The gutters were so badly damaged by the last cash-in-hand roofers who oversold their abilities that they now creak and moan in even the slightest breeze. She’s convinced she’s disturbing them when she sighs deeply enough, her breath causing the gutters to groan as they strain away from the tethers keeping them in place.
She’s sensitive to sound though, jokes that it’s a result of yoga-related trauma.
One morning she was being guided through a post-yoga meditation. Some beautiful young American instructed her, via YouTube, to observe sounds without getting lost in them. To hear them, then let them go without investigation. She observed Paddy next door listening to the RTE news.
My god he must be deaf to be listening at that volume - ah, but no, no investigation. She let the thought go and nestled back into meditation.
She observed her neighbour on the other side scream ‘something kurva something’ at his children.
Doesn’t that mean ‘fuck’? Wojciech, the project manager from her last job, had told her so. Wonder what Wojciech is up to. But anyway, what could the children be doing that would warrant that kind of lang- ah.
Aha! Caught it again. She let the thought go, adjusted her shoulder blades in a manner she believed to be more yogi, and settled in again.
And so, this time, when she heard some unusual scratching near her head on the floor, she thought she was in some kind of hyper-aware state thanks to the meditation. She was just hearing what was always there but had never been heard before. What a trip. She successfully let the sound go with minimal examination and she was elated. Until the pretty young thing on screen instructed her to slowly open her eyes, in her own time, and take in her surroundings, and she did so just in time to see a small brown smudge with a pink tail dart from the coffee table she was lying beside.
Since then, noises don’t go uninvestigated. Himself walked in on her once with her entire head in the crisper drawer of the fridge, she was perfectly still. He watched her for 15 seconds, then;
‘What the fuck?’
She slammed her head against the bottom shelf in shock and emerged red-faced. ‘There’s something… In there. Or behind there. I hear scratching. Do rodents live behind appliances? Can we pull it out? It smells a bit… rodenty. DON’T ask me what I mean you know, like, musty’.
