Truth upon Truth

 

My neighbour is on the phone. She can hear a didgeridoo.

“Come and hear it,” she says.

I go around. She takes me into her front room. I’ve never been invited into this room before and I’ve been her neighbour for thirty years.

“Stand here and listen,” she says.

I stand still like a chocolate soldier and listen.

“Kept me awake all last night. I even went next door and banged on their door,” she says.

I can hear nothing.

“Can you feel the vibration?”

I centre my thoughts around my socks, but can sense nothing.

She is becoming agitated.

“Can you still hear it?” I ask.

She is anxious and distressed.

I listen again.

There’s nothing.

But her room is closing in on me, the browns, the swirling patterns, the claustrophobia.

“Why not come next door,” I say. “Come and have crumpets, tea and some of Ivy’s homemade plum jam.”

She follows me, and I make hot tea and steaming crumpets and ladle Ivy’s jam on top.

Her eyes are bright. She is looking around for electrical gadgets that could be making a noise. She spots the modem and its flashing lights.

“I can hear that,” she says.

I go closer to it.

It’s silent. Not making a sound.

The teenager comes downstairs.

He can’t hear the modem either, nor feel any vibration from it.

I tell her stories to cheer her up.

I tell her how I often mishear things. How when listening to a story that was being read out recently I thought the narrator said, “…running an umpire” and how mystified I had written down the phrase. Listening to other words in about batting and innings and how later I said how much I’d liked the cricket analogy. “Cricket?” they’d exclaimed.

Puzzled I’d then read out the puzzling phrase.

“Not ‘umpire’, empire!” It was explained, to much hilarity.

Then I tell her how during the same night in a poem about war I’d heard the phrase, ‘Troop upon troop’ and later commented on how effective I thought this phrase was and how it pressed home the terror. And how again I was given a mystified look. And then the line was read aloud again, and it turned out to be ‘Truth upon truth.’

I tell these stories so she will know that my hearing is not top notch and that there may well be a didgeridoo playing somewhere in her house which is sometimes punctuated with a thump before it beginning all over again, but even if there was or even if Rolf Harris was in the hallway giving it his all that I would probably be the person who would hear it.

She leaves laughing.

And I’m left wondering as to what my neighbour is really hearing and why I couldn’t hear anything at all.