The speed of sound

1

He was driving along the road, minding his own business, but mindful of all the other road users. The car coming towards him had just finished negotiating the roundabout that he was approaching. The driver of the other car caught Tony’s eye. The fellow coming towards him drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tipping a handful of something into his mouth. Tony saw that he was wearing some kind of small-rimmed boater, then realised that the odd thing about his face was the thick, plain white face-paint, like a clown’s. It stopped at his neck, which was ordinary skin colour. What looked most odd was the lack of red make-up around the mouth, and black make-up around the eyes. ‘This clown is late’, he thought. But Tony’s attention was diverted from this odd sight by the frightened eyes of a rabbit lying on its back at the edge of the road. It was desperately trying to turn over and stand up. As he was passing this pathetic creature paddling against thin air with its front legs, vigorously and uselessly trying to turn over, it occurred to him that he should have swerved to hit it, to go for its head with the front wheel of the car. By the time he realised that it had already had its back broken by a car, and that the kindest thing to do would be to carry out one final act of brutality, it was already too late to achieve the necessary manoeuvre. He toyed, momentarily, with the idea of going back to finish the job, but there was nowhere to turn safely here. The road was busy and narrow. A truck or a bus would be along soon enough to finish the job.

Tony shook his head to dispel these memories from long ago. He no longer had a car, and probably would not know what to do if he got into a driving seat again. It was many years since he had been inside one, and he was quite happy about not being able to drive any more. But this daydream/memory had stopped him in his tracks. Until today, he had not thought about cars for longer than he could recall. It wasn’t the memory of the events that pulled him up sharp, but the sudden realisation that he had grown unaware of whole episodes in his earlier life. Or should that be lives? He felt like one who had been reincarnated too many times as a human.

He thought it strange, in a way, to find, when he got home, there was no front door on his house. He was sure that houses usually had front doors. He struggled to remember whether his house had ever had a front door. It was increasingly difficult these days to bring deliberate memories to mind, especially about practical, everyday things. His mind seemed to be taking a path independent of his volition. It worried him that he no longer knew how long he had lived here. He daren’t focus for too long on this thought, because a much more worrying gap in his memory frightened him. He was too scared to focus on this, because he dreaded the consequences of the answer to the nagging question that he had successfully repressed, but the thought was just about to surface again, ‘do I own this place or rent it?’

This burgeoning question was driven out of his mind by the ear-crunching blast of a military jet screaming low overhead with a deafening and sudden roar. It was terrifyingly low, unimaginably fast, and so loud that it left total silence in its wake. It was never clear to Tony whether this was temporary deafness, or if every living thing in the vicinity ceased singing, twittering, barking or scratching in the face of this overwhelming power. It was a frequent occurrence, and he always mulled over what might be done to stop it in the quiet minutes that followed. Standing there, struck deaf, dumb and motionless in a suddenly silent world, he came up with an ingenious plan. As the sun shone on his unprotected head, he thought about ways to add height to the frail, doorless structure he called home.

Tony was glad to get into the house. He was still uncomfortable about the lack of a door. As usual, there were piles of leaves that had blown in, and some squirrels scampered out as he came in. He stood in the middle of his room, and breathed more easily now that he was home. The familiar surroundings reassured him. Familiarity was such a comforting emotion. He tried to recall a time when things were different. Nothing would come to mind. He could remember chasing the squirrels out, and he could remember the jet screaming low overhead. Did this happen every day? More than once a day? He felt disoriented and dislocated.

He also felt hungry: Time to eat. He prepared his meal with slow, deliberate movements. It was always the same meal these days, as he had run out of ideas. Just some random vegetables boiled to a mush that reminded him of soup. And some bread. This had kept him going for years.

After he had tidied everything away, he stood, wondering what to do next. He was tired, and more than a little confused. It was dark in here, and this observation made him want to lie down. The need to lie down and sleep was overwhelming. There was nothing else he could think of, so he simply lay on the floor where he was. The notion of lying in a bed was eluding him for the first time. If he had known that there was such a thing, he would have had no problem using it. He would have been glad of it, as his bones ached on the cold floor, and it was very difficult to get comfortable. He spent a restless night and the draught through the open doorway was quite unpleasant in the chill of the night.

