I’ve just read about a study of the effectiveness of music in public places and the way it aims to fill in the empty noise spaces.
I must here say that every noise space in our house is filled and that I’ll have to put you on the waiting list.
I’ll go further and say we have the best listening device in the country and, if you wish, I can introduce you to her.
Once we had long silences at the breakfast table but not any more.
Once I could say: “Give me a moment to think.”
But now only the stereotyped retort, “We haven’t got all day.
So it’s noises, noises and I must say she has a remarkable noise identification catalogue where every sound is on file and any acoustic outbreak beyond the norm is instantly investigated by the auditory computer with inlets on the right and left side of her head.
My wife (you surely have guessed by now) knows the squeak of mice, even separating the squeaks of mature and immature rodents. She can detect the scuttle of a fruit rat hurdling the rafters above the ceiling.
She can define the creak of specific furniture, especially the quick, indrawn twang of assorted springs accommodating Old Jumbo Bum.
She is instantly alerted by the stealthy passage of surreptitious slippers on carpets, she can interpret the creak of individual boards marking a nocturnal foray in the direction of the refrigerator and can tell you to the centimetre how far it has progressed.
She knows when the person will bark his shin on the sharp edge of the nest of tables with which she has slyly minefielded his flight path.
The resulting Who put the *&%$#@! things there? of course immediately fills the noise spaces to overflowing.
This naturally makes the victim fight noise with noise.
Suggestion. Why not drown the opening of the refrigerator door by flushing the toilet?
Good thinking, friend, unless, of course, the door opener has forgotten the basin of cold stewed quinces, poised like a boulder above an abyss and which falls in a red cascade of juice and fruit and a shattering sound upon his toes and gives him basin feet blues.
Even when the flushing technique works one has to scamper to reflush and then return tiptoeing to the refrigerator and, let’s face it, not all of us are built to stand on tiptoe.
There’s, for instance, the dousing of the refrigerator light with an old sock because the slightest rise or irregularity in the level of illumination is also noticed by the ever-alert house control.
This brings her down, rubbing her eyes and murmuring: “Seeing that you’re up you can make me a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich and don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. Oh, and I put a 100-watt globe in the fridge and it lights up the room like daybreak.”
It does indeed.
I’ve tried to counter her fiendish hearing with headphones and a little tape player and her optical alertness by her wearing a fringe. Alas not all the lullabies in the world can lull her or Wagnerian chords shock her into insensible sleep.
So we have learnt to live without noise spaces.
Take it from me.
We’re all goners in this house—rats, mice and myself, we things that go munch in the night.
Max Fatchen