Noise by Peter Wild

It’s more your kind of thing than my– hic! ’
    â€˜Your hiccups are b-b-b-b-back,’ I said.
    â€˜Now you’re offended.’
    I didn’t disagree. I would forgive you later when you came by to apologise. I was looking forward to it.
    Â 
    5
    Â 
    Wie niets weet en weet dat hij niets weet weet veel meer dan iemand die niets weet en niet weet dat hij niets weet.
    The one who doesn’t know anything and knows that he doesn’t know anything knows a lot more than the one who doesn’t know anything and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know anything.
    Â 
    When I got in, my father slowly straightened from examining a fossil oyster he kept on the sideboard, a relic from when there were oceans. ‘Don Dodd’s dad’s dog’s dead,’ he informed me, several times.
    â€˜Dong Dog’s deads dogs deg,’ I agreed, sadly, and went to my writing desk to tally the day’s take. He turned sideways to let me past, and nearly disappeared. ‘$150,000,’ I wrote. ‘Deg.’ Then I locked up the cash, took the accounts book, went to my room and closed myself in the closet.
    When you’re in a safe place, your face disappears, I think. There’s nothing between you and what you’re looking at and, if there are old coats brushing your forehead and nothing to see but darkness, all the better. After a while I pulled the seashell out of mysleeve and put it to my ear. I always try this, even though I know it’s stupid. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘Boit deg shleets den buttle swun…’
    Amaranth, if you ever need to talk to someone who isn’t there, about something you don’t understand, in a language you don’t know, you could do worse than go to my father. You probably already realise that you’ll find the words only by accident, while trying to say something else. Try ‘rubber baby buggy bumper’. Dad knows hundreds and that’s not even including foreign languages.
    Every new word I hit upon, such as ‘bubby’ or ‘rugger’, I wrote down phonetically. I used symbols I made up myself, concentric circles, crescent moons, zigzags and little wizard hats. They were easier to remember than the ones in the dictionary and more accurate, since a few of the sounds I made were not featured in the English language. I pored over these words, trying to fit them together. Sometimes I thought I felt a gladdening inside me, telling me that I’d got something right, a word or phrase, and those I memorised. I didn’t know what they meant, of course, but I had a feeling that in this case, not knowing wouldn’t hurt. It might even help.
    I heard something fluttering outside the door.
    â€˜Go away, Dad!’
    â€˜I wish I were what I was when I wished I were what I am,’ he said.
    â€˜You’re a fig plucker,’ I said, rudely.
    â€˜I thought a thought,’ he said agitatedly, ‘but the thought I thought wasn’t the thought I thought I thought.’
    â€˜Go aw-w-w- way !’
    â€˜White eraser? Right away, sir.’
    I tried to start over, but I couldn’t find the words. Finally I groped in one of Dad’s ancient wellingtons for the flashlight I keep to check for spiders, mostly. Sometimes to read by. I opened my accounts book. Swun? Goist? Buttle? Sissle? Dag?
    Mom?
    She wasn’t there.
    Â 
    6
    Â 
    Fekete bikapata kopog a patika pepita kövezetén A black bull’s hoof knocks on the pharmacy’s chequered pavement
    Â 
    When I came out, Dad was watching the TV. I turned it on for him and went outside to check for you. The December fog was suffocatingly warm and thick. If I was a kid still I would have checked the sky for Santa’s ’copter on its Xmas hop, sprinkling ‘snow’ and dropping stockings on their little parachutes. There was sometimes something good in them–candy teeth, a cat whistle–but mostly I loved the way