you find a tape, old video tape, no label. Couple of things at the start, old films forgotten about, half the nine o’clock news, static **********
words come through, picture fades in – talking heads mostly. Then a house, a little suburban bunker, epileptic hand-held camera.
CAPTION: ANNE BROOKING – HOME OWNER
Anne Brooking: – thought he was too drunk to get the key in the lock. I was even laughing at him. Then he started knocking on the door and calling to Louise inside. But all the lights in the house had been turned off and there was no answer. (Deep breath) After a while, Gilbert started studying the lock on the door. He called me over and I agreed that it looked like someone had tampered with it. The we spotted the wood shavings on the step and realised that the locks had actually been changed.
GILBERT BROOKING REFUSED TO BE INTERVIEWED FOR THIS PROGRAMME.
DONALD LENNON – NEIGHBOUR
Lennon: I’d just got in myself when Gilbert and Anne came to the door. Gilbert was absolutely soaking, even though it wasn’t raining outside. Then I caught the whiff coming off him and realised that it wasn’t just water he’d been soaked with, but… well, it was water, after a fashion…
SARGEANT NEAL WEBBER
Webber: We got a call from the Brookings saying that there was someone in their house and that they had changed the locks. It was a slow night at the station so I decided to attend the scene myself with a colleague, Colm McClay.
INSPECTOR COLM MCCLAY
McClay: We took a statement from Gilbert and Anne Brooking in a neighbours house. Apparently they had returned home from n evening out to find that someone had changed the locks on their house.
Webber: Anne Brooking was hysterical by this time. There were strangers in her house and their daughter – Louise Brooking – was alone inside with them.
McClay: Mister Brooking had tried to break the door down, but a voice from inside -not his daughters – had told him to stop.
Webber: He recalled that it was a young man’s voice, weary and tired-sounding, no one that he recognised. They had a very brief conversation through the door in which the occupant of the house claimed to have rigged the doors with cheap explosives and that he had a shotgun with which he would shoot Mister Brooking if he tried to get in any other way.
McClay: Brooking refused to leave. That was when someone emptied a container of urine over him from the bathroom window above.
Anne Brooking: I looked up just in time to see the window close and hear this laughing coming from inside. You know, that mocking teenage laugh…?
Webber: I tried to call the house, but the phone rang out. I then made a scout of the perimeter of the residence. There were no signs of life – it was totally dark and all the curtains were closed.
?: Oh, but we were watching him…
Anne Brooking: I was in a panic. Whoever Gilbert had spoken to had said that Louise was in there with them, but that she was ‘asleep.’ I didn’t know what to think…
Webber: Eventually, after some firm knocking, I managed to get a response from the house. The voice I spoke presumably belonged to the same person to whom Brooking had spoken earlier. I judged the speaker to be about sixteen or seventeen – ages with Louise.
I asked him about the gun and the explosives. He confirmed that he was willing to shoot anyone who tried to enter the house by any means. I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not.
He refused to give me his name.
When I asked what he was trying to achieve, he simply stated: ‘We all just want to be left alone.’ Then he was silent and I couldn’t provoke any further reaction.
McClay: That was the last we heard from the house.
Webber: We quizzed the Brookings, but there was no suggestion of a reason why Louise would wilfully allow herself to be locked away. She was apparently a very solitary girl with few friends. Her evenings were mostly spent reading, watching movies and surfing the internet.
McClay: From the following morning, whenever we tried to ring the house, all we could get was an engaged tone. Later, when we tapped the line, all we heard was the squeal of a modem. No, we didn’t know what they were doing. By the time we decided to trace the connection, they’d cut off the phone altogether.
Webber: I confess, at first I thought Louise was being held against her will. McClay was sceptical though, and I started to come around to his way of thinking.
McClay: In the morning, we brought the reinforcements in and started the routine door to door. By and large, we had little luck – but old retiree across from the Brookings home claimed to have seen four or five youths go into the house about nine the previous evening. Of course, when she was interviewed by the papers she changed that number to a dozen. We doubt that was true. She failed to give any decent descriptions.
Webber: By this time, my superiors were arriving, essentially wondering why I was – pardon me – still fucking around trying to get these kids out of the house. Supt. Marx was never the most patient of men.
SUPT. ALLEN MARX
Marx: It seemed to me that what we had to do was a) establish who and how many were in the house; b) establish whether their claims that the doors were rigged with explosives was true; and c) re-establish communication with the people in the house.
