Now the part that is mine, and I am going to put it in properly.
I liked that week.
Not the dying. Nobody is confused about the dying and I am not going to be coy about what the last two days were.
But for seven days I was the person in the room. I was the one the nurses told things to. I was on the whiteboard by the door as next of kin in somebody’s handwriting, and I looked at that about nine times a day.
For fourteen months I had been a woman with nowhere to put her hands, and for seven days I had somewhere.
I have had to look at that. A woman in Corliss Street made me look at it for most of a spring.
Because Absalom Renner did not only pick somebody with standing. He picked somebody who was going to say yes, and he had watched for eleven weeks to make sure.
He picked a twenty-nine-year-old whose mother had just died, who was volunteering on a terminal ward because she could not stop, and who wanted to be needed so badly that she said yes to a stranger on the third day and sat in a car park for forty minutes calling it a decision.
That is not a man being kind to somebody vulnerable.
That is a man reading somebody accurately, which is what he did for a living, and then using what he read, which is also what he did for a living.
And I would do it again. That is what I cannot resolve.
I would do the whole of it again — the yes, the jumper, the seven nights — and I am not sure whether that is because I am a decent person or because it worked on me, and I am no longer certain there is a difference from the inside.
There is one more piece of this and it is worse and I nearly left it out.
On the fifth day I told him about the last week of my mother’s life.
Properly. All of it, in a chair, at about two in the morning, including three things I have never said to another living person and am not going to write down here.
He listened for about forty minutes and he held my hand for the whole of it and he did not say anything useless.
He was the best listener I have ever sat with. That is a true sentence and I have to live inside it.
And he already knew where she had worked, and what she had signed, and why she was ill, and he had her staff badge in a bag under that bed.
I have asked myself whether he let me talk that night because he wanted it or because he owed it to me.
I have decided it does not matter, which is the same conclusion I have reached about everything else that man did, and I am aware that it does not matter is what you say when you have run out of ways to ask.
There is one more thing in this part and it is the smallest and it is the one I would take back.
On the sixth day he asked me to call him Abe.
Nobody called him Abe. I have since asked four people — his lawyer, his daughter, a woman who worked for him for nineteen years — and not one of them has ever heard anybody use it.
His wife did. She died in 2011.
So on the sixth day of my marriage a seventy-two-year-old man asked a stranger to use his dead wife’s name for him, and I did it, for a day and a half, because he asked and because he was dying and because it seemed like a small thing.
I did not know what I was being handed. That is the defence and it is a complete one and I still cannot say the word out loud now.
That is the thing about being arranged by somebody who is very good at it. You do not find out which parts were real. You only find out that the question exists, and then you have it for the rest of your life.
PART 5
