‘That’s Beukes. B-E-U-K-E-S,’ says a soft-spoken woman into an office bordering the funeral parlour waiting room, typically overcompensated with smiling, doe-eyed receptionists, soft paintings on pastel walls, hard, but strangely comfortable couches, and large vases filled with synthetic flowers. ‘Passed away peacefully.’ She pauses. ‘Aged 90 years. Will be lovingly remembered by all her family and friends,’ she says, before gently returning the phone to its cradle. Next to me on the small pine side-table, the Cape Times headline reads Dead Judge’s Wife Arrested.
A short, stocky man fills the gap to this small enclave of the waiting room, blocking out what little natural light was peeking through the frosted doors at the front. He holds out a right hand and offers a meaty shake – the kind that’s difficult to grip.
Ronny Ackers is by all accounts a pretty solid bloke. Thick-set, bordering on paunch. But for a 62-year-old man, who’s just been called back from retirement, he looks surprisingly good. Thin, rectangular-framed glasses sit comfortably on his wrinkling round face, in front of a pair of eyes desperate to share stories. He exudes a warm, unpretentious air, and walks and talks with palpable purpose. Tucked under his left arm is an A4 folder bearing the logo of ICSA – the Independent Crematorium Company of South Africa.
‘Let’s talk in here,’ he says, striding into an unoccupied office. At least a dozen bunches of colourful fake flowers, wrapped in plastic, are stacked high on the desk. Ronny slides the folder out from underneath his arm and drops it on the table. And there, halfway down, towards the spine, standing out against the glossy white card, are a few light specks of blood.
He pulls up a seat on the opposite side of the table but looks uneasy, restless, and before long, he’s up and standing, thumbing through a small pile of enlarged, laminated photographs.
‘You see…’ he says, plucking a blurry picture from the folder. It’s a head shot of a young girl. Late 20s, probably. Killed in a motorcycle accident. Her hair, long and liquorice black, is wild and haggard and splayed on the slab behind her. What little is left of her face reveals an expression of utter terror. Her white teeth stand out from her lipless mouth above the deep red and fleshy pink that otherwise overwhelm the photograph. ‘…you must clean up all this with tweezers…’ he continues, his deep voice now a distant echo in the small office. ‘…and get all the old pieces of metal, or whatever, is in there…’ He drags his stubby index finger over the photograph, indicating exactly where he means. ‘Then,’ he continues, ‘You actually start filling up the facial cavities with wax. Where necessary you’ll stitch it up – where you can get the skin together. And of course, now,’ he says, sliding a new picture out of the folder, ‘That is the result.’ And, whether because of the restoration, or the fact that he’d covered the last picture, a small amount of the grief and horror that had flooded the room dissipates, as he reveals the photograph of her almost irreparable face post-reconstruction – smooth, bloodless, with slightly rosy cheeks, but disturbingly un-human.
It’s not ideal. Even the faces of the dead reveal emotion, and, ideally, when you’re looking at a face in a coffin, you want you want it to radiate peace and tranquillity. But this isn’t the movies, and these results are pretty much impossible to achieve, especially in South Africa, Ronny tells me, where the latest latex and reconstruction materials and colourings are replaced with a few jars of wax and a can of spray paint.
Ronny acknowledges this: ‘What the family must expect, is that you’re never going to get a person looking 100%,’ he mentions later that afternoon. Especially not in the severe accident cases. In many these, he has to encourage the family not to view the body, for the sheer horror of it all, but, he says, ‘You can’t say no. Some people are very adamant – they want it done. We are there to provide a service, and you do it to the best of your ability.’ This is all in reference to a story about a young boy who was brought to him by his distraught family after he was hit by a bus. ‘They forced me to open that coffin…’ he says, his firm tone wavering for the first time.
And so it becomes clear that his role is not to create wax models that could stand proudly in a Madame Tussauds exhibit – as much as he’d like to. Restorative artists, as they are euphemistically known, typically have a maximum of 12 hours, and very limited resources, to make it bearable for the family to have one last look at their loved one. And it’s seldom about religious conventions or cultural practices – most people who request his work simply want to say goodbye to a face that’s recognisable and vaguely tolerable.
‘And this is a different case.’ He pulls another laminated photograph from the pile, breaking the momentary silence. ‘That’s a lady. She’s been hit with a crowbar.’ The horror floods back into the room, as the picture drains what little normality had clawed its way back. ‘They broke into her house and they killed her. They ripped her hair right off her head.’ He doesn’t linger on this one – he’s eager to reveal the After photograph. Once again he explains the processes behind this specific restoration.
The first task is to pull together and suture whatever skin he can, offering some sort of foundation on which to build up various features. The sutures are covered with the malleable restorative wax, which goes on hot and hardens when cooled, and it is this wax that is shaped to recreate cheekbones, eye sockets, ears and jaws. In the background of the picture there’s a can that wouldn’t look out of place in a graffiti artist’s arsenal. There are limited colours available, so the art of achieving a realistic colouring lies in the blending process. ‘You start with the pink like that, and you work up towards the nose. You work up… you blend up…’ he says, illustrating on his own face. ‘Because the darker shade is always at the back of the head.’ After that, Ronny will add a touch of base and basic make-up to remove the shine of the wax, only adding lipstick and bold eye shadow on express request. ‘And then, of course,’ he says, reaching for the longer hair at the base of my neck, ‘I took the hair off the back of her head here to give some eyebrows.’ He gives my mullet a little tug. ‘Just from the back.’