2

The next morning, at the crack of dawn, he awoke to the sound of birdsong. He got up and started to move around the house without thinking. Automatic responses kicked in and he did his morning ablutions with no effort, changing his clothes and cleaning himself up. All the while, his mind kept wandering back. He struggled to remember recent events, but only things from long ago popped unbidden into his mind. He found himself sitting on a chair at the table in his kitchen, thinking breakfast thoughts, but not entirely sure what to do about it. A jet screamed overhead and frightened the life out of him. “What was going on?” he asked himself. When had there been a time without these violent incursions into his consciousness? The silent lull after the low-flying supersonic din produced another lucid picture in his mind.

There was a time, long ago, when he used to go to the pub. It was when he lived in his home town. He must have still been a teenager, but he wasn’t sure now. He recalled sitting in a pub, trying to talk intelligibly and politely to part of his severed family, but he was growing increasingly disconnected from them. They were conversing at two levels. Their words were about his ungratefulness for all that they had done for him. The final straw was their statement, “We did it for you”. He snapped, “You did it for yourselves!”, and, grabbing his helmet and coat, left in a great hurry, dimly aware that some profound emotion was bubbling up from some deep place, and instinctively feeling that the only way to deal with this tide of emotion was to be alone. It was a profound and inexplicable grief which simply did not fit with the genial surroundings of a rural pub with real ale, carpets, and a family conversation.He got on his moped and headed off into the unlit country lane, barely controlling the bike. He was very confused about why he was crying, because he was only aware of the words that had been spoken, rather than those that lay underneath. It grew increasingly difficult to see through the deep sobbing tears. His balance went and he drove in a straight line while the road bent to the right. He fell off his bike and landed in a ditch unable to control his deep, shuddering sobbing. The bike’s engine died as it lay on its side. Darkness was everywhere. He had no idea why he was crying. It would be another 20 years before he worked this one out.

Tony shook himself out of his reverie. This episode was crystal clear in the details of what had happened all those decades ago. He was shaken by the lucidity of the recollection and by the misery of his early life. As always, every one of the mixed emotions he felt was replaced by just one, a profound resentment towards his father who had committed the adultery that had led to the estrangement, then divorce. The memories subsided and were replaced by the familiar numbing resentment as the sounds of his house began to emerge from the aftermath of the sonic attack of the low-flying jet. He heard a squirrel scrabbling at the threshold of the doorway and got up to chase it out.

He was pleased with himself for remembering that he was going to add some height to his house today. He moved around the yard looking for materials and collected together quite a pile of good quality timber. He still had a good supply of nails, and some usable hand tools. He found his ladders, and set about his work with gusto. He was going to erect a wooden pylon on top of the house. As the sun rose and the sky cleared, he cut his timbers and fixed them in place. By lunch time, he was ravenously hungry, and drained of energy. But he had added perhaps three metres to the height of his single story dwelling-without-a-door. One thought brought him back into his house - soup. After lunch he slept for a couple of hours, and was awoken by the rush and scream of another jet. Surely they were getting lower, he thought in the silence. Nothing stirred. It was so quiet now, that his mind was free to wander, unfettered by the distraction of sound or discomfort, Tony dreamed some more memories.

When he was a teenager, week-ends were long and relentlessly boring. The town where he lived was a long way from the coast, a long way from any city, and remarkable only for the violence of its rival gangs of hells’ angels, skinheads and Pakistanis. Each tried to outdo the other in their steadily escalating battles, and each had their own weapons of choice. The angels liked motorcycle chains wrapped around their fists, combining the twin uses of knuckle-dusters with deadly whirling chains. The Pakistanis like to use meat-hooks to attempt disembowelling of their enemies. The skinheads liked to kick heads with their steel toe-capped boots. It was a frightening time to grow up. These kids were offspring of people who had seen the horrors of the Second World War. They were determined to bring their kids up in a safe, decent society, having defeated the violence of Nazism. But, somehow, in this town, at least, the imposition of peace, the protection of these kids against violence, had not worked. They had invented their own and they meant to use it.

