Three weeks into their training, they’ve watched several embalmings, helped suture, and raised veins and arteries. A post mortem case is a completely different matter. The body has already been opened by medics examining the internal organs to determine the cause of death. Their rough and ready suturing has to be undone, the sternum reopened, the organs taken out again. Once the body and the organs have been treated, the sternum is put back and the skin stitched together – this time neatly. It takes hours.
Arthur has a different suturing style to Uncle Robert – he holds the needle at a different angle and his movement is less fluid – but the result is the same; a perpendicular ridge down the torso. As he stitches, Arthur’s tall frame hunches in concentration over the body. The careful needlework will never be seen by the family – it will sit beneath the gown, or suit, or whatever clothes have been chosen – but still, Arthur takes his time. It matters. Somebody loved this man and even if there’s no one left to mourn him, he’s still a person, and embalmers have to believe that people matter. If they didn’t, why would they do their job every day?
Two and a half hours after he started, Arthur ties off the suture.
‘Ray?’ he says, breathing out heavily and finally looking up. ‘What’s the mnemonic we use for remembering completion procedures?’
Oh no. When Ray’s put on the spot, he never knows the wretched answer, however simple and obvious. This one could be particularly painful, because he might try and guess it. At least he’s cut his fingernails and knows now to keep them clean. William imagines him at the sink in his bedsit, scrubbing at his hands. His hair is still matted and haywire.
Ray stares at the window for a moment, then lifts his eyebrows. ‘Fold her frock and put it in the drawer?’
Arthur’s jawbone twitches but his face remains expressionless. ‘And what do you think that stands for, Ray?’
Ray catches William’s eye and winks. William shakes his head slightly and looks back at the body.
‘Can’t remember, sir,’ Ray says, with that terrible cheerfulness.
‘William?’ Arthur says.
‘Pack Her Cotton Dress Clean Today Please,’ he says quietly.
‘Correct.’ Arthur turns his body towards Ray. ‘Say it.’
‘Pack Her Cotton Dress Clean Today Please,’ Ray speaks loudly and clearly. William knows that this cocksure manner is only to save face and that when he goes back to his bedsit it’s another story, but he wonders if he should tell Ray how annoying it is.
‘And William, please tell your colleague here what it stands for.’
‘Pack is pack orifices. Her is set hair – or shave as appropriate. Cotton is cosmetise, if necessary. Dress is dress as directed by family. Clean is clean all mortuary equipment. Today is tidy up and check stocks. Please is attend to personal cleanliness.’
‘Thank you, William.’ Arthur clasps his hands. ‘I’d like you to take charge of these proceedings with Ray as your helper, and please give a running commentary on what you’re doing and why.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. And Ray?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Humour is important – embalmers need it to keep sane. But I’m telling you now, you will not use humour to cover your ignorance. I will never find it amusing that you have failed to learn even the most rudimentary of things. Things have got to change. Do you understand?’
While William agrees with Arthur, he sorely wishes he’d say these things to Ray in private. Roger and Simon, working with Norman at the next table, can hear every word, and each public humiliation stokes Ray’s resentment, which William will then have to endure at the pub. Outside, a car with a hole in its exhaust splutters, darkening the window high up on the white wall. Ray meets Arthur’s stare.
‘I understand, sir.’
‘Good,’ replies Arthur. ‘Off you go, William, and ask Ray to assist as and when you need him to.’
William moves closer to the table. Neither Ray nor Arthur has any idea just how familiar he is with Pack Her Cotton Dress Clean Today Please, nor what a salvation it was when he found himself back in Sutton Coldfield. In fact, in his mid-teens he used to worry sometimes about how much he loved the H and the C.
? ? ?
If mourners commented on how their loved ones looked so peaceful, so themselves, Robert didn’t tell them it was the work of his fifteen-year-old nephew, but he always passed on the compliment.
‘That’s down to you. I may do a decent job, but they can’t see those bits. What means most to them is the part you played.’ And he’d touch William’s shoulder, or rest his hand briefly on his head, even though by now, William was taller than him.
Sometimes, as he finished up on the H and started on the C and found he instinctively knew what colour eyeshadow to put on, how much or how little blusher, what nail varnish, William wondered if he was a poofter after all – that’s what they were called at his new school. Sometimes he wished he was. He could be like his uncle and Howard. He could get Martin back – he need never have lost him.
But it was girls he liked. When the bus stopped at Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls and they streamed on, it was their faces, legs, and the imagined shape of their breasts under their uniforms that William thought about. Sometimes, when he couldn’t summon the will not to, he’d think of Imogen Mussey and those intense few days at their home. He always regretted that indulgence though, because it inevitably led to Martin. It seemed every good thought in his head had to lead to something bad. The thrill of the bed hop to the humiliation of a beating. The kindness of Martin to the cowardice of William’s betrayal of him. The beauty of the ‘Miserere’ to the shock of his mother’s spite.
Stop it. Forget it. All of it.
? ? ?
‘So, first is Pack,’ William states now, looking briefly at Arthur and Ray before pincering a sizeable chunk of cotton wool with large metal tongs. ‘For pack the orifices.’ Lifting the man’s thin legs and bending them back towards his stomach, as if he’s a giant baby, William inserts the wad up his backside.
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