The Silence

It was one month to the day after George’s funeral when the silence came. The house, which had been quiet and empty since they hoisted his corpse out of the easy chair he lived in, was even quieter and emptier than usual, as if there was an invisible weight in the air.

At first I told myself that I was being paranoid, or that grief was playing tricks on my mind. That’s certainly what my daughter, Mandy, would say. The grandkids would probably trot out some pseudo-scientific term for these delusions that they had read about on the internet, but I have never been able to keep up with all that stuff. It’s only because you haven’t left the house in so long, maybe they’d say. It’s not good for you to be so isolated all the time. I’d given up leaving the house. There was no point, now, not when you can get your shopping delivered to you easy enough, and I had long ago given up all my clubs and activities. Being George’s carer had been a full-time career by the end.

I tried to push that unnerving silence out of my mind, filling the air with inane radio chatter just to hear someone other than myself, but it didn’t help. The sounds came out muffled and muted, as though they were underwater, no matter how high I turned the sound up. Probably have the neighbours round to complain soon. There is only so far sympathy for the batty old widow stretches, after all.

I wanted to think it was deafness settling in, rather than dementia. I felt panic, like rickets, trembling in my limbs at the very thought of it. I remember my own mother losing her marbles at the end. She didn’t recognise any of us, not even my father, and they had been married sixty years. Would Mandy come round to see me, and I’d mistake her for a carer or nurse? Would my teenage grandsons, Leo and Jack, become transmuted into sullen strangers hiding under their headphones in my living room? I remember wondering if this was how it began.

I almost booked a hearing test from Specsavers on the highstreet, but I thought better of it. It was better not to know, I decided. Still, the silence haunted me. It followed me about the house, winding itself underfoot like a hungry cat heeding the call of the tin-opener.

It was on a foggy Tuesday that I realised the silence came in pockets. It was a thick, sleepy kind of day and I had fallen asleep in the easy chair to some afternoon drama I wasn’t really watching. The whole house was imbued with that same weary restlessness, dozing away in the armchair, time laying heavy on my hands. The fog blinded the windows until it seemed there was no world waiting for me out there anymore. As if, after George’s death, everything had shrunk down to this square house and it made me feel more claustrophobic than I had felt in a long time.

On impulse, I got up and went to the backdoor, opening it out to stare bleakly into the thick white clouds shrouding the house, and, to my surprise, I could hear everything just as clearly as I once I could. The birds were complaining loudly in the hedgerows, the cars were chuntering down the busy A-road passing by the back of our street (and hadn’t George complained about that when they were proposing it, but dozens of town hall meetings hadn’t done any good for any of us. Mandy still refused to use it on principal). The world seemed loud and close once more and I froze in place, submerged by it.

There was a distant wash of panic through the air, as if something had realised I was missing, which loomed up overwhelmingly behind me. I turned to stare back inside the house, but it was empty, as always, and then the silence surrounded me once more. I frowned, staring out at the thick white fog staring back at me, and then went back inside. The silence dutifully followed.

“What are you?” I asked it, but, of course, it did not reply, but it was after that that I started thinking of it as The Silence instead.

The next day, I tried an experiment.

“I am going into the garden,” I said loudly, feeling rather foolish as I did so. The Silence did not answer, of course. “I want you to stay here.” The Silence shifted a little, the empty feeling in the house feeling a little panicked and a little petulant. “I will be back in three minutes, I just want to check the bird feeders,” I said firmly. “I want you to stay here,” I reiterated firmly, and I got to my feet.

I opened the back door and stepped out. The petulance grew, but so did the noise. Birds and cars, even the distant chattering of school-children as they squabbled and screamed through their lunchtime breaks. I felt a broad smile break across my face as I went to fill up the bird feeders. They needed it. I hadn’t bothered filling them since before George I died. I had to scramble around in the garden box to find a half-empty packet of bird seed mouldering around at the bottom. The Silence enveloped me thickly the moment I stepped back over the threshold into my house, bounding around me like a great, invisible dog.

“Well done. Good boy.”

I didn’t know if it was a boy, of course, but it felt about right. I let out a strange, strangled laugh. Mandy would have me committed if she knew I had an invisible pet.

