After Angela

Susan liked sounds and anti-sounds, she liked to write lists of her favourite words, sounding them out as she wrote them in a whisper and circling the silent parts of them.

"sweetheart" that inaudible 'th' soft, like a caress.
"phonograph" the long and short combinations.
"knight" the sister word to night, its secret letter only revealed on paper.

Susan lived with her grandmother, a loud woman whose voice carried through the house. Susan would listen sitting on her bed writing out her lists, as her grandmother talked boomingly on the phone, or while she entertained friends.
Susan became an eavesdropper to conversations over tea and chocolate cake.

Abruptly one summer, her grandmother died, leaving her alone in the house. The house had been in Susan's family for generations. her distant ancestors had brought the land and built it, but now Susan was the only one left. After the death of Susan's grandmother, it seemed that the house had been only held together by her shouts. It began to creak and sway in the wind that perpetually blew.
At night Susan listened to the rattling windows and shifting of the floor tiles. It seemed that the house spoke to her, whispering secrets of the long since past.
As Susan walked about the house, or shifted in her bed at night, it was as if she replied to those creaks, those muffled moans through cracked brick and broken mortar. The sweep of her corduroy trousers answered the wind blowing under dusty doorways, the crackling of her satin bedspread as she turned over spoke to the popping window panes.
She continued to write out her lists, including the soft language between her and the house. When she ran out of paper, she wrote on the walls, over the pinstripe wallpaper. The house became it's own reference to her new language, and new words continued to spill from it's rusty hinges.
Susan wrote letters to her house colloquist, and posted them in the dark cracks between the window sash or through the floor boards. The letters gradually seeped out, becoming like a second skin over old brick. Her fingers were blackened with ink, so that she herself became stained with her own words. "I am full up of new words" she would think as she wrote, " I am brimming with stories".
On the anniversary of her grandmother's death, two young boys passed by her house talking in loud voices. The loud sound remained her of her grandmother, so she peered through the brass letterbox and listened again to the speech of others. But Susan had spent so long in her house, that she thought that the boys words were the same as the gentle communion between her and the house.
In actual fact, as Susan had passed her quiet existence alone in the house, the once wealthy neighbourhood had become derelict.
Her new neighbours were Koreans, Germans and french new Caledonians who had moved to seek out a new life, only to find the new place was hard and cold. Their savings had been so meagre that Susan's area was all they could afford.

Susan leapt out of her door, speaking her soft housewords in hope of communion with the outside world once more.
The two boys looked at her dusty clothes, stained hands and white face. Their eyes became saucer-large and they ran off down the street screaming about witch women. Susan sighed and rambled to her house, then silently closed the door on the world once more.