The washing line again

Here's the scene from chapter 1 again, some months on. It's an example of how it might go, and I'm not promising it.

It's Sunday, late afternoon, and you're hanging out washing. Your hands know the job and your mind is free, and into the free space comes the photocopier, with the corridor and her coming towards you.

"That's the photocopier," you think. "It's written up. Say sorry and stop, and don't dodge people."

The scene hangs there a moment, as if waiting to see whether you mean it. You look at what's in your hands. It's a pillowcase, inside out. You turn it the right way and peg it. There's a blackbird making a racket on the fence. You wonder if there's enough line left for the sheets, and there isn't, so you fold one double.

By the time that's solved, the corridor has gone. You didn't push it out. There was nothing for it to do. You hadn't left anything open for it.

You may also remember the man in accounts. You did speak to him, the week you wrote it up. You said you were sorry to hear his wife was ill and asked how he was managing. He talked for ten minutes. At the end he thanked you, and said most people had been avoiding him. The photocopier had been costing other people something all those years, and that stopped the week you looked at the whole of it once.

It won't always go this cleanly. There will be evenings when an old scene gets you, and one or two of the large events will always be able to make you sad. That's as it should be. A person with a past and a conscience will feel it sometimes. What you can stop is the repetition, the hundreds of trips back into a room where everything has already happened.

The event took eight seconds and ended eleven years ago. You learned what it had to teach within a day. Whatever you owed for it, you've paid many times over, and the payments never reached anyone. It's already over, and it was already over the first time you replayed it.

If you do one thing after closing this book, take the smallest event on your list and write it up this week, under five headings, in the third person, with a date at the bottom. Then go and hang out the washing.