Quiet
I
Trapped in his armchair by the window, barraged on one side by the cacophony of the city and on the other by his caterwauling guests, Hugo searched about vainly for anything with which to plug his ears. A softened candle for a glob of wax to force into his eardrum maybe, to block out the interminable mumblings, murmurings, snacking, lip-smacking, phlegm-thick chortling, and all the shrieking, screeching laughter. His home was no longer his own.
It was a spacious apartment, the highest in his building, lined with paintings and towering bookshelves inside, and adorned with columns and carvings on the outside. He had lived there for two years—buying it with the savings of six years in the small legal firm he now all but ran at barely thirty-four—but had guarded the place badly: lost it to the thoughtless impositions of colleagues, functions, and clubs. The frivolous, self-aggrandising societies begged a suitable place to hold their revolutionary book clubs, brunches, and card nights. With bitterness he recalled the pride of first hosting them all, affirmed in his aspirations by the idea that successful people hosted things.
The headaches were endless, a constant drum beneath the disharmonic music of the world. His doctor had hummed and a therapist had hummed, but soon their voices became worse than any other. Driving himself too hard. Blood pressure much too high for his age. Symptoms of stress. Anxiety.
Fiction
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August 4,
2019
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20-minute
read
Chronic this, chronic that. They only wanted his money.
He spoke at these gatherings when called upon, but hearing his own voice was no better. Reckoning his only other option was to reach for the tall bookshelf ladder beside him and pull it down on top of them all, he decided to simply pretend to sleep until people started getting the hint. Besides, it’d only set them all coughing and groaning out their last.
Tighter he screwed his eyes, further he let his head slip, yet on they went scraping their forks through their teeth, clattering their plates and saucers. It was only when he snored for a minute straight that they began to shift, shuffle, and gradually leave him. Still, each one insisted on throwing their cutlery down to scratch on the platters and tapping his knee goodbye, forcing him to mumble an apology when he had enough furious energy to beat them away with a candlestick holder. Four times he had to hear his door as they went off in ones and twos: squeak, slam, squeak, slam, squeak, slam, squeak, slam, over and over, driving his nails into his palms.
At length, he was alone again, and the world half quiet.
He drew his curtains, rubbed the crick from his neck, and blocked his ears with two rubber plugs. It was clear enough from the flaming redness after using them that he was allergic, but nothing worked as well on the days when it all just had to stop. To use them twice in two days, though, before everything calmed back down, always felt like cleaning his eardrum with a toothpick.
He tucked himself away beneath his heavy sheets and blankets, fixating on the clear moments of quiet through which he could slip away to somewhere calmer. Deafer and deafer he grew, forgetting every word spoken all day, until he finally found sleep in his dark box in the city.
It had been quiet where he had grown up in the country, just him and his father. The universe was quiet too when at night he might focus on the stars in a cradle of grass and draw fresh constellations. It was no poetic tendency, no scientific fascination. He was simply at the end of his nerve for the grating screech of his father’s violin. Any wish for a mother was more a wish for an adult to tell his father to be quiet, but he only insisted that she had enjoyed it. Only once had Hugo dared to question then why she had run so far away when a wailing baby can’t have been any worse.
There was more potential in the city. Boundless prosperity. He had escaped at twenty to build a life of his own, and two months shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, he had built it high. Since Thursday last, he was as senior in his solicitor’s firm as he could ever be on his own merit. Mr. Stevens had taken him aside that week to promise him the company come the day of his retirement nine months away. All Hugo had to do was maintain his standard. Wait. Be patient.
And yet the relentless din continued. It was the din of every other person scraping by around him, surrounding him in the markets and cafes and offices and theatres. All chattering and calling and singing and shouting, crying out their wares and drowning each other in the thick sickly treacle of greedy voices. All of them, squalling for success.
He had taken a holiday away in the country once at the end of his wit, desperate to escape them all—but out there he could do nothing for himself. Any time spent away was time he would never recover, and time in the city ran twice the speed. With every walk through the streets, any chance for a real respite from it all caught his eye. Package holidays. Suitcase sales. Even just the train timetables.
