Goldsmiths - University of London

"Keep your index finger bent. Bent and on the edge of the knife. Don't relax it. Like this," she says bringing her hand from underneath the dining room table and contorting it before him. She looks straight into his eyes and nods.

Harris nods back and will sometimes wake up to notice her hand's shadow on the red wall behind her. It's a rabbit, a small one at that, but a rabbit with long pointed ears. He wishes Joan would give the acrylic nails a rest every now and again; their reflection ruins the softness of the shadow.

"I printed those flyers for the sale in a couple of weeks; left them next to the bed for you to have a look at. I handed a few out to people at work as well," she says with her eyes still fixed on Harris' knife. In her head she marks him out of ten. Seven point five.

"Can I leave that up to you then?" Harris says.

"You could tell a couple of people about it at the gathering tomorrow? There's only so much I can do."

"I can't see what the rush is, I'm not too sure if I want to keep any of it yet. I know Margaret doesn't want any of his things, she took some of mum's, but that's it. I'd like to go up on my own first and have a sort through."

"I told you I went up there last week. I've put all his clothes in bags; they're in our wardrobe with all the photographs. The rest is still there. I can't really see what we'll do with the rest." And Joan cuts into her gammon steak, tapping her foot to her own music which wills her to get up and dance.

There is Joan and there is Harris and there is this whole collection of stuff they've been looking after since Harris' father had moved into, and eschewed breathing in, Ridgewood Gardens Retirement Home. Harris and Joan don't use their front room; they'd decorated last Spring, and for days after Joan would stand at the door of the room looking at the back wall. Harris had painted it for her as a surprise while she was shopping one morning. Joan had wanted it yellow, Lemon Spring yellow. Harris used the eggshell blue from the bathroom for the final wall. As a contrast. Joan said it was the shell in the omelette, yet still wanted to greet the guests in there for the gathering after the funeral. If Harris made a conscious effort to stand in front of the wall for the entire night, it would be alright. It would help it blend in, Joan said. They'd probably use the room at Christmas as well if Harris' sister, Maggie, ever came to visit like she said she would, but as with every excuse she made, the snow would be too bad. For now at least, friends, some family, and no children would fit into the front room.

Harris blames the carers at Ridgewood Gardens for the way in which they told Mr. Potts how his dog had died. It just wasn't appropriate, a mere wisp away from cruelty, and the sudden nature of the dog's death had more than likely sparked Mr. Potts' own need for an end. In the years after his wife's death, Potts excavated every scrap of devotion he felt he had left, and invested it in his equally elderly dog. The two spent their days walking and eating lightly grilled chicken for dinner. When Potts could no longer walk as he used to, Joan suggested they move him down from his house on The Sugar Loaf to somewhere where he could enjoy an easier life. Harris wasn't the type of man to nurse his father, and Joan wasn't the type of woman to help Harris do it. She and Harris would take the dog and visit him with it every Sunday. They relied on this routine for some time, until the dog choked next to its food bowl. Joan had over cooked the chicken; old age creases us, makes us vulnerable and we must watch out for it, she said. She also said she never thought of applying this thought to the dog.

Harris locates this moment as the moment his father died. He pictured Potts lying face down next to his food bowl, chicken un-masticated. The truth was, Potts died when he realised he could no longer work, his eyes, which he depended on more than most, felt like bleary sacs which were forever leaking, and his ears could no longer register the sounds by which he had made his name. He also could not remember what it was that had kept him going for the last 74 years. So five years after they buried Potts' wife and a week after they buried the dog, they buried Potts.

Joan prepared a salmon for the gathering afterwards, and Harris sits down on the sofa in the front room next to his sister, and a man who worked with Joan at the Leisure Centre. He needn't have told them this, Harris can smell the halo of swimming pool chlorine which seems to cling to the thick, dark hairs on the man's arm. They sit there, knees touching knees, dry elbows pushing into their middle-age spreads; they are a sad chain of daisies which have gone unnoticed and wilted. Not one of them thinks to move to the spare chair in the corner of the room.

"I understand you still have their house, you thinking of finding a buyer? I'd start looking now if I were you", says the Leisure Centre man, "you'll find it hard, what with that place being so far out."

