The only issue with this impasse happened to be that Mrs Brock also taught me history for two of those five years. History, therefore, didn’t turn out to be one of my strong points, not helped by the number of Harolds/Haralds mooching about in 1066.
The fault all lay with my mum. She’d met and married a John Thomas (yes, really) and they decided to join forces and hyphenate their names after they got married. I’d always thought someone who had grown up being called John Thomas would have had more awareness and sympathy about kids’ names instead of lumbering his only daughter with such a mouthful. He’d even managed to become a professor of social anthropology to avoid using his first name. Even his bank cards only had ‘Professor J Thomas’ printed on them.
As a youngster, before I had the presence of mind to change my name, I had a plump, lumpy body, a squished face and little self-confidence. I used to come home from school, go into my bedroom and slip into a Cinderella or Snow-White costume from my dressing-up box and prance up and down in front of the mirror pretending I lived a different life, using clothes as an emotional crutch, an image to hide behind. I still did.
I’ve always felt that there was a certain cruelty involved, growing up as an only child, especially with parents like mine, who were too wrapped up in their own obsessions to notice my issues. All parents should be obliged to have two or more children or none. In my opinion, having only one kid could lead to them growing up lonely – well, kids like me who had real problems making friends would, anyway. If I’d had a sibling, they would have played with me and banished some of my loneliness.
Yeah, but knowing you they would have hated you so that would’ve made things worse.
‘Things couldn’t have been much worse.’
Wanna bet?
When I get stressed I often argue with my inner self, usually out loud, which can bring me some weird glances from strangers. Well, weirder than normal. Reminiscing about my childhood usually raises my stress levels so I try not to.
Despite the problems in high school I left with some decent grades, much to the surprise of many of my teachers, especially Mrs Brock, and won a place at Napier University in Edinburgh to study nursing.
I couldn’t stand the thought of working in an office. I was a practical sort of person and initially believed that nursing would be a good option. I anticipated that it would provide a stimulating and fast-changing environment that would stop me getting bored. It didn’t.
My first placement in an adult surgical ward saw me dealing with patients who were either waiting for or recovering from an operation. The ward was chronically under-resourced (like so many others), which meant I felt used and abused by everyone, staff and patients alike. On my first eight-hour shift my mentor said, ‘Kat, the patient in room three needs some toast and tea. Can you get that for them?’
I rushed back to the nurses’ station after I’d finished. My mentor said, ‘Quick work, that. Can you change the two beds in room eleven, they’re covered in blood and vomit, and after that could you be a dear and nip down to the shops for some sandwiches for me and Elaine, the staff nurse, as we both forgot to bring anything in for lunch?’
By the end of the day I felt more like a waitress and a chambermaid than a nurse. I also wondered why patients were called ‘patients’ as they were anything but, constantly pressing buzzers and shouting for anything and everything.
I could have probably put up with all that and carried on but for me the final straw came on the last week of my first placement. Whilst I was escorting an elderly male patient to the toilet, he suddenly turned and grabbed both my breasts in his bony (but surprisingly strong) little hands, thrust his head into my cleavage, sighed and expired on the floor.
Enough was enough, so I dropped out and began a medical internship at the local mortuary. Dead patients didn’t grope me, or demand things, or speak to me, or stare at me, or assault me. In fact, they rarely did anything at all – except lie still. They occasionally stink a little, but you soon get used to that.
I applied myself and with the help of day release and evening courses I qualified as an anatomical pathologist practitioner, better known as a mortuary technician. I suppose given my view of the world and my relatively serious and introverted nature, the work suited me. I’d been working in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary for nearly six years now and there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen, or, more pertinently perhaps, smelled.
Initially, my mum reacted in horror at my relatively unusual career choice and couldn’t understand my motivation. Over time, however, she came to recognise that I enjoyed my job – as weird as that sounds – and never complained about it, the way many people did.
Monday, 23 November started out like most other early shifts. My alarm woke me at 5.45 a.m., I showered, ate cornflakes whilst drying my hair and staring at BBC News with the subtitles on, so I could understand what the presenters were jabbering about over the noise of the hairdryer. My thick hair always takes ages to dry.
After that I applied my Manic Panic foundation. If I was honest I liked the name more than anything as pretty much any pale slap worked for me. However, for the last ten years I’d only ever worn three shades of Rimmel lipstick: black, purple and, for special occasions, RockChick Scarlet but today being a work day meant boring Black Diva.
I then applied my black liner and smudged some light pink blusher on to contour my cheeks and make me look slightly less like one of my charges. In truth, as I’d got older I’d toned down the Goth persona. I supposed I’d got nobody and nothing to rebel against these days, but still liked the fact it made people wary of me.
I then pulled on my clothes, left my tiny rented flat in the Duddingston area of Edinburgh and drove to work. My workload scheduled for that morning should have been light as we had no post-mortems booked until the afternoon, so my plan had been to sort out a load of paperwork I hadn’t bothered finishing on Friday. Another plus would be that I’d be working with Sid.
Sid’s actual title was Dr David Ingles but his idol growing up had been Sid Vicious, so he’d taken the nickname. My only issue with this was that, in my opinion, Taylor Swift bore more resemblance to Sid Vicious than David did with his soft round face, big lips and gentle grey eyes. There was also the slight problem that as David, being only thirty-six, wouldn’t have been born when the Sex Pistols were at their zenith but then who am I to criticise? Sid was my favourite forensic pathologist, which was a bit like saying he was my favourite teddy bear, given his nature. He started at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary around the same time as me and although much more senior he didn’t have the ‘lording over’ attitude some of the other doctors have and we got on brilliantly.
He was on my wavelength with so many things, and as we had absolutely no interest in each other physically it was easy to talk to him. I suspect he might be gay – in fact I’d stake money on it – but whenever I broached the subject (usually on a night out after a few drinks) he changed the subject of conversation immediately. He was firmly in the closet as far as I was concerned, so far in that he’d locked the damn thing and thrown away the key.
On this Monday, I managed to arrive before anyone else and opened the door to the large basement room where all the recently deceased were stored. Then, something made me stop in my tracks. I’d heard something. I didn’t move for a moment, hardly breathing, then decided I must have been mistaken. I’d been alone down here hundreds of times before, both during the day and at night, and it didn’t bother me any more. It had been a little creepy at first, but I’d soon come to realise that the dead couldn’t hurt me (barring any kind of zombie uprising, of course), and life had taught me well that it was the living I needed to be wary of.
I quickly scanned the log, noting only one new entry, and as I turned to go and get changed I heard something coming from one of the drawers. How strange.
I cautiously approached the section