This extract is taken from the novel Later, That Same Year by Ruth Mackay.

Later, That Same Year (extract)

She told me the story in the wrong order, which is to say she told it the way she remembered it.

The accident had happened three years before I met her, but she never spoke of it sequentially. She would mention the sound first, then the light, then a detail about what she had been thinking about at the moment before, which was usually something entirely 5 ordinary: whether she had locked the back door, or if there was enough milk. She could not tell me what happened in what she called after, by which she meant anything from the moment of impact onward, and she had stopped trying.

"You go there," she said once, "and you go there when something calls you, not in order. The brain is not a camera." 10

I wrote things down after our conversations and tried to assemble them. I had pages of her story in fragments, each note dated, each fragment attributed to the day and the mood. I had the sound. I had the milk. I had seventeen references to a grey coat that may or may not have been hers. 15

She asked me once what I was doing with all the pieces.

"Making sense," I said.

She looked at me for a long time in the way she had of looking at people who had said something she disagreed with but had decided not to correct. 20

I kept writing.

How and to what effect is pacing used in this text?