PART 1 — THE BAG
Dov was thirty-two.
He was diagnosed in the October and he died on the ninth of June, and I am not going to write about the eight months in between, because they are mine and Edda’s and his, and because everybody who has had one of those years already knows what is in it.
What I will say is this.
We spent everything. There was not much to start with. I sold the two rings my grandmother left me and I was not sentimental about it for a single second. We took eleven thousand against the house in the February.
None of it did anything.
He died on a Monday afternoon and he never saw the second one. I was six months gone.
Dov and I met at sixteen in a chip shop on Fenn Road and we were together for fourteen years, and I have never once in my life wanted anybody else.
Edda was four. I had about four hundred pounds and a loan I could not service, and I remember standing in the hall after everybody had gone on the night of the funeral and genuinely not being able to work out what the next day was for.
They rang on the Thursday about his belongings.
I had been putting it off. The woman on the phone was very kind about it and I could hear that she did this call a lot.
I went in on the Friday morning with Edda at my mother’s and parked in the multi-storey and sat in the car for about eleven minutes first.
The ward was the same and it smelled the same and I had to stand in that corridor for a moment because your body does not know he is not in there.
The nurse on the desk was Oyin, who had been on nights for most of the last fortnight and who had brought me a blanket once at about three in the morning without being asked.
She came round the desk and hugged me, which I had not expected, and then she went and got the bag.
It was a proper bag, not a carrier. She had packed it herself and she had done it well — his things folded, his book with the receipt still in it as a bookmark, his glasses in a case rather than loose.
“I’m so sorry, Lenna.”
“Thank you. You were all very good to him.”
And then I looked down at the top of the bag.
There was a cardigan folded on it. Grey, soft, women’s, about a size twelve.
Not mine. I am not a size twelve and I have never owned anything in that colour in my life.
“Sorry,” I said, “I think this has got mixed up with somebody else’s. It isn’t mine.”
Oyin looked at it and frowned, and then she did not frown, which was worse.
“No — that’s from your husband’s room. That’s the lady’s.”
“What lady?”
“The lady who kept coming.” She said it slowly, watching my face. “Wasn’t she family?”
I did not faint. I want that in because people always ask.
What happened is that I heard a sound a long way off that turned out to be the lift, and I put my hand on the desk, and Oyin got me into a chair in about four seconds flat because she has been doing that job for nine years.
Dov grew up in care. He had nobody. No mother, no father, no aunt, nothing, and he had told me that at seventeen in about one sentence and had never added to it in fourteen years.
And my family is four people and I would have known.
“How often did she come?”
Oyin was careful. She is not supposed to say anything and she knew exactly what she had just done.
“I hadn’t seen her before. But the last few weeks — most days. She’d come in the afternoons, when you had Edda.”
Most days.
The last few weeks.
My husband was in that building for twenty-six days at the end and I was there every morning and every evening, and I went home at two to collect my daughter from nursery because I had no other way of doing it.
And in those two hours, most days, somebody else was sitting in that chair.
I asked her to help me and she should not have and she did.
It took until the Tuesday. There is a camera on that corridor and a man in security who has a sister with the same thing Dov had, and he let me stand behind him for four minutes on a Tuesday afternoon and watch about ninety seconds of footage.
A woman came out of the lift. Dark coat. Thin. Maybe late thirties. She stopped outside the door of that room and stood there for about six seconds before she went in, which I noticed at the time and did not understand until much later.
I had never seen her before in my life.
I went home and I did not do anything for four days.
I did not sleep. I lay in that bed on the side I have slept on since 2016 and did arithmetic in the dark.
Most days. For three weeks. In a cancer ward. While his wife was on the school run.
And then on the Friday evening, with Edda in the bath and the door open so I could hear her, somebody knocked.
I went down with my sleeves wet.
And it was her.
Standing on my step in the same dark coat. Thin, and tired in a way that goes past being tired, with her eyes already going.
She had an envelope in both hands.
“He asked me to give you this after,” she said. “Not before. He was very clear about the not before.”
I did not take it. My hands were doing something I could not stop.
“Who are you?”
And she looked at me, and then at my stomach, and then she said, quietly:
“You don’t know what he left you. Do you.”
PART 2 — THE WAKE
I have to go backwards, to the Wednesday of the funeral, because of the nine days.
We did it at the crematorium on Marrowbridge Road and then back to my mother’s house, which has the room for it.
About twenty-five people. Dov’s lot from the yard, four of the lads he played football with on a Sunday, two nurses who came in their own time, and my family.
I had the hospital bag with me. I had carried it into that house and put it in the hall, because I had not been able to leave it in the car and I had not been able to take it into my own house either.
At some point in the afternoon I went out to the hall and got down on the floor next to it and started going through it.
I do not know what I was looking for. I think I wanted to hold something that had been in that room.
And my mother came out of the kitchen with a tea towel and saw me on the floor of her hall at four in the afternoon in a black dress with my hands in that bag.
She crouched down and took it off me. Gently. She closed it and lifted it away and put it up on the shelf by the coats.
“Give me that, I’ll see to it. You don’t want to be going through a dead man’s bag today, love. Sit down — people are watching.”
And they were. The door through to the front room was open and there were about eleven people who could see straight down that hall.
Somebody said, “She’s right, Len.”
My auntie Fay said something about it keeping.
Nobody said one word for me, and to be completely fair to every person in that house, they all thought she was being kind, and so did she.
And I said, “All right, Mum,” and got up off the floor and went and handed round sandwiches for two hours.
The bag came home with me that night and went into the bottom of the wardrobe and I did not open it again until after the Friday on the doorstep.
Nine days.
In the bottom of that bag, under his washbag, folded in half, there was a compliments slip from the hospital with a mobile number written on it in biro and the name Siobhan underneath.
He had put it in there himself. He had asked Oyin for a piece of paper on the second of June and written it out and put it in the bag with his own things, because he knew exactly what would happen to that bag and he knew I would go through it.
Nine days, I had that in my house, three feet from where I was lying awake doing arithmetic about an affair.
And I need to put down what I did in those four days, because this story gets told as a thing that happened to me and some of it is a thing I did.
I told two people.
I rang my friend Prue on the Sunday night and cried down the phone for forty minutes and told her my husband had been seeing somebody in the hospital.
And on the Monday I told my mother, in her kitchen, and my mother — who had buried my father in 2019 — put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, Lenna. Oh, the state of him,” which is not a thing you can take back out of a person.
Those two women spent four days believing that about Dov.
And there was a third thing that I have only ever said to one person and that I am going to put here.
In the hospital car park, in the car, holding that cardigan, for about ninety seconds, I was relieved.
Not glad. Relieved.
Because an affair was something I could be angry about, and I had not been able to be angry about anything since the October. You cannot be angry with cancer. There is nowhere to put it.
And for about a minute and a half my body found somewhere to put it, and that was the first time in eight months that I had felt anything other than frightened.
I have had to say that out loud twice. It does not get easier.
PART 3 — THE DOORSTEP
So. The Friday.
I did not take the envelope and I did not ask her in. I stood in that doorway with the bathroom running upstairs and said:
“Who are you?”
And she said, “My name’s Siobhan Delaney.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
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