Noise (6 page)

1

 

The goo wheezed and flopped against the dyke. It was no-coloured, marrow-coloured, with the look of something private, something that belonged inside something else.

It was wrinkled as a scrotum, and yes, Amaranth, I do know what a scrotum looks like. (It wasn't Dad's fault, I got worried about leaving him alone so long and walked in on him.) Its swells were dry and tacky, covered with fine hair and insects, but where it broke against the dyke, it was gluey, gooey. It spindled up, then collapsed back on itself till the tip touched, forming arches that thinned to threads and snapped. It slung a cord up at a gull and yanked it back, burped up feathers like foam. During storms, it coughed hunks the size of hogs over the dyke to splat violently on the street. The puddles they made didn't stay flat–the edges crept in, the centre humped. In the dark, they looked like crouching figures. If one of them ever stood up and walked to the door of a house backed against the dyke, knocked and was admitted, nobody had ever told me about it. But I had always wondered who my mother was.

There are no pictures of my mother and my father has never spoken about her, except in a few strange and incomplete phrases, long ago: ‘A book in Braille' (as you know, my father is not blind), ‘A doorknob turning', ‘What dogs hear' and, even more inscrutable, ‘Holes in', ‘When floorboards', ‘You twist it' and ‘Once'.

Mother may be the wrong word for what she was. I do not know that I was ever born. Maybe I came about another way. Many different objects are delivered to this shore. But I know that by the time I was aware that, instead of not existing, I existed, my ‘Holes in', my ‘Once', was gone.

Missing a mother did not strike me as strange. Everyone missed something. The goo had taken away the streets where our older residents had strolled, sold things and slaughtered one another. It had taken their scrapbooks, their loofahs, their names rendered in colourful animals and flowers by street artists. It had taken people
too, those who had not retreated behind the dykes fast enough and those who had advanced instead, in fascination or despair.

The goo gave things, too, but not the right things.

Perhaps, I was one of the wrong things.

 

2

The pig sings the pig's song.

 

The goo slapped the dyke like the palm of a hand and the tassels danced on the awning above me. The customer jumped, fumbled a piece of flotsam he had been examining, steadied it, tried to catch my eye, steadied it again, this time needlessly. ‘Uh–Hey—'

‘She sells seashells by the seashore.'

Now he stared. ‘How did—'

Do you know how many times I've heard that? Because I do, I run a souvenir stand on the seashore, if you can still call it that–some do. Obviously, I don't shell many sea cells, she many see, see many she, sell many seashells these days, but people have taken to calling by the same name any object plucked from the goo by ‘anon. beachcomber' (i.e. me) and these are what I shell–
purvey–
at my stall here on the dyke, high above the peaked roofs of our town.

The goo jumped again and the customer, looking aghast, hurried away. ‘
P.U,
' I whispered, adjusting the object he had disturbed. ‘
P.U.
'

This one looked like a doll's head, its features rubbed away,
merged with something the shape of an egg cup. It was the exact colour of my hand and together they made another object. I held it a moment and pretended we were fused, but when I opened my hand, we came apart easily, so I knew I still had to go home.

Home was almost invisible–chimney pots and satellite discs adrift in the fog, like a becalmed regatta of boy totes, toe boits, toy boats. Curving around them was the great dyke, visible for only a short stretch, but its coordinates pricked out by those darker objects that stuck up from the roofs below. The dyke was chalk-white concrete cast in vertical slabs. The slabs' proportions, and the seams between them, made them look like a row of teeth. Sometimes the goo, when it reared up above them, resembled a tongue. Sometimes, when it hissed and mumbled, it sounded like words, though not ones that could be found in any dictionary. This is the first language I imitated, when I began to speak. Even now, if you've noticed, I sometimes sound more like a storm than a person. When I'm self-conscious, my tongue seems to thicken or flatten into something like a rudder or an oar, unfit for the fancywork of words. I wuh-wuh-wuh-wu-wuh-
wuther
, like wind rubbing itself, goo on goo.

Since I was little, my father had given me tongue-twisters to practise on. I'm your go-to girl if ‘The sixth sheik's sixth sheep's sick' needs saying. But wuthering was never the real problem. Have you ever been so ashamed that you could hardly stand to have a face and when you thought of what you'd done you had to go, ‘Whatever!' or ‘P.U.'? That's how I felt every time I said, ‘The capital of the United Netherlands is Kansas City,' or ‘That'll be seven hundred thousand dollars,' or ‘Thank you, come again.' I was stupefied by the stupidity of my stupid, stupid voice saying
such stupid, pointless, normal things. ‘
Thank you
'? Those aren't even words to me. They're–I don't know–second-hand bowling trophies–faded plastic Santas–adult diapers. Whatever! P.U.!

Maybe my father is still trying to get me to talk like a normal person when he screams, ‘Good blood, bad blood! Good blood, bad blood!' Maybe he doesn't mean that I'm my mother's daughter and always will be. But I even look like the goo. My hair and eyelashes are the same no-colour as my skin. Boys call me Blondie, but I'm not, just colourless. Beige, if you like, though under this green awning, I'm practically chartreuse.

If I am my mother's daughter, and my mother is missing, does that mean I am missing, too?

If I am my mother's daughter, and I am not missing, does that mean my mother is not missing either?

