Doors feature strongly. Slammed or knocked gently on. Shouted through or wept behind

I stand by my father’s frayed and sagging chair. His absence from it pulls at me with the gravitational force of a black hole. I rest my hand where his head has left a grease mark on the fabric, breathing quietly while something heavy in my chest rises, turns slowly over and sinks away again. The ceiling above my mother’s chair is stained brown with nicotine; she smoked a pack a day, often more. I look across to where she sat for so long, and feel my way back in time. An old heaviness comes upon me, a soft, wet weight like a pregnancy or a tumour.

My recall of the years I lived here with my parents is episodic, perforated with blanknesses and punctuated with bright vignettes of uncertain chronology, each one with its own peculiar density and saturation. Doors feature strongly. Slammed, or knocked gently on. Shouted through, or wept behind. What entered, or didn’t. What stayed behind them. The chronic sadnesses of this house enter me along with the smell of stale carpet and unwashed clothes. My mother’s lengthy absences from which she would return pale and chastened, duller and more docile. An illness I was never given a word for. The little brown pill bottles she kept beside her. I’d pick them up to read the labels while she was sleeping, looking for some clue about what was happening to her, but the contents remained mysterious. Chlorpromazine. Temazepam. Largactil. The words tasted spiky, made me anxious. Too much x, y and z.

Here, in this basement, in the space between these two empty chairs and the people who once occupied them, is the space in which I grew to adulthood. And I realise that the task that lies before me is more than simply clearing away the remains of my parents’ lives, more than sifting out the things of value from the magazines and chipped crockery and sagging furniture. The task before me is to understand the elusive dark matter that lay at the heart of this home, the centre of its slow-spinning galaxy, to feel for its gravitational pull, the invisible ballast that, in spite of everything, held these two people together for 68 years, and holds me in their orbit even now.