The Quiet Drum

Zara got a drum for her birthday, and the drum knew one thing.

BANG.

That was it. That was all it knew. Zara hit it with the stick and it went BANG, and she hit it with her hand and it went BANG, and she hit it with a spoon by mistake and it went BANG even then, slightly surprised.

Everyone said it was a lovely drum. Everyone said it in a slightly tired voice, by the end of the day.

"Zara," said Mum at bedtime, "the drum needs to sleep now too."

"Drums don't sleep," said Zara.

"This one needs to learn," said Mum, and left the light on low and the door open a crack.

Zara sat up in bed with the drum on her knees. Owl sat beside her. Owl had had a long day of BANG and had the look of someone who would like a different kind of day tomorrow.

Zara put the stick down. She looked at the drum. It was round and tight and the skin on top was pale, like the top of a biscuit, with a yellow star painted on the side.

"You don't have to be loud," she told it. "You can be the other thing."

The drum did not know what the other thing was. Nobody had shown it.

So Zara showed it.

She put one finger on the skin. Not a hit. Just a touch. And then she lifted the finger a tiny way and let it fall.

Tap.

It was so small a sound that Owl had to lean in. But it was a drum sound. It was round and warm and it had a little echo inside it, like a sound inside a cup.

"There," whispered Zara. "That's you too."

Tap.

Tap. Tap.

She found she could make it go slower. Tap... tap... tap, with a long quiet between, like someone walking down a corridor far away. She found she could make it softer still, just the pad of her finger brushing, so that the sound was hardly a sound at all, more a feeling in the drum than a noise in the room.

Tap.

The drum, which had spent all day being hit, seemed to settle under her hand. The skin was warm now. The star on the side caught the low light.

Owl's head began to droop.

Tap...

Zara's own head began to droop too. She noticed it and did not mind. Her finger kept going, slower, softer, each tap a little further from the last, like steps getting quieter as somebody walks away.

Tap.

Tap.

Mum looked in through the crack in the door. The drum was on the pillow. Zara was curled round it with one hand resting flat on the skin, not tapping now, just resting, the way you rest a hand on a cat. Owl was asleep against the drum's side.

Mum did not take the drum away. She turned the low light off.

And in the dark the drum, which had learned the other thing it could do, lay very still and quiet, and kept the last tap inside it, in the little echo place, until morning, when, no doubt, it would remember the first thing all over again.