Treacherous Tuesdays

It started during Economics tutorial in the morning.

While my tutor explained to a class squirming with the agony of mid-morning lethargy, once again, the Keynesian liquidity theory, Rachelle started to hear music playing in the distance. It seemed to originate from the running track, and the martian landscape of construction work with its dust mounds and grey debris.

"Did you hear that?" she said, glancing back at us from the front row with mild irritation. "Who would play music so loudly in the morning?"

While I did hear the muffled crackling of marching band music in the background, the disjunction of place and sound become unnervingly apparent. My tutor, sensing a ripple in an otherwise serene and gentle bobbing of heads perhaps signifying agreement, moved on to aggregate demand with a stoic flick of the projector switch.

"It could be Japanese marching band music," I sneered. Popular lore claimed the school was a massacre site during the Japanese Occupation — our history teachers seemed to take a ghoulish delight in perpetrating this to rumour-weary teenagers. The classroom became unsettlingly chillier.

Ignoring the fresh frangipani on the ground en route to the toilet, we went about with our usual Tuesday routine: we stumbled in and out of lecture theatres and hung around with the expected world-weariness of seventeen year olds. The signs were everywhere, if you bothered to read into them. As if a show of pathetic fallacy, grey clouds rolled in and promised stormy weather. The birds spoke to each other with an urgency in their guttural squawking; the trees shook and waved their branches like adolescents in the Awkward Phase; the wind sent history notes flying across Good News Café, and nearby, a stall assistant burnt her fourth chocolate croissant of the day while dreaming of a year-end holiday to Tioman.

While listening to a Literature lecture, our flow of thought was interrupted by ominous knocking coming from a wooden wall panel in the lecture theatre. Thump, thump, thump.

There was a sharp, collective intake of breath, but we continued after the knocking ceased.

Someone, in passing, observed: "That knocking has always annoyed me."

The period bells tolled with the sterility of electronic music, and I was standing outside the Literature room with Andrea waiting for the rest of the class to catch up.

"Andrea," I said, "do you hear that – that odd sibilant sound coming from inside the room?"

There was a poster on the door – "Walk into the Poem's Room", it said. "Lit Night 2009". The sounds started, and stopped again.

"Yeah, what was that?" she wondered, knitting her brows.

A miasma of sleepiness pervaded the classroom once again while we struggled staying awake to discuss topic sentences.

During the history lecture, we scribbled notes furiously as the lecturer dictated a recap of the Cold War for us. While he proceeded with his erudition with the microphone left alone on the teacher's desk, there was a buzzing that came from the speakers.

"If this was still the Seventh Month, all this would be very eerie," the lecturer joked.

And then — thump, thump, thump — that frantic, purposeful knocking reverberated once more through the frozen air. Thump, thump, thump. It continued well into our KI lesson, where the projector failed us in the middle of a video screening. We tried to use an older projector, but the new one kept reviving, refused to die on us. Kill it, we thought, unplug the switch, cut the cords, turn off the power. It painted the screen with blue, and would not stop until we pasted a post-it over the lens.

But the thumping never stopped.