“It could be worse” says Madge without looking up, “this death thing.”

The morgue is cracked porcelain. Rogers pokes through the dead man’s file. His fingers whip the pages.

“Who was he?” Hughes asks.

“He ate well, that’s all you need to know.”

“Really well,” adds Madge looking at his large belly.

“How much can a man hold?” Butcher is all heart.

The white walls feel like he’s farted all over them, the dead bloke I mean. That’s the way it is with death, the body relaxes that’s all.

The cracks in the tiles creak. A breeze blows a cloud across Butcher’s eyes. Madge reassures them, “He’s clean, alright.”

The Morgue is not air fresh porcelain. Stumpy comes back into the room, he’s got the tubes that Madge wanted. “These look like they’re in need of a clean,” he says.

“Give em here.” Madge hasn’t much time.

“You should clean em before ya stick em in.”

She looks at him. “He’s dead.”

“It mounts up. The germs... The germs mount up.”

“Will someone give me a hand?” Madge looked around.

“He’s all yours.” Butcher is generous to a fault.

“I’m not touching him,” adds Stumpy. “We’re on strike.”

There is nothing to be done. They are on strike. The smell is getting unbearable.

Madge looks at them, “He goes outside.”

Butcher hands the look back “They’re all suppose to go outside.”

“I mean on the street."

Stumpy lets out a laugh, “What did she say?”

“He goes out on the street,” Hughes says in answer for Madge.

Everyone just stopps for a second. They breathe heavily, their foreheads get creased up.

“And what’s he going to do there?” asks Butcher.

“Hang about. Rot,” Madge is on form.

“He can’t do that,” complains Hughes.

Madge is cool and calm “Like you said it’s a strike. It’s the best way I knows of telling the world what we’re about. And then, maybe then, they’ll listen."

She sticks a tube in the corpses stomach. “No-one wants to bury him. There’s no one to burn him. There’s no room in the fridges and the vats are chocker. What else do we do with him?’

*****

A few hours later, Madge, Stumpy, Hughes and Butcher are looking at the corpse. They’ve done him right to the nines, a special job seeing as none of them was getting paid. It was all for good publicity; they’d brought out the best of him. He looked better than photographs of fast food like Burger King or something.

But now they’d done it they didn’t quite know whether to go through with it or not. I mean bodies might get left out on streets during wars and that, but no one had heard of anything quite like this before.
Well, I suppose they did it to highway men and the like, left them hanging to rot in cages, but this was different as they had been and done it all proper and cleaned him up. And that was down to Madge being the woman in the team. But to now go and leave him out on the street, just to make a point – well it was unusual and they all knew it.

“I dunno,” said Hughes. “Don’t seem right. We can’t just put him outside.”

“You can’t go and treat a person like that. There’s the sanctity of life and all that.”

“He’s dead,” pointed out Madge.

“But what would he have wanted, eh?” asked Butcher, “Answer me that.”

“That man died for a reason,” Madge was feeling strong about this. “And whatever that might be, he ended up here. And that wasn’t no accident.”

They all nodded, because Madge had put a fine finger on it. “And that’s it, you see. He could have gone elsewhere, and then we would never have come up with the idea in the first place. Don’t shake your head Butcher, he was a part of all this. He was here when I suggested it, he was here when we cleaned him up, and he’s here now.”

“But he’s dead, Madge,” said Butcher.

“Sometimes we get carried along by everything around us. Sometimes we don’t get to exactly say what we want, but our presence is enough. Just by being there, we’re there and that’s all there is to it.”

This wasn’t holding water with Hughes, “but he was a breathing man, who walked and talked, shared time with friends and probably has a load of people who love him. There are some things we don’t do.”

“So what do we do?” It was obvious to Madge now, “just put him out back with the others. Just squeeze him in the freezer. They’re all looking a bit like squashed buns in the freezer in there. We’re piling them one on top of the other. When this is all over they’ll all be stuck to each other. If we try pulling them apart they’ll peel each other’s faces off, we’ll be breaking bones to straighten them all out. This strike has got to stop.”

Oh, right, I see,” said Hughes.

“I don’t want to be a part of this,” said Butcher.

“I think she’s right,” said Stumpy.

“Things have gone far enough, Butcher,” continues Madge, “you don’t have to be with us, but I reckon I’ve got a majority in this room and that’s what counts.”

They all nodded. There was nothing Butcher could do but his complaints were duly noted.

*****

That afternoon a body of a fat man was sitting on a park bench, with his eyes closed. It was a warm day and there was a gentle breeze blowing through his hair. A crowd surrounded him. He was very neatly dressed in a black suit and wearing a beautiful paisley tie with a perfect knot. Madge did that, as they all felt that women are better at that sort of thing. It could have been that he had simply closed his eyes to savour the day and that he was holding his breath to hold joy in, because, although death had bruised his eyes purple blue, he was evidently glad to be counted.