Silence
Some places don't suit silence. Sometimes it's a favourite classroom. Sometimes it's a street, sometimes a garden or a corner of a room. Some places just don't suit silence. Some places need noise. Chatter, the whir of machines, the hum of electronics, the tapping of feet, the banter between best friends, the communication between birds or the sound of the breeze making its way through the branches of the trees in the forest. There are some places that need noise. In those places, if there is no noise, things seem off. The people in those places, when there is an absence of necessary noise, never seem to be able to concentrate. They walk around aimlessly, wondering what to do with themselves. They can't simply stay still and take in the silence. That's too stressful. Silence is not a nice noise.
To most people, silence is a very disconcerting noise. It makes them think far too deeply into things. Deeply enough to scare themselves. This was certainly the case for Sybil Branson. More than ever on this occasion. She'd had four children. None of them were at home this evening. Her eldest, Clara, being a typical sixteen year old, was spending the night with her boyfriend. Of course Sybil worried about her. This was the first time Sybil had been through having to deal with teenage love hormones. It certainly wasn't an easy task to keep her eldest contained. But she could hardly stop her. Not with the strong-willed blood the sixteen year old had. And anyway, Sybil wasn't going to risk being called a hypocrite. Clara knew all too well that Sybil and Tom had spent years sneaking about to get to see each other when they were about her age. Sybil couldn't judge her eldest's form of escapism. If anything, she was proud of her. She knew her own mind, just as Sybil did. She liked knowing that she'd brought her child up how she had always wanted to be brought up. She wanted to be brought up to discover life for herself. She wanted to be pushed out into the road of life so that she could get herself out of the way of oncoming traffic without having to be pulled onto the safety of the pavement by somebody else. She wanted to find her own path in life. She didn't want to get directions from others – instead, she wanted to go down a new path that nobody else had ever been down. Clara was the same. And Sybil was proud. Her next eldest, her only son, Peter, was thirteen. He was beginning to get to the stage that all boys reach where they decide to trash things and be rowdy and start to defy their parents' orders. Sometimes Sybil would have a moment and get cross with him for being disobedient. Though, with four children, it was hardly surprising that Sybil sometimes lost her temper. He was at a friend's party. Originally, he was supposed to be home by eleven, but after a good week on the behaviour front and a bit of persuasion, he managed to convince his parents to let him stay the night at his friend's after the party was finished. Sybil knew this friend of his well. His best friend, Colin, was a small boy with a large personality. Sybil didn't expect anything to happen at this party, but she worried about it nonetheless. When a group of teenage boys were put together, all beginning to find who they really were and all running on hormones, Sybil knew that things could get out of hand quicker than they could be got back to normality. Then she had her youngest two. Twins. Faye and Jasmine. They had two very similar personalities, but there were a couple of things on which they disagreed – favourite colour, tastiest food that dad made, best way to spend a birthday. But on the whole, they were two halves of a whole. They were nine. They weren't distinctly like Sybil, neither were they distinctly like Tom. They were their own, but they were each other's. Clara and Peter had been quite 'normal', if that's an acceptable word to use. They'd been what Sybil and Tom could have expected from their two children. They weren't usually anything more than they had anticipated they were going to be. And, although Faye and Jasmine weren't exactly more than they'd thought they'd be, they certainly weren't quite what they had expected them to be. Sybil liked it, though. She liked that they were different. How boring it would have been to raise two more girls who had been exactly the same as Clara. The twins, being at the same school, were on a school camp together. They had looked forward to it for weeks. Sybil had encouraged them to go on the trip. It took some coaxing to get them to agree to it at first, but then they had spent weeks planning for it and looking forward to it. Sybil knew that they were more confident when they were together. If anybody ever saw them in the street, they would have thought they were simply best friends. They were non-identical. Though they looked different, their personalities were remarkably connected. With all four of her children out of the house, Sybil took great notice of the silence.
