Selma’s death had something to do with me, I felt it but I could not tell what it was. I tried to see, but it kept slipping away from me. The time slipped away too: the days and months and seasons went round and round, while I sat bewildered in the centre, unmoving, wanting vaguely to make it stop so that I could get a grip on it, but nothing would ever stop and I could not catch up, and meanwhile my life was leaving me behind and I was thirty-four years old and it was winter. Dear God, the time, the time was disappearing, and I was nothing, was always nothing.

I tried to understand why I could not catch up, why I could not get a grip. I sank further into the bog of my mind, trapped there now and desperate. The end was very near.

It must surely have been this — detachment — that was the flaw. There used to be, I have read, such a thing as a fatal flaw, but that was long ago when a mistake, a missing part, could bring death, when the world was small enough that such things counted. It was my flaw that I could not come to grips. I could reach nothing, could fasten onto nothing. I could get only so far before I found fog, and I could never get beyond that. I might even have been comforted if I had thought that the flaw could lead to death, that it was truly fatal. That would have finished it, no need to be concerned. But this would never be fatal; it might even preserve me, untouched and therefore unscarred and therefore alive, if that can be called alive.

I needed belief: that was what I concluded. I needed to know something for certain. But it had to be real, I would not accept anything that tried to fool me, that was just part of the fog. I bogged down, exploring beliefs, in simplicity, in detachment, and if one got further than that, it faltered eventually in the mist through which my mind could not go.

What, after all, was there to believe in?

I remembered once believing in God. He was as real to me when I was a child as a member of my family. My parents, I remember, took God for granted and used Him effortlessly.

“Thank God that’s done,” my father would say, coming in sweating from mowing the lawn, reaching into the fridge for a beer.

“Thank God she’s better,” my mother would say, hearing of a successful operation on some friend or relative.