An Echoey Courtyard

Have you ever encountered a yell so terrifying your blood actually curdled to cheese? Ever survived a scream of such ferocity and volume that your bones quaked and your muscles jellied and your skull rang like a chapel bell? Well, in my apartment complex, I endure these onslaughts bi-weekly. A man, one unit up and one unit over, sporadically screams. His motives are a mystery to me.

The apartment complex in which I reside comprises four separate buildings congregated around a central courtyard. The buildings are a fortress to the sounds of motorists on the semi-industrial roads outside. My balcony faces inward to the courtyard, and when it’s warm my fellow residents and I leave our windows and balcony doors open to bring air into our concrete boxes so we can breathe, however, with airflow comes unobstructed noise, comes sound unimpeded. The Yeller yells as if his legs are being sawn. I clamp my ears to his Exploud-loud shrieks [1].

In the construction docs for this cluster of buildings, Pages 32–35, there is a section on acoustic design. Instead of asking, ‘How do we dampen sound?’ the designers have taken a different approach, namely, the opposite approach and asked, ‘How do we bring this community together/tear them apart?’ They took one look at London’s Millennium Bridge [2] and superimposed its resonant qualities onto my complex’s design. When the compression waves of my neighbour, The Yeller, shoot out into the courtyard, they bounce off the opposite walls and bounce back again and again at such a frequency that the screams’ own interference is always constructive. Layer upon layer, it piles, amplifying the original shout. From a top-down perspective, the courtyard of my complex represents the ultimate subwoofer, the envy of every pre-adult P-plater with a thousand-dollar paint-delaminated car.

Because the screams are random and short-lived, and because the interference blurs the original message, it’s difficult to decipher the cause of The Yeller’s shouts. I hear his screams and the passion behind them and assume they’re caused by marital problems. I picture a beefy husband with an orange moustache, red face and lonely childhood. I envision a twiggy wife with bulbous eyes who likes to criticise her husband, his inadequacy, and taunt him with the threat of an affair. He yells because the cat pissed on his Foxtel box again. He yells because his wife is drunk and giggling at his anger. He yells because of some backhanded comment about his failed sporting career. And I want to race upstairs and put my ear to their door to hear this bold and beautiful drama. But the screams cease as quickly as they start, and I’m left sitting stunned on the couch.

Conversely, there is a stereotypical-sounding Greek lady whose specific blend of vocalisation-regularity, -pitch and -volume reverberates through my urban conch shell of a courtyard in such a way that all mystery about her life is dispelled. She squawks weather-talk and fitness-talk and family drama to the attendees of courtyard dog-club every afternoon. To me she is The Cockatoo. I know she does kickboxing at Bondi Junction at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesdays. I know that her niece, Maria, has four teeth now. I know that the extraction fan in her bathroom is dysfunctional and that her husband just loves this show Underbelly and that he is refusing to go in for knee surgery and that her brother Antonio should pay for his own damn well flights to Sydney when he wants to see Mama and Baba. She is stocky and works from home and wears a lanyard clogged with keys from other trusting apartments so that at eighteen points throughout the day she can take other people’s dogs our for wee-wees and poo-poos on the small patch of well-manicured grass specifically designed for shitting. The distant jangle of her keys reverberating is a warning to brace myself for an overzealous “Hellloooooo!” Not a single aspect of her life is unknown. Her voice is regular and sharp and clear. The detail is already there; my imagination meets dead ends.

When presented with a mystery, we tend to conjure, posit, and begin to believe the worst-case, most dramatic or juiciest somewhat-logical explanation, e.g. The Yeller’s broken marriage; or the lady between the curtain slats in the opposite apartment being naked despite the blueness of her legs; or the building manager wishing death upon you because he left a note on your abandoned bike; or how the constant, rhythmic, wet slapping from the apartment above is obviously sex that’s lasted thirty minutes strait despite the recent rainfall and downpipe that drips in perfect time with the unrelenting thrusts of the man upstairs. And we can get so caught up in these initial, dramatised stipulations bouncing around our heads and layering up in a courtyard-esque harmonic resonance that they can stamp out the other possibilities and seem like the only logical option [3]. Periodically, it is helpful to pull back on our hard-held beliefs to inspect them from afar and just check if they hold up or if something else could maybe make more sense. And these revisions can reassure us too, help us charge again headlong into the future with a fierce passion for what we know.

I discovered The Yeller’s motivation last week, seated in my $35 quad-fold camping chair on the balcony reading 1Q84. He screamed and I understood him. He wasn’t abusing his wife or punching walls or giving himself a Chinese burn. He screamed with painful ferocity, ‘COME ON, SEVEN! YES! SEVEN!’ The man just really likes sports.