A Shock

by Keith Ridgway

  — Yes. Don’t worry.

  She strokes the cat and they make stupid noises at each other.

  Then the music starts up. She freezes.

  — My god.

  It has probably started up, not for the first time, but again. It is a throb and a pressure. The cat jumps off the bed and onto the wardrobe shelf and burrows into cardigans. She usually forbids that. But now she lets it happen. She might climb in there too. She might. This is awful. It occurs to her that perhaps the music stopping was what had woken her. Perhaps she could have slept all the way through it if the music hadn’t stopped. Her dream had been something . . . something sharp, but it has fled now.

  She could go out.

  It is too late. There would be nowhere open. Nowhere for her.

  She could just walk.

  She eases herself off the bed and stands up. The cat watches her. She is stiff and her mouth is dry and she thinks she will brush her teeth and find her earplugs. When she turns to leave the cat makes a furious protest, and then leaps out to join her. She walks along the corridor in the gloom, not daring to turn on any lights, to the bathroom, wary of the wall, imagining that it is bulging with sound, like the skin of a drum, though of course it is doing nothing of the sort. But this is so loud. She is still half asleep, and she knows that she is, but this is so loud, this is not what she had expected, surely it can’t be this loud? The cat is mewling behind her, following her all the way into the bathroom — no rules tonight bauble — and she splashes her face and brushes her teeth and rummages in the drawer for her earplugs, which are many years old, and all the while there is the throb of next door at her back, a boom and press of bass, like a heat against the wall, like a fire, and sometimes the haze, the flick of other things on top of it, singing and instruments and melody, things jumping and spitting on a pan. And the voices, all the voices boiling together, people having to shout to make themselves heard, shouting out, and you might think they’re dying in there if it was not for the laughter, the huge bursts of laughter that come every few seconds, which punch through the wall as if directed at her personally. She stands in the bathroom staring astonished at her own face in the mirror and just listens. The cat at her legs.

  Downstairs she considers what lights to turn on and settles for the lamp in the living room which throws light into the hall, and one of the kitchen lights, the one over the table. She isn’t sure why she is thinking about lights so carefully, or at all. It is something to do with her presence in her own house. She is . . . There is a fried egg sitting in the frying pan on top of the cooker.

  What an astonishingly odd-looking thing.

  She thinks then that she might have left the ring on, and is momentarily furious, but of course the egg is cold, as is the pan. She has no explanation.

  The earplugs are still in her hand. She is trying not to attract attention. She is trying not to disturb the people who are making the noise. She is trying to be unobtrusive next to this.

  What is wrong with her?

  A little white island with a little yellow lake.

  Obviously there is an explanation. She fried an egg and forgot about it. Has she eaten? She can’t remember. Is she hungry?

  She stands by the sink and pulls the side of the window blind towards her and peers through the gap. She can see a couple of people. Three or four people. Young people. One of them throws their head back and she thinks they’re laughing but . . . he, maybe, he . . . is drinking from a can. Another has sunglasses pushed onto the top of their head. But the fence is quite high and all she can see are the top halves of faces, or just hair, or skin, butterflies amongst them. They might all be naked, she thinks. The sky is a deep dark blue, far from turning black, and a plane crawls across it, and it is still warm.

  She takes the pan and scoops the egg into the bin and feels tearful and goes to sit down in the living room. She’s put the earplugs down somewhere. She thinks she should eat something. The noise is ridiculous. She sits in the armchair in the corner and looks out at the hall. She stares at the wall, she thinks she can see it moving, the way you can see a pulse in a neck or a wrist. But she can’t see that. It’s not moving.

  It occurs to her suddenly that the shared wall between two terraced houses is often called the party wall. She laughs.

  — Party wall.

  She’s right isn’t she? She thinks about it and decides that she is. This seems inordinately funny. It changes something. She laughs out loud, actually claps her hands together, has a little fit of the giggles. The party wall. What’s wrong with her? Why is she sitting miserably in the gloom in her own house, just because next door is having a party? Yes it’s loud, but parties are loud. She has made plenty of noise in her time. It will not last forever. It will, in a few hours, be over. This is not hell. Let them have their party. For god’s sake.

  She gets up and finds the earplugs beside the cooker and puts them in her ears and that improves things too. It muffles and distorts the noise. And it makes her own breathing and her own voice when she talks to the cat loud and warm in her head and she likes that and talks more because of it. The cat won’t leave her side. I would put earplugs in your ears too baby but you’d have my eye out wouldn’t you? You’d have my eye out!

  She wanders around for a while. She looks out into the back again. No one there now. She goes to the front door, peers through the glass and can half see some shapes in front of their house. She pulls back when she realises that she is a face at the glass. She goes upstairs and goes through the complicated procedure of lying on the floor to peek through the curtain. They are smokers mostly out there, the rise and fall of their orange dots. They murmur and laugh a little. She worries that she can be seen and ducks her head and lies flat. The cat climbs on top of her and she laughs. She waits for a while, to catch her breath, and the cat settles, and then she tries to crawl backwards from the window and the cat is on her shoulder, confused, and she is laughing again, more giggles, and this is just ridiculous, look at her, lying on the floor with the cat practically sitting on her head, and it is no small thing for a woman of her age to get up from down here, with an animal attached, what on earth was she thinking, and she makes it eventually to the bed, still laughing, and manages to get awkwardly to her feet, calling herself a ludraman.