Nine months. Nine.
He woke that next morning to a burning grip about the sides of his head and, prodding his ears gingerly, dreaded removing the plugs. As much as he hated the pain, it was the first city sound of the day he hated more. He waited for it with his breath held fast as he eased the pellets out with tweezers. The first slipped out with a flare of heat, but with the second something broke in through an open window: one loose wheel on the cracked pavement, rattling coarse on a rusty axle. Metal grinding metal.
Walking to work was no better, and, with a quiet desperation, he hurried through the side streets towards the park. It was a longer route with a growling beast of a road to cross, and he drew up to the crossing with his hands balled into fists in his pockets.
‘Hugo?’
The word rose like a serpent, fangs bared, from the clatter of carriages and the guttural spluttering and belching of cars. Hugo turned with a grimace. The man beside him was familiar—a colleague from a year before, maybe two, of a similar age. Stanley… something?
‘Stanley,’ he said, forcing a smile against the sound of his own voice. ‘How are you?’ The squeak of it. The drag of it. Every layer made him want to shrivel away into the gutters.
‘Oh, well enough,’ he said, checking for any gaps in the clattering traffic. ‘Cramley’s has taken me on. Nice desk, all the usual things. Working for Elise now, if you remember her. Stuck with it, didn’t you? Gone up again?’
‘Yes. Vice, now.’
‘Well, hold tight. You’ll be running the place.’ He frowned at Hugo’s face. The redness framing it. ‘Are you all right?’
At Stanley’s vague gesture, Hugo’s hands went halfway to his ears before realising they could do nothing, and fell back again. ‘Allergy. Nothing serious.’
‘Red as roses, Hugo. Red as hell. Know what it is?’
‘Pellets,’ he said. ‘Earplugs. The rubber. Can’t sleep without them, but nothing’s as good.’
‘Music?’
‘No, no. No. Not on top of all’—he flapped a hand about—‘this.’
‘How about records? Something relaxing. Like not sing-songy ones, like—’
‘It’s not voices, it’s—’
‘I don’t mean instruments.’ Stanley checked his watch and glanced down the road. ‘I should be off, but I ran into someone at a concert the other month. Some kind of musician who runs a shop called Talbot’s—Jane Talbot—and she makes these records for people. Takes all her equipment out to the forest or the beach or somewhere—anywhere us lot are all too busy for—and sets it all up where nothing’s around, captures all the little sounds, and goes home to print it to record. Does wonders. Makes you think you’re really there. Here…’ Stanley drew from his pocket a slim tin of business cards, snapped open the lid, gave his thumb a wet lick, and flick, flick, flicked through ten before sliding one out into Hugo’s hand and snapping it shut again. ‘Real unique kit. Cuts out all the city. Mention me.’
The card was soft, the cadence of its font almost silent. It was neat. Clean. Staring into the name and address—not too far at all—the air hushed about him. He barely heard Stanley hurry off to work and barely thought twice before hurrying away himself.
II
Through the streets he walked, away from the park and into the noise, thinking of an illness to justify having today to work from home. Something vibrant, colourful, explosive.
When he reached the street, all the excuses fell out of mind. It was without doubt the most peaceful street he had ever found. The shop was beautiful: old wood for the façade, a sign in gold on black, lit dim inside but filled with books, instruments, stands, stools, cleaning tools, and cases. The moment he stepped inside, though, his anxieties resurged.
Shrill music shredded the air, a hectic scramble of strings and clashing cymbals, and Hugo wondered if the owner were lying injured on the other side of the curtain behind the counter, flinging her tools about to summon help. He gritted his teeth to endure ringing the bell on the counter and only relaxed them when she stepped through the curtain with a smile of absolute contentedness and set her hands on the counter. They were marked with a lifetime of crafting scars gathered over more years than Hugo had been alive—and a morning of sawdust—but her three-piece suit was entirely pristine and a finer cut than his.
‘Ms Talbot? Jane Talbot?’
