west london tales 11 - silence

I finish the play that I've been reading. It's gone midnight. The play's about a soldier who comes back from Basra and brings the war with him. I switch the light off. I notice something. I look out of the window, which is placed alongside the bed. The Westway is closed. Not a car passes. A camera flashes in the distance. I realise what it is that I am noticing. It's the first silence I have known in my home in the two and a half years I have lived here. I listen to the sound of my room. It hums. I hear a train go past, and see its lights reflected in the next tower block down. Or perhaps I see the lights and then I hear the train. The room hums. Silence.

Then, even as I am wondering what it might be like to live with silence, or that approximation of silence which the traffic, the traffic which never sleeps, snuffs out; the Westway opens again. Red tail lights drone Westwards. In an instant I forget what the sound of that silence, if that is what it was, felt like. Although the hum remains.

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