The remembering, and the sentence after it

You are in the chair. The lamp is on, the house has gone quiet, and it has come round again.

You have thought about this most nights. This is the one place left in the world where what happened is still being taken seriously. Everywhere else it has gone quiet. The people who knew have died, or moved, or stopped mentioning it, and the world has made its own arrangements. The thinking is where it still counts.

Nothing in this chapter is asking you to stop.

If you go on thinking about them every night for as long as you have left, that is yours. It is not on the table here, and it will not be on the table later in the book either.

There is something else in the room, though, and it arrived after the remembering did.

Most nights, when the thinking has finished, there is a sentence. It is short. It says what sort of person this makes you. It is read out at about four in the morning, and it has been read out every night since.

The remembering is about them.

The sentence is not. It has never had anybody in the room but you.

What happened may have been one day. Often it is not. Often it is a whole bad year of small things — a tone of voice, a turned back, a door closed on a question that had been asked for the ninth time. That has no date on it and no edges to hold. It is still a fact, it is still yours, and the year still ended.

Whether they know any of this is not something this book can tell you, and anybody who has told you they know was guessing.

What can be said is narrower, and it is only about the room you are sitting in. The sentence at four in the morning is not addressed to them. It is read out by you, to you, with the door shut.

Somewhere underneath both of them is the plain question.

What did I actually do?

Some people can answer it exactly, and the answer is worse than they would like. Some cannot. Memory moves. Families hold versions of a thing that do not match, and the version you cannot bear to hold may be the accurate one.

Not knowing does not oblige you to a hearing every night. It does not entitle you to a finding in your own favour either. It stays what it is: a thing you are not sure of, which is its own kind of thing and not a verdict waiting to be reached.

And if there is somebody still alive in it — somebody who could be telephoned this week, somebody owed a sentence that has never been said — then this chapter is not where that gets settled.

What goes up the telephone is the thing you did, and that you are sorry for it.

The nights do not go up. Lying awake is not a payment, and it is not a credential. Said down a telephone it arrives as a bill for something the other person never agreed to buy, and they have been carrying their own version of this without any help from yours.

Two things, then.

The remembering, which is theirs, and which stays as long as you want it.

And the sentence that comes after it, which is not theirs, which has never reached anybody, and which has been read out in an empty room by the only person who ever hears it.

They may not come apart tonight. They have been in the same room a long time and they are used to each other.

The lamp is still on. The house is still quiet. Nothing has been settled.

One thing has been told apart from another.