A noise in the night

It’s an hour after midnight. The town slumbers under clear skies, nothing stirring except the occasional possum or a couple of fruit bats squabbling in the trees. An elderly couple is fast asleep in their bed – and is suddenly jolted awake by an insistent beeping.

It took us (yes, it was us) a while to find the culprit. The sound ceased when we got out of bed, hearts racing, but it started again after a few minutes. It was the smoke alarm.

Here in Queensland it’s compulsory to have smoke alarms fitted in all the bedrooms in a house – and those alarms must be wired to each other so that if one alarm goes off with its mind-numbing scream, they all do. The thing is, while the electrically connected thing is good, it isn’t going to work if there’s a power failure, so each alarm also has a battery that kicks in when the power goes down. The sound we heard wasn’t the mind-numbing scream. It was much more polite, kind of saying ‘excuse me, there’s a problem’.

The battery was flat. Great. Thanks for letting us know, we’ll get a new one in the morning. We went back to bed, turned off the light and prepared for more sleep.

We got to that point where you’re drifting off into slumber – and the smoke alarm made its ‘excuse me, there’s a problem’ noise. Bloody hell. All the other alarms were silent so we took the battery out of the one furthest from our bedroom and put it in the one in ours. Problem solved.

Nup.

We were just about to drift off when it went ‘beep’. Just one beep loud enough to jerk us off the train to slumberland. But it was just one beep. Our brains could cancel out that noise. No, it couldn’t. It beeped every couple of minutes so the brain went into alert, listening for the next one. Ear plugs didn’t work. But eventually the smoke alarm monster gave up and went silent. It was about 3am.

Next morning Pete rang our friendly electrician. He agreed that these thing always seemed to fail at 2am. The single beeps that jerked us out of sleep was the alarm clearing and resetting itself. He also told us that on one memorable occasion the smoke alarm had triggered at his place in the middle of the night. The kids slept through it.

Later that day we bought a packet of the correct batteries. ‘They’ say you should replace the battery every year. But in this system the battery is just a backup device that sits there unused most of the time. Anyway, next time it happens, we’ll be prepared.

A couple of days later, having recovered from the trauma of the smoke alarm, we were treated to some spectacular pyrotechnics in the sky. After a lovely morning, in the afternoon ominous clouds built up in the east, a bit like a giant black mountain with a bad case of gastro. Rumbles issued forth, followed by stabs of lightning. And a few fat drops of rain. Like most cases of gastro, this went on for some time. And then this happened.

The giant cloud moved away, feeling much better. I’m grateful it didn’t happen at 2am. Needless to say, the sunset was awesome.

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