Sam
Thirty-five days. Thursday.
On Thursday I decided to stop listening to what the Lighthouse Man said and start listening to where he said it.
Everyone else had been doing the first thing for three years. His words were weather, and a flask, and a light that was turning nice, and anybody could have written those. A room is different. A room can't help itself. Whatever's in it gets onto the recording, whether the person talking wants it there or not.
So at twenty to two I was in the guest chair wearing Hector's spare headphones, the good ones, which he keeps in a drawer under a tea towel and had handed over with the face of a man donating a kidney.
The drawer had stayed open a second too long. Under the tea towel was a window envelope from Leeds HR, opened, folded in thirds, with the word REDUNDANCY in the second line and a date at the top: the first of April. I looked at the date and not the rest. Ruth had said minded. Nobody dates a letter for a switch that hasn't happened unless they're the sort who like to be ready, and I'd met the sort. Hector shut the drawer with his knee.
"Don't touch the gain," he said, on talkback.
"I wasn't going to touch the gain."
"You were. I can see it in your hands."
I put my hands under my thighs. Wren, in the other chair, leaned to a dead mic and said, "He's sitting on them, Scarholme," purely for my benefit, and pulled a face at the ceiling. It was the first joke she'd made at me since Wednesday that didn't have a bet attached.
At one forty-one the board lit and Hector put him through without looking. I shut my eyes.
I'd listened to six of these in the car on the way up. What six teaches you is that the pause isn't empty. It has a floor. A wide soft hiss, like surf on a bad radio. Wind, but wind going across the lip of something, a hollow note, a bottle with someone blowing on it. And under all of it a hum so low I couldn't tell whether it was his or the building's.
"Thursday again, pet."
Slow. Gravel. Wren said, "Hello, you," soft, and he didn't say it back, and I counted the gap. Four seconds. Then: "Still no sign."
Another gap. The wind went across its bottle.
"Cold's got in me chest, pet."
And then he coughed.
It wasn't a clearing of the throat. It came up from a long way down and took its time, a wet, dragging, patient sound that went away from the phone and came back and went away again. When it finished he breathed for a bit. I could hear him do it. In. A catch. Out.
Beside me, Wren's hand went to her mouth.
"Wind's gone round east," the Lighthouse Man said. His voice had lost something at the bottom. "Kettle's been on four times. Never once got it hot." A pause. "Mind how you go home."
Then the clunk.
I'd been waiting for it with my eyes shut and my whole head tipped towards it like a dog hearing its name. Metal on metal, with a spring in it. A catch dropping. A heavy, settled sound.
"A receiver?" I said. Out loud, off mic, to nobody. Hector's head came round behind the glass.
"Handset on a cast-iron hook," he said, on talkback, flat, to me only. "Old boxes clunk." Then he turned his face away, because the line had gone and it was Thursday and he was not available.
Wren didn't make the speech.
In Studio B, when he goes, there's always a speech. Two minutes forty. Never answered a question. A joke about a fringe. This time her hand sat on the fader and didn't move it, and seven seconds of nothing went out live, which on commercial radio is a long cold swim. Hector didn't dump it. Nobody touched anything.
"That was him," Wren said at last. Small. "He's poorly."
She cleared her throat.
"Somebody get that man a lemon."
The city got him four hundred.
Not literally. But Hector had a list inside five minutes, and read it out in his fault-report voice. Lemon, a hundred and four. Honey, a hundred and nine, forty of them specifying a kind called manuka, which I gather is the Rolls-Royce. An onion in a sock, from a woman in Saltby, twice. A man in Seaton who said to put Vicks on the soles of his feet and a sock over it, and a second man in Seaton who said that was how his brother died, and which, Hector said, was not going to be read out.
At one fifty-eight, line two.
"A man with a chest like that," said Vi, on air, "wants a doctor. Not a radio station and a hundred and four lemons, pet."
"Vi, I—"
"And you." She meant me. I hadn't spoken. "The lad. If he wants to know what his listeners think of his programme, he can ask them. Headland Bowls Club. Friday, half past two. They'll all be there. Wipe your feet."
