The Replacement by Sharmela Kaluzny, Cup o' tea

Leah had become a collector of silences following her bout of sudden deafness.

The cause of her deafness was clear: Shock of…the doctor’s pen hovered a moment, before plumping decisively for the only word appropriate: bereavement.

The cure was less apparent. The medical jury was quite confident that her hearing would be restored, but were unable to say when exactly that would be. They recommended therapy. Luckily Leah’s sense of humour had a bent for the ludicrous.

‘Speak up,’ her therapist would say, Leah lip-reading. ‘I can’t quite hear you.’

London became strange and angular. It took on the air of a theatre set, and the other Londoners were like players in costume, masquerading as important versions of themselves. She made scuttling forays through indifferent crowds, her eyes strained to saucers, ears in a vacuum, fighting the paranoia that this was all an elaborate set-up at her expense.

Having slipped out the back exit, she re-entered centre stage at her parents’ home in the Kent countryside. A flurry of excitement followed, involving some wild brandishing of the vacuum, and fresh sheets in her old room. Her existence in the world reaffirmed, she rallied, and quite simply – as she told it – walked herself out of the silence. After four weeks of daily tramping down sunken country lanes, over muddy fields and through bluebell woods, she woke up one morning to the sound of the kettle whistling, and the muffled voices of her parents over breakfast. Relief washed over her, and she immediately began planning her return to London.

Perversely, she found herself missing what she’d lost once her hearing was regained. She felt a need to find the mute button to life.

She stumbled upon a passing substitute for this unlikely possibility when house-sitting for friends who had rabbits. She’d thought the creatures gormless at first. Mainly, she realised, because along with having almost no tail to speak of, they also had no vocal chords. She’d googled it, after realising they made no noises: not a yap, squeak, or even a purr.

She started to observe them for signs of communication. They reciprocated this interest with a shy curiosity, and she found herself won over. Their stubby noses would nudge for food, and their paws rest delicately on the edge of her hand as they ate from her palm, exerting a pressure as light as their fur was soft. She found comedic value in their habit of materialising by her side, treating her to their deadpan stare. She imagined them speaking in her terrible rendering of an Australian accent. ‘Awright, Sheila. Whaddaya got for us t’day?’ While steadily munching on a daisy. The tension in her shoulders eased as she watched their noiseless movements.

They were the start of her collection of Things That Moved Without a Sound.   

After them came sycamore keys helicoptering through a sylvan tableau, and the swirls of vapour dancing upwards from a mug of tea, cupped by cold hands on a chill day. She added the sound-deadened cacophony of fatly whirling snowflakes. Then a butterfly’s wings’ soft breathing in and out. Dust motes moving treacle-like in a golden shaft of sunshine. The coy unfurling of an evening primrose, with its startling flick into full-skirted bloom.

 

She made the mistake of telling her sister Claire about this private film reel. Who immediately saw that curling up the edges of all the silences was the moment when her world had become deafened.

‘You need to get another dog.’ It was stated in the imperial tones of an older sister. They were walking Claire’s own canine companions through Hyde park. Purdy and Ponce cavorted gracefully in the light drizzle, and Claire’s bedewed hair framed her face in a pearly halo. Leah looked up, half expecting the clouds to part. They remained sullenly grey. The dogs whizzed past and sent up a spatter of mud.

‘No, I don’t: my hearing’s come back; I’m cured,’ Leah protested, hating the idea. Ponce came up and waffled into her palm with a wet muzzle, wanting her to throw a stick. She bent down and scooped one up as they walked, hefting it as far from them as possible. Then she surreptitiously wiped her hand on her rain coat. Her sister had a fondness for big dogs with loose jowls and ribbons of drool.

‘That just means you’ve got over the shock,’ Claire was saying. ‘You’re still grieving, and this is the best way to speed up the healing process.’ She stopped, forcing Leah to stop too and face her sister. Hand on hip, head on one side, every line of her vibrating holy pragmatism: ‘What, are you telling me you’re never going to have a dog again?’

Enter Monty. A rescue, a sheepdog mix of wire-haired unruliness. But he could only ever be an ‘after’ dog, because before Monty, there had been Tilly. She was a Jack Russel, as neat and perky as Monty was scruffy and daft. She was the Lady to his Tramp, although Monty was more gauche than raffish, and Tilly more bright than dainty. She was pithy, whereas he was rambling. On paper he was the more loveable, but in the end any comparison was unfair, because Tilly was that once-in-a-lifetime dog, and that trumped everything.