  London, she thinks to herself. In England. Of the world’s many ludicrous places she had to choose London.

  She goes downstairs, opens the bottle of wine and pours a glass.

  After a while, more people drift out to the garden at the back. Or they drift out there again. She can hear them. A clearer sort of laughter, more human, understandable, coming to her through the kitchen. She goes and looks but the fence makes it pointless really, just the tops of heads, just young hair and fringes and she wonders how long she has to live. Of course she might die tomorrow. He did. But if everything keeps declining at the same rate, and given the age of her mother when she’d died, and adding on a few years for better drugs and what have you, she might last another decade. That seemed absurd. What could she do with all that time? Although. It felt like no more than the click of a couple of seconds since he’d died, and a minute or two since they’d met, and maybe half an hour since she was a girl. The whole thing was absurd no matter which way you turned. And how banal, she thinks, how predictable and dull, to think of time at all.

  There is only now, in all its perpetual detail, as deep as a well.

  She goes upstairs and spies on them through the back bedroom. Youngsters. Light summer clothes. Chatting and laughing. Drinks, joints, cigarettes. Those machines with the big clouds. It is a big party. Well done them. She goes downstairs and has more wine. A novel thing these days, wine. She mustn’t overdo it.

  After a while she finds herself with her ear to the kitchen wall again. It is muffled. She takes out her earplugs and immediately puts them back in. She stares at the hole above her head, and looks around for a whil
e. The hole looks terribly interesting. She wonders if it goes all the way through to the other side. Whether she can look through it.

  Let’s go to the party! Let’s make some new friends! Find out what the young people are like now. See what they get up to. Come on. I’ll look after you. This, his voice, still so easy to remember, and to hear saying these things, or things like them, though only glancingly. When she tries to slow it down, to actually imagine his face, and his voice, it falls apart. Not because she cannot remember, but because there is too much to remember and it all comes at once, and she is cowed by the scale of her loss. It seems too important and vast to be hers alone.

  — Shoo shoo baby she says, bright as she can, ostensibly to the cat.

  She goes to the cupboard under the stairs where there is a step ladder and she moves a couple of boxes to get at it. The boxes are light, just decorations, tinsel, and the step ladder is good, new — she bought it online after she fell from a chair while changing a light bulb in the living room. It was nearly the dying room she thinks and — because she is still battling something, or because of the wine — she laughs very loudly, a great explosion of mirth, good lord, and stops.

  Would they hear that?

  She hopes they did, but they wouldn’t would they? Impossible to judge with the earplugs in. She probably hadn’t been loud at all. No. Maybe one of them might have heard her. Young, good ears. A shy girl in their hall, leaning against the shared wall — the party wall! what is wrong with you? it’s not that funny — pretending to be interested in her boyfriend’s conversation with his friend, but bored really, or that variation on boredom that comes chiefly from shyness, from wanting to be elsewhere. She would be listening to them have a conversation about politics, about sport . . . no, more likely politics, about the . . . what . . . the eccentric, in international terms, confusion of the British Left. She would be drifting off in her mind, thinking how nice it would be on her own, at home, reading a book, watching something, asleep, instead of here at this mostly male — but allowed, because also mostly gay — party, where the straight women are ostentatiously welcome, where the gay men think of themselves as the best sort of men, rather than what they might profit from, which was to not think of themselves at all, or certainly not as much, and to refuse that particular tail pinned on that particular donkey, but very few of them think like that, attached as they are to the business end of things, which they cannot, most of them — maybe she was being unfair — most of them cannot separate from the naming of the thing, and the naming rights, the bragging rights . . . now she has lost her train of thought.

  The cat has vanished.

  She stares at the step ladder. Yes. She had laughed. So maybe some shy girl on the other side of the wall who was not enjoying the party very much might have heard her. That was all. That was the thought. What if the girl, being curious, were to ask someone — Who lives next door? And on finding out that it is — what would they say — it’s an old woman, some deaf old woman who lives on her own, what would happen if the girl, being curious, were to wander out of the house then, being just a little curious and quite a lot bored, having said to her boyfriend something like I’ll be back in a minute, not that he cares anyway, talking now as he is loudly about the failure of social democratic parties in Europe, and off she wanders, away down the hallway, down their corridor hallway to the front door, which is open, excusing herself past people, squeezing past people, and out into the little patch of gravel, probably walking on the gravel because the path has people standing on it, and out the gate and to the right and then again to the right, and through this other little patch of gravel, two steps up the path which she has entirely to herself, and she lifts the knocker and lets it drop.

  Moments are eternal.

