Didgeridoo

 

The phone rang, it’s my neighbour. I’m surprised as she doesn’t usually ring at all. We thank each other for our Christmas gifts. We chat about the weather and I tell her the story about the pond.

She wants to know why I’ve taken the fence down next to it. I explain about the poor light conditions and I’m lulled into thinking that was why she was ringing, that she was concerned for one of my sections of fence being missing.

But I am wrong.

“Now don’t think I’m being funny,” she says.

I wait already apprehensive. I wonder what it is I’ve done wrong.

“But are you using anything electrical in the upstairs front room late at night? It’s just that there’s a vibration and it goes right through my bed and I can’t get to sleep with it.”

“Uh?” I say, trying to take this in.

“There’s a low rumbling sound and then a bang.”

“A what?”

“I’ve asked the students next door, but they say it’s not them. And anyway the sound seems to be coming more from your side.”

I’m trying to think what could be making the noise.

“That’s the teenager’s room,” I explain. “I know it can’t be music you’re hearing, as he wears headphones to listen to music.”

“It’s a bit like a didgeridoo,” she says.

I know for a fact that he hasn’t got any didgeridoo in his room, and tell her so.

“I know he walks around as he listens to music,” I say, perhaps it’s that. “I know he’s also on his computer late at night Skyping his friends and sending messages to them. Perhaps it’s him using his keyboard.”

But even as I say this I doubt if it could be the cause of the mysterious didgeridoo noise she is hearing, and I can’t think of any electrical devices he might have that could cause a similar sound.

“He’s going back to university soon,” I say. “Tell me if it continues after next week.”

She says she will.

But I don’t trouble The Teenager with any of this.

“She doesn’t know she’s born,” a friend comments after hearing of it.

But now at night I’m straining my ears for the hum of a didgeridoo. Could there be an aborigine trapped somewhere in the walls?