The case you have been keeping open

It is the middle of the morning. The kettle has boiled and you have not poured it yet.

This chapter is about something that happens at four. It is not done at four. It is done now, with the light up and nothing frightening in the room.

Not all of four o'clock is a court.

Some of it is simply thinking about them. Her face. The door. The thing she said that you still hear. That part is not on trial here and nothing in this book is going to ask you for it. It is yours for as long as you want it, and it was never the trouble.

What this chapter is about is the part that comes afterwards. The part that repeats.

After the thinking, most nights, something runs. The same words in the same order, arriving at the same place. It has not been new for a long time. It behaves less like thinking than like a procedure, and it has the shape of one: a charge, somebody answering it, somebody deciding.

If none of that is recognisable, this chapter is not about you, and nothing is lost by closing it here.

Two things before any of the rest.

The charge in this chapter is against you. If what keeps you awake is what somebody else did, that is a different court — chapter 17 — and none of this applies.

And nothing here asks anybody to drop a charge they did not bring.

Here is what is true of a sitting that happens every night.

It does reach a finding. It reaches the same one. By morning the finding has gone, and the next night it sits again and reaches it again.

Forty years of that is not a conclusion being approached. Whatever the nights have been, that is not it.

A charge read that often does not stay still either. Nobody enters anything new — there is nothing new to enter — but the words are not quite the words any more. Four in the morning is not a neutral hour, and the version that lives there has been living there on its own.

What the accurate version is, this book cannot tell you. Not the night one. Not the short one used when somebody asks, with the edges taken off. Its actual size is yours and it is not for estimating here.

Some of it may not be recoverable at all. A charge with holes in it is still a charge. Holes are not grounds for an adjournment until four tomorrow, and they are not grounds for a finding in your own favour either.

So it gets said once, in the daylight part of the day, out loud, with the curtains open.

I was not there when he was ill.

That. Not the part that comes after it about what sort of person that makes you. Just the thing that happened, in whatever words arrive. Near enough is near enough; this is not an examination.

Alone will do — it does not need a witness to count. And if there is somebody you would rather say it in front of, that is the better version of this, not the weaker one.

And then nothing follows it.

That is the unfamiliar part. The words are said and no finding comes. Nobody says guilty. Nobody says it was not your fault. The sentence that usually arrives next does not arrive, and the room stays as it was.

Not because the answer is unknown. Because the finding is what lists the case for tomorrow.

The court rises without a verdict.

That is not being let off. Nothing about what happened has been made smaller by a word of this. If somebody is not speaking to you, they still are not, and they are not obliged to start because you have stopped holding your own trial. What they are owed is unchanged, and if they are living it is still owed — the thing you did, and that you are sorry for it. The nights were never part of that. They were never theirs.

Some mornings nothing gets said. The kettle boils and it does not happen. That is not a failure of anything; the nights went on for years without this and they will survive a morning that got away from you.

But if it was said today, out loud, in the light, then for one day the thing that happened is only the thing that happened. Nobody has decided what it makes you. It is out of the dark, and it is not carrying anything on top of it.

The kettle has gone off the boil. It can be boiled again.