Getting up

You are awake and it is dark and the thing has started.

You did not send for it. Nobody decides, at ten past four, to begin. It arrives on its own, the way a cough arrives, and whatever else is true about it, that part was never up to you.

What happens next is that you lie still and let it run.

All of it, in order, to the end. The thing you did. The face. The part afterwards that says what sort of person that makes you. You do not interrupt it and you do not get up, and by the time it has finished the light is coming anyway.

There is a reason for lying still, and it is not weakness.

Lying there and taking it has felt like the least you could do. Getting up would be ducking out. Making tea in the middle of it would be treating it lightly, and it is not light. So you stay, and you hear it out, every time, because hearing it out is a form of taking it seriously and there is nothing else left that is.

Nothing here is going to tell you that was wrong.

Nor is this about the other thing that happens in the dark.

Thinking about her is not what this chapter is about. Her face, the things she said, the year she was frightened — that can have all night if it wants, and for as long as you have. Nobody is asking you for that and nobody is going to. It is not the trouble and it never was.

This is only about the part that comes after. The summing up. The bit that is not about her at all.

One thing before the rest.

If what wakes you is what somebody else did to you, that is chapter 17, and nothing here asks anybody to stop holding what they are holding.

Here is the thing worth separating, and it took a long time to see.

The arriving is not yours. It comes whether you like it or not, and no decision of yours will stop it coming. Anybody who tells you otherwise has not had it.

The staying is a different matter.

You have stayed because leaving felt like disrespect. But the part you have been staying for — the summing up, the verdict on what sort of man you are — has never once been heard by anybody but you, and it has never once got anybody anything. The lying still is not reaching her. It never did.

So: you can get up.

Not to escape it, because you will not. The light goes on, the kettle goes on, the radio if there is one. You stand at the window for a bit. The thing may still be going on in the background and it probably is, and that is all right, because you are not in the bed being read to any more.

That is the whole difference. Not that it stopped. That you were not lying still for it.

Nothing is put down that was owed.

If your son is alive, the thing that has never been said can still be said, and it can be said this week. Getting up at four does not pay it and was never going to. What is owed does not depend on whether you lie there; it did not go up by a penny on the nights you suffered, and it does not come down on the nights you get up.

Most nights you will lie there anyway. It is what the body does at four, and a habit of this age does not come off because somebody wrote a chapter.

But some night the light will go on at ten past four, and there will be tea, and the dark will go on without you in the middle of it.

You will be tired tomorrow. It will be the tiredness of having been up, which is a different tiredness from the other one, and you will know which is which the moment you have it.