I awoke one midnight, just past twelve, to a wet and repetitive clicking sound. It was the open-mouthed cluck an infant emits when slurping away at pear purée, and it was the giddup click of an equestrian rider spurring their Warmblood into piaffe, and it was the disapproving tisk of a grandmother catching a child’s finger in the jam jar, and it was a tap drip, a toenail clip, a frog croak, a knuckle crack, and it was all these sounds intermingled, sporadically dialing between intensities of each to no apparent pattern. The sound was foreign, unreadable. It came from beneath my bed.
I did not wake with curiosity for stolen sleep prohibits such interest. I woke spiteful, and I woke groggy, only wishing for the sound to cease, but click-ka-cluck it went on. My first formed thought was rhetorical: How could she do this to me? For my partner beside was still alert (reading), and given her conciousness, her continued activity in the waking world, she must’ve been the catalyst, the instigator, the sinful creator of this vindictive provocation. I did not care to question her motives, did not request excuse or apology, just rightfully expressed my disapproval and frustration through one extended groan. How could she do this to me? She always does this to me. Wakes me with white noise through speakers “accidentally” turned on too loud, wakes me with her continued tossing, her TikTok, her spiny shins on mine. It’s all some manipulative ploy; she’s decided somewhere deep in her head that she must be the first to slumber, but only on her terms, only at her time, with no regard for me. So she woke me this night—I was convinced of her scheme—with this infernal clicking.
“What’s that noise?” I asked with politeness beyond necessary, and she offered a worried glance. I asked again and she feigned ignorance, and asked again and she said she didn’t know. Didn’t know? A preposterous claim! How could she—the alert one—not know the sound? So I asked again and again and as each of her oblivious responses increased in earnest and intensity, I grew more frustrated as the circumstance increased in complexity to resolve, for when I finally believed her plea, the sound solidified itself as a mystery. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said, until finally she asked, “Can you check?” I buried my face in linen, and moaned.
Why did I have to check? I did not care to uncover the source, only cared for it to end, and I was the one asleep, and she the one awake, and the noise came from her side of the bed anyway such that all she needed to do was roll and lean to see underneath whereas I would have to remove myself from blankets, lumber around the foot of the bed navigating loose shoes and clothes and a pedestal fan on my journey, and engage my tired quads, calves and glutes to squat a do the same. And I always fixed the other household problems, the faulty drawer runners, the car service, the blown light globes. So why couldn’t she take charge and solve this one-off, midnight mystery beneath?
I knelt on the hardwood floor beside her cluttered bedside table (books, a phone, a plant, an eye mask, a bracelet, some lip balm, and this tacky, woven-straw ring box from her childhood containing scrappy plastic things), and I peered into the murky realm whence the clicking came, and I saw: nothing. It was dark, you see. So I reached up for her phone—my kneecaps flattened by gravity and wood planks, the clicks sounding fuller in my ears—and in grabbing the device, I knocked the straw ring-box and it fell, bounced, and rolled. It rolled a ruler-length past the bed’s threshold and came to rest in The Underneath. Typical, typical Murphy’s Law throwing blockade after blockade at me when most I needed frictionless sleep. How could she do this to me? It was such a useless box, anyway; why did it have to be here interfering with the smooth progression of everyday life when it could be tucked away in a drawer or cupboard and exhumed when feeling nostalgic? We’d lived perfectly well without this box before her mother posted it down last winter, so why did it have to be present now? Why did it have to make solving clicking mysteries slightly/enormously more difficult? The dozen or so plastic bits it held were nothing more than rubbish. They were those soft-plastic ovals that used to come attached to the blue shopping bags you’d get from the chemist or butchers, a byproduct of the dispensing mechanism, I suppose. As a child my partner collected them, stole them from bag handles on the car trip home, folded them in half and rubbed them between the pads of her thumbs and forefingers because it felt nice. The ridge of the fold would scan her fingerprints, and the slippery sensation calmed her, took her mind off things. She’d get home and accrue these little choking hazards in the ring box beside her bed so that when (irrationally) there were ghosts in the attic, or when thunder threatened to dismantle the walls, or when the noises downstairs were sure to be kidnappers, she could reach across to the trove on her bedside, pluck a plastic from the nest and distract her scared, fixated self with soothing back-and-forth stimulus, and so relaxed, she’d sleep. Sleep. I wished I could sleep more deeply and not wake to minute but insistent, metronomic noise. But this was not the case, apparently.
As a child, I too had similar stupid fears, of snakes, of spiders, of feral rats lurking in the shadows, sure to strangle or bite or scratch me in my vulnerable dormancy. I had this one fear that a gust would rip off our roof, and another fear that some demonic entity would force me back into nappies. And as a child, I too dealt with these fears externally. I had totems, pocketable, inanimate objects that had texture and some small meaning: a coin my mother brought back from China, a pebble with a bolt of quartz, a broken chunk of wood that fitted with my friends’ chunks, a block of Lego that I imagined animated things. I’d lie in bed churning on the knowledge that the diaper demon hid below me, sure that he would reach up with elastic arms and latch a scratchy nappy to my groin. And I’d grab my at-the-time totem, be it coin or timber or stone. I’d thumb it, and the texture would distract, and its sentimentality would reassure. I’d calm and drift to sleep.
