the day he moved the desk from the spare room. Mum was pregnant with Gracie and struggled to help him lift it, Dad all the time protesting that she shouldn’t even try. With the old den completely empty, he covered the carpet with torn, threadbare sheets. Convinced that the baby would be a girl, he began painting the room a light, coral pink.
Building