Four days without a word

The leaflet says the following, and a leaflet is written beforehand, so all of it is in the future.

Participants will arrive on a Thursday between three and five in the afternoon. They will hand in their phones in a cardboard box marked with their own name, and the box will be kept in the office and given back at midday on Sunday.

At six there will be a light meal. At eight, the reading of the rules.

From the reading of the rules onward, nobody speaks again.

There will be nineteen people. It is almost always that number, because the hall holds twenty and somebody drops out the night before.

The rules will be read by a woman in her sixties who has run these four days since 2009, and she will read them slowly, without dramatising any of it, because a rule that is dramatised turns into a promise.

There will be no conversation. No reading, no writing, no music, no competitive exercise, no sustained eye contact.

That last one is the one almost nobody takes seriously on the Thursday and everybody understands by the Friday.

The dormitories will be separate. The hall will not be: the places are numbered in order of booking and set out in four rows of five, and each person sits at their number for all four sessions of the day, every day, with no swapping.

Place 9 will belong to a man of about forty who arrived in a hire car. Place 14 will belong to a woman who came by coach and walked the last two kilometres with a rucksack far too big for four days.

On the floor plan of the hall, 9 and 14 sit on the diagonal, three and a half metres apart.

The bell will go at half past four in the morning.

First session at five. Breakfast at seven. Second session at half eight. Work period at ten, which is when each person is handed a folded slip with a job on it. Lunch at quarter past twelve. Third session at two. Tea at five. Fourth session at half six. Lights out at half nine.

None of that will vary across four days, and it is precisely because it does not vary that people start to see things they walk straight past at home.

On the Friday morning, for instance, the man at place 9 will notice that the woman at place 14 sits down before everyone else and gets up after everyone else, and that she does not move during a session. Not once. Forty-five minutes.

He will assume she has done this before. He will be wrong: it is her first retreat, and the reason she does not move is a different one, and he will never find out what it is, because nobody here is going to tell anybody anything.

The folded slip for the work period is drawn at random, and nobody adjusts the draw.

On the Friday the two of them will draw the same job: firewood.

The store is behind the kitchen, roofed in translucent sheeting, with a sliding door that catches on its runner. The work consists of moving split logs from the outside pile to the inside pile, stacked cut side up, to dry.

Two people, one hour forty, without exchanging a word and without being allowed to look at each other head on.

What is left is hands.

What is left is deciding who picks up first, who waits, who holds the long log at one end while the other holds it at the other, who gives way in the narrow gap between the pile and the wall when both of them need to pass at once, and who does not give way.

On the Saturday the job will come round again, because Saturday's draw is made on Friday night and the woman who runs the retreat repeats the pairs that worked.

She repeats them for efficiency. She will be seventy-two before she understands what she did.

It will rain on the Saturday night, and it will rain onto translucent sheeting, which is the loudest noise there is.

At half nine the lights will go out. At eleven the rain will still be coming down.

In the men's dormitory there will be five men and one of them snores. In the women's there will be eleven women and a window that does not shut properly.

The silence of a retreat is not an absence of noise. It is an absence of explanation. Things go on happening and nobody comments on any of them, and it is that, rather than the quiet, that makes four days feel like three weeks.

All of the above is in the leaflet, or follows directly from what is in the leaflet.

What comes next is not.

At twenty past four on the Sunday morning, ten minutes before the bell, the sliding door of the wood store stood open by thirty centimetres, which is as far as it goes before it catches.

It was cold and the rain had stopped around two.

They did not speak. That has to be clear, because it is the one fact both of them would have confirmed afterwards if anybody had asked: at no point, before or during, did either of them say a word.

There was a smell of cut eucalyptus, which is sweet and slightly sickly, and the inside pile stood at her shoulder height because the two of them had stacked it to there the previous afternoon.

His jacket ended up on the bare earth floor and went back to the dormitory with earth on it, and at five o'clock, in the first session, he was wearing that jacket.

She sat down at place 14 before everyone else, as on the other three days, and did not move for forty-five minutes.

At midday on Sunday the bell went three times and the rule fell away.

Nineteen people started talking at once, which always happens and is always unpleasant, and the office handed back the cardboard boxes with the phones in them.

He left at ten past one, in the hire car. She caught the twenty to three coach from the main road.

Neither of them knows the other's name to this day. A retreat does not use badges.

The next one will be in March, Thursday to Sunday, with the same nineteen places and the same leaflet, written beforehand and all of it in the future.

Booking opens in January.

They have both already paid.