I have heard it during dinner parties, as well as at quiet Friday night meals, exhaling from the week. I have heard it when I am alone, working the soil in the garden or reading on the sofa. Increasingly, I hear it in the middle of the night, rising up against the hum of my husband’s sleeping breath. The cry of a baby, loud enough to wake me, which doesn’t exist.
The baby exists. A toddler, recently turned two, he is rarely the source of this noise. Still, I go through a now-familiar routine of pausing to tilt my head as if I am a creature with ears to cock, listening, and then switching on the baby monitor to inspect my silent, sleeping son on its screen. Sometimes the cry is so insistent that I turn the monitor’s sound up to check. I am caught between these two sensations: my ears hearing something my eyes suggest is false. The strange dissonance between the image in my hands and the noise in my brain.
My mother called it “babies in the head”. More generally, it is known as phantom crying. My husband and I call it Jeff, as in “is that the baby, or is it Jeff?”. Mostly, Jeff is a mild annoyance, especially when he interrupts an otherwise quiet night. Sometimes he hints at other things — anxiety, tinnitus, insomnia. For the past two years he has been present enough to become a kind of obsession for me, not least because, in terms of formal research and medical study, phantom crying is all but undocumented. I have spent many months listening to a baby that doesn’t exist, and many hours trying to find out why, to have this strange, slippery experience spelt out for me.