Noise

Flash Fiction by Steven James Foreman

It all started when I was arrested.

Well, I guess that wasn’t really the start. What I mean is, it started before that, but I can’t say when, exactly.

So, in summary, at some time, some place, something fucking happened.

But it was the arrest that brought it into focus.

There were times long before that, like when I complained to my roommate about all shouting and yammering from the neighbors, while I was trying to study, but he told me there were no neighbors, or when I moaned about some road crew’s jackhammer going all morning out in the street, but he told me there was no road crew. He was an asshole anyway.

But even incomprehensible chatter of someone outside my window or murmurs of conversation heard through the room wall fucking annoyed me. If I could hear what they were actually saying, it might have been better, but I doubt it. It was all probably mediocre mundane shit anyway. But just that toneless, endless noise pissed me off. I just hate noise.

I moved from there ages ago. I had no roommate now. I don’t remember what happened to him. He probably became a CEO of some fucking boring corporate place. Or dead. I don’t care either way. He was an asshole anyway.

Then I got this room to myself. You probably wouldn’t call it a room because it was more like a sort of alcove between floors of this tenement. Some sort of neglected service area, which could only be reached by clambering down the rusting old fire escape. You probably wouldn’t escape from a fire on that thing. It would probably collapse, if you got more than one person on it, and they were panicking.

I had visitors, though, to my room, who managed to get up the fire escape without falling off. Well, not really visitors; let’s say temporary guests. Most of them were assholes too. Assholes who wouldn’t stop talking or yammering. You know, like when you’re in a restaurant and you can hear every inane and pointless non-stop fucking word of the bitch with the big hair on a nearby table. You know, emphasizing each word by clicking her stupid polished nails on her wine glass. Even her husband, or the poor bastard she was with, couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Some people just can’t help it. Being assholes, I mean. I guess it is not their fault, but just being near them pisses me off.

It was like those sorts of noisy loud-mouthed fuckers are wrapped in a skein of poisoned ivy, and when I got near them, I would itch, and scratch and it would set me off in a raging torment. But I had to control it, until it got quiet.

I was comfortable in my place, I mean, you might not have been, but I was. And I had everything I needed. You would have found that a bit lacking, but it was okay for me.

It was a bit small and cramped, but what did I need a big place for? You’ve only gotta fill it with fucking furniture. I had a bed, over in the corner. It wasn’t really a bed; it was just a mattress on the floor.

The only problem was it was a bit dark; the room I mean, not the bed. That on account of there being no windows.

But I had light – a single bulb. Enough to see what I was doing; like when I had something to do. Sometimes the blue flame on the gas stove was enough to see by, but I only lit it if there was a big pot to boil on it.

And then the steam rising from it, and the vapors, all swirling around and lit by the orange glow of the single bulb, turned into a shimmering hologram of past memories, conjuring up the tortured faces of my past guests.

Do you remember those oil lamps? I don’t mean those old paraffin lamps; I mean those psychedelic electric lamps with blobs of gyrating oil inside? The hologram was like one of them, but instead of globules of oil, there were these distorting faces, all weaving around and silently screaming, like they’d been created by some asshole called Edvard Munch.

But I didn’t need much light. You would have probably needed more light, but I don’t give a fuck about that. When the light was off, the place was as dark as a hole in a tramp’s shoe.

That’s a metaphor. Metaphors are okay if you control them. I mean, you can get carried away by them and get led off on a tangent and forget what point you were making in the fucking first place. You know, like, you could say something like, “she was as dead as last winter’s leaves” – and then, “last winter’s leaves, blowing around in the dark like little scurrying animals” – and then, “little scurrying animals, scratching in the corners of abandoned houses, like fingernails of ghosts, trying to escape the grave”.

Fuck! I have forgotten what I was talking about.

Oh yeah. Talking of talking; I should have talked more, apparently. The psychiatrist told me that if I had talked more to people about my problems with noise, it may have helped me a lot and not ended up like this. Fucking shrinks! They have no idea of reality! I had no one to talk to – not alive, anyway.

They really get on my nerves; the shrinks I mean, not the dead people. Some days I want to poke their fucking eyes out and eat them; the eyes, I mean, not the shrinks. I heard it’s like biting down on a big juicy grape; first the slight skin tension, and then the pop, and all the juice spurting out.

The only person I really connected with and talked to was my neighbor, Alice.

I wasn’t living next door to Alice, but we sat next to each other at school. We got on okay because she didn’t talk much. She wrote poetry. Sometimes she would pass me a bit of paper with a Haiku written on it. I never understood a fucking word.

But then we went separate ways after high school. I kept her phone number, and sometimes I thought about calling her. But I never did. Maybe I should have. Maybe we could have talked about stuff and even got married. But I didn’t call her. Maybe she went down the rabbit hole, like we used to joke about, what with her being named Alice. She probably turned into a stupid yapping bitch, anyway.

Then, one day, some busybody living above or below me reported to the sanitation department about the smell coming from my place.

I didn’t notice a smell myself. I mean, when you live in a place all the time you don’t notice the smell, do you? Well, you might notice it, but I didn’t. I guess I just got used to it. My guests wouldn’t have noticed the smell. Well, some might have, but only for the briefest of time, really early on in their visit.

Anyway, a health and safety inspector got called in, and then the police were called in and then I was called in.

I am now in another room, a bit smaller than my old place. It has a bed in the corner, not really a bed, but a mattress on a smooth concrete shelf. There’s a window, though. High up in one wall. It has bars, I know, I can see the shadows of them on the floor when the sun shines. And there’s a bulb on the wall, inside a metal cage,

I found some graffiti scrawled on the walls. I thought about adding to it, you know, something witty, but they won’t give me a pencil, or anything sharp, actually.

I can hear echoing voices and shouts from outside the steel door. Noisy, untranslatable yells and blabbering. And clanging doors. That pisses me off.

One of the guys in uniform hinted at it one day. He stuck his face up against the grille when I banged on the door and complained about the noise.

He said, “You won’t have to worry about the noise soon, asshole. You’re gonna be taken somewhere far from here!”

Well, if that’s true, I hope it happens somewhere really quiet. And dark.

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Bio: Steve Foreman is British, an HM Forces Veteran (Army), and a recently-retired security contractor/advisor, who lived and worked for over 30 years in Africa.

As a freelance writer, his non-fiction articles have appeared in BBC Wildlife, Soldier magazine, Combat & Survival magazine, SCUBA magazine, Church of England Newspaper, African Travel Review, Land Rover World magazine, Your Dog magazine, Travel News and Lifestyle magazine (Kenya), The Dar es Salaam Guide (Tanzania), and the Daily Mail newspaper (UK).

Steve’s fictional work has appeared in The Yard Crime Blog,  Close to the Bone, Twisted Dreams, Aphelion, Siren’s Call, and Hellfire Crossroads, and he’s been published in two “Amok”; anthologies, and two “James Kirk Ward” anthologies. You can find him at his website, HERE.

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