Four.
There are four people in this family. One two three four. Four is the amount of times my sister closes her bedroom window before bed. Four soft thumps of the glass collapsing against the windowsill, every single night. Then it’s the back door (three), the front door (also three), and then her bedroom window again (another four times). Just to be sure, I guess, that no mosquitos nor monsters nor bad-intentioned men sneak through.
Fourteen.
That’s how many times windows and doors need to be closed before this house can fall back into the silence that screams from the walls. I listen to this routine of window shutting and door closing each night whilst I watch the cracks in the roof of my bedroom grow. Fourteen is often the age that the monsters under the bed start to seem a little less scary than the ones in real life. Fourteen is how old I am now, with my freshly braced teeth and recently developed acne. Fourteen was the age of my sister when she started this ritual of hers, doing what she can to protect this house from the monsters outside.
Four.
That’s how many glasses of wine my mother drinks when she says she isn’t drinking. Four is most nights now, four has been most nights since my sister started her window shutting. It’s a dance they do, my sister and my mother, a dance they do that only I can see. My sister counts her windows and doors; my mother doesn’t count her glasses and bottles. I can see both, I can see the windowpanes chipping from an excessive amount of shutting, I can see the empty bottles of chardonnay from an excessive amount of worrying. My mother worries about my sister and my sister worries about herself, and my father doesn’t pay enough attention to notice.
Fourteen is how old I am now, watching the ceiling above my bed grow wrinkles and frowns. Like every other night, I watch this map of veins as I listen to the symphony of this house. Doors shutting, windows closing, bottles opening. I remind myself that I should tell my parents about the cracks, how they grow whilst I sleep. I wonder if that means something, if maybe this house is falling apart. I wonder if that did happen, if maybe then we would talk. Maybe then we would we talk about the collapsed home at our feet, or maybe we would continue to step over it blindly. Genuine ignorance for the sake of artificial bliss. I decide that we probably wouldn’t talk about it, that this roof will close in and the walls will crumble before my parents talk about anything.
The next morning, I stay in bed instead of rising with the sun like I normally do. I don’t brush my teeth as my sister opens the bathroom window twice, nor pour milk into my cornflakes as my mum slugs into the kitchen with deep bags under her eyes. I don’t eat my breakfast self-consciously across the table from my dad, the crunching sound between my teeth somehow the loudest noise in this house. Instead I stay in bed, not to sleep but just to see, to see if anyone would notice if I did.
Staying home from school was something I revelled in as a kid. A quiet house with a ticking clock was a cheeky reminder of all the things the rest of the world was doing whilst I watched daytime TV. But today I stay in bed. The novelty of being socially isolated from the word on those sick days has worn off, replaced by the desire to remain physically isolated from my own world. This desire is only bolstered by the simple fact that no one knows I’m here.
The silence that pervades the space between the rooms of this house is less obvious in the day. When there’s only me existing in this space, the lack of verbal conversation remains more of an assumption than a defiance. A defiance is when four people manage to survive under the same cracking roof with the inability to converse.
The ladies in this house arrive home first. My sister slips silently through the front door, school bag tow. Although we attend the same school, my tendency to waffle in the corridor after the final bell means we don’t normally catch the same tram home. As I daydream at my locker, my sister would already be at the tram stop, a few steps away from the rest of the kids. For this reason, I know that she doesn’t think it weird that she didn’t see me on the tram today.
My mother’s entrance to this house is loud in the most dysfunctional sense. The slamming of the door, the dumping of the groceries, the clinking of glass wine bottles. No words need to leave her mouth for her to announce her presence home from work. She makes dinner and eats it alone. She leaves three bowls in the fridge. One two three. Three bowls for us to claim when we too eat our dinners alone.
My father arrives home much later, usually directly from some undisclosed meeting or corporate dinner or after-work drinks. If it’s a dinner, my mum will scream at him that he should’ve told her, that she wouldn’t’ve bothered slaving away for hours in the kitchen for him. And instead of saying sorry, instead of saying thank you, he tells her that she would’ve been in the kitchen anyway.
Tonight though, my father arrives home not from a dinner but from drinks. A drunken head-start that brings him up to speed with the ground my mother has already covered in his absence. Eventually, after window shutting, door closing, bottle opening, bottle disposing, the house again falls silent. This house is silent, the occupants are sleeping, and I haven’t moved all day.
Twenty-four.
I contemplate my existence, contemplate the reality of my being in a world that for twenty-four hours hasn’t acknowledged my being. I could maybe live here, maybe cease all movement outside of these four walls and wait for the roof to crumble. It’s not a powerful urge of mine to stay here, to bury myself in pillows and plaster, yet it feels an easier course of survival than rolling out of bed each morning into a house that burns with silence. The fire under these floorboards was lit many years ago, fuelled by weird habits and unspoken vices, ignored for the sake of familial tolerance and civil co-inhabitancy. Even as the flames have grown louder, engulfed the space between door slamming and screaming, not a single one of us four is willing to cool the heat. This house burns with silence and will burn until it crumbles.
The silence has become more tolerable my way, by way of staying in bed. Fourteen is how old I am now, how old I am for one more week, then I will be fifteen. One five. Five is how many weeks it has been since I was last at school, since I last spoke to a person, blood relation or otherwise. Five is how many weeks I have watched these cracks above me grow, grow deeper and wider and longer and thicker. Grow until I can’t tell if there’s any roof left in these cracks.
Four.
Four is how many times my sister closes her window before bed tonight. She’s already closed the back door, and the front door, and her window four times before that. I listen as she opens it again, and pulls it closed. One. Between each motion of pushing and pulling, of opening and closing, I hear the clink of a bottle from down the hall, the clink of a bottle against a wine glass, two, against the recycling bin, three.
Meanwhile, with each numerical jump, the cracks above me shake. It’s almost like they’re laughing, they’re laughing and they’re crying and they’re doing so together. They whisper their secrets and giggle at jokes, and they do all the things that this house has not known. Four. That’s the last pull of the window, as the glass hits the sill, as the glass hits the bottle, as the cracks hit the floor.
Plaster buries me in my bed, buries me under my doona and under this house forever. I hear the finality of my existence. I hear the fire burning and the silence screaming. I hear my family standing at my bedroom door, watching. Yet still, I hear no talking.
I almost laugh, I truly almost do, because for every night doors and windows were closed fourteen times, my sister believed she was protecting this house from the monsters outside. And maybe if we opened our mouths, maybe if we talked and maybe if we listened, we would’ve realised that the monsters were inside all along, living right beside us under this crumbled ceiling.
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