The Tuesday I Did not Call

I need to tell you something that happened on a Tuesday.

Anna, who I mentioned earlier, is the friend I have not let go thin. We speak on Tuesdays. It is a standing call. It has been a standing call for nine years. We do not schedule it. We do not remind each other. I am supposed to ring her at six, or she is supposed to ring me if I have not, and it has been so steady for so long that I have taken it for granted, which is what I want to tell you about.

A Tuesday in February, I was tired. There was nothing particular wrong. I had done a long day at work and I had not eaten properly and my back was aching from a chair I have been meaning to replace for two years. At six o'clock the phone was on the counter next to the kettle and I looked at it and I thought, I cannot do this tonight. I will call her tomorrow. She will understand.

And then I did not call her tomorrow, because tomorrow I was also tired. And I did not call her the day after because it had become the kind of thing I was going to have to apologise for. And by Friday the not-calling had become its own event, and the longer I left it the bigger the apology was going to have to be, and by Sunday I had worked myself into the small quiet selfishness of someone who would rather lose a friend than say sorry.

She rang me on Monday. She did not say anything about it. She said, how are you, I was worried. And I said I had been tired and I was sorry, and she said it is alright, I know what tired is, and we talked for forty minutes about her sister, and her new reading group, and the thing her cat had done with a mouse, and when we hung up I sat at my kitchen table and I cried, properly, in the way I had not cried for months.

I am telling you this because the rest of this book has been me telling you what people should do, and I want to be honest that I am one of the people failing to do it. Not in a big way. In a small way, week after week, the way most people fail. I am not writing from outside the things I am describing. I am in them. I am describing them because I am in them. The shopkeeper I mentioned in the beginning — I did not know his name until the week he closed. The elders I said we no longer visit — I have not visited mine either. The kitchen table I said should be full — mine is, on Tuesdays, because Anna called me on Monday when I had been too tired to call her on Tuesday.

I am not above any of this. The only thing I am doing that I think is worth doing is noticing it. And even that, I am doing badly. Anna is the one who called.