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who tells you they are big-boned; inside Mr P was a small man trying not to suffocate. As it happened, Dr Burberry discovered that Mr P had a deep vein
thrombosis in his leg, which can break off and lead to pulmonary embolism in the lungs. He said that he probably got it because he hardly ever moved.
    After this, Graham reconstructed the body, which on an obese body usually proves very difficult as the skin will tear when the needle goes through because of the sheer weight you are trying to
stitch back together; even if that doesn’t happen, you have to hope and pray that the two sides of the incision down the body are lined up. Graham explained that when he started out, quite
often he ended up with one nipple two inches higher than the other! But he now had a nifty way of dealing with the reconstruction of a larger body. He would draw three lines across the body,
horizontally, then stitch these back together first, so everything was lined up again. Job done.
    That still wasn’t the end of it, though. Clive said that the problem now was that Mr P was a health hazard. His body cavity had been opened and contaminated with gut contents; we had no
body bag big enough to put him in and we could not refrigerate him as he was too wide. Clive was worried about the health of those of us working in the mortuary. Although with any body there is a
danger of disease and therefore a daily risk to the staff, with an average-sized body, they can be handled safely by being sealed in a body bag and put back into refrigeration. Mr P was lying
uncovered, oozing body fluid which was dripping and trickling onto the floor. Clive rang Neville at once to confirm that we could release the body back to the funeral directors as Ed had given them
a cause of death and our job was done. Initially the funeral directors were not keen on coming and collecting Mr P; they don’t want decomposing bodies around the place any more than we
do.
    What the hell were we going to do with him? He could not stay on the table over the weekend forming a puddle on the floor. Clive muttered about the possibility of the mortuary being closed down
and all this hitting the local press. He thought about contacting the Infection Control Department, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. He took this problem to Ed who, thank goodness, got to
work it. Within the hour everything was settled; although there had at one point been talk of hiring – at a cost of several thousand pounds – a refrigerated lorry just for Mr P, the
funeral directors were persuaded to co-operate and come and collect him that day.
    Barry Patterson at last left the building just before it was time to lock up for the evening, in a coffin that looked like a wardrobe, and carried by eight undertakers. Another week gone and
definitely time for the pub again. I rang Maddie at once.
    I had first met Maddie a couple of days into working in the mortuary. She had started at about the same time as me, taking on a job upstairs in the histology lab as a Medical
Laboratory Assistant, or MLA; these are the people who do the less specialized tasks in the pathology laboratory. It was part of her job to bring down to the mortuary the products of conception
– foetal tissue – for ‘sensitive’ disposal. We clicked instantly and soon became close friends.
    Maddie had come to Gloucestershire from Wales with no ties and, since Luke is not the controlling type, we were able to go for a drink after work whenever we felt like it in order to catch up;
in this way our friendship grew. That night, I was overwhelmed by what I had seen over the past week or so with Mr Patterson and bent Maddie’s ear about it for the first part of the evening.
We had gone to the closest pub to the hospital, but as the evening moved on, it started to become full of underage squealing teenagers so we headed to a place we had discovered in town called The
Firestone, an old bar with a modern relaxed feel. They had got it right with