“Do you eat anything?” I asked. There was no reply. “Should I get you anything?” I tried again. Again, there was no reply. I frowned to myself. Well, it was at least a very convenient sort of beast.

After that, The Silence and I got into a routine, of sorts. I suppose I ought to have wondered if it was malevolent, some unquiet spirit or poltergeist haunting my two bed terrace, but it never felt like it wanted to hurt me. It felt like it wanted to protect me. It would follow me forlornly around the house, tripping over my heels as I floated to the fridge or the wet room. It waited outside the door as I went to the bathroom (I had set very firm boundaries on that one), and whenever Mandy came round to see me (Sunday afternoons, three o’clock) The Silence went out into the garden, or upstairs onto the bed to wait. It was shy of strangers, it seemed. One day I went to the corner shop, to see if it would follow me out of the house. It didn’t, but it was waiting dutifully for me when I got home again.

I tried dusting flour across the kitchen floor once, to see if I could see any footprints when I called for it, but I could just feel a reproachfulness oozing at me from the living room and it refused to get any closer until I had swept it all up again. Sometimes I held out a flat hand and made little kissy noises like you do to stray cats, to see if it would let itself be stroked, but though The Silence grew warm and friendly to my advances, it never came close enough to be touched. Some things don’t want to be seen, it seems. Like love and grief, they can only ever be felt.

One month after The Silence arrived abruptly in my life, I decided that if it was going to stay, I’d better learn some more about it, so I took myself off to the library. I confess, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I stood in the middle of those metal bookshelves, staring around a little hopelessly, uncertain where to start. Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to have a section for mysterious invisible animals that turn up unannounced in your house. In the end, I settled for the supernatural section. A lot of it was dominated by strange werewolf erotica with strapping topless men leering from the cover, but I found a dog-earred copy of My First Haunting, what to do in your first supernatural encounter, and a glossily pristine copy of Ghosts, Spirits and Unnatural Phenomenon, which looked brand new. The lady behind the counter gave me a strained smile as she stamped them out for me and I thought that perhaps I ought to have braved those self-check out machines that I always avoided, after all. George was always the one who fiddled with all that fancy technology. Any time anything new came out, he had to have it. He even had all the latest mobiles, though who he had to call I didn’t know. He tried to set one up for me, once, but I kept losing it.

The Silence leapt up around me as I came back home. I had grown to recognise the patches where it was and the patches where it wasn’t, now. The quiet was more unwieldy where it was, the air, though still invisible, seemed thicker somehow in the place where his presence was. I could feel him bounding and leaping about me enthusiastically as I shut the door behind us both and it occurred to me that the poor thing was probably lonely. That had been the longest I had left it since it had arrived. I felt a wave of shock reeling over me as I realised that it had been the longest I had left the house at all since the day of the funeral.

I settled myself down in the armchair, The Silence purring soundlessly by my feet, feeling more cat-like than canine as it settled itself down for a quiet afternoon of reading. The glossy book was far too technical for me to be getting on with, but the older one was full of fun personal anecdotes and grainy bookplate pictures, and some scallywag before me had annotated all over it in pencil, which I quite liked, actually. It felt almost companionable, knowing that someone else’s hands had touched these pages, their eyes had scanned these words.

There was a post-it note tucked into the book jacket of the older book, and as I withdrew it, I found a hand-written phone number. I stared at it for a moment.

“Well,” I said to The Silence, “What do you think? Should I call it?” The Silence did not respond, as if it was considering the matter. “Well,” I said aloud, “And why not? What’s the worst that could happen?”

I picked up the landline and dialled the number. I almost hung up as the ringing started on the other end, but The Silence sent a warm wave of comfort in my direction and I held my nerve. The phone picked up on the fifth ring, and I could feel my heart hammering in my chest.

“George!” A jovial voice exclaimed on the other side, and I almost dropped the phone. For a moment I thought he must be strangely telepathic, this stranger on the phone, and then I remembered that number recognition was available on most phones these days.

“What a lovely surprise!” he said, still blithely unaware of my shock. “Haven’t heard from you in years! We’ve missed you at the meetings. George? Are you there?”

