Bass

Waiting for entry into a room belongs to a number of categories. These include boredom, irritability, patience, loss of patience and an enhanced sense of fidgeting. To many, the latter is the least evident and indeed least important of an otherwise unpleasant and self-inducingly irritating list. To the human brain, however, the ability to fidget for no reason besides keeping your motor senses running remains one of the most important aspects of survival and sanity it has equipped itself with, over otherwise unproductive millennia.

Amongst it's arsenal, is also the ability to focus on something almost entirely trivial and unimportant. If you have ever been told by someone that nothing is pointless, and everything has some use to somebody, think of the last time you were waiting for something, remember the thing you stared at for 20 minutes in that time, and politely - but with a due sense of one-upmanship - ask them for the use of that particular item. The brain has a habit of making absolutely anything pointless utterly fascinating in times of undue boredom and waiting. This usually follows the fidgeting, when limbs get tired, and is thereafter duly followed by an intense subconscious curiosity.

To anyone who has stood waiting for entry (specifically entry, waiting for exit usually induces high-level fidgeting, leading to paranoia, panic, hallucination and eventually the belief that one is the king of the pickled onions) for a particular length of time, different to everyone, known as the Personal Separation Constant, they will know the feeling of when your consciousness has been inactive for a suitable period of time, face-down in it's neurotic spaghetti and your subconscious decides to get up from the table, do whatever it pleases at that particular point, go off to a nearby night club, have a jolly good time and leave your consciousness to foot the bill. This takes the form of unwittingly touching a body part of someone in front of you, kicking someone (usually in a queue), singing he 16th line from a song you haven't heard for 3 years at full volume and/or gradually eating your face.

The time it takes for one to pass through these stages could take several hours, but in a collective environment, this could happen very rapidly...

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Waiting to go into a room, she started to flick pointlessly at the air. Initially, her body did it of it's own accord - as it might as well, if you're deliberately trying to make it do nothing - but relative to her current situation, it seemed and interesting path to be following and thus she continued the effort. Eventually, she came to the adequate conclusion that she was flicking in order to fool the surrounding people into thinking she was swatting flies with impeccable accuracy and ease.

She didn't.

At precisely the 67th stroke - a meaningless piece of trivia, which I merely add because I was in a similar state of vacancy at the time, and decided to pay abnormal quantities of attention to a stray smudge of blue nail-polish on her index finger - a perfect D hummed through the corridor.

Thoroughly perplexed, the occupants of the space invaded by this sound turned, in whatever direction or angle suitable, to stare intently at her. Some with confusion, some purely as something to do, and some giving that unmistakable 'How utterly dare you break that silence I was enjoying. I'll have to reactivate my brain now' sort of look, through coin-slot eyes. One of them was chewing their lip, though this is unimportant.

She, in a state of similar perplexion, darted her eyes, in a panicked attempt to do a mixture of things; divert attention away from herself, convince her audience that she was not to blame, and, possibly most importantly, in an attempt to work out what on earth that sound was. Unfortunately, being human in their infinite curiosity, her hand decided it was having a good time with this farce, and plucked the air again. This was somewhat further to her left than the previous one, and thus emanated a smooth G through the corridor.

(Just down the corridor, in room E303, the sound travelled, encountered it's own echo coming the other way, and cancelled each other out perfectly at the precise location of both of one Michael Smith's ears. As consequence, he was the only person in the room not to hear it, got bullied by the room's other occupants for this reason, and as a consequence, went on to help develop the induction loop hearing aid.)

Her consciousness, now awake with Bolognese on it's face, and an unusually long receipt on it's lap, had decided that it should stop whatever had started and, in a somewhat natural yet wholly unexplainable swing of the arm, brought her hand around to grab the air just in front of her left shoulder, as if slapping a horse. Horses, however hypothetical, don't take kindly to being slapped, and as a consequence stop whatever it is they were doing sharpish; in this case, the note stopped.

Now, to the open-minded, musically-eared or indeed mime-friendly people there, they could only describe her current position, in terms of the past activities, as that of holding an invisible double-bass.

She felt conspicuous.
She was.
The 73 eyes staring at here were a dead giveaway.
(A 24-year old Glaswegian's subconscious thought it saw something pink and edible through his left eye, and decided to check it out. He later missed his job interview due to food poisoning, and thus lost out on the chance to help develop the induction loop hearing aid.)

More importantly, however, they would be right.

The bass in question was a Jerome Thibouville Lamy built in 1949. It had lived a good life, with a brief stint in the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and played out it's retirement in an atmospheric jazz quintet known as 'The Kennelly-Heaviside Layer', despite all the band member's names being Dave. It met an unfortunate end at the top, and a rather nice rounded one at the bottom, but died shortly after realising this in an apartment fire in southern Jersey, after a mishap involving an elasticated eyepatch, 3 coy fish and an electrical heater (the latter, mostly). However, determined to live on, at the moment before it's spirit was to be flayed into the eternal Ether, it latched it's last link with the physical world - it's sound - to the first person it happened to come across.

This is all very well, but due to the unfortunate persistence of the laws of probability, it managed to latch onto someone with about as much musical experience as a moth born between 2 layers of loft insulation.

Nevertheless, after her mind had cleared a few things up, paid the bill, left, had a big row with it's subconscious and slept in a welcomely empty bed, whilst the subconscious slept on the sofa, and after a few people had attempted for themselves to make the sound by - and yes, it was as unusual as it reads - grappling wildly by her crotch, she settled down, got comfortable, and began to practise.

That night, she earned £3.45

Epilogue:
She had brief stint on morning news shows as a novelty, went out for a while with a man who could belch the national anthem, joined an alternative jazz band 'The Leibniz Notation', and played merrily before an accident at one of the gigs made her give it up, settle down in an advertising agency and wear an induction loop hearing aid.