A short story...
On Permeability
The woman had never liked sounds. As a child, she would put wads of blu-tack in each ear, pull a beanie down over her face, and crawl hampster-like onto the top shelf of the airing cupboard, where she could enjoy the blissful absence of the everyday noise that made life so exhausting. As she grew older, she found herself more and more repelled by the constant physical menace of sound, its encroachment, its impatience. The rustle of shopping bags seemed to scrunch the skin of her inner ear. The chink of teaspoon against china cup struck against her temples and brow. A neighbour practicing saxophone seemed to smear notes across her face with a disgusting mustard stickiness. It was unbearable.
She began to look for solutions.
The eastern suburbs were problematic, plagued as they were with the constantly descending blades of aeroplane noise. The western hills were cursed with rusty kaka cries and the intolerable death gurgles of tui. The inner city was completely out of the question. The south coast was promising for a few blissful days, until a southerly storm sent long rollers explosively up onto the rocks in terrible liquid exhalations, receding with a deep sucking undertow that she felt was trying to pull her insides out through her pores.
She found refuge in a brand new soulless hill suburb, far from the shops and schools, a dark-glassed McMansion large enough to facilitate her retreat into the innermost rooms of the house. She paid cautious men to come with thick armfuls of purple-grey wool and fill the walls and windows and ceiling and front rooms while she sat in the basement wearing BOSE noise cancelling headphones turned up to max negation.
You could order your shopping online, she found, and have it delivered in reassuringly silent cardboard boxes. She ate from floppy silicone bakewear with gentle plastic spoons and disconnected the sound output of the TV so it became a soothing bath of colour and shape.
When the sound of the kettle accelerating into violent white noise became intolerable she turned to slow trickling mouthfuls of tap water, and when the infernal glopping of her stews and curries began to slime across her skin like a rash she undertook a diet of soft silent fruits, avocados, and rice pudding from Meals on Wheels, who tactfully left it on the back step.
She eased herself into silent lukewarm baths that had dribbled from the tap over many hours, and wiped her teeth with a carefully non abrasive sponge.
On Guy Fawkes night she put her headphones on and wrapped expensive shawls around her head in the manner of a Kenyan woman; and when hardy Trick or Treaters ignored her articulate and discouraging signage she crept down to the basement through long tendrils of mint green carpet and waited for them to leave.
The silence spread around her like a blissful picnic blanket.
Many years passed.
One day the woman was sitting in her headphones constructing a pastoral scene from Fuzzy Felt, when suddenly the silence became too much.
It was ravenous, it had no bottom, it yawned and gaped and tried to swallow her face. And there she was in the middle of it, a rock in a swirl of dark ocean, the hole at the bottom of the whirlpool, a guttering candle about to be swallowed! It was a vacuum, it would suck her brain out through her ears, it would turn her inside out!
She ran for the door, shedding headphones, mohair rugs, blankets of finest lambswool and small knitted items, and opened it wide on hinges of silent oil. The unfamiliar daylight stopped her short upon the front step. A wild tangle of convulvulus and dock, snail infested fennel and raggedy agapanthus had obscured her narrow front path. She took a deep breath, a lungful of late morning air, the gasp of a surfaced swimmer.
The sounds came at her. Roadworks gnawed at the distant air, cars shifted gear up hills, invisible building site men shouted at one another to fuck off, snails slimed their ways up the fennel stalks, cicadas and blackbirds and the cluCLUNK of a loose manhole as the tires went over it all swarmed in the air. They washed over her, they went straight through her and around her and up her nostrils and inside her molars. Her jaw unclenched. Her bones breathed a sigh of relief and shuffled imperceptibly away from one another. It was ok.