I found my voice with difficulty.

“This is Moira, his wife. I’m afraid to tell you that George has recently passed away.” My voice grew thick as I stumbled over the words, still unused to saying them aloud. There was a deep breath in on the other side of the phone.

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that. He was a good type.”

“How did you know him?” I heard myself asking. “I found this number in a library book, I didn’t know…I don’t…” I heard the tears welling up and tried with difficulty to swallow them down again. I didn’t know George kept secrets, I was going to say, but I could not say them aloud. The Silence sent a compassionate wave of sympathy in my direction and I smiled at the invisible patch wetly. There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“I think we’d best meet in person,” he said. “Some things are better said face to face.”

Mandy would have said I was an idiot, meeting up with someone I didn’t know, so I didn’t tell her. I suddenly wondered if this was how George felt, when he was sneaking around to meet this Mike fellow. We met on a park bench on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll be the one with the red carnation, he had joked. The sun was bright and shining and the pigeons clustered round our feet. Mike was around about my age, but he had weathered better than I had. He was plump and ruddy cheeked, and just about as you’d imagine from his voice.

“George first came to our meetings, ooh, fifteen years ago now?” he said after we had made the obligatory introductions. “His brother had just died.”

I remembered that time well. Martin had been George’s older brother, but they had been like enough to be twins, everybody had said. George had taken his death hard. Barely said a word to anyone for weeks on end and started to drink more heavily than he ought to. Though I never said so to anyone, I did wonder if that was when all this degenerative disease thing started to kick in. He wouldn’t be diagnosed for another four years after that, but all the same, I wondered whether something in his body gave up then.

“Meetings?” I said aloud.

“Paranormal Encounters in Kent.” He said it matter-of-factly enough, as if he was talking about a chess club or a coffee morning. “George said that he was being haunted. He didn’t know how to talk about it to anyone because-”

“They might think he was mad,” I finished slowly, my own words echoing back at me. In that moment I felt both closer than I had ever felt to George before, and indefinably distant. I would have thought you could have told me, George, I reprimanded him silently. “Was it Martin haunting him?”

“No, no. It wasn’t a spectral encounter.” Clearly this was a fancy way of saying ghost, I thought. “George thought it was a protective spirit.”

I froze. “A protective spirit?”

“Yes, an invisible entity sent to guard and guide you when you have fallen off of the right path. It looks after you until you have got yourself back where you’re supposed to be.”

“Like a guardian angel?” I asked carefully, and Mike laughed.

“No, they’re not sentient. They’re like animals. Guard dogs, I suppose you could say.” He cast an eye over at my frozen expression and then reached an over familiar hand out and patted mine kindly.

“It is said they can be sent by those who love you,” he said softly, his eyes all too knowing as they met mine, and I blushed deeply. “George always thought Martin had sent him one to guide him home. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover George had sent one, too,” he said.

I got to my feet, clutching at my handbag and a flurry of pigeons took flight.

“How long do they stay?” I asked, avoiding his eyes, embarrassed at taking all this nonsense seriously.

“Just as long as they are needed,” he replied.

I don’t know how long The Silence stayed with me. I hurried home from my meeting with Mike, terrified lest it should already have gone by the time I returned, but it was there, waiting for me on the doorstep like usual, and I felt myself breathing again, relief flooding through me. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to it yet, not so soon after losing George.

It didn’t like the shrill cry of the telephone, I remember that. It used to slip away to another room whenever the phone rang, breaking through the silence, and when Mandy and the boys came by, it took itself off into the garden alone. One day, it wasn’t waiting on the doorstep when I got back from coffee with Mike (a new weekly tradition), and it didn’t turn up until dinner time. When I took up Seniors Yoga at the Rec. centre, it started disappearing more regularly. Two or three days might go by before I sensed its heavy weight and quiet seeping into the room beside me comfortingly. It was coming up to the anniversary of George’s death when I realised that I hadn’t felt The Silence in a long time, that I didn’t know, actually, when the last time I had felt it was. That was when I knew it wasn’t coming back again, and a wave of sadness washed over me as I said goodbye to strange pet for the last time, but then the doorbell rang, piercing through the silence, and time moved on once more.