This morning, he checks the paperwork; the death has been registered, it’s a cremation, and both doctors have signed the forms. He wheels the table to the centre of the room and removes the sheet.
‘Morning, Margery.’ He touches her yellow waxy hand then reaches behind him to flick the radio on. The acoustics in the mortuary are dreadful really, like a cavernous bathroom, but he’s grown to love it. It’s Dana and ‘All Kinds of Everything’; the simple tune has a kind of purity appropriate for this old lady with no wedding ring.
As he works, he hopes Margery will replace the bright flashes of the child’s broken head nestling under his chin. ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ now. The procedure comes so naturally to William that sometimes when he’s finished, he can’t remember carrying out parts of it at all, but his equipment and the state of the body tell him he has. He packs her orifices now, singing loudly, then gently lifts her into her coffin. He dresses her, cuts, files and cleans her nails, combs her hair, trims her eyebrows.
He has done a good job. But today is not a good day. The body has tormented him. Too big, too old, too clean, too whole. On a day like today, he’d prefer a post mortem job; a body already cut, disrupted and crudely stitched back up by the pathologist. And, God forgive him, on a bad day, he thinks that to find a child on the table might provide some sort of exorcism for the children of his dreams.
Later, he’ll be aware of the look that flits between Howard and Robert over lunch, when he’s like this. And he’ll hear, when Gloria gets home in the evening, Robert and her talking quietly. He doesn’t blame them. He sends Margery’s body fluids down the sluice, wishing he could do the same with the contents of his fixated memory.
46
MARCH 1972
On Saturday 18th March, the morning of his twenty-fifth birthday, William is woken by Gloria kissing him loudly on alternate cheeks, twenty-five times, holding his face in her hands as she has every year since they’ve been married. He emerges from sleep smiling.
Having been sung to at breakfast by Uncle Robert, Howard and Gloria, and opened their gifts, it’s now only the two of them. She’s just sat on his lap in the kitchen and asked him if they can go to Cambridge for the day.
‘I don’t want to.’ He snuggles into her soft body. ‘It’s my birthday, and you want me to be happy on my birthday, don’t you?’ He was hoping they could go back to bed.
Gloria reaches for her teacup on the kitchen table that’s messy with birthday cards, wrapping paper, aftershave from Robert and Howard, a wallet from her. She takes a sip, puts the cup down and rakes her fingers through his hair. ‘I think it would be good for you.’
‘Enough.’ William gently pushes her from his lap, stands, picks up his own cup and leans against the sink, immediately feeling damp seeping into his back. This is the third consecutive weekend she’s suggested they take a train and go to evensong. ‘Why make me remember things I want to forget?’
Gloria sits back down on William’s vacated chair. ‘Sometimes, I think all you do is try not to remember. It must be exhausting.’ She picks up the unopened card they both know is from Evelyn and then gently rests it against the teapot. Later, she’ll put it on the mantelpiece next to her own; one of the small, determined stands she takes to acknowledge his mother.
Looking across at him now, her face softens. ‘I wouldn’t ask to go to Aberfan, but evensong? In Cambridge? It’s beautiful. What if you went, and actually enjoyed it?’
The teacup he’s holding is suddenly so light and fragile, and his hand so tense, the only thing to do is hurl it at the wall.
William hates World of Sport, but Gloria leaves him alone when it’s on, so with the broken teacup swept up and dropped in the bin, he’s now in the lounge staring at Brian Moore talking about football teams he has no interest in.
Night sweats, bad dreams and waking flashbacks have been in their marriage from day one, a short six months after Aberfan, but Gloria seemed to take them in her stride, just as she seemed to take his determination to remain childless in her stride. It’s getting on for six years since Aberfan. Six years! He’d hoped as time went on, his brain would calm down, that the electric-snap bursts of battered limbs, broken bones and most of all, parents’ stricken faces, would start to fade. If anything, they’re getting worse.
He has wondered about the other two Birmingham embalmers who went to Aberfan. Do they suffer like him? He knows Gloria would approve were he to get in touch with them. It’s not the embalmers’ way, he always concludes. At times it’s a tough job, but William has always felt it’s expected to bear those times quietly, with dignity.