Sybil undressed in silence. She clambered slowly and stiffly into bed in silence. She turned on the light and began to read in silence. Tom wasn't home yet. He'd been extremely overworked recently and had been coming home at about ten each night for the past few weeks. Sybil looked at the clock. She expected him home any minute now. She kept reading. She kept thinking. She kept missing her family. In silence. She didn't like silence. Her house was one to be filled with noise. Too much noise was better than none at all. A household with four shouting children was better than a household with no children and no noise. Even the clock was silent. Digital clocks were like that. They annoyed Sybil. She preferred to hear the gentle, methodical ticking of the second hand, but Tom couldn't stand it. He'd been known to grab a clock from the wall and throw it down the stairs to stop it from ticking. Tom refused to let a ticking clock anywhere near their bedroom. There was one in the living room, but things were usually too hectic for Tom to notice it, so that one clock had survived to this day. It had had the fortune of not being flung to the floor, the glass smashed and the hands stopped in their tracks. It was still alive. For now. Sybil read to distract herself. Then she heard the door open and close. A briefcase was placed down on the floor. She remembered the countless times when the same briefcase had been placed on the floor by the same man over the years. So many times Tom would walk into the room and surprise Sybil as she couldn't even hear the open and close of the heavy front door over the clamour of her brood of children. Oh, how she wished that she couldn't hear the front door open and close now. Footsteps were heard throughout the kitchen. He heard them proceed to the stairs. The sound of footsteps edged closer and closer to Sybil. Tom was home. Thank God for that. She wasn't alone. Maybe she wouldn't feel such a yearning for noise now. If Tom was here, at least she could focus her attention on him. Maybe this would take her mind off the fact that there were none of her children in the house. It was her and Tom. Just like it had been all those years ago. But all those years ago, she didn't know how horrible silence was. Back then, she longed for silence to read in peace or just think about things without distractions. Now, she wanted there not to be silence so that she could think straight. How things change over time. Children do that, you know. They change the way in which a parent thinks. They don't know they do it, and more often than not, parents aren't aware that they're being manipulated. But they are. Every hour of every day there is a child somewhere in the world slowly changing the way their parents think. Children really are a wonderful thing. They were certainly the most important thing that Sybil had ever known.
She never thought that anybody could be more important than Tom. But then she had Clara, and Tom was suddenly fighting for first place. He walked into the bedroom, saw Sybil lying in bed with her head resting on the headboard and her eyes focused on the pages of her book. He walked over to her side and placed a gentle, well-practised kiss on her forehead. He wrapped an arm loosely around her shoulders and she leant into him. "Are you alright, love?" Tom asked.
"Yeah, I'm just tired."
"How so? The kids aren't here."
"That's why, though. I don't like it being so quiet. This house feels more like ours when it's full of children running around and causing chaos."
"They're all growing up, Syb. We can't keep a hold of them forever."
"I know," Sybil stated plainly and quietly. "But it doesn't mean that I can't miss them when they're not here. We've brought them up, Tom. I've put everything I've got into those four little monsters and I don't really want them to leave for good."
"They won't. They love you, Sybil, just as much as any other child loves their mother. You mean the world to them and they need you there. They wouldn't cope without you, Sybil. I know it's tough, but this will do you good. When they're all at university or all married and living somewhere else, it's just going to be you and me in this house. We're going to have to learn to cope sooner or later."
"I know. But I'd rather it was held off for as long as possible." Tom smiled inwardly, and then began to get ready for bed. With the amount of work he was doing, he was glad for the rest without having to control his young family as well. He slipped out of his work clothes and into his tatty old pyjamas that really needed replacing. As soon as he was next to Sybil in bed, she placed the book back on her bedside table and turned herself so that she could wrap her arms around Tom. She wriggled so that she was as close to him as possible. She had needed Tom's comfort for various things before, but never to quite this extent. He kept her going when she was having a tough time for any reason. "I love you, Tom."
"I love you too." Things were better now. Things were better when there wasn't silence. Some noise was good. Even if it was only in the form of Tom's slow breathing. Sybil was happier now.
This idea came to me because one of my friends noted in a quiet room at school that the room didn't suit silence. It's only a short little fic, but I think it didn't go too badly. Let me know what you think of it - I love hearing what you all think of my stories.