The one you blame most

The photograph is still up in the hall.

You go past it four or five times a day without seeing it, and then some days you see it.

There is one at the top, and it is not there because of the size of what they did.

Almost always it is somebody who was supposed to be on your side. You have to have needed somebody first, which is why it is a different kind of thing from the rest of the list, and why it has never behaved like the rest of the list.

If the name at the top is your own, that is chapter 12, The remembering, and the sentence after it, which separates what you go on remembering — yours, and yours to keep — from the sentence you pass afterwards, which has never had anybody in the room but you. That is where it is dealt with, and not here.

Which is why it keeps coming apart in your hands.

You go through it — the order of what happened, what was said, what anybody with any sense would have done instead — and you get most of the way and then something arrives. Them carrying you up the stairs when you were small, or laughing at something on a Sunday, or the way they were with the dog, or whatever yours is.

And the whole thing has to be put back together, because it is still true, none of it has stopped being true. So you put it back together. You have been putting it back together for a very long time, and nobody has ever known you were doing it.

That is the part that is tiring. Not the anger. The rebuilding.

And you have had the conversation with them a great many times.

You get the better of it. You always get the better of it. You have a version now, worked at over decades, that nothing could be said against, and you have never once said a word of it out loud to them, and it has not helped on a single occasion.

If they are dead it carried on without them, which you would not have predicted. If they are alive, you have said some of it, or all of it, and it did not land, and that did not finish it either.

There is a sentence of theirs you can still hear.

Not the worst thing they did. Something small and sideways, said in a kitchen, or a car, or on a doorstep with the engine running, and you have got the exact voice of it — the particular way they came down on one word.

And they may not know.

Some died without knowing. Some were told and said it was not like that. And some have known for sixty years, and have been in it the whole time, and carry their own version of that afternoon which you have never been shown and are not going to be.

And there is the one way you turned out like them.

You spotted it a long time ago. One specific thing, and you know exactly which one. It is the part of this that frightens you most.

If what you are holding is something you did, it has a place to go that is not this page and not your own head at four in the morning. Somebody outside it: a priest, a chaplain, a counsellor, a doctor, somebody on the end of a telephone at four in the morning. Not their children. Not their sister. Not anybody who would then be carrying it instead of you.

Nothing is asked of you here. Nobody is being defended and nothing is being withdrawn.

And it will want putting back together again before the week is out.