The Knife of Never Letting Go

exactly.

It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.

I am Todd Hewitt.

“Todd Hewitt,” Manchee murmurs to himself beside me.

I take a deep breath and open my eyes.

That’s who I am. I’m Todd Hewitt.

We walk on up away from the swamp and the river, up the slope of the wild fields to the small ridge at the south of town where the school used to be for the brief and useless time it existed. Before I was born, boys were taught by their ma at home and then when there were only boys and men left, we just got sat down in front of vids and learning modules till Mayor Prentiss outlawed such things as “detrimental to the discipline of our minds”.

Mayor Prentiss, see, has a Point of View.

And so for almost half a stupid year, all the boys were gathered up by sad-faced Mr Royal and plonked out here in an out-building away from the main Noise of the town. Not that it helped. It’s nearly impossible to teach anything in a classroom full of boys’ Noise and completely impossible to give out any sort of test. You cheat even if you don’t mean to and everybody means to.

And then one day Mayor Prentiss decided to burn all the books, every single one of them, even the ones in men’s homes, cuz apparently books were detrimental as well and Mr Royal, a soft man who made himself a hard man by drinking whisky in the classroom, gave up and took a gun and put an end to himself and that was it for my classroom teaching.

Ben taught me the rest at home. Mechanics and food prep and clothes repair and farming basics and things like that. Also a lot of survival stuff like hunting and which fruits you can eat and how to follow the moons for direkshuns and how to use a knife and a gun and snakebite remedies and how to calm yer Noise as best you can.

He tried to teach me reading and writing, too, but Mayor Prentiss caught wind of it in my Noise one morning and locked Ben up for a week and that was the end of my book-learning and what with all that other stuff to learn and all the working on the farm that still has to be done every day and all the just plain surviving, I never ended up reading too good.

Don’t matter. Ain’t nobody in Prentisstown ever gonna write a book.

Manchee and me get past the school building and up on the little ridge and look north and there’s the town in question. Not that there’s all that much left of it no more. One shop, used to be two. One pub, used to be two. One clinic, one jail, one non-working petrol stayshun, one big house for the Mayor, one police stayshun. The Church. One short bit of road running thru the centre, paved back in the day, never upkept since, goes to gravel right quick. All the houses and such are out and about, outskirts like, farms, meant to be farms, some still are, some stand empty, some stand worse than empty.

And that’s all there is of Prentisstown. Populayshun 147 and falling, falling, falling. 146 men and one almost-man.

Ben says there used to be other settlements scattered around New World, that all the ships landed about the same time, ten years or so before I was born, but that when the war started with the spacks, when the spacks released the germs and all the other settlements were wiped out, that Prentisstown was nearly wiped out, too, that it only survived cuz of Mayor Prentiss’s army skills and that even tho Mayor Prentiss is a nightmare coming and going, we at least owe him that, that cuz of him we survive alone on a whole big empty womanless world that ain’t got nothing good to say for itself, in a town of 146 men that dies a little more with every day that passes.

Cuz some men can’t take it, can they? They off themselves like Mr Royal or some of them just plain disappear, like Mr Gault, our old neighbour who used to do the other sheep farm, or Mr Michael, our second best carpenter, or Mr Van Wijk, who vanished the same day his son became a man. It’s not so uncommon. If yer whole world is one Noisy town with no future, sometimes you just have to leave even if there ain’t nowhere else to go.

Cuz as me the almost-man looks up into that town, I can hear the 146 men who remain. I can hear every ruddy last one of them. Their Noise washes down the hill like a flood let loose right at me, like a fire, like a monster the size of the sky come to get you cuz there’s nowhere to run.

Here’s what it’s like. Here’s what every minute of every day of my stupid, stinking life in this stupid, stinking town is like. Never mind plugging yer ears, it don’t help at all:

And them’s just the words, the voices talking and moaning and singing and crying. There’s pictures, too, pictures that come to yer mind in a rush, no matter how much you don’t want ’em, pictures of memories and fantasies and secrets and plans and lies, lies, lies. Cuz you can lie in the Noise, even when everyone knows what yer thinking, you can bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight, you just don’t think it clearly or you convince yerself that the opposite of what yer hiding is true and then who’s going to be able to pick out from the flood what’s real water and what’s not going to get you wet?

Men lie, and they lie to theirselves worst of all.

In a for instance, I’ve never seen a woman nor a Spackle in the flesh, obviously. I’ve seen ’em both in vids, of course, before they were outlawed, and I see them all the time in the Noise of men cuz what else do men think about except sex and enemies? But the spacks are bigger and meaner looking in the Noise than in the vids, ain’t they? And Noise women have lighter hair and bigger chests and wear less clothes and are a lot freer with their affecshuns than in the vids, too. So the thing to remember, the thing that’s most important of all that I might say in this here telling of things is that Noise ain’t truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there’s a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don’t watch out.

“Home, Todd?” Manchee barks a bit louder down by my leg cuz that’s how you gotta talk in the Noise.

“Yeah, we’re going,” I say. We live on the other side, to the north-east, and we’re going to have to go thru the town to get there so here it comes, as fast as I can get thru it.

First up is Mr Phelps’s store. It’s dying, the store is, like the rest of the town and Mr Phelps spends all his time despairing. Even when yer buying stuff from him and he’s polite as can be, the despair of him seeps at you like pus from a cut. Ending, says his Noise, Ending, it’s all ending and Rags and rags and rags and My Julie, my dear, dear Julie who was his wife and who don’t wear no clothes at all in Mr Phelps’s Noise.

“Hiya, Todd,” he calls as Manchee and I hurry by.

“Hiya, Mr Phelps.”

“Beautiful day, ain’t she?”

“She sure is that, Mr Phelps.”

“Beaut!” barks Manchee and Mr Phelps laughs but his Noise just keeps saying Ending and Julie and rags and pictures of what he misses about his wife and what she used to do as if it’s sposed to be unique or something.

I don’t think anything particular in my Noise for Mr Phelps, just my usual stuff you can’t help. Tho I must admit I find myself thinking it all a little bit louder to cover up thoughts about the hole I found in the swamp, to block it out behind louder Noise.

Don’t know why I should do this, don’t know why I should hide it.

But I’m hiding it.

Manchee and me carry on walking pretty fast cuz next is the petrol stayshun and Mr Hammar. The petrol stayshun don’t work no more cuz the fission generator that made the petrol went kerflooey last year and just sits there beside the petrol stayshun like a hulking ugly hurt toe and no one’d live next to it except Mr Hammar and Mr Hammar’s much worse than Mr Phelps cuz he’ll aim his Noise right at you.

And it’s ugly Noise, angry Noise, pictures of yerself in ways that you don’t want pictures of yerself, violent pictures and bloody pictures and all you can do is make yer own Noise as loud as you can and try to sweep up Mr Phelps’s Noise in it, too, and send it right back to Mr Hammar. Apples and Ending and fist over hand and Ben and Julie and Beaut, Todd? and the generator is flickering and rags and shut up, just shut up and