Webber: Heh… yeah, there was a lot of ‘establishing’ done that morning.
McClay: Men were deployed to the local high schools to find out how many of their fourth to fifth year pupils were missing that morning. Efforts were then made to track down the absentees. Most of them were just sick, on holiday, or simply truant. Ultimately, so suspicious cases came up.
Webber: In tandem with McClay’s efforts, we made checks into Louise’s stilted social background, but no real candidates came up from that. She was a largely silent presence around school.
?: There was a fucking reason for that.
McClay: Later that day, the local news teams turned up. We started drawing the crowds after that.
ALISON SHARP – SOUND TECHNICIAN
Alison: We got there about half two that afternoon. Just in time to film it. I swear Lewis had only just set up the camera when-
LEWIS GREEN – CAMERAMAN
Lewis: I’d literally only just got the shot framed. Greg Brent was preparing to give his bit to camera.
Webber: None of us saw it coming – but in retrospect, as more and more of us arrived at the scene, we were encroaching more and more on the garden lawn. They must have felt that they had a point to ma-
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-miracle no one was hurt. The debris, some if it still on fire, flaked down on us.
McClay: Amazingly, the front of the house was barely scratched. There was a massive scorch mark on the lawn through.
Marx: Yes, it was at that point we realised that they had not been lying about the explosives.
Webber: Marx always was a sharp one…
McClay: Their point made, they withdrew into total silence again. No communication, just the modem sound. Nothing happened. We didn’t know how to deal with the situation.
?: The days must have faded in and out like an old recording on a worn tape.
Webber: About the four day mark, we decided that the key was to find our what was going on inside. So we had these sound-guns, surveillance tools, send in from the city…
18:17 26064 FILE099723
PRESENT: UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE 1; UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE 2; UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE VOICE; LOUISE BROOKING (CONFIRMED).
MV1: (______) not taking it up at all (______) speaks strange tongues.
FV: (______) not him.
MV2: (_____) doesn’t tr(____) say?
MV1: (______) did (______) or does it (______) wawa (?) (_____) cataclysm.
FV : (_____) isn’t that slightly (______)?
MV2: A little…
LB: More replies are coming in…
FV (____________________________)
LB: One hundred or so.
MV2 (_____) enough?
MV1 (______) the pedant?
LB: Sleeping.
?: Hm.
MV2: (_________) there.
MV1: Yes.
FV: We can seeeeeee you…
LAUGHTER
MV1: You remember (_________)?
?: Hm.
MV1: Look at (__________).
MV2: (____) buried so deep.
LB: Deeper than ours.
MV2: Who (__) Christ(_____) Trent?
FV: Shhh.
MV2: What?
FV: Not a word.
RECORDING ENDS
Webber: The quality was poor anyway, all those screeching mechanical sounds from god knows where in the background. But it didn’t matter. From that moment, we heard nothing from the house. At least until the following Monday.
McClay: On the Saturday, Marx ordered the power to be cut. Later that night, all the lights in the house were turned repeatedly on and off for a period of about five minutes.
Lewis: On the footage, you can see the shadows behind the curtains, rushing from room to room. They seem to maniacal, it’s pretty disturbing to tell you the truth.
Webber: The Monday after that, at around 10.20 in the evening, the sound-gins picked up multiple voices from within. Some sort of chant. They kept it up for about an house before lapsing back into silence. We’ve since had the tape analysed by about four dozen linguistic experts and no one’s been able to place the language, if it is a language at all, that is…
Alison: They started arriving and dawn the eleventh day. There had been considerable crowds since the start of the ‘siege’, but the kids arriving that morning were clearly different. They all arrived alone for a start, and they all came from further afield than your standard gawper.
Lewis: There were kids from all over the country, suddenly flocking into this shitty suburban street. The police didn’t look like they had a clue what was going on.
McClay: They all seemed to come from nowhere… Knapsacks, sleeping bags, like a camping expedition or something.
Webber: By now there were almost a hundred and fifty teenagers clotting up the street. They chatted easily amongst themselves, although they had mostly come alone. Yet when I tried to walk amongst them and find out why they were there, they clammed up. It was McClay who suggested they might be waiting for something.
McClay: Luke a signal. When I sat down and thought about it, it seemed the obvious solution.
Webber: Marx suggested moving them out by force, but a full scale riot in suburbia really wasn’t an option. The whole situation was embarrassing enough.
