Spinetinglers Anthology 2008

by Nolene-Patricia Dougan

  I looked up from the figures and gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Buses filled with students crawled up and down the road; they were losing the race against take- away wrappers and snack packets that raced along the pavements in the wind. A voice was trying to break through the white noise on my radio, it sounded like a woman singing, but I did not recognise the song. It was a high-pitched voice that wavered oddly and the words did not sound as though they were English. Just as I began to rise from my chair in order to turn the radio up and listen more closely, it stopped, and a pop song emerged with crystal-clear reception. I guessed that it was just bleeding from another wavelength and returned to my monitor. This time I brought up a map of England and marked the location of each postcode. I could instantly see that they were spread evenly across the country, and although I could not be precise, they each seemed to have an equal distance between them. The population of the area seemed insignificant, London, for example, had only one, as did Manchester. Birmingham had none, and neither did Liverpool or Bristol. I made a note of the name of each town or area that the postcodes fell into and searched for them on the Internet, to see if I could locate any parallels. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but in the back of my mind, I was hoping to find stone circles like Stonehenge or perhaps military bases. What I did find was that in each area, there was no power station, no pylons, and as far as I could tell, no military establishments. This proved very little, however, as there was plenty of other postcodes without pylons or power stations, and people still died from cancer there. Each postcode area I had noted also had a river running through it or nearby, but again, this was not exclusive to those postcodes.

  I brought up a map of Manchester and pinpointed the postcode for this area, the first postcode that I had identified. It was the bottom end of two streets, and it was about half a mile from my office. Nonetheless, it was not an area I knew well, as I had never had a reason to go there, but I did have a vague image of it being residential. There was perhaps a corner shop but on the whole, it was red-bricked terraces with tiny yards and no front garden. The area was not popular with students or immigrants, and I guessed the population was probably nontransient; it was, on the whole, the home of born and bred Mancunians, who probably grew up in the house they still lived in. This did not appear relevant though, as the area in York I had noted was a new housing estate, aimed at young families and first-time buyers. One location I had identified on the east coast was renowned for immigrant workers; it was an area ministers discussed in some of the emails that I was copied into, because constituents complained of their wages being kept down and all the local jobs being taken.

  “What links these places?” I said out loud to myself.

  Suddenly the volume on the radio dipped and the music was replaced again by disturbance and an electronic whining sound. This had happened before, as I have said, but the radio reception seemed particularly bad today.

  “Bridges.”

  That one word was audible above the hissing noise. Other words preceded it, but it sounded as though the voice had been sped up, and the beginning of the sentence sounded as though it was in a foreign language. Immediately after that word, the music returned, and I was left wondering if I had really heard a voice at all. It was, of course, a snippet from another radio station, but it struck me as peculiar how it seemed to answer the question I had just asked myself. Also, shortly before, I had been thinking of rivers. Although a bridge was not too far away from the Manchester postcode, I knew there was not one actually on the two streets.

  Then, I reminded myself that I was acting as if I had received a sign through the radio, a voice from the ether. I didn’t believe in the paranormal and had no intention of being converted by a stray broadcast from another station bleeding onto the wavelength, because of the weather that day. Still, these cancer-free zones continued to intrigue me, and as I had no motivation to write my report, I continued to think about them as I sipped my coffee.

  The music dipped again, and white noise hissed from the speakers. I listened intently, wondering if a voice would come through again. I heard something; it was a brief sound that I thought was a voice, but again, it sounded as though it was at the wrong speed. The pitch was oddly unaltered, but it was impossible to decipher what was said. It was almost entirely drowned out by static, and if it was a word, it didn’t sound like English. I continued listening. I was sure I could hear voices, but they were too quiet and faint, they were overpowered by the interference. The voices sounded like a series of short pronouncements, very different to how I would expect a radio broadcast to sound. The voices sounded as though they had been recorded and processed before being broadcast, and I found it impossible to decipher what was being said. It made me think of a number of broadcasts I had once heard as child while playing with my granddad’s old radio set; a robotic voice repeated a series of numbers, and the message had ended with a stern, thank you. My granddad told me it was coordinates being transmitted to spies on missions of espionage. It had intrigued me as a youngster, but this was the first time I had thought about it for years. Was I hearing a message intended for spies?

  I thought I heard the words, “Control centre,” amid an unintelligible mumble that struggled to be heard, and then the music returned and the crackling static disappeared as suddenly as it came.

  Outside the trees waved in the growing wind, and I decided to get some fresh air and buy some lunch before the rain started.

