Wren
Thirty-six days. Wednesday.
By Wednesday the city had picked a side, and it wasn't mine.
"'Can Producer Sam do the weather,'" Hector read out, on talkback, at ten past twelve, in his flat voice. "'Can Producer Sam do the travel. Can Producer Sam read out the bin collections, I find him very calming.'" He scrolled. "'Wren, love, you're great, but let the lad talk.'"
"Who sent that one?"
"Your Auntie Jean."
"I haven't got an Auntie Jean."
"Somebody's Auntie Jean," Hector said. "She's got your back up, whoever she is."
Four nights. That's all it had taken. Four nights of a man from Reading sitting in my guest chair with the stuffing coming out, saying things in a voice like a bank statement, and Scarholme had fallen for him the way Scarholme falls for anything that turns up in January and looks cold. He'd audited a biscuit tin. He'd said "I'm not good on air" on air, twice. Last night he'd described the hum in Studio B as "the building quietly wanting to be a carpet warehouse again", and a woman in Seaton had rung in to say she'd laughed so much her teeth came out.
He'd also brought my mam's plate back. Washed. Dried. With a note on it, folded in half, in handwriting so neat it looked typed: Thank you. The gravy was excellent. Sam.
"You can't say that to her," I said. "You can't put that in writing. My dad'll have it framed. He'll put it up in the van."
"It was excellent."
"It was granules."
"Then the granules were excellent." He put a mug down on the desk next to mine. A new one, white, with nothing on it. "And I've bought my own. So you can stop giving me the chipped one."
I took it into the kitchen during the first record and put it at the very back of the cupboard, behind the guest mugs, behind the mugs for guests we like, behind a vase from a Valentine's special in two thousand and nineteen. Then I brought him the chipped one. He looked at it. He drank round the chip. He didn't say a word.
That was Wednesday. That was before midnight, even. He was winning already.
So I did what you do. I made it a fight.
"Good morning, Scarholme," I said. "It's Wednesday. It's twelve minutes past midnight. And tonight, by popular demand, which I resent, it's Wren versus the Man from Leeds."
Sam, in the guest chair, said into the guest mic, "I'm from Reading."
"He's from Leeds."
"I work in Leeds. I'm from Reading."
"Nobody's from Reading, sunshine. Reading's a place people pass through on their way to being disappointed somewhere else."
That got a laugh out of Hector, which is a rare and terrible sound, like a drain clearing. I'd won the first round. I could feel it.
"Here's the game," I said. "You text in. You text Wren, or you text Sam, and you tell us who's winning. Hector counts. At two o'clock, whoever's got fewer has to do a forfeit, live, on air, no backing out."
"What's the forfeit?" Sam said.
"If you lose," I said, "you eat the pink wafer."
There was a silence in the booth. The pink wafer was still in the biscuit tin. Nobody had touched it since Friday. It had become, in five days, a local landmark. People had texted in asking after its health.
"And if you lose?" Sam said.
I hadn't thought about that. I hadn't thought I'd lose.
"Texts," Hector said on talkback. "Already. Line's going."
"Hector, sunshine," I said, "what do they want me to do if I lose?"
He scrolled. He scrolled for a long time. He looked at me over the top of the screen.
"Sing," he said.
Round one was Words.
It was my idea. It was meant to destroy him. I'd say a Scarholme word, he'd say what it meant, and the whole city would hear a man from Reading drown in our language in real time.
"Clarty," I said.
Sam thought about it. He has a way of thinking on air that is completely silent, and then just as you go to fill the gap, he speaks.
"A small pastry," he said. "With raisins. You'd have one with a cup of tea, in Whitby."
"It means muddy."
"That's a shame. It sounded nice."
"Bairn."
"A child. I know that one. Everybody here has one, or is one, or is looking for one in a cupboard."
"Hinny."
He frowned. "A sort of mule."
"It means love. It means sweetheart. It's what your nana calls you."
"Then why," Sam said, very reasonably, "is it also a sort of mule?"
"It's not a sort of mule."
"Look it up."
Hector looked it up. Through the glass he turned his screen round. There was a picture of a mule. Some sort of mule. Half horse, half donkey, the other way round to the usual. It looked like it had been told something upsetting about its parents.
The texts went mad. Hector didn't even read them out. He just held up both hands with his fingers spread, and then did it again, and then pointed at Sam.
"Howay," I said, which isn't a round, it's a word you say when you've lost one.
"That's a football team," Sam said.
It isn't. It's not even close. And it didn't matter, because the city was laughing, and I've done this ten years, and I know the sound the phones make when the laughing isn't at you but it isn't for you either.
At one o'clock we stopped for Find Her, because you have to, because Ruth checks.
Sam had made what he called the evidence board. It was a sheet of paper. He read it out on air like the football results, and I'll admit it was funny, because he read everything in exactly the same voice, whether it was good news or Kevin.
"Sightings of a woman in a red coat, since Monday: sixty-one," he said. "Sightings of a woman in a red coat who turned out to be a post box: four. Claimants: fourteen. Claimants called Kevin: one, three times. Theories that he's a ghost: nine. Theories that he's a ghost, sent in by the same woman in Saltby: nine." He turned the paper over. "Things we actually know. He rings on Thursdays. He talks about the light. He's never once said where he is." He put the paper down. "That's the board."
"That's a terrible board."
"It's an honest board."
"Scarholme," I said, "if you know anything, anything at all, ring in and save this man from his own stationery."
