Then they’d talked about Egyptians pulling brains out through the nostrils, but he found his mind kept jumping back to the thought of Gloria with a baby daughter.
‘You’ve painted your nails,’ William notices now. ‘Nice colour.’
‘Thanks!’ she says, smiling at her splayed fingers. ‘I always do them if I’ve got two days off in a row.’
‘I used to paint nails for my uncle in the morgue.’ He’d never offer this to a normal girl, but he’s confident she’ll understand. The risk pays off.
‘I did too!’ She grins. ‘For Dad. I loved it! Especially how when you hook their hands over the edge of the coffin they don’t budge an inch.’ She laughs. ‘I used to think it meant they really wanted it doing, the way their hand just stayed put. I was only thirteen.’
‘I was fourteen,’ he says, and they laugh again. ‘Actually, that’s still my favourite bit; the cosmetology.’ Encouraged by her warm delight in anything he says, he confesses, ‘I love it all: hair, make-up, nails.’
‘Maybe you should be a beautician.’
‘No.’ He laughs. ‘It’s after we’ve gone through all the other stuff, I like being able to say it’s all over now, we’re just going to make you lovely for your family.’
Gloria stretches her leg out to gently kick his shin. ‘You’re a talker, then. Dad natters his way through an embalming.’
‘So does my uncle,’ William says. ‘He tells them about the weather. I tend to stick to explaining what I’m doing.’
She tilts her head and a thick curtain of auburn hair falls across half her face. ‘What, everything?’
‘I sing during those bits.’
Her laughter is kind and William couldn’t feel more pleased with himself as he goes up to bed an hour later.
? ? ?
As early autumn had taken hold in Sutton Coldfield, William discovered that he found the presence of the dead calming, and the sight of his uncle quietly, skilfully looking after them equally so. He had five more weeks until half-term and his move to Swansea, but he found the more time he spent in the morgue, the more he liked it. There was a relief in looking at a corpse; nothing more could hurt them. Nothing more could be done or said. He’d yet to see a dead body that didn’t look peaceful.
He was relieved to find he didn’t mind the visceral nature of it either, wasn’t at all squeamish when the sharp trocar pierced a heart, or stomach or lungs, to drain off the fluid. He didn’t have to look away when the needle went through the roof of a mouth and into the nostril to keep the jaw from hanging open.
He couldn’t help but register the intrusive and, yes, even though done by his gentle uncle, the violent nature of some of it. So once the P for packing （which, he was shocked to discover, meant shoving wodges of cotton into every orifice） was done, and they got to the H and C, he felt a sense of relief. It had quickly become very natural, standing next to Robert, to say, ‘All done now, Stanley,’ or June, or Terrence, ‘all finished.’
Doing this quiet, intimate work in the peaceful morgue, and with no audience, was enormously appealing. The simplicity and privacy of it won him over. No performance, no audience, no humiliation. As the distance between him and his chorister days increased from days and weeks to months, his future as an embalmer acted as an anchor for his present and some kind of hope for his future.
He let the routine of his days carry him. From one lesson to another, to lunch, usually on his own if he got his way, though sometimes he put up with someone’s small talk. Then straight home, his bag heavy with textbooks, to a warm, quiet welcome from Robert and Howard, who carried on around him, delivering tea and biscuits and taking a quick glance at the work he was doing. Sometimes, looking up from his books, William imagined Evelyn at work in a very different environment; moving lightly amongst polished pianos, hulking double basses and cellos, glinting trumpets and flutes. In those early days, when she still thought he was going to join her there, she wrote to him about it; ordering obscure sheet music for customers, recommending local teachers to parents, stock-taking. Yesterday a man had come in to buy a kazoo and asked her to recommend a good teacher, and the piano tuner’s young guide dog had cocked its leg on a drum kit. It impressed him really, her persistence in trying to entertain him, but it was now ingrained in him to brace himself against her, hold her responsible, never forget. So no, he didn’t write back to her, even though sometimes he felt a twitch of humour, the urge to respond, to continue with a piece of nonsense she had started. But he always managed to resist. While his mother knew from practical, matter-of-fact letters from Robert that he was healthy, going to bed on time and doing his homework, she had absolutely no idea that William had been helping in the mortuary and was often entrusted to take sole charge of the H and the C of Pack Her Cotton Dress Clean Today Please. She had no idea of the growing resolve that he wasn’t going to Swansea at half-term. But then neither did Robert and Howard.