‘Jane Talbot, yes. How may I help you?’
He pointed up, his face twisting. ‘Can you turn that down?’
‘The music?’ She frowned, then crossed to a stately gramophone in its shadowy corner, flicked the arm up, and freed Hugo from his torture. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, returning. ‘Needed it.’
‘For what?’
She looked him over with a laugh, leaning her elbows on the glass. ‘It’s for testing. All very well to make relaxing music for a quiet, sunny street. My father before me here used to only work in absolute silence, but ease has never spurned invention. What was it you wanted?’
‘Stanley Durridge recommended you. Said you might help me.’
‘Yes, he would, wouldn’t he? In here every week. I’d been telling him to spread my name about. These records need hearing, I think. Very special. Did he recommend a particular…?’
‘He said you did experiments. Trips. Recorded seas and forests and things. Recordings that can make things quiet.’
‘He hasn’t sold me short. What’s your preference? Waves or leaves?’
‘Is that all you do?’
‘How many do you do?’
‘Excuse me?’
Talbot smiled. ‘Shall we try some out?’ She crossed to her large gramophone again and opened the display cabinet behind it.
A library of slip-covers filled the shelves, and she ran a finger across them, murmuring gently. Hugo fell quiet, the rustling of her finger fixing his attention. When Hugo realised upon opening his eyes that he had closed them, Talbot stood again by the counter exactly as she had before—elbows on the glass, smiling with an expression that prompted no speech. She only raised a finger an inch from the glass and closed her eyes.
It was then that Hugo heard it: the rustling, the crackling, the weary creak of wood and the far-off twittering of birds he hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t the rustling, the crackling, the creaking, or the twittering that drew him closer, that closed his eyes and shut out the world. Between each sound he heard the space, the open silence of a natural place laying softly around them like a blanket. All anxiety melted from the air, and he fell from the city into the woods and into its natural hush.
Before the record finished, he had every note from his wallet on the counter. Talbot opened her eyes to see him gazing at the gramophone as if it were carved of gold.
‘I need it,’ he said. ‘The whole machine and every record like that. Do you deliver?’
‘For an order like that, I’ll send a courier. You’ll have it by tomorrow.’
A rush gripped Hugo’s limbs and he advanced on the gramophone, grasping its sides as if scared it might evaporate if he let it escape his senses. ‘No, no. I need it today. Now.’
‘You like it?’
‘I need it. Please. Let me have it. Buy it. Rent it.’
‘If you’re really needing it today…’ She thumbed the notes with silent, deft arithmetic. ‘Not quite enough here, actually.’
In an instant Hugo drew out his cheque book and signed off a blank one. Gazing into the darkness of the speaker, he tore the page and held it, shaking but not looking, out to her. ‘Take it. I’ve enough.’
She smiled. ‘You’re absolutely sure you want this?’
Hugo only nodded, waved the cheque again, and shifted along to the records when she took it. ‘And as many of these that work like that one. All your experiments. All the tests and recordings. Everything.’
She frowned down at his signature. Enderley. Despite the sheer unlikelihood, the decades and distance between her and that name, she couldn’t help running her eye across him.
The stature.
The profile.
The early grey at the temples.
‘You like the woods more, no?’ she said. ‘There’s something of the country to you.’
‘Despite my best efforts,’ he murmured, flicking through the forest records. ‘Smaller selection though. Have any more?’
Jane Talbot let her eyes shift back to the cheque and the wonderfully inviting blank space above the familiar name. If he could write one, he could write another. And another. No sense ruining her prospects by making it personal.
‘Afraid I’ve only a handful of short ones for the forests,’ she said, folding the cheque into her pocket, pushing away the memory of that infant’s interminable wailing. ‘It’s all been practice for something much more potent anyway to be ready in a few days. But for such generosity… Why not? Have it all.’
III
Within the hour he was home again, the gramophone standing in the parlour by his chair. He sat alone with the needle hooked onto a spring contraption, ready to pull it back to the start the moment it reached the end. The other four records were stacked beside it and changing took only a second, but she had promised another invention soon to manage that as well.
