Noise

by Peter Wild

  I lie here on your bed

  And even though I’m dead

  There’s fine stuff in my head

  And ended

  Once we’re safely wed

  And I’ve traded white for red

  I will still inspire dread.

  Then I got up and opened their suitcase. It was full of the usual travelling crap, like they all have, all the guys who stay here, all jumbled up. I sort of swished it around a little with my index fingers, trying to remember which way egg-beaters turned: right beater clockwise, left beater counter? Vice versa? There was a plastic bag with some shaving cream and a razor in it. There was a can of shoe polish. There was a comb with some of its teeth missing. There was a book of stories by Hemingway. There was an oversize Arkansas-is-for-Lovers belt buckle without a belt. There was a pair of Mickey Mouse flip-flops. Ha, Ha, Ha, boys, I said. After which I put on a pair of blue boxers and a wrinkled white shirt, took them off, did a headstand that I held for a twenty count, then went downstairs because I thought I heard the phone.

  although

  It was dark and I waited, first on the front porch, then outside their door, then on the couch in the living room under the ceiling fan, then in the high grass under the fireflies, then at the kitchen table as my mother and I ate pork chops that she had burned worse than usual, then in front of the TV, then in the garage by the box of comic books, then out on the sidewalk where the mosquitoes got me, then balancing on the roof of the long-empty doghouse under the stars, then back on the couch in the living room, then on the phone although everyone was on vacation, then in the shower where I shaved and zoomed and buzzed and hummed, then up in their room, then down in my room, in the basement, where the posters stared at me and the walls creaked and some motherfucker cricket went to work.

  inevitably

  The kitchen heating vent and my bedroom’s heating vent sit one on top of the other, which is (understatement) annoying when my mother has Monopoly night, given that she and her friends are all drinkie drinkie and double word score whatever for hours at a time. Not so annoying this time. Yeah, said the first one. You bet, said the second. Ha, Ha, Ha, said my mother. I sat up. Still black out. My clock had been blinking midnight for days. I lay back down, sound was better there, right under the vent, kind of a clear channel. A Swede? my mother said. Big guy, used to put on the gloves, had some luck, said the first one. Usually eats at the diner–every night except tonight. Didn’t show tonight, said the second. Which diner? said my mother. Greasy little place, said the second. By the station, said the first. A Swede? said my mother. Like clockwork–every night until tonight. We need to see him. There are lots of big guys around–you say this one’s Swedish. Some kind of Scandinavian. Northern persuasion, has a nose looks like a loaf of bread. He’s all punched out. Well, I might know him to look at him and I might not. Fair enough. Why are you looking for him? Business. We need to see him. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, pulled on my shorts and went up. The second one had his left hand in his glass fishing for an ice cube. The first one’s eyes went Kabam! My mother had her hair pulled back and some ear candy on. Yeah, right–dream on, I thought. I know a Swede, I said.

  or moonlight

  Ice cream, I said. I’d shown them my Swede. That’s the one, they’d said. They’d gone right over to him and sat down on either side of the bed where he was lying with the covers pulled up to his chin, breathing deeply, blue eyes carefully blinking, and they had clapped him on the shoulder and chucked his cheeks and told him he needed a shave and a shower or a bath or some cologne, and then they had discussed bogs and quicksand and concrete modalities, just, they had said, for the fuck of it, then they had clapped him on the shoulder again and had asked me to step outside and wait for them so they could do something and then take me home. Out they had come. Nice moonlight, said the first one. Lovely, said the second. Ice cream now, I said.

  home

  The Pinto let out a couple of sharp pops and pings that echoed off the school and smacked me on the face, making the earrings I had borrowed from my mother jangle, and the second one groan. The first one said, lead on, and I led on, Quick Stop soft-cone coating my fingers, tickling my wrists, over the glinting asphalt and on to the high grass of the football field, the cool grass, the dark grass, the you wouldn’t dare grass, where the first one said, don’t run, and the second one said, you won’t, will you? and I said, run? A minute later the first one said, spot’s as good as any other, and the second one said, good spot, so we all sat down, and I started licking my fingers, which is when the sirens started up in the distance and the first one said, oh fuck, and the sprinklers came on.

  snare, girl

  catherine o’flynn

  This story wasn’t inspired by any single track or lyric–more just the mix of emotions and sensations I experience when listening to Sonic Youth. I wanted to try and capture that nihilist, elemental, caustic flavour. I think it’s good music to listen to whilst locked in the boot of a car.

  Naomi didn’t know what was sticking in her back. At first, all there had been was blackness and her breath coming short and fast, but as the hours had passed she’d pieced together an intimate knowledge of her new surroundings. The metal surface pressing against the top of her head was a toolbox, the stiff fabric at her feet some kind of tarpaulin, in front of her she knew was her school bag, and under her was something softer than cheap carpet–maybe a picnic blanket. Mr Lynwood was the type of man who would have a picnic blanket in his car boot, he probably had pimply PVC runners over his carpet, and nasty arm covers on his sofa to absorb the unspeakable fluids that seeped out of his skin. She couldn’t work out what was sticking in her back, though. It felt firm and rounded, like a body. Surely there wasn’t another one in there with her. She tried to suppress another fit of shaking. It seemed to go in cycles–a phase of blind panic followed by a spell of calm and heightened clarity. She was trying to cling to the calm, she didn’t think her heart could stand another surge of adrenalin.

