My car kept making a thucka-thucka noise, but no one else could hear it

In the middle of the night, when dark thoughts come, I think about dictators and bushfire and pathogens, and I also think about a statistic I recently saw that said one in five Aussies is partial to having a go at fixing their own vehicles.

Sure, I’ve superglued school shoes back together, jimmied the bathroom door open using a credit card, and fashioned a spider catcher using only adrenalin and a disposable face mask, but when it comes to certain things – things that are heavy and move quickly on roads – I say, leave it to the professionals.

Something wasn’t right, but I had absolutely no idea what it was. Credit: Jim Pavlidis

“I have always depended on the knowledge of mechanics,” Blanche DuBois might say in the stage-production of my recent experience trying to identify the source of a noise that my car began making.

I am a car buffoon, a car ignoramus. My car knowledge was gleaned at age five from an illustration in a Richard Scarry book about things that drive and fly. An unwanted noise from my car equates to full vehicular collapse, by my reckoning.

“What kind of noise?” Glen, the mechanic, asked me, when I took it in.

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. “A noise like a hollow aluminium chain being dragged across a swamp,” I said, and when Glen did not reply I tried: “Sort of thukkathukkathukkathukka.”

He wrote something down. “But soft. Like something is loose or flapping,” I added, ominously.

“And where is it coming from?” he inquired.

Not knowing the anatomy of a car, I gestured to my own body, to my upper abdomen.

I had tried to record the noise on my phone the day before. I played it to him. He held it closer to his ear for a second listen.

“The tinkle tinkle sound?” he asked.

“No. That’s my bracelet hitting the microphone,” I explained.

“Well, best thing would be for us to take her for a whiz together so I can hear it,” he said.

Off we set, Glen at the helm, in silence.

Glen floored it round the carpark, hitting the gas and then slamming on the brakes. The noise did not happen.

“Can you drive a little slower?” I asked. “I think it is louder when I am driving slowly.”

He turned out onto the road, and my request was granted. It was peak hour. We inched forward. No noise.

I put the radio on, feeling it might trick the noise out of hiding. “Trump has argued that ...” a woman was saying.

Glen piped up: “Trump’s going to save the economy...” he started.

“Nope!” I turned it off. “No radio! Nope!”

The lack of The Noise was palpable.

“Could have been a branch,” he said.

“Could have been,” I said. “But it was more like ...” I thought I would try a more forceful approximation of the noise. I took a deep breath: “THRRRRTTTTTTHHHHRTTTTTTHH.”

A tiny bit of my spittle landed on his left hand. The lights had changed three times now, and we still had not moved.

“Sorry,” I said, about the spittle.

“Happens,” Glen said, about the absent noise. “Could have been anything. Probably a branch.”

We inched our way back to the garage. “Sorry”, I repeated, many times.

Glen was gracious. “Happens.”

Of course, later that day, collecting the kids from school, the noise returned. THRRRRTTTTTTHHHHRTTTTTTHHHHHRRRRRTTTTTTHHH.

“Can you hear that?” I asked my children.

I rang Glen. “The noise is back,” I said. “Really. I’m not imagining it.”

Glen told me to bring the car in for a service. “Then we can put it up on the lift and have a good look underneath.”

I took the car in the following Wednesday, and by lunchtime, he’d rung back. “Well, you were right,” he said. “There were a couple of bolts missing from the undercarriage. It was flapping about.”

I Ubered in to retrieve the car.

“Thanks, and sorry,” I said, though there was nothing to apologise for. I paid for the service.

The undercarriage. Bolts. There was learned knowledge held by the Glens of the world that I would always be reliant on, and that was how it ought to be. Cars, teeth, brain surgery – those kinds of matters.

Traffic was light when I drove out, being the middle of the day, and the sun was shining bright. The radio was playing a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song I love, and I turned it up loud. The accomplishment of having resolved the noise and the fact of this beautiful day and song coalesced into one of those moments of deep, joyous rightness, and I wound the window down, resting my arm on the car bit thingy where there’s space for an arm, and sang along.

Nicola Redhouse is a freelance writer and the author of Unlike the Heart: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.

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