Kim, is it now?

The lad comes into the sitting room. Young enough to be my grandson; bright, healthy-looking, and he’s working in the undertakers. Says cheerfully, ‘Sorry to trouble you, but we might have to take that door off the bottom of the stairs to get her out. It’s that right-angled bend.’

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

‘Rubbish, lad! I’ve taken wardrobes and beds up and down these stairs without taking the door off. You telling me you can’t get my wife down here? There’s nothing of her.’

He looks at me with sudden concentration as if he’s translating my words from a foreign language.

‘Yeah. Okay. We’ll have another go.’

I follow him into the dining room, where the door to the stairs is open and the edge of a trolley is wedged in the doorframe.

I stand on the bottom step next to the lad and take a quick look. Enid’s strapped tightly to the trolley, underneath a red blanket, as if she’s not dead but just chilly and likely to spring off it at any minute, protesting at the damage to the paintwork. I shake my head – if she were alive now, there’d be ructions.

‘You want to back up a bit, you won’t get it through at that angle,’ I tell the lad.

He gets hold of the trolley. ‘Back up a bit,’ he tells his dad.

They back up and disappear from view.

A muffled voice asks impatiently, ‘Now what?’

I’ve never had a high opinion of myself. Didn’t make it to grammar school – it was the technical college for me. But the older I get, the more faith I have in myself because people don’t know how to think for themselves anymore. That’s what’s wrong – they don’t have to figure things out – they get a google to do their thinking for them. I haven’t got a google. I do things the old way. ‘Hold her vertically,’ I say.

‘Okay, Kim. Gotcha. You go back in the sitting room, leave it to us. We’ll call you when we’re done.’

I smooth my hand down the waxed woodgrain of the door. Take the door off? How did they think that would help? The door opens outwards. They’d have to take the doorframe off.

Standing in the dining room, I can hear grunts and curses up the stairs; they’re more like builders than undertakers. To them, it’s just a job.

‘You’re having the funeral in the crem,’ the lad says when he reappears in the doorway and sees I’m still there.

‘The crem?’ I say. He’s too lazy to stick another four syllables on it.

‘Crematorium,’ he says helpfully and he backs up the stairs again.

Enid would have hated them.