2

So what on earth do we do now? Looking around there were two main camps, both silent. The first headed on in the direction they had been going before the Voice; the second turned and started heading back the way they had come. This left a tiny proportion, such as me, left to consider, without a clue what to do; and the car drivers who, on the narrow bridge we found ourselves, were forced to move forwards. But slowly. Non-commitedly. So decisions had to be made and the easiest was the carry on. I was only 5 minutes walk from the office, but 20 minutes from home, with the benefit of other people to speak to, and a working phoneline, a luxury not afforded in my flat as Jen would probably have left for work herself, and we were undergoing the trauma of a change of phone supplier which had rendered us incommunicado. I have to admit the novelty of it had lead me to leave the mobile phone switched off in the flat as well, but at this precise moment in time I needed the backup of trusted news websites to find out if this mass auditory hallucination had been confined to that one pocket of commuters; or had it been experienced further afield?

Then there came the shouting. It rang out and stood out, but not because of the silence that had preceded it, the daily wander to work was always accompanied by sounds other than human chatter, but rather because it was like nothing I had heard before. There would be the occasional angry exchange, sometimes drunken even at that time in the morning; or youthful, excitable chatter, if heading in early coincided with school runs; or half heard mobile phone conversations ranging from the verbal delivery of a shopping list to news of the passing of a close relative and the stifling of tears behind a wavering voice that couldn't hide behind anything. This was tortured. But not physically. It was coherent, but only in so much as the words were in English and formed into sentences, but the sentences themselves were disjointed. Rapid fire exhortations that would by turn proclaim or damn or celebrate or abuse. There was more than one voice, with only one, a twenty-something guy fifty yards or so ahead, actually visible. Some were muffled by closed windows, but others had flung open those windows so that their words could reach where their image could not.

It was, I have to admit, more than a little unsettling. Not a usual Monday morning, that goes without saying (despite the fact I just have, it was that kind of morning). Of course I didn't need to pinch myself to make sure I was awake, no need for Hollywood contrivances to confirm what I knew absolutely. I was wide awake, and all of this was real. What I didn't know was where the line was drawn, the further I walked, and by now I was only moments from the front door of the office, the more it became clear that a pretty wide body of people had heard the Voice. The initial bubble of commuters I was in had become a good square mile of Edinburgh.

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