Chapter 79: Other
I drove out on the fifth of December with a cold coming on and a bag of oranges I bought at a gas station for no reason I can now recover.
Forty-one files. I did them in the order they were numbered, which is the only defensible order.
B1-0006 was a raccoon on the terrace. You can hear the gutter.
B1-0022 was a pipe.
B1-0031 was a pipe. B1-0044 was almost certainly a pipe.
B2-0155 was my own phone alarm, set for 03:15 and forgotten about, sounding for ninety seconds in a coat pocket in another room.
B2-0203 was a sneeze. Mine.
B3-0091 was a man’s voice on the landing, two words, too far off to read.
Marco has since matched it to a delivery of firewood, which arrived at an idiotic hour.
B3-0310 was a smoke alarm testing itself.
B4-0058 was, I am reasonably certain, a moth.
That is the actual texture of it.
Nine hours of work for a raccoon, three pipes and a moth.
I want that on the record because of what people assume afterwards.
They assume you were hunting. I was filing, in a cold room, with a cold.
I got to B1-0079 at twenty past nine at night.
Twelve August 2025. Ethan is one month old.
The file is eight hours and two minutes long and the shape sits at four minutes and eleven seconds in.
I remember I ate a segment of orange before I pressed play, and that afterwards I could not eat oranges for about a year.
The recorder sat on the shelf above the changing table, four feet up, angled at the room, because that was where I could reach it with one hand.
At 04:11 there is a woman’s voice.
She is a long way from the microphone.
Ten feet, maybe twelve, and there is a door partly closed between her and it.
She is not talking. She is humming.
Four bars, then a gap, then the same four bars, slightly wrong the second time.
Then five or six words I could not make out at any volume, in a voice pitched the way people pitch their voices at babies, low and up at the end.
Then a rustle, then nothing, then the hum again for about nine seconds.
Then the file goes back to being a hum of a different kind, which is the humidifier.
Thirty-one seconds in total.
I played it four times.
Then I turned the volume up and played it a fifth time with my eyes shut.
I want to be exact about what happened in my head, because it is the part I have been asked about most and the part I have never explained well.
I did not recognise the voice.
Not for a second. Not a flicker.
I had lived in a house with that woman for four months. I had handed her a baby every morning at six.
I had heard her order coffee and say thank you and ask me whether he had taken the whole bottle.
And I sat in a stranger’s ironing room in Berwyn and listened to her four times and thought: that is somebody I do not know.
There are reasons.
I have gone over them since with a person whose job it is to explain such things.
The distance and the door take the top off a voice, and what is left is not what you know a person by.
Singing is not speaking.
A voice doing something you have never heard it do is, to the ear, a different instrument.
And I had not heard her at all in eleven months and twenty-six days.
But there is a fourth reason and it is the true one.
I was not expecting anybody.
In my head that room contained a baby and me, and had contained a baby and me for four hundred and fifty days of remembering, and the mind does not hand you what you have not asked for.
So I did what I had trained myself to do, which is the thing I am glad of.
I did not guess.
I did not write down a name I could not defend.
I opened the index, and in the column headed CONTENT, next to B1-0079, in blue pen, I wrote what I could actually swear to.
UNKNOWN FEMALE. HUMMING. 31 SEC. 04:11.
Then I wrote the date of the file beside it, because the date always goes beside it.
12 AUG 2025.
I capped the pen. It was twenty to ten.
I had eleven files left on the list and a drive back that always feels like two hours and is actually thirty-five minutes.
I did four more files. Two pipes, a truck, and a bird.
Then I packed the drive into my bag, turned off the lamp and said goodnight to Marco’s sister.
I drove back to the house, and I slept for five hours, and nothing whatever occurred to me.