I don’t have or need these totems anymore; I’ve replaced them with experience. After 3000 fretful nights where no assault occurred, I came to believe in safety. My consciousness no longer latched onto diaper demons or feral rodents. Indeed, it did not even conjure them up. Adults have better mechanisms than external stimulus for dealing with irrational fear. We have logic, meditation, and above all, prevention. The fear of something impossible occurring doesn’t occur to us. So why did I have to reach beneath the bed to fetch the ring box when there was no need for it in the adult world? It should by all means be trashed. The only objects I carry with me these days are my phone, notepad and fountain pen that my grandmother gifted me for Christmas, things that are practical, things that have use. These strips of plastic no longer had use and were just getting in my way.
The phone screen cast a dim OLED glow as I reached towards darkness, closer to the click-ka-cluck, out to retrieve the ring box. As my hand hovered, as my fingers opened to accept the straw receptacle, my partner shoved, gratuitously, her frightful thoughts into mine. Referring to the clicking, prompted by my reach, she asked, “Is it a rat?” And I froze. The click before sounded sweet (an infant's tongue), and then the next it sounded sinister, like incisors snapping, like molars grinding, like the frothy-mouthed nibbling of some foot-sized hirsute thing. All my frustration flipped to fear. My throat stoppered, abdomen clenched. I became acutely aware of my own nudity, kneeling there on the floor, skin vulnerable to any attack, to teeth and claws and disease. How could she do this to me? Send me to The Underneath and then thrust this fear upon me, an image that all my child-, teenage- and adulthood experience had wiped from my head because I’d never endured a vermin’s assault. But now I saw it, red-eyed, buck-toothed, lice popping off its grimy back like carbonated water. And I knew, like in movies, it would pounce.
I withdrew. “Well?” She asked, blankets drawn to her chin, the crunch of teeth reverberating in our tight concrete cube. I had no answer. “Get the broom,” she said. So, I armoured up in tracky dacks and drew our plastic rapier. I knelt again by the bedside and shone full-power phone torch onto the dust and junk hidden beneath: a box of baubles, a suitcase containing handbags and backpacks, an electric heater, an old canvas painting, the cardboard box containing our Christmas tree which, from the direction of the sound, seemed to contain the enemy. It feasted on the plastic tree trunk, devoured the astroturf leaves, too wrapped in its voraciousness to notice trembling me. With the outer objects first, I swept my way in, removing the ring box, then the suitcase, etc. until the path to the tree was cleared. Then, when I tried to formulate a plan, I encountered only prophecy, snippets of a future where the rat lept to my body, where I struck myself with the broomstick, where I screamed. My partner urged me to persist. How could she do this to me?
With the handle end of the broom, I tapped the box—no change. So I tapped again, prodded and the sound, the gnawing, ceased. The rat, now alerted of my presence, prepared itself to pounce. Again I prodded, and it loaded its haunches. I smacked the box with vigour, hoping it would leap prematurely, while there was still some distance between us—but the rat was too savvy to fall for such tricks. So, I edged the box outwards, raked around behind it, crept it closer, closer until the lip of the box peaked from beneath the bed, closer until the rat was within striking range, and here I winced, here I froze, breath held, my mind a lava cake of melted rationality—and the rat, inexplicably, held its fire, and I whisked the box away to the balcony.
In the aftermath of the removal, I laid in darkness questioning my memory of the click. I replayed it over trying to decipher with my now slightly more level head if the sound had even resembled rat noise, or if it was something else entirely. The more I repeated those clicks over, the less murine they seemed. But, if I did not remove a rat, what had I achieved? And then, from non-existence, from the place where extinguished thoughts R.I.P., popped into my head the knowledge that the diaper demon had deceived me, that he’d hid whilst I was down there, that he’d stopped tinkering with crackly diapers only as a diversion. I realised I had not removed a rat at all, but a herring of a ruddy hue. And that night, if I slept, the demon would creep up and dress me.
This fear was irrational, I knew. I kept repeating the logic of it to myself, but remained frightened and uneasy. Shadows on the wall. A whisper. The awareness of an evil aura thinning the bedroom air, refrigerating it. It was a strange, disorienting double-think to be emotionally sure of attack but rationally certain of safety. I listened again in the direction of silence for the clicking sound; if it were absent, I could consider the problem solved, but if it persisted, the demon was sure to be there. I listened and heard a rustle, a faint shh-shh, looping like the click. It couldn’t be. Was this an echo in my head? Or was it the rodent on the balcony muffled through glass? Or, God forbid, the crackle of peeling Velcro on a Huggies. My chest went hollow. My blood pressure spiked. I put out my hand to find my partner’s and found her fingers moving, a slow rub, back and forth, with a shred of soft plastic between; because old ways of thinking can pop into our minds—without preamble, without warning—and the only way to deal with them is with old external things.
From my bedside table I retrieved my Grandma-gifted pen. The clip on its cap, smooth aluminium curving in three dimensions. I traced my thumb around these curves, and then I traced it back. The stimulus distracted. What it meant to me reassured. And with the pen clutched in my sweaty palm, I closed my eyes and slept.
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