For a moment he resisted the tug of the needle, holding it up, praying it would work again. But as the noise of the city rose again around him, clawing at his window panes, he let it play.
The effect was absolute.
The clamour slid away—the hooting and hollering and roaring of the world smothered in the gentlest breezes of the valleys. For hours he listened with his thoughts beautifully clear as nature peeled the stress from his skin, and the gramophone’s arm flicked back to the start. Back and round, and back and round, and back and round. With this waiting at home, the nine months would pass like a dream: no bother trying to break from the city if he could holiday in his own apartment.
A knock brought him up to find the sun down and the room dark, but he woke happy. The knock was the gin club calling round, and he put up with their idle musing on the hints, notes and themes of the flavours for hours—through all the clinking and sloshing and swallowing and the smacking of verbose lips. Still, by nine he grew restless to return to his records.
‘That’ll have to be all,’ he said, cutting through their chatter. ‘Much to be done very early in the morning.’
‘Aren’t you busy!’ said one, gurgling out a tipsy laugh, but Hugo didn’t share it.
‘Very busy. And for the next three weeks, so you’ll have to be somewhere else next time.’ He waved off all who took the hint and took the rest by the arm to his door with a curt farewell.
Again alone, again at his chair with the needle to the record, he let himself fall back as the first crackling leaves swept his cares away. There he stayed to dawn, then morning, then noon, with only short breaks for food or the bathroom.
By midday, having cycled so many times through the forest, the sea, the glade, and the hilltop records, the whine of the world crept steadily in, and his focus began to crumble.
By evening, he could not bear to leave his chair, staring at it hoping it would let him again grasp the moments of quiet within the sound. He had become too familiar with the records already. Any interruption from the city, any little splinter of chatter or distant tooting horn, broke the peace entirely. His brain relentlessly caught on the difference, stripping away the magic.
By the next morning, it was lost to him.
He resolved to return to the shop, and after checking into work only briefly with the plugs firmly back in his ears, did so that afternoon.
‘More, Ms Talbot,’ he said, striding into the shop with his chequebook in hand and the plugs out again, but found the counter unstaffed and the horrendous music only louder. He drew up to the counter and forced himself to ring the bell. ‘I’ve listened to them all too much. I need more!’
The music played on. The curtains hung. Minutes passed, and he rang the bell again and again until he set himself wincing. After wandering terse circles around the displays, he scowled at the curtain and summoned the courage to check behind it.
It opened into a small workshop, a dim, rough place, cluttered with tools on shelves and instruments hanging from hooks in the ceiling like carcasses at a slaughterhouse.
‘Hello?’ he called around. Nothing. A thin, closed door with a small window seemed to lead directly onto a staircase going up. From the daylight pouring down it, he reckoned an apartment lay upstairs. Not having broken any locks, he primed himself with the excuse of fearing she’d met a terrible accident and—half-believing it—let himself through.
A soft thump hit him when opening the door—a kind of wind, not over his skin, but through his senses. It was only halfway up the dusty stairs that he understood, watching his feet thumping down on wood surely old enough to creak: no matter how hard he stamped, he heard nothing. He tried to call her name again, louder and louder, but nothing passed his lips.
Emerging into Talbot’s cluttered apartment, he found nobody and still no noise. Rapping ornaments on their shelves, he searched for the smallest click or tap, flicked himself all over his ears, snapped his fingers, ground his teeth, and rapped his skull—but all was silent. He’d heard that in true silence like this, one should start hearing all the noises of their bodies, but he couldn’t even hear his pulse.
Finally he saw it hidden in a small alcove in the corner: stately and gleaming in the soft shine of the round window over it was another gramophone, needle down, record turning. Softly he approached and set a palm on the speaker to feel for any vibration.
Nothing. The speaker seemed to numb his hand, its unnatural stillness seeping into his fingers, crawling up through his veins, climbing his arm all the way to his shoulder, until the fear of it crossing his chest and stopping his heart tore his hand away with a silent gasp.