Some cases, he says, are easier than others, and he’s most relieved when a body comes in with at least half a face to work with. Such is Ronny’s enthusiasm for the job, that it’s not hard to imagine him peeking excitedly under the sheet, hoping for some features to work with. Using a photograph of a young man who was dragged under a truck to illustrate how much it helps, he points out exactly how he was able to use the unaffected side of his face to recreate the other, which he says was nothing but jelly – even the eye of the deceased had to be put back into the socket. But, he says, he’s not always so lucky – ‘if you haven’t got any part of the face, then you’ll ask the family for a photograph. A recent one, I mean – some people are ridiculous. They’ll give you a photograph of the guy when he was 19 years old, and today he’s 60-odd. You know?’
Ronny has always been a hands-on kind of guy. He’s done his time in the army as a paratrooper, and then nine years in the navy. But it was his first job post-navy that got him into the funeral industry, when he used his original training as a carpenter to build coffins in the funeral home’s on-site factory. But he soon found himself intrigued with the mysterious workings taking place at the back. ‘I used to be inquisitive,’ he says. ‘What’s going on in the morgue? And I peaked in.’ It wasn’t long before he was caught with his head around the door, and before he knew it, he was dragged into the mortuary to work on the recently deceased.
Soon he found himself deeply entrenched in the workings of the morgue, and he spent the next 36 years embalming bodies and performing post-mortems. It was a slow journey to the top, but eventually he learnt the skills to become one of the region’s most respected restorative artists – the position that he still holds today.
Ronny laughs when he talks of his early days as a facial re-constructor – his first job was a royal disaster. He was tasked with rebuilding a collapsed cheekbone, a process he thought would be fairly simple. He filled the cavity with wax, and handed the restored body over to the undertaker to rush it through to Belville, where the ceremony was taking place. But in his haste, the undertaker failed to adequately anchor the body to the coffin, and en-route to the funeral, it slid around inside. ‘Thank god the undertaker opened the coffin before the family did, because it was for visitation. When he opened it, half of the wax had fallen out of the hole where I put it. There was one massive hole on the side of the face and half of the ear had fallen off,’ he chuckles gently. ‘Imagine what would’ve happened if the family… if he didn’t open it before that? That had my heart throbbing!’
They do offer a basic introductory course in the art of dealing with dead bodies, but, according to Ronny, you can read all the books you like – if you don’t have the stomach for the morgue at the back, you ain’t gonna cut it. Too many people, he says, come along to job interviews thinking ‘Lekker, I’m gonna sit and learn, I’m gonna drive a hearse’, not realising the crap they’ll have to deal with day in, and day out. But it took Ronny no more than a few weeks to get used to dealing with dead bodies, and it seems you either have it or you don’t: ‘I’ve had guys that have come from the ambulance station. There might be body parts that have been picked up next to the railway line and have been put in black bags. And on a Monday morning I would send them down to the state mortuary to go and fetch the deceased.’ Most of them, he says, don’t bother to come back.
The accident cases, he says, are the worst. ‘They look terrible, some of them. There are cases where you can’t do anything to the face. You know, there was a guy who went through a shredder machine and… the family wanted to view him. Now that was impossible.’ In those cases, he says, they’ll take the oldest and strongest relatives to view the body, and in this specific case, the relative was adamant: ‘No, no. No ways,’ he told Ronny. ‘The coffin stays closed.’
But somehow Ronny is able to cope with all this death just fine; he’s truly integrated the profession into his everyday life, and he’s not ashamed to speak of how much he enjoys the challenges associated with it all. He has coping mechanisms, but these are surprisingly simple. He speaks fondly of his band, The Savage Eye, that used to be his principle escapism tool in the early days. Their crowning moment, he tells me proudly, came when they won a battle of the bands at the old Three Arts Theatre in Retreat, over The Idiots and The Flames. This band broke up a few years ago as everyone went their own ways, but ‘now,’ he says with a glint in his eye, ‘I’ve got a garden full of gnomes and dwarfs and ornaments that I’m busy with all day.’ He pauses. ‘And, I do embalming after hours.’
With that, Ronny hops up from the chair. ‘Come, let me show you the back’. He leads me through the still, stark, concrete courtyard, past a small fleet of shiny black hearses, and into a small room just a few metres from the reception area in which I had waited a few hours ago. As soon as we enter, the sharp smell of formaldehyde and ethanol rises rapidly up my nostrils, swirls around violently in my head, and leaves me reaching out to the wall for support. The shrill ring of a telephone perched in the middle of the room echoes throughout the hollow morgue, and a man wearing a plastic apron quietly shuffles over to answer it. Ronny points out the slab where they do all their work, and the crude tools they use in the process, and then casually pops open the fridge door – home to a few dozen bodies, tightly wrapped in white plastic bags, most already coffined.
I forced a grimace in an attempt to match Ronny’s smile, and thanked him for his time. I shook his meaty hand and walked out through the reception area, past the sympathetic receptionists, towards the bright sunlight filtering through the door. I pushed it open, stepped gingerly into the sticky midday heat, and headed towards the chaotic main road ahead as I tried hard to shake the images from my cluttered head.
