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Danny, is to burn dead people to ash. Specifically, your duties are to watch over the equipment at night. If it malfunctions then phone me. Otherwise, just leave me to a bit of peace and quiet, OK?’
    ‘But they’re moving around in there, Mr Winters. And they’re making these horrible sounds. You can hear them above the gas jets; I bet you can hear them over the phone, if I hold it to the ovens for you. They’re going—’
    ‘Danny, Dan – just listen to me, Danny. If I come down there now, I’ll have to file a call-out report. When my gaffer sees why I’ve had to come out at midnight you’ll be out faster than shit off the end of a shovel. Now, think carefully, Danny, do you still want this job?’
    ‘’Course I do. It’s the first I’ve had in a year.’
    ‘Didn’t any of the blokes down there tell you what to expect?’
    ‘They said I’d got the cushiest job going. Just sit here all night and keep checking the burners are working all right.’
    ‘Bugger,’ said his boss, stoically. ‘Look, Danny, as I said, it’s not a pretty job. We burn people, right? Burning people isn’t like burning old cardboard boxes. They’re complicated mechanisms made up of skin, muscle, bone. Inside they’ve got organs – those are bags of fluid and gas. You with me, Danny?’
    ‘Ay.’
    ‘Also they’ve got mouths and arseholes. So if you heat them up fast, fluids boil, and I’m talking about blood and piss now. Gasses expand. They’ve all got to come out somewhere. So what you’re hearing is basically belching and farting. But on a grand scale; you follow me, Danny? Sometimes it works on the vocal chords, too, so you can actually stand outside the crematorium oven, and it sounds like people are groaning their heads off. I’ve heard it. It is nasty. It takes some getting used to. Believe me, Danny, I’ve heard a burning corpse actually sound as if it’s singing; it nearly turned my hair white.’
    ‘How is it then, they can move?’
    ‘You must have good eyes, Danny. When I look through the spy-hole into the ovens all I can see is flames.’
    ‘But they do move about in there, Mr Winters.’
    ‘Then it’s got to be a muscle reaction. When muscle burns it shrinks. I’ve heard stories of burning corpses suddenly sitting up. There are other things, too. You might hear bangs. And I mean really loud bangs like a cannon firing. Fluids boil in the stomach making it inflate like a balloon. Eventually, the pressure’s so great – BANG! – it explodes.’
    ‘I didn’t know that. They never told me.’
    ‘All right, Danny. They were wrong not to warn you. You all right now?’
    ‘Yes, Mr Winters. Sorry to disturb you. It gave me a bit of a scare, that’s all.’
    ‘Don’t worry, Danny. As the blokes at the Crem said, you’ve landed yourself a good job. All we’re asking is you keep an eye on the place. Apart from that your time’s your own. Is that old radio still down there?’
    ‘Yeah, over on the fridge.’
    ‘Switch it on, it’ll drown out the sounds.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr Winters.’
    ‘Good night, Danny.’
    The phone clicked, then purred softly into Danny’s ear. He imagined Mr Winters shaking his head while he thumbed up the television’s volume on the remote. Danny replaced the phone and switched on the radio. Late night ballads throbbed from the speaker. He wasn’t fond of them, but it buried the sounds coming from beyond the oven doors.
    Danny felt better now that he’d talked to his supervisor. So it’d been natural what he’d heard. What he’d glimpsed, too, through the oven spy-hole. It gave me a bloody fright, though , he thought with a shiver. The blokes here should’ve warned me . He made himself a cup of tea, then he sat on a chair with its back to the wall. There, it faced the oven doors. The room consisted of bare, whitewashed walls. The floor was of concrete; it was still damp and reeked of industrial strength disinfectant where it’d been sluiced down earlier. This was