Once the body is exposed, you have to listen to the heart, the lungs, look at the eyes and try to elicit pain. Nothing happens, of course, since the person is dead. I feel like a total weirdo as I go through the motions. The most awkward part of the whole procedure is feeling the chest for a pacemaker. This is important, because if a pacemaker remains in the body when it’s being cremated, it’ll explode. Still, there’s something totally off about feeling a cold corpse’s chest.

I arrive at the morgue, to find one of the nurses looking flustered.

‘Katarina, we’ve had three triage sixes arrive. The emergency department would normally deal with it but they’re too busy. Can you sort it out, please?’

I stare blankly at her. Triage 6?

‘You know,’ she says, rolling her eyes at my ignorance, ‘DOA.’

DOA?

‘Dead on arrival,’ the morgue attendant explains helpfully as he walks past.

This leads to my introduction to what I like to refer to as ‘the death van’. The death van is a non-descript white van driven by anonymous contractors no one seems to know anything about, who drive around New South Wales fetching dead bodies that need their deaths certified by a doctor.

The van rolls up outside the hospital; the contractors tell the staff they need a doctor to certify a triage 6—or dead on arrival—then they wheel the body back into the van and disappear mysteriously, as if they were never there.

I stare at the van doors, almost morbidly fascinated, wondering what is about to declare itself. The death van driver then helpfully explains. ‘And sorry, Doc, but one of them’s a decomp.’

I’m getting sick of all these abbreviations. ‘Sorry?’

‘Decomposing. You know … smell’s not great.’

Holding my breath, I watch with voyeuristic horror as they wheel out the ‘decomp’ and unzip the blue body bag. I stare at the withered, blackened corpse in front of me. ‘Looks pretty dead to me,’ I say, holding my nose. ‘Do you reckon I need to do everything? Like do I really need to check his pupils and stuff?’

I wonder whether I should go through the proper motions and listen to the corpse’s chest to ascertain there are no breath sounds or heartbeat, but I start to feel a little queasy at the thought of my stethoscope touching a dead body, which has been decomposing for the last month. I settle for putting on some gloves and palpating the chest for any movement, which is horrible enough.

‘Yep, dead … definitely dead,’ I say firmly, signing off on the clipboard.

‘Okay, there are two more to go, Doc.’

‘All right, wheel them out,’ I say, trying to breathe normally now the ‘decomp’ is safely back in his zipped bag on the van shelf.