  She steps back a little. Sticks her head around the corner of the cupboard under the stairs and looks at the front door. Just shadows and glows. Nothing sharp or definite, nothing moving. What would she have done if a tipsy girl came calling? She laughs again, but much quieter now. No one would hear that. No one would ever hear that. She imagines the awkwardness. The girl at her door trying to make friends with her, trying to escape the boring party, wanting to come in, expecting tea because she is so tired of these lukewarm sweet drinks that fuzz up her head and all she wants is a good refreshing tea and the chance to sit down for a nice chat with an old lady, a chat about what, tell me about your life she’d ask, tell me about the war, what bloody war what are you talking about I’ve never been in a bloody war, no more than you have you idiot and there is no girl she does not exist.

  She picks up the step ladder. She puts it down again.

  If a girl like that existed she would not be so rude. So stupid. You are simply deflecting away any possibility of empathy, connection, offer of friendship. You are running away from your own story. You are bitter and lonely and terrified that you will be like this for the rest of your life. But if someone were to knock on your door and ask you your story you would turn them away. Because how can you tell your story? How, now? There was a person I loved. Who says person? A man I loved. A man? There was someone I loved. And there it is. And I love him still, more than I can possibly explain, in that way that she doesn’t have to explain, in that way that everyone already understands, apparently, that same way that is not very different to anyone else who loves a person, a dead person, a gone person, as if all love is the same in the end, a click of the tongue, a single tear, and people nod and know, isn’t that terrible, she loved a man and he died, god love her, but better to have loved and died, loved and died, loved and . . . Because he died, the end of all stories, and all stories are the same story, and here I am, the leftover part, the unresolved plot, the loose end, the woman in the house, the house in the woman, the cat, the unkempt garden, the clothes in the wardrobe that she cannot throw out and cannot wear, the furniture she moves so that she can forget, and moves back again so that she can remember, and remembering anyway whatever she does, lost in a little roundabout life, the shopping and the library and the visit once in a while from people who were friends but who now are strange old men, strange old women, who sit in her living room and talk about the television and their internal organs, so that they confuse one with the other, and she confuses them one for the other and they ask her how she’s doing and she says all right. All right. I loved a person. She died. He died. That is all there is to it. A person. Love. Death. It is stupid. It is barely a story. It is not a story.

  It is not a story.

  She tutts at herself and takes the step ladder to the kitchen.

  It is her life.

  It feels foolish. To open the ladder and to set it sideways against the wall. So she does that and then stands back and looks at it, smoothing out her top with her hands. The cat has reappeared. The noise now is something she imagines. Perhaps it has stopped.

  She goes and takes a sip from her wine glass in the living room, fiddling as she walks back with one of the earplugs, reassuring herself that things are as bad as she imagines them to be, and they are. But they are no worse.

  She climbs the ladder and sees the kitchen from a new angle. The top of the fridge is covered in dust. The table looks small, the chairs childish, the sink below the window looks cheap and useless. She hovers for a moment close to the ceiling, looking down. It is like a doll’s house. She turns and peers into the hole. She can’t see anything. She pokes her finger into it and immediately feels a drop in temperature. The rim of the hole feels almost damp. She pinches an edge and it crumbles between her fingers, plaster and paint dropping to the floor. She takes her finger out and presses her eye to it. She can’t really see anything. A gap, then something dark and flat, presumably the wall on their side. Why are there no bricks? She is surprised that there seems to be nothing between two sheets of plaster. Is that how they do it? It can’t be. It seems absurd. It’s nothing. There is a definite smell of damp.

  She gets a decent grip. Tugs, n
ervously, too gently. She tugs harder and a small clump of plaster comes away in her hand and the hole opens up to the size of her fist. She drops the clump and pulls at another. It feels a little like damp clay, like soil she tore as a child from the bank of a stream at the edge of a field, and she hasn’t remembered that in years. It would come off in big pieces that held for a moment, then collapsed.

  She drops another clump and the cat runs off.

  — Sorry button.

  She used to tell him about the place she grew up. He would get her to describe it all in great detail, because he wanted he said to draw a map of it in his head. She would ask him to do the same, but he had grown up in a place he did not want to remember, and he would make things up, castles and forests and elaborate and impossible fortresses cut into the sides of cliffs. That was their exchange. She took him back in time to a small farm and minute adventures. He took her to places that had never existed.

  He’d have taken her to the party. He’d have negotiated an invitation with a breezy laugh and a bottle of something. He knew how to have people in a house.

  Soon there is a hole the size of her head, and then slightly bigger than her head. She sticks her head in it. Definite damp. A leak, she hopes. Rather than rising. She taps on the other side of the cavity. Also damp. She can even see, a little to her left, but lower down, a bit of light, which seems to be a small hole, on their side, through which . . . The noise is slightly louder, especially the voices. A dozen conversations riddled with laughter. She thinks of taking out her ear plugs.

  He’d have been laughing at her by now. He is dead and there is nothing of him left in the world at all. No one remembers him except her. He liked parties, liked people. He would talk to all of them, her hovering shyly at his shoulder. There are some who still remember him of course. She assumes. But they have stopped coming. And in any case, they had not known her.