  I held my jacket around myself to stop it flapping in the wind and kept my head down to prevent a gust from revealing my normally well-disguised, receding hairline. As I fought my way up the road, my thoughts turned again to those odd voices that I had heard on the radio, and how their pronouncements seemed to coincide with my investigation into the nine cancer-free zones. It all seemed rather far-fetched but despite my scepticism, I was a sucker for a mystery. The sandwich shop had closed, I was too late, and so I went to the newsagent, where I could buy a prepacked sandwich and some crisps. As I stood in the queue waiting to pay for my lunch, I spotted behind the cashier’s till some blank tapes, and I had an idea. I could put a tape into the deck of the radio and if the voices came again, I could record them. I could then transfer them to my computer; using the graphic equaliser to reduce the noise, I could maybe decipher what was being said. I wondered what the origin of the voices was, was it a normal broadcast distorted by atmospheric conditions, was it the spirit world, ghosts trying to communicate with the living, or was the radio somehow picking messages from mine, or someone else’s, subconscious? I had once read an article by a psychiatrist, who claimed that everything we ever said and heard was stored in our brains. Perhaps, magnetic fields, served as some kind of remote access memory. All those words and phrases, that were stored in our brains, mingled in the ether, waiting for our minds to receive the necessary software upgrade to open them, make sense of them.

  The shopkeeper announced what I owed him and disrupted my thoughts, bringing me back to reality with a jolt.

  “And a blank tape, please,” I asked, as I offered a ten-pound note in payment.

  Back at the office, I unwrapped the tape and placed it in the stereo. All I could do now was wait, as the radio was currently dutifully playing an hour of hits from the seventies. I moved the nine postcodes I had identified to one side, rightly or wrongly. I now associated them with the phenomena of the strange voices on the radio. Until the voices returned, I decided to do what I was paid to do and get the report written.

  Finding myself focussed and determined to get the report completed, I sat there typing away to whatever tunes the DJ on the radio selected. There was no sign of any voices and the reception remained clear until four o’clock, when the final full stop was pressed and the report was complete. I had described how the high levels of unemployment was good news for new businesses, as they would be able to find staff easily. I said the cheap property prices were great for first-time buyers, and the imminent arrival of new employers meant jobs
would be plentiful for all. I invited publicans to open bars, as custom would be plentiful, which it would, with an alcoholism rate of almost twenty percent. I described these areas as youthful and vibrant, which was true, as few lived past middle age, and I said the streets were quiet which was also true, as no one felt like partying when their friends were either dead or dying. Job done, the spin had been spun. I didn’t mention the nuclear power stations nearby, with looming chimneys that spewed smoke all day, or the huge pylons that loomed over the crumbling housing estates. I didn’t mention the mobile phone aerial in one area, which sat on the primary school roof that every local child attended, and obviously I didn’t mention that living in one of these areas almost guaranteed an early death. That wasn’t in my remit.

  I decided to proofread in the morning, and turned my thoughts once again to the radio and the nine mysterious postcodes of cancer-free zones. The thing with cancer was that it sometimes seems that almost anything can cause it, from the food we eat, right down to the air we breathe. Tumours are like rats; you’re never more than a few metres from one. While we’re told tomatoes are good for us and that broccoli can help prevent cancer, it is strange to think that the best possible way to avoid that terrible disease is to move to one of these nine postcode areas, which seem to have nothing in common except for their distance from each other and the fact that their residents just don’t get ill. It didn’t make sense.

  “Well, explain it then,” I said to the radio, half expecting the airwaves to fill with white noise as they had earlier.

  I gazed out of the window again and watched big rain drops land and splash on the sill. Everything looked grey. Even the brightly coloured golfing umbrellas that people carried looked like decaying and deflated beach balls. With the report completed, and the radio refusing to comply, I felt boredom creeping upon me like mildew. I sighed a long sigh and looked at the clock, I still had nearly an hour to kill.

  “Come on, help me out,” I grumbled at the radio.

  Suddenly, the volume dropped, and a low whining pulsated from the speakers. Invigorated, I leapt up from my chair and ran to the stereo to press record, in case any voices emerged mysteriously again. I was instantly aware once more of short utterances. I recognised the pitch and timbre of a human voice, but I could not even decipher any phonetics, let alone recognisable words. It sounded distorted and oddly remote, like a transmission from another galaxy, or so I imagined. I stayed by the radio and listened intently. A female singing voice, like the one I had heard early in the day, returned again. I recognised what sounded like words, but either the pronunciation was odd or the words were not in English. Just as her song ended, I detected four words that I felt sure I recognised.

  “Controls are bridges. Yes,” she sang ethereally.

  “What do you mean, bridges?” I replied, unable to resist responding, even though it felt rather ridiculous talking to a radio.

  My question was met with what could have been numerous voices talking at once but could also have been the swirling sound one sometimes hears between radio stations.

  “... Bridge.. control... broadcast centres live.”

  This time the voice was different and far clearer than the others I had heard. It sounded male, but at the same time, robotic and toneless, inhuman. The words sounded processed or filtered, and those I could not understand sounded unmistakably like foreign words, even though I knew no other languages apart from English.

  I thanked the stereo, as for some reason, it seemed like the right thing to do, despite the fact that what I had heard made little sense. And whom was I thanking, the last voice sounding like an alien from an old B-movie. This was all very strange. I wanted to go and get someone else to listen with me, but I feared that the voices would stop and suspected that I would be ridiculed anyway.

