It is then that William notices Valerie’s perfect left hand. Nothing missing or mashed, no blood, no bruise, not even a scratch. No matter the twisted leg, the missing toes or the indent on one side of her skull. It will be her perfect hand that her parents remember when they have to remember this.
Carefully, he lifts the carotid artery from the neat incision in her neck. He rests it flat on the stainless steel separator, noticing the tiny capillaries tracing their delicate path through the blood vessel. He eases the small artery tube into the cut he has made and then repeats the process with the internal jugular vein. After joining the first to the supply of arterial fluid and the second to a tube leading to a bucket by his feet, William picks up the hand pump. Squeeze release, squeeze release, squeeze release. The fake heartbeat drives the fluid through the girl’s arteries and her blood into the bucket. William’s hand aches from all the pumping. His back aches from leaning over small bodies, but he doesn’t slow down, or stretch his back, or flex his fingers.
Once the body has been aspirated, treated with fluids and the incisions sutured, William breathes deeply. He takes her left hand in both of his and rubs, bending her knuckles, easing the fluid to the very end of the fingertips, rendering them pink again.
‘There we are, Valerie,’ he says, ‘all done.’ He doesn’t mind that Harry, busy now at the next table, can hear. While he continues to hold her hand, he finds himself singing, very softly, barely more than a murmur.
‘I forget all your words of promise
You made to someone, my pretty girl
So give me your hand, my sweet Myfanwy,
For no more but to say “farewell”.’
The last time he’d sung this he was holding another hand. Martin’s, his best friend in Cambridge, who would theatrically grab his whenever they sung it together. ‘She’s Welsh, you idiot,’ he mutters to himself, ‘sing it in Welsh.’ He glances up at Harry, but he is suturing, and doesn’t seem to have noticed his quiet serenade.
‘Anghofia’r oll o’th addewidion
A wneist i rywun, ’ngeneth ddel,
A dyro’th law, Myfanwy dirion
I ddim ond dweud y gair “Ffarwél”.’
William walks to the stack of coffins. The top one is white, flown over with the Irish embalmers. He’s glad. Valerie would probably prefer white. He lowers her into it, arranges her head to one side, covers her body with one of the donated blankets and rests her hand on top of it.
He carries the coffin into the chapel and lays it down on one of the pews, uneasy that Aberfan seems to have resurrected memories of the two people he’s trained himself so rigorously to forget.
The waxy lampshades dip and swing as the door opens. Jimmy’s lean figure enters quickly carrying a blanketed body. Another one. And after that will come another. And the later they come, the harder it is. The longer they have been under the slurry, the quicker the decomposition once the air hits them. Now the diggers are moving through, some bodies are hurt a second time. Jimmy takes the bundle through to the vestry.
‘I’ll tell you what.’ Jimmy stands, out of breath, hands on hips, next to Harry’s station. ‘I’m not religious, but after this, I’ll never hear a bad word against the Sally Army.’
‘They’d been here twenty-four hours before we even arrived,’ says Harry, walking to the back wall for a coffin, ‘must have served hundreds of cups of tea and still going strong.’
‘You’d expect sandwiches and tea,’ Jimmy says, ‘but you know what else they’ve got?’
Harry nods. ‘Whisky.’
‘And cigarettes.’ Jimmy shakes his head.
‘Good on ’em.’ Harry carefully places the body from his trestle into the coffin. ‘Some of those miners came straight from a shift on Friday morning and haven’t stopped. And where are we now? Sunday lunchtime!’
William is suddenly ravenous. He hasn’t slept and no one has mentioned a break, though Jimmy has brought them sandwiches every so often. On a busy day at work, he might look after three bodies. Valerie was his seventh. There are now five embalming stations around him doing the same. The formaldehyde fumes he usually enjoys are intense, even with all the leaded windows tilted open to the chill day.
‘Jimmy?’ he asks. ‘Can I go and get something to eat?’
‘Surely,’ says Jimmy. ‘At the last count, there are five left to recover.’
On the way through, William glances at Valerie and notices a speck of dirt still in her index fingernail. He reaches in his pocket for his Swiss army knife, flicks open the smallest blade and, holding her hand firmly to get traction, he scrapes hard at it, wiping the black smudge from the knife onto his trousers before going at it again.
In the porch he slides his coat on and ties his scarf over his chest. With the cold air streaming through the gap under the heavy door, William hears Jimmy from the vestry.
‘Let’s hope this doesn’t screw that young man up forever. He’s a natural.’
‘Got a beautiful voice on him too,’ says Harry.
Braced against the cold, he thinks at least there’s one good thing about not having spoken to his mother for five years. He can’t even be tempted to tell her about any of this. She wouldn’t be able to bear it. He decides, with relief, that it wouldn’t help either of them to visit her when he is finished here, even if it’s the nearest he’s been to her since she left.
6
Outside the air is bitter and damp. The light is failing, but it doesn’t feel like any particular time of day to William. He tries to imagine Aberfan as an ordinary mining village, with children alive and well, and grown-ups whose world is still intact. He weaves in and out of cordons, police, miners and sand sacks, to get to the Salvation Army station. The soles of his shoes are tacky. The idea of trying to clean them when he gets home is revolting.