The line clicked.
"Did you just get summoned?" Wren said.
"I think I've been subpoenaed."
At ten past three, with Hector in the next room playing a record about a truck, I found the logger. It lives in a cupboard behind the lift, a beige box from two thousand and nine with a fan like a hairdryer. The law makes a station keep every hour it broadcasts for forty-two days, so I went back to Christmas night and scrubbed through Wren talking to nobody until she stopped being able to, and then a call. Six words, in a voice that sounded like his.
I listened for the sea. There wasn't any. No wind across a bottle. Just a small room with the door shut.
Christmas Day, I thought. Gale warning, probably. A man with a chest goes indoors to make a phone call. I wrote Christmas: no sea on my pad and underlined it, and filed it where I file the things I'm not ready for.
Wren's car was at a garage called Trev's with a noise in it she described as a goose, so I drove her home. Her flat was over a dentist's on Alma Road, ten minutes away, which I did in fourteen, because I drive the way I'd carry someone else's soup.
She had her shoes off and her knees up on the seat.
"He'll have a daughter in Australia," she said to the windscreen. "Rings her Sundays. She says, Dad, see a doctor. He says it's only a cold."
"It isn't only a cold."
She turned. "You heard it too."
"It started low. It had a bottom to it."
"Don't say that to be kind. Everyone says it's only a cold."
"I'm not being kind. I'm describing it."
She looked at me for a bit. The streetlights went across her face, one, two, three.
"I don't know what he looks like," she said, "and I know how he takes his tea. I've given him a whole bedsit. Armchair. Little gas fire. A photo of somebody on top of the telly. He's the nearest I've got to an uncle and I've never been in the same room as him, which is how my family works anyway."
I turned into Alma Road. I said, "He's got a whole city," which was true, and useless.
"Aye." She had her hand on the door. "A city's not the same as somebody with a flask." She got out. Then she bent and put her face back through the window. "Don't tell Hector I went quiet. He thinks it's his job to mind me."
"I didn't notice."
"You notice everything," Wren said. "It's your worst quality," and she went up the steps with her shoes in her hand.
On Friday I walked out on the North Pier, in daylight, to look at a telephone box.
I'd found it at five that morning. The county keeps a register of public kiosks, a spreadsheet last updated in two thousand and nineteen by somebody who'd clearly stopped caring around row thirty. Row nineteen: North Pier, Scarholme. K six, nineteen thirty-six. Grade Two listed. Number ending four four one seven.
The North Pier is six hundred yards of wet stone with the sea on both sides and a parapet you could step over without noticing. I'd arranged not to look at it for eight days. I parked at the root, under a sign that said PIER OPEN. TAKE CARE, and walked the middle, where it's highest, like a man crossing a ledge in a dream. The swell came in under me every eleven seconds, a long shoulder against stone.
It was halfway, on the harbour side, red as a postbox against the grey. Across the harbour mouth the Fish Quay was small and bright, and a café there had its lights on at eleven in the morning.
The door was heavy and swung back on itself like somebody changing their mind. Inside it smelt of cold iron and old pennies. A black push-button phone on the wall, and a card: Heritage kiosk. Minimum sixty pence. Incoming calls barred. I put in sixty pence and rang my own mobile, and watched it light in my hand. Then I rang the box from my mobile, and a woman told me, politely, that the number was unobtainable. I tried three more times. Nothing in the box rang. You could ring out. Nobody could ring in. A telephone you could only leave.
I shut the door and stood with my eyes closed, which is how I do rooms. Wind across the louvres: the hollow note, the bottle. Under the floor, the long drag and slap of the water. It was the room on the line. Not exactly. When I put the receiver back, the cast-iron cradle gave a lump of a thud that wasn't quite the sound. A cousin of the sound. A telephone line takes a cousin and squashes it into a few kilohertz and sends it out looking like a brother. I'd heard it done. I filed that too.
