Our gas heater has an important role in winter in keeping us from freezing to death as the temperature plunges toward zero. But it has an undocumented function that’s not in the user manual: the death rattle.
Turn it off and it immediately stops blowing warm air – as you would expect. But a few minutes later, to express its feelings of rejection, it starts up again, just for a short time but for long enough to annoy.
“I thought I turned it off, but now it’s on again” I remarked to myself and any family member who would bother to listen.
“Maybe you just turned it down” said H. “I’ll check it”.
“Maybe the little people turned it back on” said J who has lately been reading Irish folklore.
“Little people?” I said, mystified.
“You know – leprechauns. They’re very mischievous”.
“No, we had the pest controllers out last week and they poisoned them all” I said cruelly.
“Maybe there was one who survived for a little while and felt duty bound to carry out a final minor mischief before he died” said our Irish enthusiast. “So he turned the heater back on after you had turned it off”.
“A sort of death rattle” said H, who is a bit morbid and enjoys zombie movies.
“Death rattle” started me thinking about other objects which seem to die but don’t. Not zombies, but truly inanimate objects which seem to come back to life or at least continue to function when they shouldn’t, according to normal everyday experience.
We used to have a small outboard motor powered boat which was quite good at death rattles. It was hard to start and hard to stop. Push the off button and somehow, perhaps because of petrol vapour in the carburettor or some such nonsense, the engine continued to splutter and then started up for a moment, coughed and finally died, a true death rattle.
The next day at the sports club, I was with a group of friends and I tried to explain death rattles as we sat around the table after a match.
“I had some shares in a company that were like that” said C, enigmatically.
“How can an investment have a death rattle?” said E, the oldest member, who had been coughing more and more during the discussion and sounding more and more breathless.
“You know” continued C. “The shares dropped in value like a stone but then, just before the end, they went up 20% before finally crashing down to nothing and being delisted”.
“Technically”, said de’F, a long retired stockbroker whose advice was totally up to date for 1998, “Technically, that’s called a dead cat bounce”.
“Dead cat?” said E, totally befuddled, as he checked his pulse.
“Sure” said de’F. “Even a dead cat, if it’s dropped from a great height, will bounce when it hits the ground, giving it some sign of life at the last moment before being officially declared dead”.
“Like bushfires” said G, who lives on the urban fringe and is a member of his local volunteer fire brigade.
“Death rattle, dead cats, bushfires – what on earth are you talking about?” demanded E.
“Last summer” said G, “the bushfire totally burnt out the forest in front of our house, leaving only smoking tree stumps. “But then” he said, sneezing dramatically, “a northerly wind sprang up, fanning the embers and the fire took off again, burning out the orchard at the back before we finally doused it. We thought it was dead but it came back to life – a death rattle”.
“I get it” said E sparking up.
“It’s like my toothpaste tube. Just when you think it’s all finished and empty as an old tin can, if you squeeze it hard enough, you sometimes get a last little bit of toothpaste along with a disgusting splurting sound. Death rattle don’t you think?” he said, beginning to wheeze audibly and reaching for his asthma puffer.
We went on discussing this theme for some time. There was the death rattle of the local fruit shop, whose proprietor wandered around the premises, unpaid bills in hand, trying to sell brown bananas from the front door. Sad really. It was a sort of enacted death rattle. Someone said their laptop computer had started making whirring and clicking sounds in its hard drive. We all agreed this was its last hurrah, it’s swan song and inevitably it’s death rattle.
“Time for another game?” said someone, and we all filed out onto the court to play.
E excused himself, mumbling that he had to see a doctor “about this …er …rattle in my chest”.
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© Geoff Milton 2022
