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It is a failure so profound that all they have left to throw at it is the value of their own selves, like desperate people taking the last of their possessions to the pawn shop.īut perhaps it isn’t like that at all. It is in fact failure, their failure to control the story, their failure to control me. They appear to be wielding power, but I’ve come to understand that their silence is the opposite of power. My mother and father seem to believe they are inflicting a terrible loss on me by disappearing from my life. Then they’ll be sorry! It’s a gamble, with oneself as the stakes. It is the attempt to recover power through withdrawal, rather as the powerless child indignantly imagines his own death as a punishment to others. All the same, there’s no mistaking this for anything less deliberate than punishment. If you don’t live with your victim or see them every day, it might be a while before they even notice they’ve been sent there. It takes patience to send someone to Coventry: it’s not a game for those who require instant satisfaction. Like coldness the silence advances, making itself known not by presence but by absence, by disturbances of expectation so small that they are registered only half-consciously and instead mount up, so that one only becomes truly aware of it once its progress is complete. It’s not unlike when a central-heating boiler breaks down: there’s no explosion, no dramatic sight or sound, merely a growing feeling of discomfort that comes from the gradual drop in temperature, and that one might be surprisingly slow – depending on one’s instinct for habituation – to attribute to an actual cause. Sometimes it takes me a while to notice that my parents have sent me to Coventry.