But Tony was a younger brother. While pitch battles were carried out in certain parts of the town, these younger kids were not involved. They were not a part of their parents’ society, neither were they welcomed in the company of their elder siblings. So, while everyone else got on with their lives, Tony and his mates waited for life to start happening to them. They waited every week-end, from Friday afternoon until Monday morning. And it never seemed to start. They had worked out how to spend hours at a time in a bland coffee-shop behind a cake shop in the High Street. The management of this coffee shop really did not like them being there, as five or six young lads spending three hours over one coffee and a piece of toast each appeared, to strangers, as a threatening prospect. This was a town where youth violence was common: so most of the upright citizens of the town saw any group of lads as a threatening bunch of yobbos. But Tony and his mates had no idea that this was so. They only knew that they were ostracized and unwelcome everywhere they went. And they were bored to distraction.

As his hearing gradually returned, so the photographic recollection faded. He stirred himself and went back outside to the yard to admire his own handiwork. It looked good and solid. It was robust enough to support more structure on top. He sawed and hammered and ran up and down the ladder, and added a couple more metres of height to the structure. As evening drew in, he went back inside, made more soup, and crashed out for the night after eating a bellyful of the stuff.

3

The next morning, he awoke with an even better plan. It would take longer, but he could let nature bear the brunt of the effort. He was going to plant some trees and some bamboo. Anything that would grow high and strong. This was going to be useful weaponry in his defence of the space above his dwelling. But where was he going to get the requisite seedlings? He made off into the woods behind his house and tried to identify the tallest trees. Whenever he found a really tall tree, he looked around its immediate vicinity to find seedlings, saplings, new growth, suckers, anything that he could dig out with his trowel and carry in his bag.

He took all of his finds back to the yard, and planted them around the boundary fence, evenly spaced, ready to do battle with his aerial adversary. He watered them in, sat down and waited for them to start growing. After a few hours, he had not witnessed any growth at all, and was beginning to forget why he planted them, when, “Whoosh!” along came a supersonic jet fighter to instantly transform him into a state of suspended animation. His mind wandered along rarely-used channels and he dwelt on the memory of the old cycle tracks that he and his pals had worn smooth in the woods near their houses, until the sounds of his life returned to him.

A squirrel ran into his field of vision and shook him from his vivid recollections. Time to work, he decided, and set to the growing tower on the top if his roof. He threw himself into this task again, and for many days after that he developed a pattern of collecting seedlings in the morning and planting them, and building up the tower on the roof in the afternoon. It had grown to quite a height when he ran out of timber. He was scouting around the environs wondering what else he could utilise in extending his territory skywards, when he came across some long strips of steel channel, with holes in it. They were heavy, but strong. It took him several hours to get them back to his house, but eventually he had a neat stack of them ready for installing the following day. Just as he brought the last one in, another jet roared overhead and he was transported once again into a lucid memory from his childhood.

He was sat underneath the kitchen table in the house of a neighbour’s daughter. He didn’t like girls but she had invited him in to play, and, frankly, he was so young that he had no idea that he had the right to say no, let alone how to say it. So there they were, these two pre-school kids, sat under a kitchen table, with a bowl of water and soap suds. Tony thought that they must be about to blow bubbles, a favourite pastime of his. He could not believe it when the girl produced a spoon and started to eat the bubbles. He thought they were poison. He scrambled out to warn the girl’s mother that she was eating soap suds, but the mother was not even bothered. In fact, she seemed to encourage this whacky behaviour, so Tony left without even saying goodbye or thank you. He didn’t want to be around such people, thank you very much.

How many different people had he been in his life? he mused. Eat, drink, sleep. That’s how to finish the day, he thought. And so he did.

4

The next morning, Tony started to erect these tall extensions to the top of the tower. He had grown strong with this extended activity and he worked competently and with a great sense of purpose. The structure on the top of the house now extended for 20-30 metres and seemed to dwarf everything around. In recent days, the frequency of the flights had increased. Either that, or now that he had some definite task that was noticeably interrupted, he was more aware of the spaces between the interruptions.

