A quiet house is rarely as quiet as it first appears.
Sit still for long enough and something begins to emerge. Perhaps it is a faint, high-pitched sound from the kitchen, so slight that for a few moments it seems to be synchronising perfectly with your breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
You wonder if you’re making it yourself.
Then you realise it’s the fridge.
It has probably been making exactly the same noise for years. The strange thing isn’t that the refrigerator has suddenly developed a high-pitched whine. It’s that you’ve lived alongside it without ever really hearing it before.
Then another sound appears.
Somewhere nearby, a toilet cistern hasn’t quite finished doing whatever toilet cisterns are supposed to do. There is a tiny, continuous trickle of water — not dramatic enough to demand attention, and apparently not annoying enough for anyone to have fixed it.
Most of the time it disappears into the general noise of the house.
Now it doesn’t.
And once you’ve heard it, good luck not hearing it.
Outside, the birds are considerably less peaceful.
Pigeons flap ferociously at one another around the bird table, each apparently determined to persuade the other that there simply isn’t room for two pigeons on something clearly designed to accommodate considerably more.
Somewhere much further away, a train goes past.
You can barely hear it.
Then the garden settles again.
Inside, the fish have other ideas.
For most of the day, a fish tank appears to contain almost no drama whatsoever. The fish move about with the sort of calm you’d expect from creatures with nowhere particularly urgent to be.
Then, every now and again, they all go completely mad.
For a few seconds there is frantic movement, water, bubbles and inexplicable aquatic urgency.
And then it stops.
Whatever the emergency was, it appears to have been resolved.
The house hasn’t become silent. If anything, it seems to contain more sound than it did before.
The fridge.
The trickling water.
Pigeons arguing over lunch.
A train somewhere in the distance.
Fish having a funny five seconds.
And then there are the dogs.
Two of them, asleep nearby.
They have arranged themselves in that peculiar way dogs do, each apparently using some part of the other as a pillow. Nothing is happening. Nobody needs anything. There is simply the slow, rhythmic sound of two animals breathing.
It is difficult to imagine a more ordinary sound.
Or, somehow, a more relaxing one.
A quiet house can be full of life without anybody doing very much at all.
People can be elsewhere in it. Animals can sleep. Something can move in another room. Nobody needs to announce themselves.
Sometimes it is enough simply to know they are there.
The sound you barely noticed when it was there becomes unmistakable when it isn’t.
There is no need to make too much of this.
A refrigerator is still a refrigerator. The fish probably aren’t trying to teach anyone anything about the human condition.
And the toilet still needs fixing.
But for now the dogs are breathing, the pigeons are still arguing outside, and somewhere in the distance another train will eventually go past.
The fridge, meanwhile, is bloody impossible not to hear.
