The Quiet House

By Mandy Lee

I open my eyes and Jack turns like a beetle, tucking sheets and blankets into his curl along with legs and arms and hands and feet until he is a cotton-wrapped ball. Still. 3 am in the morning. I am still but thinking. Remembering.

Eleven years ago, Jack and I used to sit in the Library at school. We talked mostly about books, that is to say, we talked about books some of the time when we weren't talking about how everybody else wasnÆt as normal as we were. If he felt like it, Jack would sometimes eat bits of his favourite books while we talked. Catch 22 was popular, but by far the most chewed was an early edition of George Orwell's Coming Up For Air. It was covered in brown plastic and gave off a strange ancient smell reminiscent of wet earth. Jack said it was just another way of learning - the intake of knowledge. One week into the second term, bored with the taste of paper, he worked his way through the Librarian's spider plant, leaf by shiny green leaf. He was sick in the waste bin in the corner. I can remember pretending to read 'The Last of the Mohicans' while he heaved away almost soundlessly behind me.

I was fascinated by his t-shirts that advertised bands I'd never heard of, and by the tufts of dark hair that sprouted out from his collar. One day he caught me looking and came across with a purposeful glint in his eye. I remember that squeamish feeling in my stomach when he approached, sure he was going to ridicule me. My hands scurried for more pages to turn. He was grinning the widest grin I have ever seen when he reached me as if he guessed exactly what my insides were up to: "Can I borrow your pen?"

I nearly managed to give it to him without shaking but not quite. He saw me flinch when he touched my hand. I was vermilion by the time he turned away from the wall below the window ledge where the paint had all but gone and bare plaster spread grey. He pointed to the plaster where I could see tiny blue stick figures: "This is for you." I watched as he framed it with his hand: "It started off as you but it's turned into the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. Still. It looks a bit like you, here." And he picked up my right hand, singled carefully my index finger and pressed it against the wall so I had the scene reverse tattooed on my skin.

I never saw him again until today, eleven years on when I saw him poring over a dusty blue volume in another Library on George IV Bridge. He pretended not to see me. I knew it was a ploy.

I never saw him naked until tonight, eleven years on when Jack whispered : "We are the same, all of us Gloria. Just a trembling heart, a mass of thought and an unknown spark," as he slid his hand across the undulating curve of my hip and round on to the mound of my belly. The first time his middle finger found the dip of my belly button, he circled it gently making my abdomen contract of its own accord : "We are packaged uniquely, but we are all the same. Sometimes our packaging reflects our birthplace and our ancestor's birthplace. Sometimes it is unreadable but for the look of home." I shivered with that first sense of his hand and voice. My belly trembled like water, until I finally turned to him, half sleeping, half awake.

3 am is a strange hour. There is something about the heavy, heavy quiet of night that swells in my ears. It is dense and throbbing, a solid thing. The dark brings it down, or is it just that at the first sign of night all daily business comes to a close and the heavy nothing noise which has been ignored, comes to the fore? I think the latter, but sometimes in the middle of the night, I can believe that it is most definitely the former. For then, on rare occasions it is impossible to give in to sleep. It is all too unnerving, so we rise and light the house, preparing to read or eat or drink or think or switch on the television or write our novels, our poems, our thoughts, and our diaries. We check things and then check them again just to make sure. We light our fires and ovens, and clean our cupboards. We tidy shelves and sort our spices. Time and time again we tell ourselves that we should be in bed, but we refuse to go until itÆs dawn, until itÆs light, until we relax, until that call comes, until he comes home, until she wakes, until itÆs time, until we're no longer frightened. This is when some succumb to despair. The night seems too long to bear. All those hours ahead. Always hours to go and yet, we know it will end, all of us. We just have to make it through. Some can't and I understand that. For one minute in a nine hour night you can despair enough to believe that you cannot go on. I've despaired, until now.

I will marry Jack and we will be happy for as many years as we can.

What I know now is that you must give yourself an option, a choice - can I make it through this second to the next? Then, can I make it through this minute to the next? This hour? This night? If you can, there is no need to despair. You may cry and grieve and beat your breast but not despair. Despair is the loss of hope and an abandonment of hope is the loss of our main reason for living.

The bed winds round me. Next door's boiler clicks once and then once more as it always does.

What if Jack is married? What if he has a small pack of children waiting jammy-faced for him at his home sweet home? I jumped just now and my heart snapped as coal shifted in the grate. I would not have cared four hours ago, but because it is night and the house is covered in heavy quietness, it is a shocking noise. I think of both my Grandmothers, both widowed in the last few years. How hard it must be to grow used to having the house quiet after forty or fifty or sixty years of someone else's noise. That must be one of the small things that just happen - the quietness - that you suddenly notice - that nobody else thinks about. How terrifying it must be. Not just the quiet house, but the chance that you become used to someone making noise, filling the house. Then they leave and the quiet house returns, forty or fifty or sixty years down the line. Or eleven years down the line.

I know that you will leave me when the sun rises. That's such a shame, you look so pretty wrapped in white this morning. I know, have another pillow, the special one with embroidered pink words in every corner.

When we are young, we all long for our own peaceful space, without realising that there can be a too quiet house. This isn't talked about because I think we all hold a fear of it. It continues to rumble silently below until one day, we are left bare-faced and listening.

I will hold it close so that you can admire the workmanship. Can you see the names of all those books we read together, all in different stitches. I spent two days on the chain stitch and bought the thread special. You sure are wriggling this morning. Hold still now. Hold still while you read the names. I'll read them for you then. If you do this, we will be the same Jack. You and me. We are the same. We will keep the quiet house at bay. You and me forever. I'll make noise for both of us. Oh my Godfathers, what a beautiful day. Time to get up.