Language fell apart. There was shock and then for a long time it was jet lag, tinnitus, feedback.
Now she is pacing it out on the verge. Without language, she makes metaphors with sound. In place of silence, she substitutes one object for another. For snow: lump charcoal, or cornstarch in leather.
Language failing her, she divested from it. Foley replaced prose. Sounding something outside of herself, the matter is phonetic.
A breaking eggshell is analogue parts: ice cream cone, polystyrene and iron filings. She makes a kind of science of this. Not forensic, but probing. She moves forward and listens.
Beside the canal, a foil balloon is clapping the fence. Gulls are raucous. A dog asserts itself.
Divorced of speech, she turns to noise instead. She reaches the bypass, listens for a pulse. Foley puts a delay in place, between action and making the sound of it. The process begins with the translation of footsteps. Shoes are instrument. There is pace, weight, print.
She becomes a pilgrim of these things. Sound brings space to life. Under everything is the drone of traffic dissonance. Then, the voice of a child carries from path to antenna, the elevation of an orchestra pit.
She finds percussion: lead against lead. Wood against wood. She hangs around the scaffold yard. Against the body, percussion determines size, consistency and borders of organs. It reveals fluid. She learns it has more to do with resonance. The creak of a hinge is brightened by the hollow of a steel tube.
Humming settles her vagus nerve. A plane crosses overhead.
All sound is one thing hitting another. Rain against slate tile. Rain against pavement. Rain against hood. All have a different texture. When the sky detonates, chips blister in a deep fat fryer.
Beyond the hard shoulder, there is bleating of fleece lambs. Four horses huddle at the foot of an electricity pylon, winter jackets buckled round their flanks. Fuzz in the air, a blue insect is alive and vibrating above. A railway track is scored at the bottom of the field.
Rapeseed is a kind of sherbet. Or radio static. She records the fizzing and indelible whine from an amp with a faulty jack. Some land is cultivated and some land is barren. Pesticides run off to the beck. The brow of a hill marks an ancient battlefield. She wishes she had the clairvoyance of a dog: to perceive everything that passed.
She crosses a golf course, sand basins and trim grass. She ploughs along highways. They are harvesting sunrays now. She takes one long breath, inhales: pollen, pollutants. The brewery puts out a fruity sulphur of yeast, malt, tannin, husks and wort.
There is a man on a rooftop with a blowtorch, welding a seal between rolled sheets of asphalt. Heat stirs the air, working it into a disturbance as he directs the hose. She releases pressure from a canister, and lights a gas hob, exorcises her system with cold compressions and breath from her diaphragm. She takes supplements the shape of UFOs.
The barbed sound of an alarm bounces from tarmac to billboard. Billboard to car wash. Car wash to landfill. A small flock of long-tailed tits are thrashing in a winter hedge. She attempts to distinguish distress call from flirtation, scanning the boughs for irregularities as she walks. Beneath tarpaulin, there is root spaghetti embossed in the soil.
One bag contains gravel. Another, sand. Another, silt. The pavement is flat. She seasons it like a tap dancer with grit. Downhill the clay is sticky. The soil is saturated and compact with weeds at the cuff. She uses yoghurt for mud and spools of dry magnetic tape in lieu of leaves underfoot. She is stranded on a triangle. An island slipstream. The tread of a lorry goes shuddering past.
Walking, she layers: footsteps then props then a cloth track. Keys jump in her rucksack. There are cues in the environment: the quake of an HGV on an uphill start. A subway intercom. The echo of an underpass. Once she stoked sonic kindling with a crisp packet. She passes a dog on a polished concourse. One thing replacing another, metaphor is fetish. Now noises are like small jokes or dreams: the suppressed thought breaches a filter.
It comes in shallow disguise. Gloves mimic wings. Or, tipped with paperclips, become paws.
Her thoughts are exorbitant: that the interstitium might be the largest organ in the body. That a peach-coloured zinnia was grown in orbit. That copper is coiled inside a body to keep it hostile. That someone hung IV drips in the greenhouse to syphon water. That the advert said teeth two shades whiter. That the graveside pansies resembled chemical warfare masks. That blood is full of microplastics. That climate activists threw paint at a painting. That the bins are on Twitter. That the treadmill was invented. The runway. Trade effluent. Detergents. Service stations. Concrete slurry. Yellow vultures. Antibiotics.
Ascending a shale heap, she tallies the crunch with cycle chain on concrete, cat litter and salt.
The pitch of a vehicle tightens as it approaches, wanes as it retreats. It drives into its wave. The road below holds a defensive posture, twists to a redundant shopping centre.
At the summit of a conveyor belt deposit, a buzzard surveys above. Looking out, she can see the grammar of the landscape. One inverse question mark. The horizon curbs her alertness, relaxes some innate animal part.
An instruction manual gives the average weight for different areas of the body. She measures the burden of an arm. The load of a head. Pistachio shells can be crushed as bones.
She feels tired.
She feels tired.
In the reservoir, she stirs up petrol water while wind turbines pump at the shore. Up close, it is a ceiling fan and a roundabout spun in the playground. A cane whips through the air.
A dinkus of water skeeters hover on asbestos black. Her limbs cleave a cold layer. She retracts.
Pink neoprene toes break the surface, brown made bronze by the light.
There are three settings for her earbuds. Sometimes noise wants to be dampened. Cubes of glycerine are used instead of ice cubes in a glass.