I add red wine and wholegrain mustard to the simmering jus then go back outside to lie in the soil where I’d like to die, when the day comes.

Sunday roast. A weekly joy. We’re past the age where the word ‘indulgence’ holds any guilt. It’s only a matter of time before things start shutting down, and I like cigarettes, I like cooking with bacon grease. I like sweet coffee.

I survey the plant tops that shade me and brush my face from my me-shaped gap in the growth. The soil is warm from the sun and smells of everyone’s childhoods.

What does it need?

I hear miniscule comings and goings of the bug metropolis below. The sky is crayon blue with little cloud scuffs like chalk marks. Carrot fronds shade my eyes, a perennial variety casts a rainbow glow across my face and reflects purples, yellows, blues, whites in the thick lenses of my glasses.

It’s missing something. A splash of…

“Sue!” Bob barks from the conservatory.

“Yeah!” I shout back. When you’ve been married fifty-eight years, words become efficient, almost unnecessary; you’ve had every conversation, every combination of words has been uttered to the point where you can say the next three responses in your head. We’d often go a whole day having the same internal conversation off the back of one menial prompt, communicating more the way mushrooms do, with tiny signals barely seen and invisible to others.

It takes me a minute to roll up out of the dirt. Considerably longer than the last, and the time before.

The first time I was up quite quick. I’d awoken there. Face down, a tooth dug into the inside of my lip. Broad spring daylight. It was just parsnips then, this patch of garden, not much to look at, and it was Bob that liked them – I wasn’t all that keen. I’d dusted myself off and gone inside, past the dozen watercolours I was most proud of that Bob had had framed and hung in the hall, unsure if I’d fainted or fell asleep standing up, or something worse. I don’t know. He looked up from his book as I came in, more care in my step than usual, and he read it on me, a sign that we were there, in the last days, our shells already slowing to an inevitable stop. He fetched me a pack of frozen peas for my swollen lip and a cup of sweet coffee with an ice cube in it and a straw. There’s still soil down in the recess of the settee where I’d sat.

I unwrap the beef joint from its tinfoil swaddle and my glasses steam up. The smell is rich, an ancient pleasure promising a heavy sleep later. Fifty-seven degrees in the oven for three hours. Divine.

I taste the gravy. Its flavour is deep, and the wine and mustard give it a little zing.

The mash potatoes are a warm velvety bed in the pot. The carrots and parsnips, cut thin and long, are blackened across the thinner edges and honey glazed.

We’re having roast potatoes as well. Indulgence. Bob oversaw those and those alone. Dark orange crystal on the outside, cracking when bitten like caramelized sugar, revealing its soft, almost oozing inside.

The table is set. White doilies, the same ones your grandma has, we all have them.

Bob has a glass of Red and I a glass of white.

I serve with a frown. Two steaming banquets, one for each of us. But something’s missing. The colours are off. Pink beef, golden spuds and root veg honey-glistening. Bob knew the frown and got up. 

“What’re you after?” I say in protest. “I’ll get it.” 

“Pipe down.” It used to tick him off, my need for colour balance. Since my fall he’s let a lot of grievances go.

Back he comes with some mint sauce and fresh rosemary from the potted bush by the back door. He has mint sauce on all meat, ludicrous to me, frankly. He scrunches some rosemary over the beef and plops the mint sauce down by between the carrots and mash.

And the plate hummed to me as a Monet hung in a window might to a solemn onlooker out in the rain. Perfect for all senses now, tasting of the all the joy left in my life, however long or short that was.

I wash up. He falls asleep in the armchair. Countdown’s on too loud to have a conversation in the living room, not that we need to be verbal to communicate anymore. I kiss his head, he smiles in his dream, and I mosey back out to the garden, to the gap in the flora where I can lie and prep my final seconds awake.

I’d like to be buried in the garden, but I’m not sure I’d do wonders for the fruit and veg.

It’s missing something, still.

A ladybird lands on my hand, and I lift it up to block the sun.

“Yeah, bit of red.” I say to it, and it takes off.

I’ll plant some Rhubarb tomorrow, then see.