James Smythe: The Testimony

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

At first, we thought that the noise was just a radio. We didn’t even think about how long it had been since we’d had a real radio anywhere near the office; it just struck us that it was the same noise, tuning it. We were sitting in the office eating our lunches; the sandwich man had done his daily delivery, and I had picked a ham roll. I never had ham. We didn’t eat together, not usually, but we were trying it as something new, get the team together for a daily meal, something more social than just work. It promoted a sense of team-building that the management thought we were missing. At the talks, the meetings, they told us that we should learn to lean on each other more. This is a way to bring you all together, they told us. Three or four bites into the sandwich, I noticed it, niggling; like a radio, as I say, sitting at the back of the room. I asked the rest of them if they could hear it, and they couldn’t at first, and then one of them did – Marcus, I think, from sales – so we followed the noise, tried to find where it was coming from. Is it speakers, from the computers? somebody asked, but it wasn’t that. We thought it was louder as we went towards the window, so we opened them. Where’s it coming from? Marcus asked, but neither of us could tell because it sounded like it was coming from all around us. It seemed stupid to say it at the time, but it seemed like it was coming from inside my head; I didn’t say that, and then the others started to hear it, one by one. The whole thing seemed to take a few minutes, I reckon – but it could have been less, could have been more – and when the static reached its loudest, Bill, our boss, decided to go downstairs, see if it was louder there. We watched him out of the windows, in the street with people from all the other offices, and they all just sort of stood there and listened. Within a couple more minutes everyone from the other offices was either out there as well or crowded round at their own windows, and we were all listening to it. And then it was gone.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

It’s a rare day that you have silence in the House of Commons. There was some head of state in from one of the Eastern European nations, and that tended to make some of the back-benchers rowdy, make them show off. That’s attention-grabbers for you. Some of the rabble liked to think that it might make their names stand out for future PM-related references. Sad, really. The visiting chap just sat and stared at the panelling. But it was a loud day anyway: something about the NHS (again), immigrants (again), terrorism controls in the heart of Staines (again), and most of the front-benchers were going at it cats and dogs. That pillock from Chester was waving his hands around as he shouted, like he was being pestered by a wasp, that way that he did, and nobody was listening to him. Then we heard the static – that’s what we all agreed it sounded like, at first, like the sound of televisions in the middle of the night – and Chester stopped his flapping, and we listened. There’s never any sound in the room that we don’t know about – there were no crowds outside, no tours, and it’s about as soundproofed as a room without real soundproofing can get – so we all looked around for the source, heads peeking up like we were meerkats.

When it was over – quick as it began, as if somebody just flicked a switch and turned the power off – we just sat there, and nobody said anything for the longest time, until the speaker told us to reconvene the following day. We all shuffled out onto the riverbank, seemingly along with everybody else on both sides of the river, and we just milled around. It’s like a fire drill, somebody joked, but it wasn’t really a joke. The tubes, the buses, nothing was running – everybody froze because this was an event – so we were all just stranded there.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

It was like you were trying to tune into the right frequency but you were wearing ear-muffs, that’s how clear the noise was. We were working on a translation of something – me, Audrey, Patrice, David, Jolie – working on verbs, some dull shit like that for an undergrad class I was tutoring, and suddenly there it was, Chhhhhhhhhhh . I’ve never heard anything like it. I mean, people called it static, but I thought it was more like a growl, even. I said that out loud when it was finished and we were just talking about it over and over, and Audrey said that I was being stupid, but you know, I wasn’t , not really.

Meredith Lieberstein, retiree, New York City

12th of April, life is normal. 13th of April, still normal. 14th of April, everything gets torn apart, or put back together, whichever way you want to think of it. We had only just woken up – Leonard’s bladder, same as every night, tick tock – when it happened. I had the TV on, quietly, because I wasn’t completely awake, and I thought it was coming from that at first, then they went to one of those We Have A Fault screens, and the noise didn’t stop. When Leonard came back he flicked around through the channels, trying to find CNN – because that had never gone down, not that we could remember, or BBC World – but that was the same. We Have A Fault. How often do you need the news to tell you what’s actually going on these days, anyway? The one time we needed it, and it was no help at all. Eventually one of them came back – Fox was first, I think, because I remember Leonard joking about there being a first time for everything – and they started telling us what we already knew, with no explanations. There has been an event, they said. Within minutes they were referring to the noise as static, though we thought it sounded more like paper being crumpled. Leonard was watching, flicking the channels, when we heard the beeping from outside, so I went out onto the fire stairs. Cars were logged up around the park, people out of them and walking around. You could see that they were scared, even from four floors up. Look at this, Leonard said, and I went back in to see the helicopter footage of the Brooklyn Bridge – those were the days when they constantly had the helicopters out, circling the city at night just waiting for something to happen, convinced that, sooner or later, they would be in the right place at the right time – and the bridge was chock-full of cars, some of them empty, some of them crashed (because the drivers had been fiddling with their radios or headsets, looking for the source of the static, I’d guess). This was – Fox News called it – a Community Event, capital C, capital E, like a ceasefire or an election or garden barbecues on the 4th of July.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

We were talking through POTUS’ schedule, because something had to be added, visiting some library because he had said something about funding them – I don’t know, small-time stuff. It was ten minutes to wheels up, cabin doors were sealed, press were all seated, and then we heard the static. When you’re with the President of the United States sitting on Air Force One and you hear a noise like that? You assume it’s an attack.

Piers Anderson, private military contractor, the Middle East