Working at home through the pandemic has been a lonely experience, and you’ve grown to hate the silence, but after months of it you’ve grown to hate your own playlists too. So, you’ve tried the radio, wanting the comfort of voices and music as you work when most of the human contact you’ve had has been in the form of notifications on email and chat. In short order, most of the stations you’ve tried annoy you: the music is not to your taste, or it’s all songs you’ve been listening to anyway, or the voices grate in that over-enthusiastic DJ kind of way, dripping with insincerity. You think about finding internet radio stations, but the choice overwhelms you.
One day though, impatient and fed up you thumb the button on your radio to scan for stations and it arrives at a news broadcast with politicians failing to answer a question so you thumb it again and then at a station that tells you you’re about to hear Mumford and Sons in session so you thumb it again, and then it stops at a station and it’s a song you don’t know, but really like all the same, you leave it there.
And there the radio stays, because finally you’ve found something that you like. Lots of songs you’ve not heard, by bands you’re not familiar with, but which sound like they’ve listened to bands you loved before you played them to death and then added something new. Soft, easy voices, as if the whole broadcast is late at night, and the world is quiet.
It must be a local station, but it’s not for your area, because you don’t recognise the place names that they mention on the traffic and the local news and weather, but that doesn’t matter, in a way it’s better, because it doesn’t evoke your memories of when you could travel to work, see people, see places.
Then after a song that had you typing on your laptop keyboard in time, the news announcer, voice still low and calm. They talk about traffic delays on the Lichway ring road, avoid that route, try a different way like the bypass heading towards Wicksea. Two more songs, and then the announcer breaks in halfway through the second. A serious chemical spill, authorities are warning everyone to stay away from the area, close windows and doors, if you are driving and see what looks like smoke or fog, turn around.
Another song, another interruption, the calm gone. Reports coming in from listeners stuck in traffic, cut off part way through and just noise. One caller, ranting about the hill above the Lichway ring road having opened. No, what he says at the end, before the call is lost is, “They made it open but now they can’t close it.”
You stop writing the email you’re in the middle of, asking someone to reply to your email about the email that someone else sent about a different email, and you bring up the BBC news website. Nothing. The Guardian, the Times, nothing. You think about finding local news, realise you don’t know which region you’re looking for, so you go to Google Maps, but Lichway, nothing, Wicksea, nothing, St Wulfrun-in-the-Vale nothing, Holswell nothing, East Darmhurst, nothing.
The announcer tells everyone please, run. And if you can’t run, hide in doors. And hold your loved ones tight. The hill has opened. It is coming.
Then the broadcast stops.
You fiddle with the radio, tune up, tune down, but you can’t find it. You never find it, and it never comes back.
You decide it’s an elaborate prank and wonder that the authorities allowed it, wait for the fuss in the papers, this year’s War of the Worlds, but there is nothing, not this week, not next. You shake your head and mourn the music and go back to Spotify, hoping to find something new, and go back to emails and reports and spreadsheets and spreadsheets and spreadsheets.
But in your dreams, every now and then, you dream of smoke rolling down from moorland as if it’s on fire, and in the smoke there is a shadow, a huge shadow and it comes closer to you, and then you wake, covered in sweat. Later when you can travel again you will be on a train and look out at the countryside passing by and just for a moment, as the early morning winter sun just climbs above a hill on the moor, you will see another landscape, overlaid on the first as if on tracing paper, a small town whose streets are deserted, cars empty in the road, their doors open.
Then the train passes through a short tunnel and when you come out of the other side it is gone, and you just put it down to lack of sleep, because you sleep so badly these days.
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