But something else was happening to him. And this was a worrying thing. At first, he thought it was a memory, but it was not happening after the jet screamed by. And it was connected with the mirror in the bathroom. A reclining figure had started to appear out of nowhere between Tony and his mirror. It prevented him from being able to see his own reflection. He could not see around the fellow and could not see his face either, because of the pose adopted by the figure, awkward, ungainly and facing the mirror. Tony always just gave up and came back later. He was beginning to look a mess, but what could he do if he could not see in the mirror? But one day, his bathroom had changed for no apparent reason. He was struggling to lock a broken and twisted door in this strange bathroom. It had two separate entrances while he was focusing all of his attention on one of the recalcitrant doors, he was startled out of his wits by the sudden appearance of his brother who had died in an accident more than twenty years ago. Tony was not scared, barely surprised, just taken aback that his brother should have popped in. The brother’s face is painted white, clumsily, like a clown who has not had time to do the job properly and has stopped after the white base coat. The brother is extremely skinny and the two of them engage in conversation about weight: Tony wants to be skinny; his brother wants to put on weight. Tony tells him how much he weighs and advises him about how he might put on weight, telling him the kinds of thing to eat and suggesting muscle-building exercises. Tony has a strange sense of profound satisfaction. While his brother was alive, he would never have listened or taken advice. But now, with all those years of experience behind him that the dead brother had not had, Tony was the knowledgeable one. Tony would not be able to explain this, but he found this conversation with the apparition immensely calming.

Tony was growing in his muscular strength and his inner strength. The daily toil of building the tower was sharpening his senses and the lucid memories that happened after each fly-past were assembling themselves into a coherent past. Now the strange waking visions that he was having with ghosts from his earlier life were providing resolution to barely perceived problems and everything was coming together in his mind. He had one more thing that he had to do before finally bringing down the jet. He had no idea why he had to do this, but that did not matter. He needed to get hold of a rabbit and hoist it up to the top of the tower to see what effect its proximity to the blast of the passing jet would have. He spent quite a large part of the day trying to snare a live rabbit, but finally got a brace of them kicking and thumping each other in a sack. He tied the sack and hoisted the rabbits up to the top of the tower, then awaited the next flight. He did not have to wait long. After the jet had passed, Tony disregarded the memories that flooded into his brain, and made his way up the tower to regain the bag with the rabbits in it. Sure enough, they were psychological wrecks. They had wild staring eyes, and just stared into middle space, twitching, unable to do anything. He thought it unfair to subject living rabbits to this kind of hell, so he broke their necks to put them out of their misery. That evening, he popped them in the pot with his vegetables and had the first meat he could remember eating for years. He also hoisted up the last great straight piece of metal to the top of the tower, adding five more meters to the immensely tall structure that creaked on top of his shack. He went to bed a happy and fulfilled man.

5

Tony woke early. He prepared himself as best he could with a reclining man in front of his mirror. He felt bloated from last night’s enormous feast. There were more white-faced people milling around the bathroom, but he didn’t have any time for them today. He was not interested in breakfast, he just wanted to get ready for the next jet.

He did not have to wait long. Shortly after the sun appeared over the horizon, the sudden ear-splitting arrival of the jet was accompanied by a huge explosion as it collided with the top of Tony’s tower and burst into a ball of flame above the shack. The tower was immediately ripped to shreds as Tony sat cross-legged in his living room, watching the world outside through his door-less opening. He saw heat, light and great chunks of wood and metal showering down to the ground, while the sounds of tearing metal shrieked through the nearby woods as the jet scarred its way through dozens of trees over a mile of territory in a dead straight line. As the demolition of the tower was pacified by gravity, more and more chunks of materials piled up across the doorway and Tony was delighted at his good fortune. Finally, the opening was closed. No more pesky squirrels or leaves to clean up. And with the jet out of action, there would be no more horrific interventions preventing him from sitting on the floor achieving his own Nirvana. A bewitching silence descended on the noise of the crash, but not the numb silence that used to follow the visitations of the jet. This was more profound and more permanent than anything Tony had previously experienced. He could hear nothing, and he knew he would never hear anything again. He could see nothing now that the doorway was blocked, as this had been the only source of light in the shack. At last, no more interruptions. The vermin are gone, the draughts eliminated, jets no longer fly overhead. In the smouldering ruins of the house and mangled bits of jet, Tony sits, quietly, cross-legged on the floor, silently mouthing the ten thousand names of God. No more interruptions. No need for any more movement. He felt that he was in perfect harmony with his surroundings, quietly fading into his chosen obscurity, behind a slowly growing hedge of tall trees.