It took us 21 hours to find it. Where the white noise was coming from. I came home from the office at 8pm as I always do and Pip was there in a state of high distress.
‘I can’t tell where it’s coming from,’ she said, turning over a couch cushion.
‘Where what’s coming from?’ I said, on account of my hearing condition, which is a bad condition.
‘You can’t hear that? Listen,’ she said in italics.
I listened. I could just about hear it. It sounded like it was in the corner of the room.
‘Have you checked this corner of the room?’
‘I’ve checked everywhere,’ she half-yelled.
She threw herself onto the couch and growled. I went in my room, and the white noise sounded faraway. I went in the bathroom; it sounded closer but still faraway. In the kitchen I couldn’t hear it at all over the sound of the fridge, which I often compared to a jumbo jet achieving liftoff. Pip didn’t laugh at that. She thought my saying ‘jumbo jet’ made me sound old. But Gomez did, my flatmate. Sometimes I would get home - at 8pm - and he would be stood in the kitchen, punching the fridge and shaking his head. I have a theory he took his anger out on inanimate objects a lot. Things like pans, and cushions.
In the living room I found Pip in a tearing-her-hair-out pose.
‘Don’t tear your hair out.”
‘I’m not going to tear it out.’
‘You look like you might.’
‘I’ve just had it done,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to tear it out.’
And it did look very nice. We looked around the living room together. I wasn’t much help. My hearing is funny - not joke-funny, weird funny. My left ear is not what it was - Pip doesn’t laugh at that one either, she just rolls her eyes, and fair enough because it’s not even a joke really - and basically every sound sounds like it’s coming from my right. So the source of the white noise shifted depending on which way I faced.
Eventually we went to sleep with our earplugs in. The next morning, we decided we should go and ask our upstairs neighbour if he was Mr White Noise, which meant I should go up and ask him.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Is that white noise coming from your flat?’
‘I thought it was yours,’ he said.
When I went back down Pip was standing by Gomez’s bedroom door with a grave look on her face.
‘What is it?’
She pointed. His room was empty apart from the bed, and the source of the white noise: an old radio alarm clock, which he had detuned to deliver a screaming wake-up call. Gomez was not there but his alarm was blaring and his bed was made and the wardrobe was empty. ‘Baxter,’ Pip said, pointing somewhere else. I followed her point and there it was, the note folded up on the pillow. I felt her looking at me in shock. I struggled to contain my complete lack of surprise.