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Letters from Tara · September: One Thing in a Seminar

The draft she did not send

Danya,

It is Thursday and I have been here eleven days and I have not said one word in a seminar. Not one. I have had six seminars. In each one there are twelve of us round a table and a tutor at the end, and the same four people talk the whole hour, and the rest of us look at our notes. I keep thinking of something to say and then waiting until I'm sure, and by the time I'm sure someone else has said it, or the conversation has gone somewhere else, and then it's too late, and then the hour is over.

Nobody here listens. That's what it feels like. They all talk at once and nobody waits. At the Whetstone people waited. Mrs Hallam waited. Even the Captain waited, in his way, before he said your side better than you did. Here nobody waits for anyone, and I am the person who waits, so I sit there.

The kitchen is the same. There are six of us on the corridor and they all seem to know each other already, though they can't, they arrived the same day as me. They cook at the same time and talk about places I've never been and bands I don't know. I eat in my room. I tell myself it's because I have reading to do, and I do have reading to do, but that's not why.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. You're thirteen. You've got your own things. I just wanted to write it down to someone who knows what the back table is like.

I miss the Green. I miss the pond. I miss you asking "how do we know?" about everything, which used to drive me mad. I miss

The draft stopped there, in the middle of a line, at the bottom of the fourth page. Tara read it back the next morning, sitting on her bed with her coat on, and felt two things at once: that every word of it was true, and that she did not want to be the person who sent it.

She did not tear it up. She folded it into the back of her notebook, behind the reading list, where she would know it was.

What happened on Friday

On Friday evening somebody knocked on her door.

It was Hollie, from the room at the end of the corridor, who came from a town on the coast and had arrived with a rice cooker, a wok and a bag of onions the size of a pillow. Tara had heard her in the kitchen every night, talking to whoever was there and sometimes, when nobody was, to the radio.

"Sorry," said Hollie. "I need someone to stir. I've got three pans going and two hands. You don't have to be any good."

Tara was not any good. She stirred a pan of rice while Hollie did something complicated and alarming with a pan of chillies, and the kitchen filled with smoke, and somebody opened the window, and a boy from the end room came in to complain about the smoke and stayed to eat.

Halfway through, somebody asked where she was from. Tara said a place called the Green, and that it was small, and that there was a café there where she used to do her homework at the back table and listen to everyone.

"Listen to what?" said Hollie.

So Tara told them about Thursdays at the Whetstone. About Nana Fives and the dice, and the Captain who argued your side for you, and the time a whole table had spent an evening on a family's rule for Crazy Eights. She said more than she had said since she arrived. Then she stopped, embarrassed, and waited for someone to change the subject.

Nobody did. The boy from the end room said his gran had a rule for Crazy Eights too: you had to sing when you played an eight. Hollie said her family played a card game nobody else in the world had heard of and she would teach them all on Sunday. And somebody said, "So we should do a Thursday. Here."

Tara went back to her room at eleven and did not do her reading, and did not mind.

Monday's seminar

On Monday, in the seminar, the tutor asked a question about a study they had all read. The study had sent a questionnaire to a thousand households about how they spent their evenings and drawn conclusions from the answers. The same four people began to talk, as they always did. One said the conclusions were obviously right. One said they were obviously wrong. They went back and forth.

Tara had a thought. It arrived at the beginning, as her thoughts always did, and she did what she always did, which was to wait until she was sure.

She waited a minute. Then two. She checked her notes. She checked the study. The four went on. At five minutes she was nearly sure. At seven she was sure. At eight minutes she opened her mouth and somebody else spoke first, about something else, and she closed it again.

At nine minutes there was a pause. A real one, a gap where nobody had anything ready.

She heard herself say it before she had decided to.

"We've only counted the people who answered."

Eleven faces turned towards her. She went hot. But she had started, and she could hear the Captain in her head saying state it better, so she did.

"They sent it to a thousand houses," she said. "But it says on page three that only about four hundred replied. So everything we're arguing about is the four hundred. What if the six hundred who didn't answer spend their evenings differently? What if they didn't answer because they were out?"

The tutor, who was a tired man with chalk on his sleeve, looked at her for a moment. Then he went to the board and wrote, in large letters, WHO DIDN'T ANSWER? and drew a box round it.

"That," he said, "is the question I was hoping someone would ask. Thank you. What's your name?"

She told him. He wrote it in the corner of the board, which was embarrassing and not unpleasant.

She counted afterwards, because she could not help it. Of the twelve of them, four had spoken before her that term, the same four every time. She was the fifth. By the end of the hour, the sixth had spoken too, a quiet boy who had sat beside her for two weeks without a word, and who said, looking at his notes, "Following on from what Tara said."

The letter she sent

Danya,

I said one thing in a seminar today. One sentence. I waited nine minutes, which you will say is too long, and you'll be right. But I said it, and the tutor wrote it on the board.

It was about who doesn't answer a questionnaire. You'd have asked it in about four seconds.

On Friday a girl called Hollie made me stir a pan of rice, and I told the whole kitchen about Thursdays at the Whetstone, and now we're going to have one here, on Sundays, with cards.

I miss the pond. Tell Nana Fives I'm keeping a tally.

Here's my question for you, since you always have one for me. At the back table, when I used to sit and listen and not say anything, did anyone notice? I always thought nobody did. I'd like to know how you'd know.

Tara

P.S. I've written you a longer letter too. I'm keeping it for now.

The question for your own table

Think of someone who waits too long to speak. Do you notice them? What would you have to do to make the gap they need?

Something to do

Write two versions of a letter to someone you love: the long one with everything in it, and the short one with one true thing and one question. Send the short one. Keep the long one somewhere you'll find it.

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