 

Still, her sister had been right. Monty had got her back to a place where her collection of silences became as harmless as falling snow. Where she could meet Robert without a Tilly-shaped shadow dragging at her feet.

She hadn’t foreseen that Robert might have his own shadow. She clocked it immediately at their very first meeting, in the gold glint of his left ring finger. Not just an ex-wife-shaped shadow, with its tell-tale circle of pale skin where there should have been a ring, but a dead-wife-shaped shadow; an altogether more fearsome adversary.

He had been disarmingly open: he still loved his wife, and always would, but he was ready to start moving on. Leah knew this to be a blatant lie, even if he didn’t, had recklessly jumped aboard the leaky ship anyway; and they’d settled into a comfortable routine of home-cooked dinners, companionable dog walks in the park, and Sunday papers over coffee, with ominous speed.

Meanwhile, she sensed every action of hers being matched by a shadowy counterpart. It was never spoken of, and so couldn’t be exorcised. Leah just lived alongside the shadow, feeling its presence hovering as she filled the dishwasher, or falling in step as they gamely strode out in all weathers, or reading the fashion supplement over her shoulder; a habit she couldn’t abide, whether the person was living, or dead.

Leah changed tactics, insisting more frequently that they stay over at her place, or choosing a different park each time as though shaking off a stalker. Rob laughed. ‘At least I’m discovering the greener side of London with you,’ he said. By which Leah understood that park walks hadn’t been part of his repertoire with the Other One.

She joined him for one of his regular climbing sessions, wanting to learn, and was diabolical. Rob was infinitely patient, and at the end put a chummy arm around her shoulder, giving her a bracing squeeze as he said: ‘Hey, it’s just a question of practice; Anna was terrible when she started.’ She would have preferred it if he’d made fun of her.

The shadow laughed silently.

The feeling that it was all so unfair weighed on her, like branches full of suspended raindrops after an April shower, poised to fall in shimmering abandon. She was so ready to go all in; but first she needed to know if Robert could commit to a sequel – their own film in which she, Leah, starred alongside him.

And that it wouldn’t be called The Replacement.

 

She decided to broach the subject while they sat in their favourite café, safely surrounded by the hum of other customers. The waitress came and set down their order, and Robert said ‘Thanks,’ with his ready smile.

Leah felt nervous, and reached out to touch the sprig of dried flowers on their table, lightly traced the translucent honesty with slightly trembling fingertips. She sensed her own artifice, wondered if she was playing the vulnerable ingénue, and in a sudden move of frustration crushed the whole arrangement in her hand with a satisfying crunch.

‘Such a fad at the moment, isn’t it, dried flowers?’

‘Leah! What did you do that for?’

Now was the moment.

‘I understand grief, too,’ she said quietly. ‘Let me share yours.’

Was it too scripted? But he’d been caught unawares, automatically taking the hand that was being proffered across the table. She watched as what she was inferring dawned on him, saw his eyebrows knit in a frown. He wasn’t sure what to do with her hand, held now as awkwardly as her suggestion. His eyes slid, tell-tale, to Monty, and he let go.

‘A dog. You’re comparing my wife to a dog? How could you possibly compare your grief with mine? How could you have even the remotest idea of what I’ve gone through? Am still going through?’

‘I know, Rob, I know – but – but I can imagine! Grief, mourning: it’s the same emotion, whatever the cause. Let’s not make a competition out of it, out of who’s been hurt the most. I just wanted to say I’ve been there, I’m on the same spectrum; I can help.’

‘She was my soulmate, Leah, my ever-after. Not a pet.’

‘Your “ever-after”. Right. Then what are we doing here? I’m not a pet either, Rob. I deserve more!’

This was just one of the variations of the scene Leah had played out in her mind.

But in the event, in ‘real-life’ as she used to say when she was little, none of that got said.

Instead, Robert glanced across to Monty, withdrew his hand, and looked at Leah thoughtfully.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

All imagined conversations where Leah got to play the second-choice, righteously aggrieved woman beat a shamefaced retreat, and she was once again confronted with what a simply good man Robert was. Perhaps hearts are much like raw meat, she found herself thinking; a bit of bashing can make them more tender.

She breathed out a sigh, but so gentle that the raindrops only trembled, and began.

            ‘She really was the most special little dog. I’ve grown up with dogs; they were always there, but they were more like moving pieces of furniture.’

