A late afternoon lap around a silent house

The screen door clangs shut behind me. I shuffle down the front steps carefully as my sandals lightly plod on each step. Bees busily buzz away in the smelly unidentified bush beside the porch. (Jasmine?) A car edges its way into the court and the tyres grip the road with a whirr as it completes its u-turn. The driver’s window is down and a radio advertisement escapes. (Actually, scratch that. It’s a loud offensive drumbeat of some sort.) Some twigs crunch beneath its wheels as it drives away.

I wheel the bins down the driveway and they make a bumpy rattling sound against the textured pavers. Some glass bottles clink against each other. Keys jangle in my pocket and I take out the letterbox key. The key clicks into place and the interior bolt slides open with a metal scraping sound. I pull the newspaper through the back and the front metal slot closes behind it with a resonating twang. Nearby voices suggest there are neighbours chatting somewhere. A car horn beeps twice down the road, in a farewell salute.

The garage door opens with a mechanical rolling sound and I walk through to the back. Three chattering sparrows hop away in surprise, their wings loudly flapping above my head as they fly off. The leaves of the trees along the fence rustle against each other, in response to the breeze. In the distance, cars and trucks rumble past along the main road. From a further distance, growling tractors work on clearing land in the nearby new estates. The loose wooden boards on the deck give my footsteps an echoing thud as I head inside again. The screen door rolls shut behind me.

Inside, the roast in the oven spatters away in its marinated juices. (Poor oven ceiling.) Soon the oven will beep at me to remind me to turn the roast over. The cuckoo calls five times on the hour and disappears, though the pendulum ticks on. Pheebs trots into the kitchen, little bell tinkling, and sits and looks at the roast. Then at me. She blinks at me and meows. (She wishes.)

I hum along to the familiar melody playing itself in my head and walk over to the piano to reproduce it. One of the floorboards squeaks, on the way. When I sit at the stool there’s a quiet hiss in the padding of the pillow as the air disperses. Clair de Lune fills the lounge room, the tone of the keys bright and sharp as they bounce off the floorboards and high ceiling.

I thumb through the latest supermarket catalogue (searching for specials on boxes of tissues for activation day) and the pages rustle smoothly beneath my fingers. The dog next door starts barking and the little girl who lives there starts to imitate it and laughs.

These are the sounds I hear in my silent world ... if my imagination is listening.