HIDING FROM THE ENEMY AND THE BOMBING.(Discarded chapter on the Tin Heart Gold Mine)

There were dreadful and terrifying noises everywhere and all the time but the noises were at their loudest in the silence.

The silence roared and hummed. The silence made panting sounds and drummed and throbbed. Straining to hear what might be approaching through the deafening stillness terrified him. When there were bangs or shouts, explosions or engines, whines or cries, or all of them together, then he was allowed to bury his face into her bony ribs and to pull her circling arms over his ears and not listen and not think, just feel the breath and beat of her body. Thinking demanded knowledge and explanation and nobody said what was really happening. How could he understand when he could not think and no one spoke to him?

The noise was worst in the silence because then she pushed him away and he was alone, detached from safety in the small room, staring at the window. In the girl’s thundering arms he could force the noise away by filling up his small rigid body with screaming and tears. She was not a stranger. She always responded to all his needs except for that for more food unless she was simply not there – absent – disappeared – as happened most days at sunset. When she made him stand up on his own with her fingers across his mouth, he had to be absolutely quiet and then the noises invaded him like bees, humming into his ear-holes and shrilling in his brain. That was her vanishing time.

There was no time past, just the deafening and eternal present and the small room-world that they hid in. As soon as it grew dark, the pale girl would slip away and the noise would settle into a threatening out-of-breath monotone until whoever had gone returned and brought back the wailing. After that he could return to the thudding cradle of her arms.

As it grew brighter each morning they ate a little and dozed. Then tiny fragments of memory swam into the sunlight of his dreams, quiet comfortable words, a woman’s voice, clean warm fabric cosy around him and a song that vanished when he stirred and found he didn’t have the words or the questions to hook the feelings back before the noise overwhelmed him once again.

There must always have been noise – he would never get used to it but it had always existed and it would not stop - ever. He knew that. He accepted it but he fought against it with every breath. Whereas the girl kept the noise at bay by her quiet dumbness, he kept the noise away from them all by the physical effort of surrounding himself with a sound barrier.

If that barrier ever broke –

what would happen if that barrier broke –

if it broke and the girl - and finally himself became the noise -

if he became the screaming he would annihilate the only world he remembered - his world - this room –

What would happen to them then?

What had happened before today had been so terrible that he would never let himself think of it or remember it. It was secret that must be kept forever.