She batch cooked and she labelled everything, in biro, on masking tape. She died in March. The meals at the bottom are dated for next winter and there are more of them than there were.
My aunt Marion died in the March, in her own bed, at eighty-one, which is about as good as it gets and I want to say that before anything else because none of what follows is a horrible story about her. She had a good death and a tidy house and she was the most organised woman I have ever known.
I got the house because there was nobody else. My mother had gone in 2016 and Marion had no children, and I had done her shopping for eleven years and driven her to things, and the will was two pages long and had been written in 2004 and never changed.
Clearing it took me five weekends. It is a small semi and she had very little because she threw things away, which is a rarer quality than people realise.
The freezer was the last thing, because it always is. It is a chest freezer in the garage, about five foot, one of those white ones with the lid that lifts and the little sliding baskets across the top.
She batch cooked. That was the whole of her method and it never varied in the twenty-odd years I saw it.
On a Sunday she made one thing in a large quantity and put it into foil containers, and every container got a strip of masking tape across the lid, and on the tape in blue biro went what it was and the date she made it. Not the date to eat it. The date she made it. She was very clear about this because I asked her once and she said, if you know when it went in you know what you have got, and I have thought about that a lot since.
So the freezer is a diary. Fifty-odd containers and every one of them has a Sunday on it in her handwriting.
I opened it on the fifth weekend, on a Saturday afternoon in April, intending to empty it into the wheelie bin because five weeks off the mains is five weeks off the mains.
It was running. The garage has its own consumer unit and I had not touched it, and the freezer was humming away with everything in it hard as a brick.
I took the top basket out and started going through them, and it was exactly what you would expect and it was very hard going, because it is her writing on every one.
Cottage pie, 14 Jan. Chicken and leek, 21 Jan. Bolognese, 28 Jan. Fish pie, 4 Feb.
Sundays, in order, every week, back through the autumn and into the summer before.
And then, near the bottom of the second basket, under a bag of peas:
Cottage pie, 14 Feb.
Which is a Sunday, and which is eleven days before she went into hospital for the last time, and which is fine.
Then: Chicken and leek, 21 Feb.
Then: Bolognese, 28 Feb.
Then: Fish pie, 7 Mar.
She died on the fourth of March.
I sat on the step of the garage with that container in my hands for a long time.
I want to lay out the reasonable explanations because I went through all of them that afternoon and I have gone through them many times since.
She could have written the tapes in advance. She was organised enough. But the food is in the containers and the food is cooked, and somebody cooked it, and I have the electricity bills and I can tell you that the last quarter's usage at that house is nothing but the freezer and a fridge and a hall light on a timer.
Somebody could have been in the house. The locks are the locks I changed in the April and there are two keys and I have both. Before that, the keys were hers and mine and one with the woman across the road who I have known since I was nine and who is seventy-six and who did not do this.
The dates could be a coincidence of my reading. They are not. I photographed every tape on the second weekend of finding out, all fifty-three of them, and I have those photographs, and they run in unbroken Sundays and they do not stop in March.
The bottom basket is where I stopped being able to hold any of the reasonable explanations.
Beef stew, 9 Nov. Cottage pie, 16 Nov. Chicken and leek, 23 Nov. Bolognese, 30 Nov.
November. Of this year. Which had not happened.
I counted the tapes that day and there were fifty-three.
I counted them again in the June, because I had started to be the sort of person who counts, and there were fifty-five.
I have not eaten any of it. I want to make that clear as well, because it is the first thing everybody asks and there is something in the asking that I do not like.
I have not thrown any of it away either. I have thought about that for a long time and I cannot make myself do it, and the reason is small and stupid and it is this: it is her handwriting, and there is a finite amount of that left in the world, and every container I put in the bin is a piece of it gone.
So I pay the electricity. It is about forty pounds a quarter. I have kept the house, which I was going to sell, and which is empty, and which I go to on Saturdays.
The last thing, and then I will stop, because I think I have been circling it.
In the September I did an inventory properly. Notebook, every tape, the dish and the date, in order, and I did it again in the December, which is three months later, and I compared them.
Nothing had been taken. All the September ones were still there.
Eleven new ones had appeared, in Sunday order, carrying on from where the December ones ended.
And one had changed.
The tape that said Cottage pie, 14 Feb, which was the first one that had made my stomach turn over back in April, now said something else. Same tape, same container, and I know it is the same one because of a corner of the foil that is dented and because I photographed it.
It says: Cottage pie, 14 Feb. For you.
I have not been back since the sixth of January.
I pay the electricity by direct debit and I have not cancelled it, and every Sunday, wherever I am, at about the time she used to do it, I think about a garage with a light off and a freezer running and somebody making up the containers, one at a time, in order, working forward.