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the loading bay for the crematorium oven, he’d been told. In the adjoining crematorium they held the services. After that, the coffin glided smoothly along the conveyor belt, through the curtained hatchway into here, where it was stored with the other coffins until evening. The crop of the day as it were. Then the late-shift stacked the coffins, along with their cold contents, into the ovens, removing the brass handles as they did so. The supervisor checked paperwork to ensure that heart pacemakers had been removed. An overlooked pacemaker could detonate with enough force to knock the oven doors off their hinges. When all the coffins were inside, the doors were shut, the controls set, the gas ignited. There they’d burn through the night until all that was left was white ash.
    Danny’s was the easy job. Just sit. Watch. Wait. Then clock off as the early-shift came on at six to clear out the ovens. Even so, Danny, like most people, was frightened of dead human beings. Even in butchers’ shops it’s rare to find a recognizable animal lying dead on the slabs. All you get is nicely processed meat. No pigs’ heads with ears and eyes; no cows’ legs covered in fur.
    So, yes, no bones about it, this job frightened him. But it was the only job he was likely to have again. For thirty years he’d been a skilled craftsman in an engineering firm. He cut differentials for tractors. He’d been proud of his exacting work. Every day he’d worn his neatly ironed boiler suit. So what? He was a professional with skills that took years to acquire. Only trouble was in his early forties he’d been struck by crippling osteoarthritis . The back pain could be so bad he was reduced to shuffling round on all fours. Then just a week after his fiftieth birthday they’d sacked him because he’d been forced to take so much sick-leave . If you’re short-term sick you get cards and sympathy; if you’re long-term sick you’re treated with contempt. Like wild dogs that turn on one of their own kind when it’s hurt, society turns nasty on you.
    But he’d got this new job, thank the Lord. He was determined to hang on to it.
    Keep busy, he told himself. Don’t let it prey on your imagination . It isn’t easy, though, when you know that just behind that steel door twenty men and women, and even children, are being burnt down to something that will be used as plant fertilizer in the next few days, if it isn’t all collected by relatives for funerary urns.
    Danny went to the employee’s rest room. It was a cluttered place: nude girl pin-ups mixed with work rotas and union circulars on walls. Scattered on the sink worktop, pieces of pastry, bacon, bits of foil that had wrapped sandwiches, used tea bags, brown mug rings. On the radio some part-time cowboy was yodelling about his best friend being killed in a bar fight down Mexico way. It drove Danny back to the loading bay.
    For a while he stared at the oven doors. The thing might as well have been a magnet; he found himself putting one foot forward. Then another. Before he even knew it, he stood at the doors. The spy-hole, covered in inch-thick glass, glowed white from the fires inside. First time he put his eye to it had been a shock. He’d looked in expecting to see nothing but vague oblong shapes being gobbled by the inferno. What he saw had been very different.
    He swallowed at the bitter taste invading his mouth. He felt queasy again, his ears rang, his neck ached where the muscles tensed.
    ‘Never mind, Danny boy – only ten more years of this, then you can retire.’
    The first time he looked through the spy-hole he saw nothing for a while. It was pretty much like looking through one of those windows set in the walls of swimming pools. You know the sort – to look out underwater. It’s a bluey colour; while every so often a body appears as someone jumps in – there’s a mess of bubbles and arms and legs. Here, instead of water you see fire filling the space between the walls; it