Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Thornhill Surgery ·
The Listening Hole That Is Used
A club steward finds a listening hole worn smooth by years of use in a party wall that every drawing in his keeping says is solid the whole way through.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Keith Sallow, club steward"
I have kept the Thornhill club for nineteen years, and the wall at the back of our card room is shared with the surgery of the same address.
The hole came to light after the decorating, when I took down the honours board to rehang it — darts, dominoes, the aggregate of 1978, all of it half a century of brass on one frame. Behind the frame, at ear height, there is a neat drilled disc about the size of a milk-bottle top, gone brown with age, clean-edged, and set exactly where a man's ear would be if the man stood where the board hangs. That is the least of it. The rim is the matter. The rim is worn the way a banister is worn — a shine you cannot put on with a rag, the shine of years of one particular touch, always the same touch, gently, at the same place, the way an ear is laid on a wall to keep from being heard laying it.
I know wear. I have kept fittings nineteen years and wear tells you the job and the years of the job. That rim says used, often, by somebody careful not to miss what was said.
The difficulty is that behind it there is no room. Our deposit copy of the plans, and the copy the surgery gave us when the lease was drawn, both mark that wall solid the whole width: brick, and no void, and I have no argument with either. The hole takes the depth of a finger's first joint and then it stops, and what stops it, no drawing will say, because the drawings all say wall. I drilled a pilot an inch deep at a discreet height away from the hole — brick, red dust the whole inch.
I put my ear to it on a quiet Monday before the cleaners come. I heard the club, low, through my own head from behind — which is the wrong way round to hear a club, a club being the room you are sitting in — and under it, once, a drawer closing, softly, at the far side of brick, and I did not stay long after that, but I have been back twice since, and each time the club is what I hear, from behind me, as if my ear had been put in from the wrong side of the wall I pay rates on.
Mrs Hale for the surgery has been over with a lamp and her own eyeglass. She says damp bloom, buffed glossy by a standing draught, and she is a careful woman, and her letter is in the file, and her lamp is a good lamp. The surveyor we use for the licence stood at the wall and said a solid wall cannot be worn from the far side, and then said it again, which is his way of filing a thing. The committee voted to paint the disc over, and it was painted, matte, two good coats, and I log the maintenance honestly.
Disputed is the right word and I will keep to it. Nobody has proven a room, and nobody has proven a wearing hand, and two careful people have looked at the same shine and named two causes for it. But a hole takes two rooms to be a hole, and the papers give us one, and the wear is on our face of the wall and — Mrs Hale's lamp being what it was — on the far face too, and a far face has to stand somewhere to be touched. All those years of careful listening, whoever they belonged to: which side of a solid wall were they on?