Armageddon Music
The world began to end, but the songs playing in the heads of its witnesses were the only sign. Like the first cough of tuberculosis, the music wasn’t much of a warning.
At 07:06, as Gaynor walked to work through Olive Mount Park, BBC Radio 6 fell silent forever. She'd been enjoying Shaun Keaveney through the earpieces of her mobile phone, but FM-quality white noise replaced the DJ, along with everything else broadcast by the stations Gaynor had in her pre-sets. All except Airwave FM, which seemed to be broadcasting static as a faint background to Gustav Holst’s Opus 32 (2), The Planets. Not that she knew what it was called or who it was by; she knew only that it didn’t belong on Airwave’s Throbbing Twenty-Four-Hour Erogenous Zone.
So Gaynor pulled out the earplugs, though she froze in mid-step when the orchestra grew instantly clearer and louder. Several other early morning walkers in the hilltop park also slowed or halted, perfectly mimicking Gaynor’s head movements like meerkats as they attempted to pinpoint the source of the music. Eventually, everyone in the park, and then everyone in the city around it, was united by a shared revelation as their gaze came to rest on the smouldering sphere of the brightening dawn.
The music emanated from the sunrise.
Of course, many people dismissed the sound as a publicity stunt by some shop or business in the commercial centre to the east. They gave the matter no more thought as they strode on to their jobs, colleges, homes, schools or early-opening coffee shops, except to wonder how anyone got permission to play such loud music so early in the day.
But Gaynor remained standing in the glow of the sunrise, content under the soporific spell of Holst's Venus, The Bringer of Peace. Her composure wasn’t even challenged when she heard speech emitted from the earpieces hung about her shoulders. She lifted them and discerned the words, '...national crisis broadcast. A state of emergency has been declared, and your elected officials have relinquished government to the Exigent Management Agency until further notice. The EMA has announced martial law, with immediate effect. You are advised to seek shelter. Do not burden yourself with elderly or immobile persons, you cannot help them now...'
Despite this clear indication that Homo Sapiens’ dominion over the Earth was coming to an end, Gaynor did not feel compelled to walk any further than to the nearest park bench, where she sat down and studied the view of the city. She didn’t know how long it would take before she saw signs of being under martial law, or even what being under martial law really meant, though she suspected that it would involve soldiers. But quite where the army was going to materialise from, Gaynor couldn’t guess. The brightening panorama of the city betrayed no sign of rapid militarisation, or even of waking up to a state of emergency at all.
‘What do you think it’s going to be?’
‘What?’ Gaynor warily eyed an approaching postman.
‘The end. Plague? Thousand-foot tidal wave? Nuclear holocaust? Meteor strike?’ He thought about it a little more and smiled. 'Alien invasion? Zombie attack?'
Gaynor shrugged. ‘I’m more worried about the martial law.’
The postman unslung the red bag from his shoulder and span on the spot for the momentum to hurl it away downhill. It disappeared with a fluttering trail of letters. ‘Can I sit here?’
Gaynor shuffled to her end of the bench and nodded cautiously at the other. Somewhere in his late thirties, Gaynor judged him to be a few years older than herself and - relative to their circumstance - probably harmless.
The postman acknowledged her wary glance and sat down. ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not one of those people who said they’d grab the nearest girl and fuck like there’s no tomorrow if the world ended.’ He pulled his own mobile phone and earplugs from his pocket and lobbed them away after the bag of post. ‘Not the sort of thing you plan for, is it?’
Gaynor nodded thoughtfully, noticing that the music from the east became a little louder as the sun rose and brightened. ‘Strange how everyone’s so calm, isn’t it?’
‘What’s strange is someone sticking on this record so loud just as the world’s going tits up. I never thought I’d get liquidised listening to Tease Me.’
Gaynor spent some time considering that statement, quietly surveying the park and the dozen or so other people present, who had all taken seats on benches or the driest-looking patches of grass, displaying no more fear or panic than that felt by Gaynor or her new friend.
‘I’m, uh, getting music – but it’s not from a stereo,’ Gaynor decided quietly, confidently. ‘I think the world’s giving us one last song before we’re minced.’
The postman’s smile developed a knowing edge. ‘You’re more religious than me.’
‘No, I’m really not,’ Gaynor replied. ‘It’s just that you and I can hear different songs, so it can’t be someone’s radio we’re listening to.’
‘You can’t hear Tease Me?’
‘No. I don’t know the name of what I can hear,’ Gaynor admitted, gazing into the sunlight, ‘but it sounds like an angel wrote it.’
