Ping murmur perhaps a nature one second almost never that much memory almost never.
SAMUEL BECKETT, ‘Ping’
And then it was June and A-levels and I wandered through the exams knowing already that I had lost to them. I sat at home typing out notes I didn’t read, taking comfort in my typewriter. I would type anything – letters, lists, essays for friends. Typing was writing put to music – the clack of each letter, the injection of the space bar, the ping at the end of the line, the ratcheting revision of the carriage return
PING
And between exams we gathered on people’s living-room floors to watch Wimbledon, Borg and McEnroe, back and forth, on and on, the one year I followed it or cared, only for the endless back and forth, the carriage return
PING
And at home, the table-tennis table in the hall, so that when two people passed, they might pick up the bats and smash a ball back and forth, spin and slice for all they’re worth but unless you knew the warp and camber, the dead spot, the sweet spot, you were lost. A tiny ball ricocheting off the walls and windows, the phone, the fireplace, the floor
PING
And in the exam hall, the heat and tedium, the knowing I was lost and being too uncertain of myself to stay in one place long enough to shape an argument, too sick of myself to care about what happened next, the heat and the open windows and music drifting in, always the same song on a radio somewhere out there, ‘Ring My Bell’ with its synthesised pulse as if happiness depended on something mechanical
PING
And time bouncing off the walls, from one side of the page to the other, a pointless way of exhausting itself
PING
And for all the changing and saving of the world, for all the not being a girl, for all the black and white of it, the rising above and stepping aside, and for all that music had carried and shaped and shown, this was the truth: the carriage return