Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill Page B

domain was surprisingly bracing. We approached it through a walled yard where white vans with their rear windows painted out were coming and going. One of them was backed up close to a small unloading bay. It might have been delivering groceries, but was in fact delivering a body. The menwho drove, loaded and unloaded the vans, several of whom were drinking tea in a room off the passage through which we entered, were middle-aged to elderly and looked tough and slightly ribald. They glanced at us sideways as we passed the door of their room, and in their eyes was the faintest hint – an almost imperceptible gleam – of mockery. They knew. They knew that however nasty death may be while it is happening, it is too ordinary an event to make a fuss about. Most of them, no doubt, went about their work soberly, but that hint of a gleam suggested that some of them might enjoy doing some flippancy to a corpse – using its navel as an ashtray, perhaps – imagining as they did it the horror of a squeamish observer. They would probably respect the grief of the bereaved, but squeamishness they would despise. Having shed it, they had moved into a category apart.
    My own reaction to this place where dead bodies were all in the day’s work had something prurient about it. If the men in the room off the entrance passage looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, so did I at them: I did not want to betray the extent of my curiosity, did not want to be caught at it. My awareness of the cadavers hidden in the white vans and in the accommodation specially designed for them on Maria’s side of the plate-glass window, was sharp. Had I been a dog my ears would have been pricked and my hackles up. I think this odd excitement was connected at some level with the violent recoil from dead animals which seized me in childhood when I unexpectedly came on a decaying corpse hidden in long grass, or caught in a trap, or on one of those macabre gamekeeper’s ‘larders’, the wires on which they strung up the corpses of‘vermin’ they had trapped or shot. I often went a long way round to avoid passing one of those – in fact I think they are the reason why I have never much enjoyed walking through a wood. The two reactions seem like opposites, but could be the opposite sides of the same coin. Whatever the truth, I did call up that mortuary and those dead animals when trying to reason myself out of the night terrors in my mother’s house: ‘Calm down, this is not a matter of the mind saying “Alas, she will soon be dead and gone” – to that there is a whole set of other reactions of quite a different kind. This is simply a matter of flesh shuddering because flesh rots, and it is possible not only to acknowledge the ordinariness of that dissolution, but also to feel it.’ Not long afterwards I wrote a poem – or perhaps more accurately a short statement – as a result of that visit to the mortuary, which had contributed a good deal to my attitude towards death.
    I have learnt to recognize the plain white vans with painted-out back windows and the black ones, equally discreet, standing at those backstreet doors which have a never-opened look (misleading).
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    The white vans carry dead junkies picked up in alleys, old women found frozen when the neighbours began to wonder and called the cops, the man who stayed late at his office to hang himself, the boy stabbed in a sudden brawl outside a disco.
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    The black vans, early every morning, deliver coffins to mortuaries.
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    Men who handle corpses despise people who don’t.
    Why? How? What? Where? cry the hearts of the bereaved, and the men who handle corpses lower their eyelids over looks of secret but impatient ribaldry.
    A few of them are necrophiliacs onto a good thing, but most are normal men who have learnt from handling death that it tells nothing because it has nothing to tell, there is