  Bridges clearly had some significance, as I had heard the word three times now, but was it significant to my postcodes or to something unbeknown to me. It dawned on me now that I had taken the voices to speak of bridges in the literal sense, perhaps this was wrong. Perhaps the bridges were a metaphor for a link between two places. Perhaps the radio was the bridge through which the voices could reach me. I should have picked up on that earlier, ministers never say what they mean, and they only speak in metaphors.

  “Yes, oui,” a different voice responded as if it had read my thoughts. I recognised the use of the French affirmative, and this confirmed to me that foreign words were being used in the transmissions. My skin prickled and I felt my heart race, as my curious intrigue was replaced by nervous fear, that feeling you get when faced with the unknown. My mind turned to horror films that I had seen, children talking to television sets, and mad people hearing God through their radios.

  I popped my head out of my office to check whether anyone was around and then returned, closing the door behind me.

  “Do you have something to do with these postcodes?” I asked boldly.

  I listened closely through the crackling static. Minutes passed. Then a voice seemed to form from the white noise.

  “Centres,” it repeated, this time slowly with every tone elongated. A male voice, strained like that of an old man, for whom breathing was hard and speaking was exhausting.

  “We transmit with passes,” another voice added, this time with an English accent and upper-class tones.

  The music broke back in and then stopped again.

  “Listen...” the voice was almost inaudible and the sentence ended again in foreign words that I could not recognise and then the music cut back in and this time continued, unabated.

  I stopped the tape and rewound it to the beginning. Reaching for my coat, I took out my portable CD player and detached the earphones that I then plugged into the stereo. I played the tape back as loudly as my ears could take and began to listen to the woman’s singing again, and as soon as it finished, I rewound the tape and played it back. With each listen I scribbled down phonetically what I thought I could hear. Just before she sang in English, I heard words that I thought sounded German. I wrote them down as best I could and went to an online translation site on my computer.

  I eventually determined that what she sang was, “Leute sind stationen.” It means, “People are stations.”

  I went on to the voices after what I recognised to be, “Broadcast centres live.” I recognised a sentence to sound Italian, so once again, I tried to write the words phonetically until they looked Italian. The sentence I finally came up with, using the translation Web site was, “Transmettiamo attraverso un centro.” It meant something along the lines of, “Transmission is through centres.”

  I kept listening until I was able to pick out the sound of a few words in succession again. This time, the voice was very faint and sounded German; it was weak and strained and sounded the same as the voice that simply exclaimed, “Centres.” The words were, “Wir sende durch leute,” which translated to, “We send through people.”

  The final segment that I could distinguish as words was again German, and I had completely missed it on the first listen. It sounded stilted and mechanical, but I was able to make out words that I transcribed as, “Leute sind stationen.” The translation read, “People are stations.”

  Satisfied that I had got as much as a monolinguist was likely to get from the tape, I removed my headphones and took stock. I had asked if the voice’s words were relevant to my private enquiry into the cancer-free zones and a voice had said, quite determinedly, “Yes.”

  Reading between the lines, the general gist seemed to be that living people are stations, through which the voices can transmit and thus bridge the gap between themselves, whoever they are, and the likes of my radio and me. It had been the strangest of afternoons. Either I’d been listening to snippets of separate broadcasts that just by chance seemed to relate to each other, or there were voices in the ether that had been communicating with me. It was hard to take for a rationalist like myself, but the evidence for other broadcasts bleeding onto the frequency was weak, when
compared to the voices of unknown origin, which even seemed to answer me when I questioned them.

  The proposition seemed to be that people living in certain areas were healthy for a reason. Their bodies are utilised as transmission centres for whoever was responsible for the voices, be it ghosts, aliens, or some odd manifestation of the subconscious mind and, are thus kept healthy because they are needed. They have a purpose. It was all too much for a pen-pushing civil servant to take in. I came to work each day to spin some dodgy report or fiddle some figures, not to end up conversing with the spirit world, like some kind of loon.

  I took my tape from the stereo and picked up the list of postcodes, those that allegedly housed the transmission centres, and put them in my bag to look over again when I got home. I guessed my evening was going to be taken up surfing the Internet and trying to find if anyone else had encountered voices of unknown origin breaking through on their radios.

  I put on my coat and opened the office door, as I slung my bag over my shoulder. As I left, I noticed a meeting finishing in the conference room next door. My manager walked out as I was locking my door behind me.

  “Good meeting?” I asked with a grin, as I knew how he hated meetings, regardless of their subject.

  “Shite as usual,” he said with an exaggerated grimace. “Some international video conference for that report you’re doing next on pirate radio broadcasts. Bloody Germans, keeping me from my dinner.”

  “Right,” I said as I reached in my bag for the blank tape, and then lobbed it despairingly into the bin.

  I never did find out an explanation for those areas where cancer seemed not to affect people, but neither did I give it too much thought after that afternoon. After all, it wasn’t in my remit.