"So you know where it is then?" Harris says, staring at the eggshell blue wall.

"Joan showed us a picture in work."

"Oh." Harris says. "Well, once we've worked out what to do with it, we'll sell; Dad has a load of stuff; they told him he could take whatever he wanted from the studio when they fired him. He took it all by the looks of it. Joan's organised a sale actually, week after next, come if you want."

Potts had been a radio man all his life; from Monday to Friday he created the sound effects for plays which were then broadcast on the Saturday morning. Once his children we're old enough to know what a job was, he'd sit them down at the time of the broadcast and tell them when the effects he made were coming in and how he made them.

"You hear that bird in the background flapping its wings?" he'd say, worried that they'd miss it, "well, that's me flapping a pair of rubber gloves really quickly, and that sound as they're walking through the woods, hear the leaves? That's me balling up audio tape." Harris and his sister would nod, and watch him move his ear closer to the radio to prepare himself for his next audio entrance. They always knew when one was coming because he'd turn the volume up.

"You know that man who just fell off a ladder? Well the sound of his leg breaking was actually me breaking a stick of celery in half. I bought it that morning from the shop. We had to soften the sound of it, mind you. Didn't want it being too obvious."

He told those who were interested that he liked to think of himself as a "Footstepper". "I make the sounds you think are already there", he'd say reaching into his cardigan pocket and pulling out a comb. "Imagine a script which takes its characters to the country late in the evening, what do you hear?"

Sometimes people would answer "cows", or "sheep" or "trees rustling in the wind". Potts would close his eyes at this point. There was only one answer.

"You hear the crickets. Yet when we're out of the country and in the studio, the crickets," he'd reveal, "are never there," and he would run his finger nail over the teeth of the comb and wait for the reaction.

For work, Potts wore grey slacks and black brogues, with masking tape stuck onto the soles, to quieten his footsteps in the studio when they were recording. When he returned home each evening, with masking tape still smothering his shoes, the front door of their house seemed to open and close on its own. Potts was eternally creeping up on you. There was no sound but the feeling of his hand greeting your shoulder, his gold watch digging into your neck, branding you with a hello. Harris and his mother and sister learnt not to be surprised by their husband and father. They learnt that he revealed all, and was no mystery to them.

When Harris and Maggie were still at school he was invited in to give an assembly about Radio broadcasting. Harris remembered walking into the school hall and seeing his father standing on the raised stage, shaking a large piece of copper sheeting. Catching his son's eye, he asked him what effect he thought it was used for. Harris, knowing a thousand times over it was thunder, told his father he did not know and waited for that look of astonishment which rarely invaded their life.

Each day Potts would return home and tell them how he helped one of the actors smoke a cigarette and stub it out, without having lit up in the first place. He told them that the sound of an army running towards another was actually the sound of curtain rings being fiercely shaken on an old telephone cable. He told them that people rarely walk anywhere in a radio play; they stand on the same plank of wood, footstep upon same footstep, never getting anywhere. It was Potts who breathed the life into things. He told them all the secrets. They would not jump or flinch or believe that he was capable of fooling them; they knew all his tricks.

The Leisure Centre man seems to seriously consider Harris' question.

"Yes, I think Joan's already given me the directions, they're on the flyer aren't they?"

"I think so," Harris says.

"Good job it's at the foot of a mountain eh? Snow's coming tomorrow. You'd never get the bugger's things out". The man lets out a laugh which rocks him forward. He has that type of skin which looks like wafer thin ham, or perhaps the colour of a prosthetic limb.

Joan appears at the door holding a tray of sandwiches, she looks at the man and smiles, she looks at Harris. Harris stands up, releasing himself from his sister's arm, she stays seated wiping her eye; the tears would only fall from one after a blocked tear duct as a child. Harris brushes the man's crisp crumbs off his leg and moves towards the back wall. He stands with his back against the wall and feels a loose nail from the skirting board on his trouser leg. He moves to the right slightly. The nail hooks itself to the cotton.

