The Basement Corridor

Text 1: The Other Kind, by Branwen Coldstream

An original short story extract.

Len had been a porter at St Aidan’s for twenty-six years, and he talked to all of them. The living and the other kind. Tonight it was a Mrs Edith Mulvey, aged ninety-one, from Ward Seven, and he pushed her trolley down the long basement corridor at a gentle, steady pace, the way you might walk an old lady to church.

‘Bit chilly down here, love,’ he told her. ‘Always is. They keep the heating for the paying customers.’ The strip lights buzzed overhead, and every third one flickered, so that the two of them moved through bands of light and dark, light and dark, like a slow train through a tunnel. Somewhere behind the walls the boilers groaned. A mop bucket stood abandoned by the lift, a grey island in a pool of its own water.

At the mortuary doors he stopped, as he always stopped, and straightened the sheet where it had slipped a little at her shoulder. Her name was written on the tag in a nurse’s hurried capitals. He read it out loud, once, properly, Edith Mary Mulvey, because somebody ought to say it in full before the doors closed. Then he pressed the buzzer, and waited, whistling under his breath, a hymn he could not remember the words to.

How does Branwen Coldstream use language and structure to show Len’s attitude to the patients he moves?

You should use relevant subject terminology to support your answer.