‘Great,’ the postman sulked. ‘You get a lullaby from the heavenly host, I get Chaka Demus and Pliers. You know, it’d be interesting to find out how long we have left.’
Gaynor gave it some thought, but decided, ‘No, it wouldn’t. We might have only until the end of the song.’
Gaynor would discover the accuracy of her guess in a little over two minutes time. She was also correct in asserting that the music was not being broadcast by any human agency. Of course, she never would know for certain why every human in the world heard a different song during the final few minutes of their life, although Gaynor did stumble over the answer every time she wondered why she, and every other creature on the planet, was able to face its looming extinction with such light-hearted resignation.
Gaynor was offered Holst's Venus for the same reason that her companion received Tease Me. The same reason explained why the woman sitting on a nearby bench, who had been walking to her last day as a solicitor’s secretary before retiring from work, found herself retiring from life itself with the varying tempo of Salva Mea by Faithless as a soundtrack. And why Olive Mount Park’s famous old doomsayer, who harangued passers-by everyday with the warning, ‘Repent, ye pedlars of filth! Ye Godless maggots, ye fornicators! For ye all are puppets with Satan your master, and ignore at your peril Mark, chapter 13, verse 35, when he says “Watch therefore – for you do not know when the master of the house will come”!’ was so calmly able to light his final roll-up and hum along to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s Fire.
A number 84 bus stopped on the nearby road and ejected a man whistling the cello refrain of Cloudbusting by Kate Bush. A paper boy on a BMX swerved to avoid him, but he did not apologise because, at that moment, he noticed that the sun seemed to transmitting a song which, had he been older, he would have recognized as the Electric Light Orchestra’s Believe Me Now. And an elderly man beside him, leaning on a gatepost for support, dropped his gaze from the sunrise to the pavement in disappointment, guessing that instead of having something by Nat King Cole played at his funeral as he’d always hoped, his passing would instead be marked with Fifty-fifty Clown by the Cocteau Twins.
The idling bus changed its route number to 57 and rumbled away.
‘That guy’s whistling Pink Floyd,’ the postman pointed at a passing man.
‘Comfortably Numb?’ Gaynor guessed.
‘He looks it.’
‘We all do,’ Gaynor observed. ‘Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps the universe knows the best songs to stop us all panicking.’
‘Maybe we each get the song that was playing during our happiest moment. Or the song that says most about you.’
‘Or perhaps every single brain has a song that perfectly matches its wavelength. To you, Chaka Demus and Pliers is like a lullaby to a baby.’
‘I feel like I should argue with you about that, but I can't be bothered,’ the postman frowned. ‘So you’re probably right. Course, if I was a planet piping in music to distract the life-forms I was about to pulverize, I’d have a sense of humour about it and make sure someone got REM’s It’s The End of the World as We Know It.’
Gaynor appreciated her companion’s banter as the air around them seemed to warm rapidly, and an oppressive droning reached them from the city below. The old air-raid sirens had been turned on and were cranking themselves up to an antique wail of monotonous warning. ‘Yeah, or Apocalypse Please by Muse. Shame we don’t have longer. We could have made a fortune peddling compilation albums called Now That’s What I Call Armageddon Music.’
‘Or Songs to Watch Mushroom Clouds By.’
The banshee-cry of the sirens from below was now loud enough to compete with the music from above, and the sun seemed to be losing its strength.
‘Well, I think we’re coming to it now,’ said the postman. ‘Sounds like we’re near the end of our swan songs.’
‘Good luck,’ Gaynor replied, rising from the bench and offering the man her hand. ‘I know we all had a different song to finish with, but I suppose we’ll all get the same end.’
‘However it comes, I hope yours is painless,’ the postman replied with feeling.
The Planets' movement began to fade from the thickening air, which now contained the tension of a static charge. Other sounds became prominent instead. Gaynor heard the roar of innumerable distant aircraft, and the sound of what must have been thousands of car alarms reached them from every direction.
A number 3 bus braked sharply as the sun began to dim. A bus on route 2 swerved to avoid it, hit the park gates and came to a brutal stop. Its display flickered for a moment and then reset itself to the number 1.
‘Any regrets?’ The postman asked.
‘Yes, one,' Gaynor said. 'That I haven’t done what I always said I’d do if the world ended.’
The postman scanned the thrumming crimson sky. ‘You might still have time. What was it?’
‘To grab the nearest stranger and fuck like there’s no tomorrow.’
© Mark Crutchfield
