Bombinate (aka ‘The Humming’)

I was twelve when I first became aware of the Hum. Things were starting to happen to my body, strange things I didn’t understand.

“You’re changing,” Ma had said, stripping those first blood stained sheets from my bed. “My little flower is blossoming. It’s natural. You’re just coming of age Jess, that’s all.”

But despite her words I knew Ma was worried about something. She started to watch me more closely around the camp, especially when the older boys were around.

“They might be fellow travellers Jess,” she finally said to me one evening. “But don’t you go believing what they tell you. You can’t be trusting boys no more.”

Of course, I never told her I used to tingle in strange ways when I looked at some of them, especially the handsome ones. And I thought the Hum was part of that. Each night it would come, reverberating through my body and bombinating in my mind; an unbearable drone that pulsed in time with my heart, forcing my hand down to play between my thighs.

Eventually I had to tell Ma. I couldn’t sleep anymore, the Hum driving me into hysterical tantrums.

A local doctor came to examine me.”It’s combination of hormonal changes to her body and the fact your trailer is pitched directly beneath a huge electricity pylon. Her brain seems acutely sensitive to the electromagnetic waves. She can literally hear the electricity pulsing through the cables.”

So we moved, packing up the camp overnight. The locals were delighted. After all, they had been petitioning to have us removed for months. The land we occupied was old consecrated ground.

But the Hum continued, no matter where we went.  Other doctors suggested it was a problem with my ears, an extreme form of tinnitus.  The operation was a disaster and I was left deaf. Completely deaf, that was, to everything except the constant Hum. But now it was mutating, the low drone becoming strange distant voices. No one would believe me. How could a deaf girl hear voices? So I’d get angry and violent, striking out viciously.  Once as my mother tried to restrain me, I stabbed her in the throat with a pair of scissors. When I blamed it on the Hum they took me away.

For months the men in white coats ran countless tests on me. Eventually they said that the fillings in my teeth were acting as receivers to radio frequencies – my brain somehow deciphering radio shows inside my head.  It was some kind of strange mutation caused by living beneath the electricity pylon as a young girl menstruating for the first time.

So they removed all my teeth and fitted me with brand new plastic ones. It was the only solution.

That night, as I lay recovering in my bed, it came as usual.

“What have they done?” growled the Hum, as my fingers were forced angrily inside myself. “You used to be such a pretty girl.”