I needed a complete break from music so I thought I’d go home, put my feet up, and listen to some music.
But that didn’t work.
So I turned the music off and watched a few things on YouTube. But everything had beats and lines and harmonies behind it. No video maker could infer the existential themes of a 1980s sitcom, nor vlog about their smart-bath, without some kind of audial drapery.
So I decided to listen to a podcast. But each began with a small tune. At this point I couldn’t make it past the first second of introduction. Any music would send a searing shot down my nerve endings and blister my ear canals.
So I decided to listen to an audiobook. But the book was read by a British man. He sounded like a duck playing an oboe. It was too close.
I sat in silence for fourteen seconds before I started humming Rude Boy by Rihanna.
I had to leave the house.
So I escaped to the outside. But the birds sang in the trees.
So I ran to the library. There, I thought, I would find peace.
I sat, sweating and shivering, on one of those soft, armless chairs covered in thick coarse bold-coloured fabric. The kind with skinny black metal legs.
I slowly let my palms away from my ears. But the footsteps across the wooden floors made clip-clop beats and the scrapes of paper from the people reading at the tables sounded like brushes against snare drums. Every now and then a sneeze or cough would puncture the air. I had stumbled into an impromptu experimental jazz rehearsal.
I ran.
Down the road was a recording studio; recently converted from a restaurant that had been forced to close. I lurched in through the door and, with my hands again clasped around my ears to protect myself from the open car windows and shops playing the radio loud with their doors open, started banging in morse code on the reception desk with one elbow insisting they give me a soundproof room immediately. I am adept at morse code, british sign language, and interpretive mime.
They showed me to a room quickly and I sat cross-legged in the middle of the busy carpet. I let my hands away from my ears and there was a small moment of bliss. The room still smelled of fried food and some mingling of herbs, but there was no hiss of pans, nor cheeky chef’s cocaine-banter. After only a few seconds, though, something did peel away a little pleasure. Some high-pitched...barely audible at first…echoing sound…
...rat ghosts.
And as soon as I figured it out, the white figures came streaming forth from every wall, converging on some central point about five feet in front of me before curving and heading straight for me, each one of the leaping ghouls screeching a deafening screech a million times over.
I fled from the rat ghosts and spun out of the studio before shoving a busker through the window of a travel agent’s, which give me an idea.
–
Wearing earmuffs, I rented an electric car and drove to the coast. I stole a dinghy and with the gentle lapping of the oars sounding much too much like the withdrawing lip of an adequately hydrated vocalist performing too close to the microphone to make this mode of transport at all pleasurable, I paddled to a deserted island I had once heard of in the middle of the English channel.
I did not expect there to be monkeys. As soon as I started bellowing at the sea to be quiet and stop its rushing up the shore which reminded me of a distorted synthesiser, a plague of brush-haired humanoids leaped from the trees and started oo-oo-ing and ah-ah-ing at me like an early 2010s indie singalong chorus.
I hadn’t come here for the beach.
I beat up the monkeys with my right hand while the left plugged my left ear. I did this while also raising my right shoulder to that ear as I was wearing a thick jumper so the monkey screams were at least muffled.
When all the monkeys were wounded I put fingers in both of my ears and started the long trek to the centre of the island where I had heard there was a soundless cave. This silent retreat was my aim. Here I would relax.
I descended into the black mouth of the cave and, after just a minute of descent, I found a barely lit grotto in which I decided to sit.
I pulled my fingers from deep within my ears.
Silence.
No Linkin Park echoing drips of water. No whistling wind.
No animals screaming like Janis Joplin.
I sat without moving in relaxing anti-music.
The moment I yearned for had finally come to me.
I breathed a sigh of relief and the sound reverberated around the cave system infinitely, building to a perfect hum as it returned and retreated, over and over again. It filled my ears. It flowed back and forth emotionally in doppler pitch-movements and hypnotic rhythms.
I grimaced, gave up, and dropped onto my side.
My right ear hit something soft, cold, and squidgy.
I sat back up, confused, and deaf in one ear.
I plucked the wet thing out of there and held it up in what little light there was.
It was a large slug.
I looked around me and there were hundreds of them.
I jammed that one back in my ear and got picking.
Not one of them was safe. Each introduction of a slug to my ears caused a nauseating squelch, but that decreased in volume as I hit the high forties. I pushed them in and bunged them into corners of my canals my skin didn’t know existed.
Pretty soon I couldn’t hear a thing.
I shouted.
Nothing but the grim rattle of my voice in my throat. So long as I said nothing, I could be fine.
Fifteen minutes of blind, escapist and satisfying silent ecstacy later, a torch shone down the passageway, right into my eyes.
I read his lips.
A passing boat had heard the shout. They were a rescue team.
I remembered my sign language, and communicated with him.
As I spelled out my situation using my hands, I heard my bones tapping against one another. They made tones, like a marimba. In my positive mood, I wrote a good song.
