Safe Sounds
Stop. I would be okay if it was daylight. It wasn't. It was, however, two o clock on a Friday night and I was alone. You'd be scared of anything.
My figure, short in stature with a wide face, was sitting hopelessly on the edge of my single bed, fully dressed in my oversized tartan skirt and metal trimmed boots and ready to move without warning yet slightly limp in the way that I sat there. I found my eyes staring blankly at the wooden wardrobe in front of my arms; I must have looked obsessive, so much so that if that if the wardrobe had looked back at me, it would have felt as though I was criticising it. In clear view, despite the dark, was the drooping handle. In that moment I could imagine the ivory slats, as if smaller on the outside, caving in on themselves as the strange girl before him peered past its door. With a relaxed motion of the hand, I grasped for the wooden box, caressing the handle.
No.
Stop.
No.
"There's nothing to worry about Clara, it's killing me to see you this way."
Stop.
The door whined at the room as it found itself opened and then shut with an accented slam. There was nothing to worry about. My slam caused the wardrobe to shudder with a surly, silent clamour. Tenacious drums and bell plates rang through the room, ringing in new thoughts. I was paralysed. The waves of sound were conducted from the bottom to the top of my old house, my eardrums excited by the noise which abruptly reverberated back at me. This knocked me unstable. Air pulsated around me. There was no wind.
I'd be okay if I could distract myself, but I couldn't. Popping open another drink from the bedside table awakened my memory of a meal I had burnt a few hours previously, to my shame. As I eased the stopper out of the bottle, cork rubbing against glass, the object creaked with the displaced pressure. Pulling with more strength, the mushroom stalk of the bottle stopper scraped against the ring of the conical bore and cried out, anticipating its release.
Stop.
'Scrape.'
'Whine.'
'Scrape.'
Stop!
Now yearning for a different occupation, I switched on the radio. A heavy crackling stretched out and engulfed the room, painful and disconcerting, preventing my fingers from working faster. Tuning the radio to something serene was harder than it seemed. Blips of all London's stations whizzed past with every slight rotation of the tiny circular dial, filling out their millisecond of advertising space as I moved through each channel, not willing to buy. The stations: 90.5, 90.4, 90.3… silence.
The radio cut off with a minute spark and a 'zup'. I lifted my hand away. My body jolted back on the bed. The quaint machine continued to blast and blare faint noises with its dying gasps and splutters.
Stop!
'Zup.'
'Whizz, whirr.'
"I love you."
'Zop.'
"Fear is a superpower."
Stop.
I turned to see my dishevelled hair resting above broad face in the three-way reflection of the television on top of the wardrobe. I looked vile and needed more make-up. Digging my hand amongst the pillows, I searched for the remote, switching the TV on. (BBC 2, left paused on Match of the Day' by I knew who.) The play button was deftly pressed by my forefinger and the theme tune chorused out with a brazen fanfare of trumpets shouting at me; encouraging me to be upbeat but failing. Strangely, a pandemonium like that of a Shoreditch club in the late 80s was created as light from the screen exploded bright lustre while the colours flicked and alternated. The presenters gargled their way through their lines, more and more flashes of an electric spectrum illuminated the room, revealing the positions of my possessions, whose locations I had forgotten in my disquiet.
The wardrobe seemed nearer to me than it had been, but now the light emphasised individual outlines and curves of ivory indented into the edges of the slats – they looked like faces. With no warning the faces turned into patterns, next the patterns merged into letters until my mind's eye directly detected a single dull word: stop.
STOP.
'Whine.'
'Crack.'
'Scratch.'
"I love you."
'Whizz, zop, whirr.'
"I LOVE YOU."
Stop.
Outside, the wind pulsated with a melisma about the trees and it cut me in two as it perforated the room. Tossing the remote aside I strode to the curtains, shutting out the hissing which struck the window. It beat and beat again and again. Urgently I gathered the curtain that was rising and falling like a sea of wrath. I got caught up in the material. I struggled to break free as the swinging curtains swallowed my figure. I was being attacked from both sides, three sides, all sides. Soon, the beating of fabric against double glazing pitched up to a higher note, rising further up like a piano scale. Smacking more rapidly against the bumps of material that were punched by my limbs at odd angles, the excruciating noise blue-screened my brain while my eyes malfunctioned in the semi-darkness. Louder, faster, closer…
Stop.
'Click – chink.'
The front door opened.
'Creak.'
Safe, safe sounds.
At any other moment, someone entering your house at two o clock at night would be ominous, and I'd be frightened – but I wasn't. I heard my name called at a perfect resonance at the bottom of the house, the sound ascended from the doorway to the landing.
"Clara."
The door clicked shut and the wall of my home jingled deliriously. I felt myself float away from the curtain, turn off the TV set and ignore the wardrobe. Promptly, my body was steadied by the pads of my fingers on the banister. I stumbled down the stairs, not quite believing it.
"Ah Clara, sorry I'm late. Granted, I have no excuse, considering the…"
But I had stopped listening. The manner in which he articulated both syllables that comprised my name with equal weight was being looped constantly by my inner voice, purely to indulge my ears with his bright chords yet rustic timbre. His sentences became an account of where he'd been and his subsequent encounters which I half-listened to for what remained of the persisting night.
I'd be okay if it was daylight, and it soon was. I was safe.