Click, click, click of the invigilator’s hard-soled shoes on the gymnasium floor. Bob’s head full of clicks and empty of ideas. Cursing Philip Rees for their back row antics in maths. Both sending notes to Amanda in the front row, while on the board algebra was explained one last time. The clicks louder as the invigilator approaches, and then silent, as she looks down with a smile at the blank answer page in front of him, pristine as freshly fallen snow. Phillip in town with Amanda watching Star Wars. London Calling, lost in the supermarket, heart of glass, and the years pass. The sound of shock and awe on the news, the territorial trumpeting of ducks on Regent’s Park lake, Theseus nearby proclaiming his greatness from the Open Air Theatre, and then silence, as Titania sleeps, and dusk falls over London. Tick, tick, he waits 59 seconds for the next tick. Tick and he waits again. He looks away and looks back at the question. It hasn’t changed. He writes a paragraph, tears it up, writes the same paragraph again and tears it up. He waits for the tick. The sound of muffled traffic along the Strand, the tick louder than ever. Trisha, the environmental lawyer from Boston, queuing for the photocopier in the basement. Standing behind her with blank sheets of paper turned downwards. The clunk, clunk, clunk of the copier. Spending the next morning in the queue, getting to the front and starting again, front to back, back to front, more reliable than the machine, which splutters to a halt. Just as she steps out of the lift. Sitting together in the pub, her dark hair draped over an unfamiliar pint of bitter, Simply the Best on the jukebox, old guys in the corner looking on with grumpy or wistful eyes. Book marking that moment in time and portending the future. Decades pass. His grandmother wheezing, pouring him a tot of whisky in her toothbrush mug from her secret bottle that all the nurses know about, asking him if he thinks she will get better. Telling her she will outlive them all. The ensign draped on her coffin, the sound of Santa Maria sung in a beautiful soprano, the priest hurrying after the secular congregant who has pocketed the host as a souvenir. The silence of her room. The whisky bottle gone. Years pass. The gentle snore of his wife. The day time sound of his neighbour playing Bach on the piano. It could be worse, he thinks. Drugs parties, feuds, not fugues, the acid sound of blame. Then one night, another sound. Not from next door, but upstairs. And so it begins. Months pass and the past unravels. The present vanishes. A box there in the middle of the room. He peers into see if hope still resides there. Something at the bottom stirs. The sound of wings flapping. It circles the room twice and then out through the open door. He looks again into the box. It’s now pitch black. Like a black hole which allows no light to escape and sucks in all around it. Pitch black and bottomless.