Harris arrives at his father's house just after Joan; they'd used two cars to bring back Potts' belongings which didn't sell. Two other cars are parked next to her. Joan is already inside, her footsteps are close together where she's balanced herself in an attempt not to fall down in the snow. They led to the shed at the side of the house; Potts' old studio, where he stored the props he'd collected over the years, including the ones he'd chosen from the station's cupboard after they fired him. Potts' position was filled by a box which could make the sound effects on command. Potts consoled himself with the fact that a ginger haired boy called Kevin would have to press the buttons on the box to make the noises. He had been a one man show.

Harris hears the air vent of the shed click back and forth with the wind. Click. The windows inside the wooden shed are clouded and steamed from the heater which Joan has probably switched on. She did not stand the cold. She'd scraped away the snow, which had tried to seep its way in through the shed door, and left a mound of muddied grit next to the shovel. Harris sees at that moment the time when Potts had accidently made Maggie cry whilst he was practicing a new sound with the shovel. He sees him standing about two thin plates of glass resting on a plank. He sees Maggie cover her ears with her hands and watches the shovel come down and shatter the glass. Potts had put a fine layer of sand in between the two plates to soften the noise. He'd wanted to show them how the noise of cracking ice could be made. Potts flushed with the fear of upsetting his daughter, put the shovel down and picked Maggie up.

Joan is sitting on a green leather chair. She looks comfortable. Her friend Heather is flicking through a book next to her and the man from the gathering has his back to Harris. He fires a toy gun which Potts had sometimes used for the sound of crackers at Christmas.

"Look", Joan says, pointing to a blue tub. There are two notes and some coins inside.

"What did you sell? Have I been that long?" Harris says.

"Long enough. You always are. What did we sell Heather?" Joan pulls out a blanket from her bag and covers her legs with it. The fire of the toy gun still goes.

"Those old cowboy boots. Don't know why, looked like they were about to fall apart."

"He used to walk in them, that's why. For footsteps in an alley. He probably walked on that plank of wood you're using as a desk."

"Well they're gone now; you wouldn't have wanted them would you?" Joan says, and stands up, walking towards the back of the shed where she's moved most of the props to.

"What else went?"

"That rusted old oil drum. This woman wanted to fill it with hay and put it in her horse's stable." The toy gun goes again, tallying Joan's sales.

"And what else? Where's his television gone?"

"We sold that one as well," Heather adds.

"For how much?"

"Twenty-five."

"That was a good one."

"Harris, it was about twenty years old."

"But that's where he practised everything. He'd watch films on it with the sound switched off, and he'd make them himself. It was practice for the studio."

"You didn't tell me you wanted it, I asked you last week what you wanted to keep."

"Twenty-five pounds."

"Yes," and she shakes the tub of money. "Harris, if you want to stay and do it yourself, do it. I have to be at work in an hour, Brian said he'd give me a lift." Brian puts the gun down and walks over to Joan. He has his red tracksuit on, ready for work. "I'll leave my car here and we can come and get the rest of it tomorrow." She stands up in her red tracksuit.

It is hot in there now; the vent has never been that effective. Heather moves towards the door and pulls the latch, ready to leave.

"What's in the pillow by the door," she asks.

"Corn flour," Harris said.

Heather stares at it, says her goodbyes and pulls her hood up to shield the snow. Joan picks up the tub of money, and puts her leather boots back on. She is the type of woman to take her slippers with her, wherever she goes.

"I'll see you soon then, Harris," Brian says.

"Yes, soon."

The two leave together and Harris follows them to the door. Through the window he watches Brian's hand on Joan's arm, balancing her as she climbs into his car. The car slides out down the drive and Harris imagines the shovel crashing down onto the glass as the wind pushes them forward. Crack. There is so much snow. White and heavy, sealing him inside, with the wood and the plastic and the rubber and the metal. With the plastic tray filled with soil he'd rub his thumb in to sound that a cigarette had been put out. With his old recorder where he stored the noises he'd catch throughout the day; a dog barking through a letter box, branches whipping each other, a woman belching when she thought no one was listening. He stares at the objects around him, those things with a responsibility to bring the long dead to life. Harris takes off his shoes and steps onto the pillow case. Flour from the case rises up from the pressure of him, he begins to tread. He looks out of the window, flour crunching around his feet; he is treading in the snow. It is as though he is dreaming of making a sound.