But they are. And cannot be denied. Yes, I did hear that strange whine from the car when I braked. But I don’t want to…my face now has a frown, my hands are gripping the wheel and my wife’s about to say: “What’s that noise?”
“It’s part of the braking system, ABS, which automatically sends out that sound – it’s not a noise – to let me know I am braking too hard.”
Oh, if only I could say that, but I haven’t a clue really – and the car’s just been serviced so something’s wrong. I don’t know what, I don’t want to know what and I cannot afford another hit from the four-wheeled highwayman.
Knowledge is power, assurance and a passport to less expensive shores. Ignorance washes you up where the pirates hang out, ready to pull the wool over your eyes and fleece you. “You will need to change all those brake pads. If you don’t the insurance won’t pay a cent when you have an accident, even if it’s not your fault.”
Yes, it is a sound which shouldn’t be there, but it is and if I knew its cause, how different it would be: the engine sending me a message to act upon for our mutual benefit, like the note which shouldn’t be there that a good musician hears on the way to perfect the piece.
But there are also sounds which shouldn’t be there, but should.
I grew up in a big house, double-storeyed, with a wide staircase and a steeply-pitched roof that stretched in a number of directions. My friends loved coming to sleep over: for them the stairs, with banisters to slide down and a well into which pillows, pyjamas and the occasional cat could be dropped was the best thing any house could have. Little did they know, though, how much I envied them their single-storey houses when sent to bed up that long staircase to the dark and lonely upstairs,. If my parents wondered why I made such a noise on the stairs, thudding all the way up so that whatever was waiting there knew I was coming, they never asked. Loud, tuneless singing, my other strategy to block out the fears, did once prompt a question from my mother. “Why do you make such a din going up the stairs?”
“It’s so I don’t feel so frightened,” I told her.
“But there’s nothing up there to be frightened of,” she said, “and we’re just downstairs.”
But being downstairs meant they were not hearing what I heard. From the roof above my head came knocks and thuds, judders and bumps. For a small boy who has heard of people having their throats slit while in bed at night, that murderer’s in the roof.
“There’s someone in the roof.” I stood on the carpet in the middle of my parents’ bedroom. Had their light not still been on I could not have overcome the paralysis a series of knocks had induced. How had they not heard it? Did whatever was up there know that the smallest was in the room furthest from theirs?
“There’s someone in the roof.”
My father, who would never make the Rapid Response Unit, turned over. “It’s probably just rats.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s much too loud.” I knew from the previous season’s Rat Races, held over my head at night, that rats scrabbled their way around the track.
“Then it’s probably just the roof and pipes cooling down, it’s been a hot day,” was his next answer, which he considered definite enough to turn over and assume a sleeping position again.
A definitive answer would have explained that, owing to the principles of expansion and contraction accompanying temperature change, the pipes and cylinder that lay within the roof were making noises which should be there, regardless of what I thought. But neither time nor inclination willed this and all my father’s words did was send me down the passage, comforted only that they were still alive. Would any scientific reason have dispelled my fear anyway? Why didn’t I hear these sounds during the day? It must be remembered that those roofs were not like those of today in which sounds are muted by cladding, wall-to-wall thermal insulation aerolite and shallow pitches. All that lay on those thin boards overhead were the mounds of excreta that rats, squirrels, birds had built, and acres of dust. Amplified by my fear, the sounds within that dark space were horribly loud and unnatural. That was why you paid people to go into the roof.
Time has softened those sounds and now I know that they were the product of a small boy’s fears. Time has also extended my understanding of sounds which shouldn’t be there. First is what good manners and sense deem unacceptable, like a cellphone call during a performance or a gross belch; second is the sound of distress, an animal in pain, a note wrongly played, a heart palpitation; and third is that which cannot be placed, an unknown, a possible source of fear or bewilderment, interest or curiosity. It is the last which accompanied me to bed all those nights ago, those sounds which shouldn’t have been there but were, undeniably so. I have not forgotten them.
I remember well that large rambling house – as a child there was so much to explore!
“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggetty beasties, and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us.”
(From a traditional West Country litany).
I have a demented neighbour who is prone to making inexplicable loud noises during the early hours. She is aged about one hundred and fifty, and is caught fast in the grip of advanced dementia (the go-to affliction of the elderly in Britain) and she ought to be in a care home, but her sons will not permit that, as they would then have to sell her house (their bequest) to pay the care home fees. But I have learned to ignore things that go bump in the night. They are likely to be emanating from next door . . . .