A Terrible Kindness(6)
Woken from his afternoon nap by the buttery fug of baking thickening the air in their flat, William drags his blanket into the kitchen to snuggle into the old armchair and watch his mother. Warmth washes over his legs as she reaches into the oven, pulling out the wonky old baking tray and laying it on the melamine table. She slides the palette knife under the largest biscuit, puts it on a china saucer and cuts it in half. Together they watch the rising coil of steam. ‘For his Lordship.’ She gives a deep curtsy, holding the saucer in both hands. The gold leaf on its border glints at him, and his sleep-soft face lifts into a smile as he reaches out to take it. ‘Don’t burn your mouth,’ she whispers.
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.