The Music Of Bones And The Meaning Of Ghosts Chapter 2

"How can a guitar talk?" I hear you ask. How can I hear you ask that very question, even though you only thought it? Like I said before, many things in this life, the life before and the one to come, and the other one happening simultaneously to this one, depend on how you look at them, or how you listen to them. That's right. Looking and listening and sensing things in particular ways can change your understanding of the world. (Think about it...)
Take me for instance. Everything I hear, up in this dusty, damp, pitch black loft has meaning. I've lost count how long I've been up here, nearly as long as Jack's been away, and the sounds of the day and the night have become my entire life. What I survive on. Small, insignificant sounds that perhaps you would miss, I have come to know as a kind of music. The passing of a car with a loose exhaust; the soft click of the bathroom door; the drip of a tap; the cries of children in the school playground across the way; the sound of a pizza leaflet rattling through the letterbox two floors below; the weeping of next door's baby; the voice on the back of a truck crying out: fridges, cookers, scrap metal, TVs, car batteries... as it passes each week. These sounds have become a collection of songs, full of stories of loss, betrayal, greed, forgiveness, loneliness, friendship and love... I know it sounds stupid but it is not.
If you sit and listen yourself, you will hear these things too, in a different way. Do it now. Open your ears and close your eyes, and you will begin to understand the world anew. The sound of fingers flicking the pages of a book. They are a story in themselves. Jack had the gift of sensing things beyond the surface, too, picking up on what lies underneath. Jack was the one who stood and pointed me out, in a junk shop window, on a cold February morning, as Tom walked on past. Jack could hear me singing out through the glass display window. I used to watch the passers by back then, and I knew that these two men, with their unshaven faces, bright eyes and long coats would hear me. Now I have no window to look out on, just the noises I hear and even though Jack's feet had not touched the ground this night, I had heard the whole house awake in its every fibre, I had heard the trembling strings of Delphine come to life, come to life in shock at the return of long dead Jack.