My street has become full of incident over the last couple of days. Though admittedly today's news is less serious.
This morning while trying to get some much needed sleep I was continually woken by what sounded like a very loud alarm clock going off. It would beep for a minute or so and then stop, but then a few minutes later would start up again. I was in such a sleepy state that I couldn't be bothered to investigate, though I wondered if it might be the alarm on my new phone which perhaps I had inadvertently set, going off in the lounge below. I was to tired to go and check, even though the noise was waking me up every time I fell back to sleep. But it seemed unlikely that it was a phone. The noise was loud and when I could focus on it seemed to be coming from outside, and I finally figured that it was most likely a burglar alarm on a house up the road (maybe the house of the recently deceased man - which would explain why he wasn't doing anything to stop it) or possibly a car alarm, though they usually sound less like loud monotonous alarm clocks.
Eventually the noise ceased and I got up at around midday after an unsatisfactory night's sleep with a very mild hangover.
Then tonight, just as I was about to go to bed, the noise started up again. A bit more compis mentis I looked out of the window and saw that it was indeed a car alarm on a BMW parked right opposite my house. It did the same trick of sounding for about a minute, then going quiet as the lights of the car still flashed and just when you thought it might be over started up again. I wondered if it might be the dead man's car, as the owner was clearly either not in the vicinity or was no longer able to hear, but it seemed unlikely that that man would have had a BMW. By now I had a picture in my mind of who the deceased might be and he was not the BMW type. But then I might have been thinking of someone else.
I have a lot of work to do on my radio scripts tomorrow and my heart sank at the prospect of this happening all night long, but I didn't do anything for about an hour in the hope that it would stop on its own. By now I was so irritated that I considered going to the car under the cover of night and immobilising it myself. The only problems with this being that a) it would require some illegal breaking and entering and b) even if I got into the car and somehow managed to flip the bonnet, then I wouldn't even know how to disconnect it. I could have a crack at unhooking the battery, but to be honest I am not even sure I could do that and was pretty certain that I would end up electrocuting myself if I did. So even though that was what the primitive part of my brain was wanting me to do, instead I took the more sensible step of trying to ring the authorities. I tried my local police station, but they put me on to the environmental health, who even though it was now after midnight on a Sunday night, answered pretty quickly. I told them the problem and the man explained that someone else (clearly less patient than me) had already informed them and there was an officer on his way.
I looked outside and three men were standing round the car, looking at it, but not doing anything. I guessed they were some of my neighbours, though none of them seemed familiar and I thought about trying to remember their faces so I might know who they were if they died. But then thought, why bother? It will just make their deaths sadder. Best just keep them anonymous vaguely human forms, so I can continue my policy of not caring for anything biological apart from my cyst.
About half an hour later I looked out again and a man with a pad who looked a bit more official was there and they had somehow got the bonnet of the car open. The noise was still going on, but I guessed that they must be seconds away from disabling it and so got into bed and tried to sleep. Sure enough by 1am the noise came to a stop and I vaguely drifted off towards the land of sleep, though never quite getting there completely. Which I was quite pleased about when at 2am the alarm started sounding again. In the quiet of the morning it was more piercing and upsetting tha before and my heart sank as I realised that now the environmental health would have to be called again and the noise would be going on for another couple of hours at least and there was no way I was going to get the requisite sleep tonight. The alarm stopped abruptly and I thought maybe I would be OK, but ten minutes later it started again. This was worse than it ringing constantly. Just as I was about to nod off it would be starting again and in fact just lying there anticipating the restart was enough to stop me sleeping. It stopped again and then a few minutes later started up. I went to look out of the window and realised that the environmental health people were still working on it. There were now two vans parked in the road and a couple more men standing round the vehicle, shining a torch underneath one of the rear wheel arches. This must be an alarm that is as hard to dismantle as some kind of bomb in a James Bond film. I hoped they would be successful and sure enough my sleep remained undisturbed for the rest of the night.
But it was eerie to have the authorities out to my road in the middle of the night two nights running. A lesser man would think that the ghost of the deceased was playing merry havoc with the neighbours who had ignored or not even noticed him in real life - or the one neighbour at least - but I am a rational man and know that that can't be..... Or can it?
No. It can't.
