The apology that did not come

You have stopped on the bench halfway up, because the hill is more than it used to be.

He said the thing you have never once repeated to anybody. Or it was a whole year of it, and nobody in the house said a word.

And he never said so. Not once, not at the end, not in the hospital when there was time and nothing else left to do. Perhaps a version arrived instead — it was a difficult time, you were always sensitive, we all remember it differently — which is worse than silence, because a near-miss has to be argued with.

Before anything else in this chapter, three things that are not in question and will not be quietly withdrawn further down.

What he did is yours to remember, in full, for the rest of your life. No part of this chapter asks for any of it. Not the detail, not the dates, not the going over at three in the morning.

The anger is yours too. It is not a symptom and it is not a stage, and nothing here is working round to the idea that it has outlived its usefulness. Anybody who has told you it is time to put that down was not there.

You are owed an apology. That did not shrink when he died and it does not expire. It is not reduced by the years, or by your sister saying he was of his time.

And two more, because this is the chapter where they matter.

Nobody is asking you to forgive him. Not here, not later in the book, not by implication. A person who dies without forgiving somebody who never asked has not got anything wrong.

Nobody is asking you to be in touch. If he is alive, and if being near him is not safe or not bearable, nothing here sends you back — not for a conversation, not for an explanation.

So what is left, once all of that is set aside and kept?

One thing. The expecting.

Not the claim, which stands. Not the anger, which is yours. The part of you that has gone on holding a space open for a sentence — through the funeral, if you went, and after. Every so often something makes it look briefly possible and the space opens wider, and then closes again by about the width it opened.

That is the last thing he is still taking from you. Everything else he took, he took a long time ago and finished taking. This one he is still having, every month, decades after he stopped being anywhere.

You may also have loved him. Most people in this position did, which is the part nobody says out loud, and it is not a contradiction and it does not weaken anything above.

So the true thing gets said, out loud, on the bench, in your own words.

Not his words. You are not doing his sentence for him, and a manufactured apology in your own mouth is worth nothing and costs something.

He never said it. He was never going to.

That is all, and it is true, and it is the first time it has been out in the open air rather than circling at three in the morning.

Then nothing comes back, the way nothing has come back for a long time. The difference is only that the nothing was looked at once, on purpose, in daylight.

Most days the space stays open anyway. It has been open a long time and it does not close because of one sentence on a bench — a book cannot do much against forty years, and it would be no good to you if it pretended it could.

But some afternoon it will be said, and heard, and the not-coming will be an ordinary fact of your life rather than something that happens to you again each time you notice it.

You are still owed it. You always will be.

The hill is still there. You go up it slowly now, which is a separate matter, and you go up it.