Lewis: It happened at dusk, which was about 11pm this being a fairly warm June evening. If the darkness hadn’t just fallen, you wouldn’t have even been able to see it. Even on my footage it’s tricky to make it out…
Alison: There was a flash, a little flare of light, in one of the upstairs windows. The effect was instantaneous. A loud, wordless chant came up from the crowd and a hundred and fifty teenagers surged against the flimsy plastic barricades around the scene. The police weren’t expecting it and were initially over-whelmed with ease. Then some of them started really striking back with their truncheons.
Webber: I missed it. My back was to the house. Then I heard that… that battle-cry and turned around to chaos. They were storming the house. I swear, I thought that the first of them would crash open the front door and the whole place would go up! But it didn’t. They just went swarming straight in. In seconds the house was virtually full, you could see them through the windows, tearing the curtains down. Colm was behind me. He said -
McClay: They’re making their break.
Webber: And I realised he was right. Aside from Louise Brooking, we had no idea what the occupants of the house looked like. All they had to do was lose themselves in the crowd. And that was their intention, that was their plan. I wondered how we could have been so stupid.
?: We called them, and they came to spirit us away.
Alison: Lewis was so stunned he almost dropped his camera, but he soon got it together and filmed the whole thing. It was all over in a couple of minutes.
Lewis: Yeah, as soon as the place was full it began to empty again. They came out of doors, windows, most of them carrying little keepsakes. I filmed as much as I could, but they were dispersing in all directions in little groups of fours and fives.
Alison: Then the cops waded right in.
Webber: As soon as we realised what was going on, we knew we had to break things up and apprehend as many of them as we could and hope we got at least some of the housemates.
McClay: Some of my colleagues were out of order. The force used was excessive.
Webber: Yes, the methods used by a few of the men were inexcusable. Marx was supposed to guide them, but if you’ll pardon my expression, he didn’t know shit from a piece of clay at that point.
McClay: In total, we made thirty-three arrests. The law of averages was not on our side. Every one of them had an alibi for the first days of the siege. They weren’t talking about why they came, most of them put it down to an ‘instinctual gut feeling.’ What could we do? We charged them all with civil disobedience. The rest you know… it was all over the papers.
Webber: When the very literal dust had settled, we went inside the house…
The photographs:
1: The hallway, grimy with a hundred footprints.
2: The inside front door, showing signs of tampering, but no explosives.
3: The remains of a personal computer, methodically destroyed, the hard-drive an empty shell. The crucial components are never found.
4: The bathroom. All the mirrors are smashed. The base elements for the creation of a homemade bomb are strewn around the tub.
5: The living room, left in disarray by the invasion. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the aftermath of an flood. Debris. Empty water bottles. Bare bulbs. A stock of car batteries.
6: The kitchen. Piles of unwashed dishes and spoiled food stuffs. Something plastic can be glimpsed scorched and melted in the oven.
7: Ruined upstairs hall.
8: Mr and Mrs Brooking’s bedroom. The bed and contents of the wardrobe have been completely destroyed. No other damage.
9: Louise Brooking’s room. The bed has been taken apart. Only the mattress remains. TV, videos, stuffed animals, books: all lie in an unceremonious pile in the corner – smashed. The wallpaper looks like it has been flayed off with a blowtorch. All over are scrawled strange symbols. A bent percentage mark flanked with lines and circles, a target with three arrows breaking from the centre out to the north-east, anti-clockwise concentric circles, radiating lines. Subsequent research sheds no light on their origin.
10: A shelf in Louise’s room. A line of dolls heads, severed and shorn of their hair. They regard the camera, almost mockingly. There are five of them-
?: there were five of us. Originally…
Webber: And we looked – God knows we looked. The thirty-odd we’d arrested were interrogated again and again. But all they would say was that they were there of their own accord and just got caught up in the hysteria. No conspiracy. No grand plan. We threatened them with everything we could, but they just repeated the party-line. Thirty-three little drones. All we had left was the footage shot at the time…
Lewis: The filth took all of our footage of that night, ran through it time and time again, hoping to see anything that would give them a lead. They found fuck all though. Well, fuck all helpful…
Alison: One shot, that’s it. Just as Lewis was panning across the lawn, past all the kids coming out of the Brooking house, that’s when we catch her, just on the edge of the frame. She’s with people, but their backs are to the camera, so they could be anyone. But she’s looking right at us: Louise Brooking. She’s only there for a second, but I swear – though I’m told it might just be a trick of the light – that she looks like she’s winking…
* * * * static
Copyright John Forth 2008
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