  She tried to imagine all that was being done to find her. Her parents would have contacted the police by now. Her dad would hate that, he fought against any suggestion that everything wasn’t running exactly as he predicted. When the kitchen ceiling collapsed some months earlier, narrowly missing her mother, he said he’d long been expecting an incident of that nature. She remembered him poking the fallen masonry with his toe and nodding his head. He’d make her mother phone around before he called the police. Naomi thought back to the friends she used to have, their faces merged into one indistinct pink smudge. They’d tell her mother that they never saw her out of school any more.

  She couldn’t stop shaking, but couldn’t tell now whether it was fear or the low temperature in the boot. It had been five hours. She didn’t know where she was. She concentrated hard and tried to remember any features of the journey, but it was no good–all she knew was that they had been moving for about an hour. She could be outside Mr Lynwood’s house, maybe he was inside watching TV, or maybe he’d driven somewhere else and left the car. The car had stopped, the door had opened, she had clenched every muscle in her body and then gradually exhaled as the door to the boot remained closed.

  A terrible thought occurred to her. What photo were they using? Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Her mind reeled. She thought of the photos that her parents chose to display. Pitiless family shots with Naomi at the back scowling through heavily kohled eyes and an angry mask of acne. Worse still, the school photos, every one of which was displayed on the sideboard. The early ones with just-brushed static hair and tearful eyes; the mid-period gap-toothed smile; the latter phase with the face largely obscured by the long black curtain of hair. She thought of last year’s. The photographer had broken wind loudly and lengthily with no comment just as he was taking her photo. Naomi’s expression was captured for ever. Was that the backdrop behind the local newsreader’s appeal for information? Was that the A4 flyer being shown from door to door?

  Her hands an
d feet were tied, but she was able to move her hands together and reach into her bag. She put one earphone in and pressed Play. Lying in this dark space, listening to music wasn’t so different to any other evening. At 5.15 she would fly through the door after school like a leaf blown in by the wind. She’d throw her bag in the hallway and run upstairs to her room, slamming the door behind her and placing a chair against it. She’d go straight to her record player and put the needle at the start of the album already sitting on the turntable and then collapse on to her bed–feeling that she could breathe again. The music flowing straight to her lungs. Someone would knock at her door, a voice would shout, but she was somewhere else. She’d stare at the wallpaper at the side of her head and become lost somewhere in a landscape made up of the abstract shapes in the pattern of the paper and the music.

  There were many songs about love. Those were the kinds of songs that her classmates listened to and she didn’t. Recently, though, she’d begun to see a certain truth to the lyrics, they captured some of what she felt–their only error was in attributing such feelings to love. What the words described to her were the manifestations of pure hatred. The power of hate. Hate at first sight. Hate changes everything. These she understood. Mr Lynwood had entered the classroom in September, he’d introduced himself and she’d felt the thunderbolt strike. It was like an allergy, a chemical reaction. His fuzzy hair, his ridiculous shoes, the bobbling on the hips of his slacks, the way he breathed. Everything about him repulsed her. She couldn’t bear to look at him and yet couldn’t stop thinking about him. Each morning she would wake up and her first thought would be how many times she would have to see him in the day ahead. He was slimy, he was patronising, he wanted desperately to be liked and yet none of this could adequately explain the intensity of her feelings. What she felt was hissing, claws-out, fur-and-feather, bone-deep, animal.

  She imagined an alien looking down on planet Earth. Among the trees and the mountains, among the cities and the fields, among the rooftops and the streets there was a girl tied up in the boot of a car listening to the same track over and over again. But Naomi couldn’t feel herself to be a speck. Instead she felt the universe contract and shrink to the size of this boot and she was at the centre of the black cosmos floating in the music. It was pure chance that she’d noticed one day that he never locked his car. Clearly he trusted ‘the kids’.

  If, back before Mr Lynwood joined the staff, someone had ever bothered to ask her what the worst thing about school was, she would have had difficulty in choosing. Maybe the cold sweat of anxiety each morning waiting for the bus and not knowing who was going to be on it. Maybe the pain in her shoulders from keeping them clenched all day long. Maybe the afternoons that never seemed to end. Maybe the existence of netball. Now, though, she knew that the worst thing was her inability to change a single thing. Her dad would bitch and moan about his job. He’d tell her to enjoy the freedom of her school days and she would have to fight the urge to throw a cup at him. He could decide to go in late the next day, he could decide to go to work by car or train, he could decide to take his holidays in February, he could even decide to leave his job altogether and go and work somewhere new, and he wanted sympathy from her.

  Her email the previous day said simply: ‘Please stop this or I’ll call the police’. There was a chance he might have told a colleague, but she was sure he’d try and talk to her first. A disturbed student was such a great opportunity for him to practise his pastoral care skills. He spent his days imploring them to tell him their personal problems. Totally confidential. Maybe something they wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to their parents about. The thought of it made her gag. His class was last period and he asked her to stay behind in front of everyone, just as she’d hoped. To be alone with him, to elect to spend even a few extra moments in his company, cost her a lot. It was hard to do, but she had to win the right to decide.

