Matt turned 32 on Tuesday 2 September, and at 6.31am the boiler marked the occasion by clunking like someone dropping a bag of spanners in the kitchen cupboard. I know it was 6.31 because it is always 6.31, give or take a minute, on days he goes to work. The shower goes on, the boiler wakes up, and the pipes tick for a good minute afterwards as the copper warms.
Seven months in, I know every sound this house makes. Some of them I've stopped hearing. Others I would pick out in the dark from a crowd of strangers.
The mornings
The clunk is the boiler firing up. When the engineer came in March for the first service, he said it was normal for its age and called the whole thing "tired but fine", so I have decided to hear it as a sort of throat-clearing. After the clunk come the pipes. A house of this age ticks and pings as it warms up, like a car engine cooling, and for the first month I got up every time to check on a leak that wasn't there.
Then there's the landing. One board, the third along from the bathroom door, makes a noise somewhere between a cello and a garden gate. Matt has learned to step over it. I haven't, and Pickle has worked out that it works as a doorbell.
In the kitchen, if you turn the cold tap off quickly, there's a bang in the wall like a door being slammed two houses down. Jas says it's probably a loose pipe clip under the floor and that it's normal for a house like ours. If it gets worse I'll ask a plumber, not Matt with a hammer.
Evenings and the party wall
We share a wall with Maureen, and the wall is not as thick as I thought. We know when the news is on, because the theme tune comes through at six and again at ten. We know the weather forecast before we know the weather. Most of what comes through is just voices, not words, a murmur like someone in the next room of a hotel, and it stops at about 9.45 when her stairs creak.
The same applies the other way, I assume. In March she said to me across the front gardens, "He's got a lovely voice, your Matt. For the bath." He has no idea. I had planned to save that for a special occasion, and his birthday seemed close enough, so he now knows. He has not sung since.
The fridge-freezer, which is Dennis's and dates from 2008, adds a shudder every twenty minutes or so, like a very small earthquake. It's the noise I would miss least if it went, and I know exactly what it costs.
The nights
On a windy night the bins go for a walk. We put them out on the pavement for collection, and the steep street takes care of the rest. Late one night in August I lay awake listening to a blue bin make its way down the hill on its own, bump by bump, like a slow drum solo, finishing with a crash at the junction. In the morning it was sitting outside the shop on the corner as though waiting for a bus.
Then there's Pickle. She sleeps downstairs, and at ten to five she comes up the stairs like a man in work boots and sits outside our bedroom door in complete silence, which is worse than any noise. If we don't get up, she pushes the door open and tells us about it.
But the thing I notice most is what we don't hear. After eleven the gennel beside the house is perfectly silent: no buses, no deliveries, no shutters, only the occasional fox and the wind in the gutter. The flat above the shop in Crookes had buses until past midnight and a lorry unloading at five. Even now I still sometimes wake at 3am for no reason I can name, and then I realise that nothing has woken me, and I lie there waiting for a bus that doesn't come.
