I stand up straight. “What is it, boy?”
He’s growling now, his lips pulled back over his teeth. I feel the charge in my blood again. “Is it a croc?” I say.
“Quiet, Todd,” Manchee growls.
“But what is it?”
“Is quiet, Todd.” He lets out a little bark and it’s a real bark, a real dog bark that means nothing but “Bark!” and my body electricity goes up a bit, like charges are going to start leaping outta my skin. “Listen,” he growls.
And so I listen.
And I listen.
And I turn my head a little and I listen some more.
There’s a hole in the Noise.
Which can’t be.
It’s weird, it is, out there, hiding somewhere, in the trees or somewhere outta sight, a spot where your ears and your mind are telling you there’s no Noise. It’s like a shape you can’t see except by how everything else around it is touching it. Like water in the shape of a cup, but with no cup. It’s a hole and everything that falls into it stops being Noise, stops being anything, just stops altogether. It’s not like the quiet of the swamp, which is never quiet obviously, just less Noisy. But this, this is a shape, a shape of nothing, a hole where all Noise stops.
Which is impossible.
There ain’t nothing but Noise in this world, nothing but the constant thoughts of men and things coming at you and at you and at you, ever since the spacks released the Noise germ during the war, the germ that killed half the men and every single woman, my ma not excepted, the germ that drove the rest of the men mad, the germ that spelled the end for all Spackle once men’s madness picked up a gun.
“Todd?” Manchee’s spooked, I can hear it. “What, Todd? What’s it, Todd?”
“Can you smell anything?”
“Just smell quiet, Todd,” he barks, then he starts barking louder, “Quiet! Quiet!”
And then, somewhere around the spack buildings, the quiet moves.
My blood-charge leaps so hard it about knocks me over. Manchee yelps in a circle around me, barking and barking, making me double-spooked, and so I smack him on the rump again (“Ow, Todd?”) to make myself calm down.
“There’s no such thing as holes,” I say. “No such thing as nothing. So it’s gotta be a something, don’t it?”
“Something, Todd,” Manchee barks.
“Can you hear where it went?”
“It’s quiet, Todd.”
“You know what I mean.”
Manchee sniffs the air and takes one step, two, then more towards the Spackle buildings. I guess we’re looking for it, then. I start walking all slow-like up to the biggest of the melty ice cream scoops. I stay outta the way of anything that might be looking out the little bendy triangle doorway. Manchee’s sniffing at the door frame but he’s not growling so I take a deep breath and I look inside.
It’s dead empty. The ceiling rises up to a point about another length of me above my head. Floor’s dirt, swamp plants growing in it now, vines and suchlike, but nothing else. Which is to say no real nothing, no hole, and no telling what mighta been here before.
It’s stupid but I gotta say it.
I’m wondering if the Spackle are back.
But that’s impossible.
But a hole in the Noise is impossible.
So something impossible has to be true.
I can hear Manchee snuffling around again outside so I creep out and I go to the second scoop. There’s writing on the outside of this one, the only written words anyone’s ever seen in the spack language. The only words they ever saw fit to write down, I guess. The letters are spack letters, but Ben says they make the sound es’Paqili or suchlike, es’Paqili, the Spackle, “spacks” if you wanna spit it, which since what happened happened is what everyone does. Means “The People”.
There’s nothing in the second scoop neither. I step back out into the swamp and I listen again. I put my head down and I listen and I reach with the hearing parts of my brain and I listen there, too, and I listen and listen.
I listen.
“Quiet! Quiet!” Manchee barks, twice real fast and peels off running again, towards the last scoop. I take off after him, running myself, my blood charging, cuz that’s where it is, that’s where the hole in the Noise is.
I can hear it.
Well, I can’t hear it, that’s the whole point, but when I run towards it the emptiness of it is touching my chest and the stillness of it pulls at me and there’s so much quiet in it, no, not quiet, silence, so much unbelievable silence that I start to feel really torn up, like I’m about to lose the most valuable thing ever, like there it is, a death, and I’m running and my eyes are watering and my chest is just crushing and there’s no one to see but I still mind and my eyes start crying, they start crying, they start effing crying, and I stop for a minute and I bend over and Jesus H Dammit, you can just shut up right now, but I waste a whole stupid minute, just a whole stinking, stupid minute bent over there, by which time, of course, the hole is moving away, it’s moved away, it’s gone.
Manchee’s torn twixt racing after it and coming back to me but he finally comes back to me.
“Crying, Todd?”
“Shut up,” I say and aim a kick at him. It misses on purpose.
We get ourselves outta the swamp and head back towards town and the world feels all black and grey no matter what the sun is saying. Even Manchee barely says nothing as we make our way back up thru the fields. My Noise churns and bubbles like a stew on the boil till finally I have to stop for a minute to calm myself down a little.
There’s just no such thing as silence. Not here, not nowhere. Not when yer asleep, not when yer by yerself, never.
I am Todd Hewitt, I think to myself with my eyes closed. I am twelve years and twelve months old. I live in Prentisstown on New World. I will be a man in one month’s time exactly.
It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.
I am Todd Hewitt.
“Todd Hewitt,” Manchee murmurs to himself beside me.
I take a deep breath and open my eyes.
That’s who I am. I’m Todd Hewitt.
We walk on up away from the swamp and the river, up the slope of the wild fields to the small ridge at the south of town where the school used to be for the brief and useless time it existed. Before I was born, boys were taught by their ma at home and then when there were only boys and men left, we just got sat down in front of vids and learning modules till Mayor Prentiss outlawed such things as “detrimental to the discipline of our minds”.
Mayor Prentiss, see, has a Point of View.
And so for almost half a stupid year, all the boys were gathered up by sad-faced Mr Royal and plonked out here in an out-building away from the main Noise of the town. Not that it helped. It’s nearly impossible to teach anything in a classroom full of boys’ Noise and completely impossible to give out any sort of test. You cheat even if you don’t mean to and everybody means to.
And then one day Mayor Prentiss decided to burn all the books, every single one of them, even the ones in men’s homes, cuz apparently books were detrimental as well and Mr Royal, a soft man who made himself a hard man by drinking whisky in the classroom, gave up and took a gun and put an end to himself and that was it for my classroom teaching.