To be honest, Robert didn’t much care for animals; he tolerated Monty for her sake. Nor was he particularly imaginative. But he was intuitive, and felt now that it was very important he understood what she was telling him. In a triumph of empathy, he conjured up a childhood of small fingers grasping at fur, of pushing away damp doggy breath in the back of the car, the clatter of nailed paws on floorboards, a homely weight flopped down on feet.

‘I’d never experienced the bond I had with Tilly before. For the first time I felt a kinship with homeless people. You know; the way they walk and don’t look out for their dog, like they’re tied together with invisible string.

She took a sip of her latte and made a grimace. Rob took a cube of brown sugar from a little pot on the table and plopped it into her cup. She picked up her spoon and gave a couple of automatic stirs before continuing. 

‘Well, one day I drove home with my friend Jamie, and we parked on the opposite side of the road to my flat. He crossed over to my building. I was still unloading stuff from the boot. Tilly knew where home was and she knew Jamie; she wanted to go with him. So I checked nothing was coming – I always checked – and let her go across to him.’

She raked her fingers through loose hair, unconsciously graceful as she gathered and twisted it over her shoulder. Rob listened, on the alert.

‘And because I could anticipate her perfectly, I knew what she would do next: she looked for me. She needed to be with me. And what I couldn’t anticipate was Jamie in that situation. He just needed to pick her up. But he didn’t.’

She was fiddling as her story got to the hard part, avoiding his gaze, brushing some crumbs off the table and onto the floor.

‘So, of course, she started back across the road. To me. But this time there was something coming, a Tesla. It came out of nowhere, and –’

She raised her eyes, meeting his with a little ‘there you have it’ shrug of the shoulders, her hands with fingers interlaced resting lightly on the table top. Studiously nonchalant. Rob always found her transparency endearing, but never let on, knowing she’d be embarrassed. Even now, he held himself back. Didn’t take her in his arms, didn’t say ‘Have a good cry, love, let it out; let down that bloody great wall you’ve put up and we can get on with life.’

Just said: ‘Oh Leah, I’m so sorry. Did she – ?’

‘She didn’t die immediately. We had to take her to the vet so they could put her out of her misery. I couldn’t do it. I just held her.’

She still found it hard to remember those eyes fixed on hers, trusting her to take away the pain.

‘Jamie took care of it all, and it was only after…everything… I realised I’d gone deaf.’

That Tesla. It had tricked her brain, which couldn’t tally its noiseless movement with the sickening crash of impact, and so had short-circuited into silence. A blessing, perhaps, as dogs did have vocal chords.

‘And now I have Monty, and I love him’ – she gave Monty a good scrub behind his ears, an involuntary admission of guilt – ‘but it’s not the same.’

There it was: Robert fumbled towards it, the crucial point, but felt he wasn’t quite grasping –

Whereas Leah saw everything clearly now. She felt the shadow leave, and knew it was for good.   

It was Robert then who put out his hand; a comforting gesture, but imbued with a curiously pleading quality. And it was then she saw he’d removed his ring; it made his hand look naked, vulnerable. How funny she hadn’t noticed before; her eye was usually always drawn to its gloating shine. Of course, it wasn’t there to shine anymore; easy to not notice it when it was gone. Not like the silence of her deafness, which roared when she’d lost it. Always such a balance; something lost for something gained.

She felt a reluctance inside herself even as she slid inexorably to her decision, sensing there was a counter-argument to her unassailable logic…wasn’t it ‘someone’s loss is someone else’s gain’? She imagined an alternative ending. They would pick up their coats from the backs of their chairs, would weave their way through the tables of customers chatting beautiful banalities, and leave the café holding hands, discussing what to watch later on Netflix.

 At that moment she felt a dampness seeping onto her thigh, where Monty was resting his head and drooling for a treat. Time, which had slowed to the pulse of an evening primrose, suddenly sped up with a flick. She pushed Monty away with some impatience, and knew she’d made up her mind. And Robert saw it, felt the wind of change that shook the branches so the raindrops fell with a sharp patter. Knew he was just a little too late.

‘So, you see,’ she continued, ‘I do understand, and I can’t be the after-dog. I don’t want to be the replacement. I can’t.’

And she took her little tenderised heart, as lovingly cupped like cold hands around a hot mug of tea, extricating it before it was too late, not quite ready to risk another pounding, preferring her sycamore keys and butterfly wings; silences as soft and safe as rabbits.

Robert put his ring back on.

   

 About the Author:

Sharmela Kaluzny is using the time in between completing her MA in English Lit and becoming a secondary school teacher of English to brush up on her short story writing. She lives in Switzerland and her dream is to one day open a bookshop cafe.