And, as my father would say, if this mother-missing miss's mother isn't missing, where's the mother this miss misses?

 

3

 

A starling sat on the starling-house and sang to the rooster: ‘You cannot sing like I do, I cannot sing like you do!'

 

The goo takes care of me now, chucking up objects for me to sell. I have the best stock for miles and the customers know it. I never have to haggle, which is good, because P.U., I c-c-c-
couldn't
, and then how would I take care of Dad?

My father is losing a dimension. Every day, he is more like a photograph of himself and he has not said anything in years. Except for the tongue-twisters: those he's never tired of repeating–training me, I used to think, so I'd be able to speak for him when he beat his final retreat into silence. Later I figured out (imagined, you said, but you came around) that he used them to communicate–that ‘A bit of better butter' could mean ‘Please prepare my dinner', that ‘A flea and a fly in a flue' could mean ‘We are trapped, my dear. Oh, help me find the way out!' Sometimes I only understood his meaning when I repeated his words quickly several times, since it lay hidden in the slips, where the batter became bitter and the fly flew.

I got out my notebook from the chest under the table and wrote: ‘
boit.
'

The most important discoveries are the ones you make by accident while trying to do something else. ‘Our Friend Goo': that's the title of a piece of investigative journalism I didn't write in seventh grade, since my interviews had yielded nearly nothing. I only got one answer to the question ‘Where did goo come from?' and that was from my father: ‘The sea ceaseth and it thuffiseff uth, sufficeth us.' People wouldn't talk about the goo, though they were nuzzled right up against it. If it made them so uncomfortable, why didn't they build out in the middle of the polders? Mr Haas (remember his toupee?) said it was convenient, using the steep back side of the dyke as a ready-made wall, but was it convenient how the rain and wind seeped through the cracks all winter? In my room at the back of the house, there were always gaps where the one curved wall met the two squared-off walls and the ceiling, and even if we grouted, the gaps opened again when the weather
changed, because the dyke swelled and shrank with the seasons, like breathing. When I went into my closet and leaned against the back wall, behind the coats, I could hear it creak, and behind the creak, a quieter sound that I knew was the goo talking to itself. Or to someone else.

I did this often.

To tell the truth, very often.

Every day.

Reference books were no more helpful than my neighbours. They hardly mentioned goo at all. ‘A viscous or sticky substance,' said the OED, which was obvious, and ‘
Fig.
sickly sentiment', which was wrong. Sometimes in fiction an author seemed to be trying to describe it, but only under the guise of a person or a landscape. My best source turned out to be children's books, and one in particular, in which a garrulous fox led a reluctant hairy biped through a series of situations that, described aloud, proved difficult to pronounce. Beside a dark blue pond, its surface ropy and peaked, where a sort of bird chewed on a taffy-like length of goo, the biped was offered some goo to chew. That author, Seuss, had written other books about goo–green goo that dripped from the sky, pink goo that ringed bathtubs and was difficult to get rid of–but what really impressed me was the association of goo with tongue-twisters.

Recently I had consulted the OED again and seen that I had missed something. Goo had a secondary meaning. ‘Make an inarticulate cooing or gurgling sound like that made by a baby; converse affectionately.'

‘You do look like a verb,' I told the heaving waves. But the goo wasn't talking.

 

4

 

Roukhi we roukhik ya roukhi roukhain be roukh matrakh ma troukh roukhik roukhi bet roukh.

My soul and your soul are one soul. Wherever your soul goes, my soul also goes.

 

The fog was ruining business. I decided to close up shop. I rubber-banded the bills, stuck them and my notebook in my pocket. The change could stay in the cash box, which went in the bottom of the chest with the seashells. I struck the tent and stowed it in the chest, locked the chest to the table and both to a loop of reinforcing rod exposed at the crumbling edge of the dyke. Down the piss-stained concrete steps into the fog.

On the way I stopped to see you, Amaranth, because you are sometimes the only thing that thuffiseff me. You came out on your low balcony, hiccuping amicably, and hoisted me up.

‘Mr Fox, sir, I won't do it,' I said. ‘I can't say it. I won't chew it.'

‘Wha-
hic
?'

‘Say it, chew it–as if they were the same thing. The tongue-twister is, like,
stuff
.'

‘What stu-
hic
-uff?'

‘Goo. You have to chew it.' You were steering me backwards into your room. ‘Like the Goo-Goose,' I added, as you pushed me on to your bed.

‘So chew it,' you said, and put your tongue in my mouth. ‘Goo-Goose,' you said fondly, after a while. ‘What do you know? My hiccups are gone.'

Something was digging into my kidneys. I rearranged myself and a gust of warm air wafted up out of my collar. I was starting to smell like the goo, faintly cheesy. Or maybe that was Amaranth. I smashed my nose into her neck, your neck. ‘You smell like me,' I discovered. ‘Did you catch
Slime with Worms
this morning? I had to work.'

‘No, I was at school,' you said, rather haughtily. You considered seashell-selling a dead-end job. ‘Theo was asking about you again.'

‘P.
U
.'

‘So was Peter. You're very popular for someone who's never there.'

‘That's my whole secret,' I said. ‘Amaranth? You're not jealous of
boys
.'

‘Not of boys.'