Whole Home Audio

At quarter to three in the morning I got out of bed for a wee.

This was not an event. I wasn't awake in any meaningful sense. I had not entered the day or opened for business. I was simply moving a bladder from one state to another with the minimum possible involvement of consciousness.

He heard me from his room and buzzed at me.

I didn't register it immediately. I was halfway along the landing before my brain finally unpacked the noise and identified it as communication. He had buzzed at me. At quarter to fucking three. Because I had passed within range.

I carried on walking.

There are times when I don't want to be spoken to. There are times when I don't want to be looked at. There are times when I don't even want another person to move unnecessarily within my airspace. 

Don't buzz at me. Don't look at me. Don't talk. Don't wiggle.

This sounds, written down, as though I dislike the man.

I don't.

I just sometimes need him to have the environmental impact of a wardrobe. A good, solid wardrobe. Present. Useful. Potentially containing an entire magical kingdom, but crucially not explaining it to me unless specifically asked.

This is difficult for him.

He broadcasts.

If not from his face, from his arse.

He is an extremely clever man who has somehow reached adulthood without discovering that a question is not necessarily an invitation to deliver a dissertation. I can ask a question requiring a one-word answer.

“Well…”

There it is. The word that causes my auditory processing to pack a tiny suitcase.

I know what follows. Context. History. People I already know about. Things he has already told me. Things I have overheard him telling other people, often more than once. Somewhere in there may be an answer, but I have to remain conscious long enough to find it.

I am perfectly capable of asking another question. This appears to be news to him.

If I ask whether something happened, I would like to know whether it happened. If the answer is no, he may say no. I can then ask why. I know how. I've been doing questions for years.

Instead, he appears to believe that withholding the entire contextual history would be irresponsible. Sometimes I tell him I can only hear him if he answers in one sentence. This does not necessarily help, because the difficulty is not simply the number of sentences. It is finding the sentence containing the answer.

There have been occasions when I have had to ask five separate questions to assemble one perfectly ordinary fact.

This is not conversation. It is a deposition.

The reverse is equally bewildering. I can tell him something once, clearly, and shortly afterwards discover through his questions that some important part of it has failed to enter storage. So I say it again.

Meanwhile, I retain things he hasn't even told me.

His work calls travel. I can hear him from three rooms away while doing something entirely unrelated, apparently paying no attention whatsoever, and still register the new information when it appears. He finds this astonishing.

I don't.

He was talking at approximately the volume of a small regional airport.

What becomes exhausting is that he doesn't know what I already know. So when I ask something based on a conversation I've overheard, he doesn't begin at the point of my question. He goes back. Sometimes a very long way back. I can feel myself ageing as he approaches the present day.

Last week I had to say, “Please don't tell me the van story again.”

There are sentences you don't imagine featuring in a long-term relationship when you are young. Nobody gazes into somebody's eyes over dinner and thinks, One day I hope to know your van story so comprehensively that I can detect its approach from the opening three words and take evasive action.

But life is rich.

Eventually I did what any sensible communications system does when nobody appears to be receiving its packets. I reduced transmission.

I stopped talking as much.

This has consequences. He sometimes hears me talking to other people and seems faintly astonished by the quantity of it.

I can talk. Of course I can fucking talk. It's astonishing how conversational one becomes when the other person listens to the first thing you say and then says something related to it.

I have had communications training.

He had his mother.

Perhaps he learned long ago that if the recipient does not appear to have received the message, the appropriate response is to keep going. Unfortunately, when I stop responding because I have run out of bandwidth, he gets louder.

His system appears to be:

SIGNAL NOT ACKNOWLEDGED. INCREASE SIGNAL STRENGTH.

Mine is:

TOO MUCH SIGNAL. REDUCING INPUT.

Volume is not the issue. He has an inbuilt Google Nest. Walk past in the small hours? Motion detected. Buzz. Fail to respond? Increase volume. Leave the room? Whole-home audio.

There is no part of the house beyond coverage.

At approximately four in the morning I was back in bed with the dog, saying nothing and interacting with nobody, when my phone lit up.

Spotify.

Want to join Flobby's Jam?

Flobby is him.

He wasn't even in the room and still he had found a new broadcast channel.

There is something almost admirable about this. Voice. Buzzing. Looking. Wiggling. Spotify. And, when all conventional systems fail, his arse.

Even the factory-reset hole speaks.

The truly irritating thing is that he is funny and clever and I love him. This would all be considerably easier if he were simply an idiot.

But he isn't. His brain works rather like mine. He sees connections, understands complicated things and makes conceptual leaps.

He just insists on giving me the director's commentary.

And I don't actually want him to stop talking because I want silence. I want him to stop talking because I would occasionally like a go.

I want to say something once and have it arrive. I want a question to create a space into which an answer goes. I want to wander through my own house without accidentally triggering a human smart speaker.

I want quiet not because there is nothing to say, but because conversation requires a gap. A turn. Somewhere for another person's thought to land.

I am, admittedly, asking quite a lot of Flobby.

For now, I would settle for a sign.

NO BROADCASTING BEYOND THIS POINT.