Line four lit. A woman who was sure, absolutely sure, that she'd seen an old man in a flat cap buying a single tea bag in the Co-op on Harbour Road at midnight on a Wednesday, and who wanted to know whether that might be relevant. Sam, very gravely, added it to the board. Line five: a lad who wanted to know if Producer Sam had a girlfriend, for his mam. Sam did not add that to the board.
Round two was Quiet, which was his idea, and which he said was a test of professional skill.
"Thirty seconds," he said. "Neither of us says anything. First one to speak loses the round."
"That's silence. On the radio."
"That's a skill."
"That's thirty seconds of nothing on the radio. That's against everything I believe in."
"Then it'll be a short round," said Sam, and folded his hands, and went silent.
I lasted nine seconds. Hector timed it. Then I said, "This is ridiculous," and Sam said, very quietly into the mic, "And she's gone," like a man commentating on a horse falling at the last.
The text line, Hector said later, briefly stopped working.
At five to two I was losing by thirty-one.
At two, Hector read it out with the solemnity of a returning officer. "Wren Archer, three hundred and eighty. Sam Ketley," and here he paused for longer than he needed to, the old ham, "four hundred and eleven."
I put my head down on the desk.
"Sing," the city said, by text, in about four hundred different spellings.
"I'll be fair," Sam said. "Wren, you don't have to—"
"I lost. I'll sing." I sat up. "I'm a woman of my word. I'm a terrible woman of my word."
"What are you going to sing?"
"I don't know. I don't know any songs. I play songs. I don't know them."
"You must know one."
And the thing is, I did. I knew exactly one, all the way through, every word, and I hadn't sung it in years, not out loud, not since I was small enough to be sung it.
"My nana had a song," I said.
Sam leaned back in the guest chair. He put his pen to his mouth. I knew he was about to be funny, and that it was going to be about me, and that it was going to work.
"Before she starts, Scarholme," he said into the guest mic, in the voice he uses for bin days, "I should warn you. I've heard her hum along to the travel. Wren doesn't sing in a key. She sings in the vicinity of one."
The phones lit.
"Thank you, Sam," I said. "That's very helpful. You'll be pleased to know my mam agrees with you. My mam says I sing like a gull with a grievance. So if you've got a dog, put it in another room. If you've got a baby, I'm sorry." I took my cans off, so I wouldn't have to hear myself, and put them round my neck. "This is the one my nana used to sing me. Nana made it up. She sang it to me when she babysat, which was a lot. I've never sung it for anyone. Don't tell her. She's dead, so you'd have to really try."
That came out wrong. It got a laugh in the booth, a small one, from Hector. I didn't stop for it.
I sang it.
I sang it badly. I started too high and had nowhere to go and the second line came out about two notes under where it should have been, and I laughed in the middle of it, which made it worse, and I kept going, because I'd said I would.
Silver boat on a silver sea, bring my bairn back home to me.
That's where he stopped. I didn't see it happen. I just noticed, on the third line, that there wasn't a heckle coming. There'd been one ready, I could see it in his face when I started, a corner of his mouth going. And then there wasn't. He'd put his pen down. He had his hand flat on his pad, and he was looking at the desk, like you look at the floor in church when you don't know the words.
Silver moon on the harbour wall, hush now, pet, the tide'll call.
Then it was done, and I was red to my ears, and there was nothing on the radio for a second but me breathing.
Then Hector said on talkback, quietly, "Texts," and that was all he said, because he couldn't keep up.
They doubled. Not the bet texts. All of them. By half past two, Hector said, we'd had more texts in one night than in the whole of December. People saying their nana had a song too. A lorry driver on the A-one who said he'd had to pull into a lay-by. And, over and over, the same question, from all over the city, which Hector read out at last in his flattest voice because it had come in forty times: "'Has Producer Sam died?'"
"Sam," I said, on air, not looking at him. "The city wants to know if you've died."
There was a pause. It was a long one, by his standards. I didn't count it. He would have.
"No," he said into the guest mic. "I'm fine. I was just. I was listening to the key."
"Which key was it?"
"I don't know yet," Sam said. "I'm still looking for it."
That got a laugh. Gaz rang in at a quarter past with the indicator going and said it was the most moving thing he'd heard since his cousin's wedding, "and I cried at that, Wren, I was in floods, I was absolutely incontinent," and then he said, "Gaz, rank two, over and out," and was gone.
I didn't look at Sam through any of it. I could feel him not looking at me. We had a whole hour of it. We did the rest of the show like two people carrying a wardrobe up some stairs, very polite, very careful, saying "to you" and "from you" and not once catching each other's eye over the top.
At three I did the sign-off. My levels were fine. He didn't wince.
The pips. The news. The red light off.
I sat with my cans round my neck and my phone face up on the desk and waited for it to buzz, like every night of my life, one minute past three, one word from my mam.
It didn't.
Three minutes past. Five past. Nothing.
She's slept, I thought. Ten years of this, and she's finally gone to bed and slept through, like a normal person, and not lain there waiting for me to get off the radio.
Sam was putting his coat on. He did it slowly, the way he does everything that isn't talking, one arm, then the other, then a little shrug to settle it. He had his laptop bag over his shoulder already. Then he looked at me, properly, for the first time since the second line.
"Can I have the raw audio?" he said. "The song. For the promo."
"Yes," I said, before he'd got to the end of promo.