Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott Page B

in her mouth. “Still planning to leave the house?” she says, chewing.
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “Tomorrow.”
    “Really?”
    “Yep.”
    “Crikey. Will you recognize the outside world? Will it recognize you?”
    “I’ve never been able to do that thing you just did,” Miriam says.
    “What thing?”
    “Catching food in your mouth.”
    They stand there for five minutes, with Fenella throwing and Miriam bobbing up and down with an open mouth, until the bag is empty and the floor is covered with raisins. Boo’s cat appears. It sniffs the raisins and walks away. Miriam noticesthat the cat’s movements are like a performance of disappointment, feline theatre, a slinky enactment of her own feelings. She wants to reach out and touch the cat but it’s always too far away.
    “Oh well, you can’t be good at everything,” Fenella says.
    “What am I good at?”
    Fenella smiles. “Talk later,” she says. She kisses Miriam on the cheek and jogs off across the lawn and the question disappears as if it never existed.
    You cannot predict how long a question will live. Some questions are bigger than others. If you weigh them on special scales, you’ll find that the small ones are usually the heaviest.
     
    That night, Miriam makes herself a cheese and sweetcorn omelette and eats it fast. She pours herself a glass of white wine, holds it up, toasts the house. “To this house, for not growing sick and tired of me over the past three years, for not collapsing around me in exhaustion, for not going up in smoke. I’m leaving you tomorrow, maybe for a few hours, maybe for longer. I’m sorry you are so full of ghosts. It must feel like you have rats running through your walls and your pipes. I’m sorry I haunt you with my whispers.”
    She drinks her wine and listens to the reply. The humming, creaking and clicking. The humdrum. Her glass is empty now. She fills it up.
    As it approaches midnight, she stumbles into the back garden.
    Will you recognize the outside world? Will it recognize you?
    The world has changed since Miriam was last out there. It has become faster and busier and chattier than ever. She knows this because she heard it on the radio last week. You have to be bionic, supersonic, virtually histrionic, in ten places at once and forever full of comment: I am here, are you listening? I am sharing the minutia of my everyday life. Please reply with a comment, whoever you are . The air is thick with opinion. Audible smog. But what if you have nothing to say?
    She looks up at the night sky, the bluish star-studded darkness. Fenella is working tomorrow and she could never ask Boo to accompany her. This will be a solo mission, but where to go? What do people actually do out there?
    There is a voice. It says: “They stroll around parks. They go to the cinema. They buy sandwiches and eat them while walking along.”
    The voice came from inside her. It was the unbroken one again, doll inside a doll, getting fidgety and excited under the skin.

12
DO I KNOW YOU?
    R alph was no longer laughing. He walked away from Sadie and Kristin, two statues on the landing. He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, took off his trainers. He pulled his walking shoes out of the wardrobe, the ones Sadie hated, and put them on. Through the bedroom window he could see his friends and his parents in the garden below. Some of Stanley’s friends were dancing, or maybe they were Arthur’s friends. Beverley was in the middle, swaying about with her eyes closed. She looked strange and desperate, twenty years too old for the circle around her. If she had been a man, and the teenagers girls instead of boys, someone would have asked her to stop. They would have used words like predatory and sad. But Beverley wasn’t a man and the teenagers weren’t girls and she was dancing in the middle, eyes closed.
    Ralph spotted Carol, walking through the garden by herself. He picked up his wallet and phone and went downstairs to find her, ignoring Sadie and