It was just a tinkling, she said, brushing the incident aside with a dismissive wave of the hand.
No it was not! It most definitely wasn’t a tinkling. One knows what tinkling sounds like. One has heard wind chimes. How lulling their sound by day, how transporting, how inducing of a meditational state, yet how mildly alarming at night when you wonder, “Is that just from a gentle breath of breeze outside or has someone climbed through the open window and brushed the drapes, which in turn brushed the wind chimes?”
You lie awake for hours thereafter, pretending to breathe normally but all the while bathed in a state of heightened alert waiting for a follow-up sound, the unintentional scrape of shoe on floorboard. You also wonder, irrationally: Should I leap out of bed and pull the window shut? And because rationality usually follows at a snail’s pace, you decide next: Better not, for locking a burglar in (for company) is not the same as locking him out. And so you wonder... until sleep arrives.
You most certainly know a thing or two about tinkling and what you heard, through the open window, the sound that emerged from the neighbouring flat, was decidedly not a tinkling. It wasn’t, too, the sound of bicycle bells. They tinkle. And you’ve heard their incessant pealing just this last school holiday when the two youngsters from yet another flat rode their bikes non-stop in the forecourt, lap after lap, enacting their two-wheel grand prix.
The policeman, asking the questions, seems satisfied. He caps his pen, shuts his notebook, exchanges a final few words with the neighbours, husband and wife (he has an arm fondly thrown around her shoulder — the husband that is, not the policeman). Then, his job done, the policeman is on his way.
The couple disappears indoors. Another case closed. Another mis-reported incident. Another useless call out. Domestic violence!
Rather nice couple, too, he’s probably thinking as he heads for the police car parked on the street its light still flashing, a back-up officer at the wheel.
That was such a lie, you cannot stop thinking. That sound was one hundred per cent not tinkling.
Anyway, two days pass. Then a gentle rapping is heard on the open window. Luckily this is during the day so your mind doesn’t leap to the conclusion it may be a burglar — although statistically one would imagine daytime burglaries outnumber those that occur at night simply because burglars are far more savvy these days and realise that more homes are likely to be unoccupied during the day whereas at night there’s every chance of running into more than just the furniture in the dark.
One might run into the barrel of a shotgun or a saucepan of scalding water or, as happened in one earlier instance, trip over a cord stretched tightly across the top of the staircase, fall over and hit the head against a large wooden cupboard, knocking oneself out in the process; regaining consciousness and finding oneself staring at an unsmiling uniform. Night time burglary is not a funny thing at all.
Anyhow, the window rapper two days later is Mrs Biacci, a 70-year-old of Italian ancestry.
“Come out,” she says, tersely, for this is how she speaks.
Outside, one is led across the courtyard to the sidewalk.
“Look!” commands Mrs Biacci.
And you see the evidence. Piled haphazardly, rectangularly. This was it that 48 hours earlier was claimed to have made ‘a tinkling’. Seven photo frames, with their photos.
Without their glass. Nakedly exposed to the public eye. A rose garden; a city by night resplendently lit; two blue songbirds up a lush green tree, and so on…. Some things get smashed in a relationship. Some things get shattered behind closed doors.
But to the perceptive ear of the public, to the querying eye of the law they are oftentimes described as ‘a mere tinkling’. And the euphemism winks and smiles.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
