A quarter past nine

It is a quarter past nine in the evening.

The television is on and you could not say what is happening in it. There is a cup on the arm of the chair that has gone cold. The heating clicked off at nine and the room has begun to know it. This morning's post was a bank statement and a leaflet from a company that fits stairlifts.

Nothing happened today. Nothing much is going to happen tomorrow either, and you have stopped expecting it to, which is not the same as minding less.

And you are tired.

Months of tiredness are not a mood and they are not your age — that is worth an appointment, and having it looked at will not touch the thing in this room.

Here is what everybody thinks the trouble is, and it is not stupid, it is just not it.

They think the trouble is that the evening is empty. That is why they say you should get out more, and join something, and that the woman at the end of the road goes to a class on a Tuesday. Most of them mean it kindly and some of them are frightened for you. You may have tried one or two of the things. They were perfectly all right. You came home and it was a quarter past nine again.

An empty evening is not heavy. Sit in an empty evening at twenty-six and it is boring, and boredom is a different weight entirely; you stand up and it has gone.

This is not that. And it is not heavy because there is nothing in it.

There is something in it.

It is 1987. Or the afternoon in the corridor outside the ward, or the thing said in the kitchen that neither of you ever mentioned again. It is whoever stopped ringing, and whether that was your doing. It is the other life, the one that did not happen, which has improved every year since, because nothing has ever been asked of it.

That is what is in the room at a quarter past nine. Not nothing. That.

The quiet did not cause it. The quiet uncovered it.

If your forty years had noise in them — work, or the want of it, whoever needed you, the money, somebody always needing collecting from somewhere — then the noise was louder than this, and what you heard was the noise. Whether you also stayed inside it on purpose is a real question, and this book is not going to answer it in either direction.

And if your forty years had no noise in them at all — if the quiet is the oldest thing in this room, and there was never anything over the top of it — then you arrive at the same place sooner. Nothing was ever covered. It has been audible the whole time, and every page after this one is about you as much as anybody.

Either way, the quiet did not make it. And by the time the quiet had uncovered it, some of what you could once have got up and gone and done about it had stopped being possible. People died. Doors shut. The years put things on it that were not on it before.

Which is why getting out more did not touch it, and why you have quietly concluded by now that nothing touches it. What they suggested was aimed at the quiet, and the quiet was never the problem.

Nothing is asked of you in this book. There is no practice in it, nothing to do daily, nothing to keep up and nothing to be behind on.

It is about the thing in the room.

It is twenty past nine.