I should have rung her from inside the box. It was right there, sixty pence, a hand's length from the dial. I stood with my back against ninety years of listed ironwork and did the sum instead.
If I told Wren tonight, she'd be out here with a thermos by next Thursday. He'd stop ringing, or he'd turn out to be somebody in a flat cap, and a nice, strange story would be finished by Monday. Find Her is eight episodes or it's nothing. Ruth's text that morning had said thirteen thousand and change: seventeen to find in thirty-four days, and a man in a flat cap on Monday is one episode.
I told myself I was protecting an old man with a chest from a radio station. That's not true. Cut that. I was protecting a number. I'd told Wren thirty thousand would save her show, and I no longer knew what thirty thousand was worth. Ruth had called it a nice round number.
I walked back along the middle of the pier with my hands in my pockets and my eyes on the Lamp Café's window, and I didn't look down once.
The Headland Bowls and Social Club is a prefab hall with an indoor green the colour of a snooker table that's been through something, and a hatch for tea. At half past two on Friday there were thirty-one people in it, in cardigans, with the look of a jury.
Vi was behind a trestle table at the front with a clipboard. I'd heard her down a phone line seventeen times and never seen her. She was small and straight, with white hair set like something that had been done every Friday for forty years, and glasses on a chain. She looked at my shoes before she looked at my face.
"Sit," Vi said. "Frank, move your bag."
I played them the Find Her bed from my phone. The piano, the hiss, the single clock chime.
"Sounds like the end of a film where the dog dies," said a woman called Dorothy, who was knitting something with no apparent end.
"Too slow," said Frank.
"WHAT'S HE PLAYED?" shouted a man called Gerald.
"A piano, Gerald," said Vi.
"I DON'T LIKE IT."
"Noted."
Hands up for Wren: twenty-nine. Hands up for me: one, and Vi made a mark on her clipboard and said, "That was Gerald, and he thinks you're the weather."
Then Dorothy looked under the table. "Look at his shoes."
"I'd rather not," I said.
"Those are shoes for a funeral where nobody liked him," Dorothy said.
"Italian," said Frank, with contempt.
"Those are the shoes," said Vi, "of a man who's never stood on a green. If you set one foot on my rink in them I will have you arrested."
I put my feet under my chair. There was a long murmur of agreement. It was the most thorough review I'd ever had.
After, when the room was stacking chairs, she gave me a cup of tea without asking and stood by the urn with her clipboard against her chest.
"You're soft on her," Vi said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Wren. It's all over you. Like jam."
"I'm professionally invested in her figures."
"Professionally," Vi said, and wrote something down. I wanted very much to see what.
"Can I ask you something? Why do you ring every night?"
"Habit."
"And you said, on Tuesday. That she isn't coming. That they never do."
"I've been married," said Vi. "Forty-odd years. To a man who worked nights. Out on the water all hours. You learn to talk to a clock."
"Did he listen to the radio?"
"He listened to everything," Vi said, "and said nothing. Which is a gift in a husband and a cruelty in a man."
"Is he—"
"Fourteen years."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be," said Vi. "He was never in."
She turned the clipboard over so I couldn't read it, and told me to rinse my cup.
I drove down off the Headland sure, and I'm often sure. A widow, alone with a clock. A husband who was never in. A voice that said she isn't coming like a woman who'd looked up the answer and not liked it.
I told Wren at twenty to twelve that night, in the kitchen, while she filled the kettle for what everyone in the building still insisted on calling Saturday's show.
"I think it's Vi," I said.
She turned the tap off and looked at me.
"Vi," Wren said.
"The Headland. A husband who was never in. The way she talks to him."
"Vi would eat him," Wren said. "She'd have him with a bit of salt." She was laughing, properly, the good laugh, the one with no edge on it. "Sam. Sunshine. She'd have him for breakfast and send the plate back."
"It's a theory."
"It's a lovely theory. Put it on the board."
I put it on the board. I didn't tell her about the box. It sat in my coat pocket all night like a stone I'd picked up at a funeral, and when she gave me the green mug with the chip in the rim, I drank round it.