You don’t want to meet at your house. In hushed tones over the telephone you tell me to meet you at Temple Meads train station; that I will find you in the newsagent, leafing through Dog Lover Magazine. You give me a password. I will say, ‘I like dogs, but my wife can’t stand the smell’ and then you will reply, ‘She wouldn’t like mine. It really hums.’
It doesn’t quite go down like that; during some dreamlike reflection on the scrolling greenbelt between Bath and Bristol I forget the password. Luckily I still remember the meeting place.
Temple Meads Station is Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s gateway to the West Country. There are posters on the walls that carry his name. Apparently he built it in a complex expanding curve, I am told that no two girders in the lofted Iron ceiling are exactly the same size. Looking up I don’t quite believe it, but I am impressed.
This building is a Cathedral to the steam engine. A statement of futuristic intent from a founding father of the industrial revolution; a dignified grandfather to Modernity; a distant ape-like ancestor of our complex and imploding world.
Finding you in the magazine stand I put my hand on your shoulder and you jump. I say, ‘Hi, you must be the hum guy’ and you look at me suspiciously and herd me out of the newsagent into the ticket hall. With your hand on the small of my back we move swiftly out the automatic doors and into the nearest taxi. You’re about sixty-five years old and look pretty much as I pictured you from your voice on the phone. A gruff, rough skinned Bristolian Silverback. Although you are the older one, you are clearly nervous. I am having a hard time not being amused by this. I know that I am not from the CIA, I know, well at least I am pretty sure, that no one from the CIA is in the least bit interested in what you have to show me.
‘So,’ I say ‘Do you want to explain what we’re going to see or what?’
‘Not here’ you say and flash you’re eyes towards the driver. I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and give him a wink for good measure. You don’t like this. First I screw up the password and now I’m signalling to the driver, this whole thing was a bad idea. It was a risk… but for a bona fide journalist, even a small time hack like myself, to be the least bit interested in your work… It’s worth it.
You believe you are showing me something important, perhaps it’s the most important thing in the world, This is Watergate territory… you believe that I might be the spark that starts the fire that sets the whole world burning. You believe, you hope.
I sit opposite you in the taxi looking at your face, trying to figure you out. Perhaps you drank too much and it went to your head, perhaps you are just looking for meaning. Condescending snob that I am, I paint a picture of your life. I see you lifting and carying, banging in rivets, pressing buttons that cause large pieces of machinery to press down onto hot steel. Later I see you walking between jets of steam on the factory floor. You have risen through the ranks and are overseeing a shrinking human workforce and a growing army of droids. I see you sitting at home, whiskey in hand; At first you are comforted by the fact that you are needed, that you are an important cog in beautiful machine, and then slowly as the years pass, you start to question exactly what it is this machine is doing. The inhuman pulse of metal and heat that has chewed up your friends, your family, you.
In between decades of soap opera and cigarettes, you watch a number of nature documentaries about lonely animals in shrinking forests and you identify with them. Every year you make more and more cars and you see charts and graffs that rise like skyscrapers from a virgin tropical coastline. And then when you least expect it to, the graff drops and the whole thing, in all it’s immovable metallic glory, fucks off to china and leaves you standing by the roadside wondering what the hell just happened.
I am silently singing an unwritten Bruce Springsteen classic. My version of your life.
You look at me and you see it all, a college-prick with a notepad, some well worn clichés and an over-active imagination, no experience in the real world.
You tell the cabbie to stop, give him a Tenner and then encourage me to walk with you. We are near the Broadwalk Shopping Centre. We take a right off The Wells Road and head into a no-frills council estate. Some of the houses are boarded up, some are pebble dashed or comprised of raw breezeblocks. There is a pub flying England flags. even in a world cup year, I read unwritten words in the red and white ‘violent patriotism... Us and Them’. Even as a white male, English as far back as I can count, they make me uncomfortable. I get the unnerving feeling that pink skinned liberals like myself are just as foreign as anyone else. My swagger is all gone.
I had thought that it would be fun to humour you, that there would be some hilarious material to be had for my blog.
What was it you told me on the phone?
Something about a noise you could hear in your head, something about the government. The Bristol Hum: You said you knew what it was and you could prove it. You told me to Google it and I did.
I learned all about it, and I laughed while did. I mentioned you to my wife as ‘the craziest caller I’d had that day’. I felt guilty even as I did it. I felt like I was betraying you. Betraying your naive trust.
You get a key out of your pocket and open the front door to your flat. You live on the ground floor of a council house. The front door just gets us into the stair well. There is a rusty bike with no wheels. I watch you search around for seccond key. While you’re searching you drop your informant persona, candidly you tell me about your upstairs neighbour. He is a tosser, He is always playing his music and stomping around like an elephant. You say that when it’s not music it’s porn, at full volume in the middle of the day. You tell me that if you can catch him you’ll ring his scrawny neck. We step inside.
The room is dark and brown, an old two-man sofa with wooden arms sits against one wall and a TV close to the other. There is one of those gas fires with a grid of ceramic bobbles. The kind they always replace on 60 minute makeover. Where the coffee table would normally be is a machine that appears to be feeding a roll of paper from one box to another while a needle skips up and down across it. ‘Got one in every room.’ You tell me. ‘It measures, tremors and that.’
I am blanc.
You look at me like I’m stupid. Like maybe I wasn’t totally listening when you last explained all this to me on the phone. You start with a list of places. Aukland, New Zealand; Kokamo, Indiana; Toas, New Mexico and here... Bristol.
You tell me how you can hear The Hum, how some days it’s louder than others. You tell me that the night before the Boxing Day Tsunami it was so loud that you couldn’t sleep, That you heard it before Haiti, before Chile, before that Volcano took down every plane in Europe.
I’ve read all this online. You’re talking about Seismic Warfare: The manipulation of tectonic plates for military effect.
You can see the look on my face.
You take me to a room full of readouts from your own, home made seismographs, you have written dates and times on them in ballpoint pen. You point to patterns that you say link up with natural disasters. I cannot read the printouts well enough to know if you are telling the truth or not. I am not sure that you can either.
I look around the room, bit’s of blue graph paper are pinned to every wall, with the blood red ink of the needle, meandering across them like a river.
We are quiet for a moment. You imagine that I am taking in the irrefutable evidence of the seismographs. Then the needles start to move as your upstairs neighbour’s pornography gets loud enough for both of us to clearly hear what a young woman is asking a man or perhaps several men to do her.
‘That little shit!’
Leaving me alone in the graph room you storm out of your flat to confront him. I see your footfall outlined in red ink. every time your hammer like fist bangs on his door I see it immortalised in by the sylus arm. The pattern is unmistakably similar to the one I am holding in my hand. The one with ‘Christmas Day 2008 11pm!!!’ written with three exclamations.
He call’s you a freak. He say’s it’s a free country; that a man can do what he likes within the confines of his own home; that if you don’t like it you should buy some earplugs.
By the time you come downstairs, I’ve already left.