Resting a moment, he watched the record turn. The needle glided without a single stutter along the perfect, glimmering grooves before flicking back on a curious spring mechanism without a beat of noise. The silence was like he’d never known, like the world had never suffered a single note of noise. It was ideal.
He took his left hand from his pocket.
Readied it by the lever.
Counted down.
Flicked.
A hurricane of sound tore through his senses—every turn of the wind through the window, every thick blunt thump of blood in his brain, every scraping scratching scrabbling insect deep in the old wooden beams. He staggered back, hands flying to his ears—his own breath the roar of gods—and fought the turmoil for a way to make it stop. His only thought was for the plugs in his pocket and he shoved them deep into his head.
Whatever unearthly capacity for hearing that the record awoke in him, he couldn’t bear returning to it. The noise of the world with the plugs was now as terrible as it had ever been without them, as terrible as standing by the road with the flood of city life roaring past in its endless crescendo.
The record was his only hope.
He tested it twice, removing and resetting the needle momentarily. The silence was perfect—no fabrication, not an illusion like the forest and sea records. This was something else. Wherever Jane Talbot was, Hugo gained an overwhelming reverence for her—but not enough to wait. Not enough even to spend a minute having a look around or bother himself with who she was beyond someone who had what he needed.
None saw him enter and none saw him leave. Any who might have done still wouldn’t have taken any note of a man striding from a music shop with a new record.
IV
Within a day, Hugo lost all concern for what had happened to her. Any small hope that he may hear news through some channel—Stanley ambushing him again, perhaps—was tinged with the fear of her finding him and demanding the record back. No. Never. It was his now more deeply than anything he’d ever bought. It was his silence.
Setting the new armature was simple, and with it in place, Hugo never needed to touch it to keep any record rolling on.
By midnight, he hadn’t heard a sound for thirteen hours despite his best attempts. His smile broadening by the minute, he stamped and shouted, clapped and hopped, beat spoons on his kitchen counter and slapped the walls and windows. Nothing made a sound.
The first day passed with an underlying fear that his ears would eventually adjust to the record and the world would rear its sonorous head through the peace, but the fear lost its strength and crumpled away. He watched with amusement as the hands of his clock—after a good plain day of reading and rest—rolled up to and past the time of the Cards Guild calling to play around his table. A twinge of guilt, but nothing more. How could he feel any honest remorse without any sign they’d ever knocked? He’d been standing right by the door, after all.
On and on the needle passed, tracking the impossible groove that produced the impossible silence. He freed himself from work for the last day of the week with a carefully penned letter to detail his dreadful malady—nothing to worry about or check on, but nothing that could profit the office for catching it—and sent it away with a promise to send his work along finished from home. The next three days over the weekend would be entirely his own.
At five-thirty, the door was silent as the Thursday Tea Society failed to show up for the first week in thirty, though the shadows under the door played strangely, shuffling side to side.
Letters slipped under his door as he worked in soft serenity, empty things mostly for bills and such. The record played on and so did he, having food enough for meals till Monday.
For those wondrous days, he filled his time around work with anything he pleased. He dreamt up models for business growth, drew out plans to allow himself—as the new head of the firm at the end of these nine short months—to never have to come out to the office more than twice a week, and gleefully drafted a letter to his father detailing his upcoming promotion in all the certainty of his newfound peace and patience. He even found the time and ease of mind to spend full days going up and down his bookshelf ladder, organising his vast library by theme, and then author, then year, then passing preference.
His ladder never creaked, squeaked, nor complained for repair no matter how high he went all through that busy and beautifully silent Friday. The floorboards didn’t complain no matter how suddenly and how hard they were tested. No knock or call or cry or shout ever reached him from the door—and no knock or call or cry or shout ever reached out through it either.
END
Sam Fern
grew up in a handful of quiet English villages, then went off to London for something to do. He currently works in publishing and is a passing acquaintance of whoever runs the otherworldly illustrated journal @pretermond on Instagram.