Wherever I start from, here I am. And yet, it is to get beyond the assertive, mundane words of my beginning that I want to set out upon the journey at all. If I cannot be part of the rhythm of wandering, and feel myself guided by faith, then I could never force a story to its conclusion.

Sustained by my silence, nothing happened for many years. In the interim, I found myself a storyteller without a plot, which meant that the ballet hall was always empty the evenings that I chose to address it, and my memories, hardened by the flint and stone of its walls, were my only audience. Perhaps those seated at the front listened attentively enough, and perhaps the ones at the back, out of sight, did nothing to discourage me. But, taken together, they recognised neither limits nor destinations, and I knew that if I tried to understand them I would only lose my way, or else find myself in a place I never wanted to be.

There is a bus shelter on Kingston Road, with a flat pitch-covered roof overhung by sycamores, and its scratched and shatterproof panels always seem filled with a melancholy, dusty light. The bus shelter retains its quiet sense of authority because it has never once claimed to be explicable; it makes no sense of those who arrive at or depart from it; it anticipates nothing and reflects upon nothing, disdaining connections, coincidences, repetitions. On the outskirts of a leafy suburb with a worn pavement, overlooking but set back from a minor road on which the cars travel too fast, it is neither a part of the country nor the town, and its only certainty is the faded schedule with its long, lozenge-shaped frame, timetabling the arrival and exodus of out of date services.

As a child, I used to stand there; I used to stand, waiting too long, because even then the buses never ran on time, and along that route in particular. Instead, people in cars would stop to ask where I was going and if I wanted a lift, and I would look at them fearfully and say nothing, until they shook their heads and drove away again. I would stand there because I had gone to visit a particular friend of mine – a foreigner, someone who had flown into the middle of the school year from far away, and brought his own values ready formed with him. His parents would pick us up together at the school, and drive us to the place that they lived. It was a modern house; everything was clipped and clean; corners were filled with standing lamps; the kitchen was white; the windows were made of plastic and opened outward; all this was so different from the squeaky sash windows, the grey rooms and ramshackle gardens of that timeless place that I called home. And I admired it for its difference, but I also sensed its absolute incompatibility with the things with which I was familiar. Maybe this is the reason why, at the end of those afternoons, they never offered to drive me home; maybe they were powerless to transcend the native history of the place into which they had fallen. Instead, they left me to walk to the bus shelter, from the vantage point of which I would stare back along the unvarying evening street, stare as deep into the horizon as I could, and experience an emotion, an understanding, or a lack of emotion, or a lack of understanding, that is as confused and compelling today as it was then, and in the pursuit of whose meaning I seem hardly to have prospered at all.

Twelve years later, I too had traveled far from home, and suddenly realised, by chance, that I was studying in his home town. I did not remember the address in its entirety, but I recalled enough of it to locate it in the phone book. The woman seemed surprised by my call; I reminded her how I and her son had played together as children; yes, she remembered me; yes, she conceded, he too was studying here; it was probably best if I contacted the university. Abruptly I realised, from everything she had not told me, and all the questions she had failed to ask, that this friendship had ended when that family boarded their plane home, and I was the only one who cared to revive it.

At that moment, I saw both the bus shelter and the ballet hall together; no event connected them, but they had an emotion in common, for the ballet hall was where my sister used to dance, and when I went back to the empty hall I would always think about the the colour of dance shoes, and the evening in the windows of that place, and the fact she had never become a dancer, after all. And perhaps, since you are remembering this today and today itself may be remembered, the waste and inertia of your past may themselves become a beginning, and there will be an end to these empty, useless days, as you close the squeaking door and the bland, yellow, indifferent light of upstairs, like the light of any heaven, continues to fall in the street after you have gone.