There is so much room in silence. It’s so generous! It expands around you like a giant woollen blanket. Soft wool. Cosy. Quiet wool. Ah, the gorgeous feeling of semi-breath-holding. The sensual alertness of not. The resigned sigh of shhhhhh. The regretful silence. The watchful silence. The keen silence. The ambiguous silence. The mystery of silence. The infinite possibility of silence.

Everything so subtle. So gentle. Nothing stated, everything suggested.

Oooh, and the naughty waywardness of simply pointing, dumbly, when you could speak, but choose not to …

Avigail learned how to own her silence – how to protect it and to nurture it. She loved it. She hated the leaving of it – the bored croak of speech, the sudden colour and hurt and smash of language. Silence was thick, smooth cream. Words were a furious, fiery chilli sauce that hissed and raged and burned on the throat.

She once read a quotation by Max Picard about animals and silence: about how animals carry around a dense silence within them on behalf of man. Of how they are constantly placing down this silence in front of man.

A gift. An offering. A hope. A burden. A rebuke. An expectation.

Ahhh. Silence.

The thrill of it.

Avigail suspects that the great mission of her life will be to one day discover the full extent of this strange gift of hers – this amazing aptitude – for quiet. To test the seemingly endless parameters of …

Ah, this calculated regression!

This unanswerable no!

Although before all that, she needs to stop trying so determinedly to be normal.

But she’s worked so hard for it – starved for it. So she can’t relinquish it. She must keep on pretending because she is so proud of her adaptation, of how good she has become at fitting in.

Seriously!

You would never know what a freak she truly is!

Surreptitiously.

Hidden away.

Underneath.

Perhaps the performance (the normality) is merely the set-up, and the punchline, the denouement, is unpronounced, is wordless?

Jouissance.

Even in the midst of tumult, there is quiet.

It hides in the top of her head. It is like a little golden frog, perpetually waiting to jump. It is ever watchful but makes no decisions. There is no ‘do’ or ‘don’t’ here, no moral imperative. It is thoroughly dispassionate.

Tranquil.

‘How about the tiles?’ Charles asks. ‘Do you like them?’

Charles’s question can barely be heard above the desperate, harsh bark of Wang Shu’s laughter.

Avigail stares at Charles, dumbfounded.

Wow.

Wow.

He really is a piece of work!

She replaces the silver cream jug (and the menstrual tea) back on to the refrigerator, then picks up the broom, the T-shirt (which Morpheus has happily relinquished) and retrieves Wang Shu’s phone. She tries to pass Wang Shu the phone but Wang Shu is disabled by laughter. She has temporarily lost the use of her eight fingers. And her two thumbs.

Charles is now attempting to show Ying Yue the tiles, clearing away some of the assembled detritus. The tiles are quite repulsive. Over the terrifying howls of Wang Shu’s laughter, Charles is pointing at the tiles and saying, ‘These are the work of a celebrated designer called Alan Wallwork. My mother was very attached to them. It would be a great shame if whoever buys the house …’