  She couldn’t understand why she didn’t ache more. She’d get the odd spasm of cramp but not the kind of agony you might expect from being curled up in the boot of a Vauxhall Astra for six hours. She wondered whether adrenalin was a painkiller. She was aiming for eight hours. After that time she’d try and attract a passer-by with banging and shouting. It was tricky not knowing exactly where the car was parked, or how nearby he was–she had to ensure that the passer-by would hear her, but he would not. Her sole aim, the one decision she was forcibly making, was simply never to see him again. She didn’t care whether he went to prison or not as long as he never returned to her school and she never had to think of him again.

  When the rest of the class had left the room and he was about to speak she said that she needed to go to the toilet urgently. She walked out to the car park, pressed the button and climbed into his boot. Before she’d tied the rope around her feet and hands she placed a few images she’d downloaded from the Internet around the boot. There were others on the CD they’d find in his briefcase. They were unnecessary really, a missing girl in the boot is all it would take.

  She started the track again. The guitar scoured her and made her flesh feel raw inside and out. Thurston screamed he was inhuman, but it wasn’t quite working. She couldn’t lose herself in the noise, she was still aware of place and time. These final hours would not pass. She was aware of her body, but instead of the pain she’d expected, she felt a kind of swelling, lurching nausea. She was lying on Mr Lynwood’s rug, inhaling the hamstery smell of his boot, and she wondered whether she could ever scrub herself clean. She pulled the earphone out and all she heard was the blood beating in her ears.

  She rehearsed the next stage in her head. Her rescue from the boot, the look on her parents’ faces, the absence of Mr Lynwood from school the next day and the days after that. She supposed the police would question her, but she had her story straight. Her parents would want her to talk too. She thought of the questions they would ask, and she realised that she would be forced to think about Mr Lynwood when answering them. She wondered how long they’d insist it was necessary to discuss it. After that he’d be deleted from her head for good. Unless it went to court, but she’d refuse that. She couldn’t have done all this and still have to see his face ever again. She tried to focus on a future without his shadow cast over it. She imagined walking the school corridors and never hearing his fake laugh, never seeing his fatuous, clumsily written comments on her homework, never feeling his eyes upon her. But, though Mr Lynwood would be gone, her name and his would be on everybody’s lips, her name and his joined for ever in classroom mythology. With sudden clarity she realised there was no end to him. She started to shake again, but this time more violently. She struggled with the rope and untied her hands and feet. She felt his presence all around her, in the blanket, in the tools, in the tarpaulin, and it felt like an appalling intimacy. She imagined him putting his groceries into this boot, his toothpaste and toilet paper and tinned soup all around her, and these glimpses of his life were too much to bear. She felt the bile rising in her throat as she started hammering on the boot and screaming.

  Later, as she ran from the startled woman who found her, the stars shone above in the clear night sky, the dark streets opened up ahead of her and the black space she’d burst from propelled her forwards into the ever expanding universe and the inescapable cloud of her own breath.

  brother james

  emily maguire

  When I was fourteen I was in love with chaos, and that’s what I thought I heard in Sonic Youth’s music. Manic, panicked and seemingly deliberately senseless, it was like the inside of my brain amplified. I would listen through headphones, volume on full, until I was nauseated. Repeated listening, however, revealed structure and intention beneath the sound and fury. The power of purposeful frenzy, directed rage and calculatedly unhinged passion was a revelation.

  Listen, this whole Jesus caper has gone too far. You know how sometimes you realise that someone has misunderstood you and you know you should set them right but for some reason you just leave it alone and then th
e misunderstanding gets passed on to other people and they pass it on to still more and it changes form and grows and grows and then it has a whole life of its own that has nothing to do with the original incident and the prospect of sorting it all out is overwhelming but you have to try anyway because some serious shit is at stake? Yeah, well, that’s what’s happened here, see?

  I’m not saying there was no such person as Jesus, you understand. I mean, there were scads of men with that name in my village alone. But I know, and you know, that we’re not here to talk about those other men–those rabbis and rabbis’ sons and craftsmen and fishermen and layabouts. Because, even though you know Jesus was a popular name in my part of the world and that it continues to be popular in other, newer parts of the world, the name really only ever refers to one man. Jesus, to you, means the Christ, the Messiah, the Saviour, the King of Kings, Light of the World, Son of God, the one and only Lord. My brother.

  That last title is the only one he’s earned and that’s the problem. Jesus–Light of the World, King of Kings, yada yada yada–was born of woman, lived a short but racy life and then died a painful and humiliating death. And when I say ‘died’ I mean it in the full human sense of the world. Jesus is as dead as Princess Diana and Napoleon and your great-great-grandma. He’s as dead as Elvis (yes, he is), Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Dean. He’s as dead as you will be someday. (Don’t let that worry you by the way: I’m dead and I’m fine. Most of us are.)