The room was as cold as the day outside. As I stepped out of the warmth of the corridor, I could see my breath in the air. In the light, I made out the unmistakable shape of the forms under the sheets, and I knew where Francis had brought me. The room was filled with steel trolleys. It was a vast space, with perhaps ninety separate mounds spaced at regular intervals on a ceramic floor of square white tiles. These same tiles in orange climbed the walls to a height of about five feet. At the end of each trolley there was a tray of shining steel tools, blades and tongs glittering in the glare of the strip lights. The students paired off, and stood in twos before their veiled mounds. Dr Fitzgerald took up her own position on the podium at the front of the room, and switched on the computer display hidden in the pine rostrum. The projector above us came to life, and an image of the human brain in X-ray appeared on the white screen behind her. She read out names from a clipboard in front of her, and the students answered in turn. Whilst she did so, they took latex gloves from boxes on the tables in front of them, and coaxed them into place. Francis talced his own hands before putting them on, unobtrusively showing me the technique. He answered to the name of Edward King, and it reminded me to listen out for my own alias. When Austin Willis was called out, I replied ‘Here’ without hesitation. I was amazed when she accepted and ticked me off her list. I did a brief inventory of the other faces in the room. Only one person was looking at us – a small girl with a short brown ponytail; she stared over at us with naked contempt. I could tell, however, from the way that her eyes narrowed into little slits when she saw me looking, that it was the hatred of impotence. She was trying to make me ashamed of myself for want of a more effective reproach. I was not afraid that she would say anything.

When the roll call was completed, the other students around the room pulled back their sheets to reveal the dead faces underneath, that same cold layer of calm lying over their features like the new snow over the city. Francis took our sheet in his hand and pulled it smoothly down to the chest of the man in front of us. I understood that any hesitation or show of emotion would now be fatal to our pretence.

I had never seen a dead body before. The smell came off the flesh, a mixture of the chemical preservative and the dead meat itself. The man under our sheet was old, perhaps in his mid-seventies. His white hair was confined to two thin downy strips above his ears. The skin of his cheeks was grey and rough with stubble. His eyes were closed; the lips of his mouth rested open, showing the yellow edges of his incisors. I tried to bite back the urge to vomit as I looked down at the chest. Work had begun in earnest on the organs. I felt as if I was breaching the old man’s privacy, gazing down into the cavity of his stomach. But it was the look on Francis’s face that I remember most of all. It jarred so strongly with the assumed impassivity of the scientists around us that I feared it alone might give us away. He gazed at the old man’s face with pure compassion, and for the briefest moment placed his hand on the back of his skull, touching the skin through the soft thinning hair, like a priest giving a final hearing to his weaknesses.