Wren
Twenty-four days. Monday.
The dinner ladies of St Hild's Primary had put me up over the potato peeler.
Laminated. Big. Jackie's husband has a laminator and a grudge against the council, and between them the school has a lot of very durable notices. There I was, in a red duffel coat, at a stone rail, with the sea doing something grey behind me and the little white lighthouse sticking out of my head like a unicorn horn.
"That's not your best," said Jackie, from the custard, looking at me over the spoon. "I can't see your face."
"That's the point. I'm looking at the sea."
"You're looking at something." She stirred. "Mind, look at the shoulders. That's a lass who's laughing. You can tell from the back. That's a lass who's been laughed at in the right way."
Mam had said twelve o'clock, which in my family is a summons. The kitchen at St Hild's sounds like a ship being built: trays, steam, three hundred children being told to walk, and somewhere a woman's voice saying, "Not with your fingers, Callum, it's a pie."
My mam was at the hatch in her whites and her hairnet, serving. She didn't look round. She put a plate on the steel counter behind her without turning her head, the way you'd hand a spanner to a man under a car, and I took it. Shepherd's pie, peas, carrots in a little pool of their own regret.
"Eat that," she said. "You're grey."
"I'm not grey. I've just got up."
"That's what grey is."
I sat on a crate by the potato peeler, under myself, and ate. It was good. It's always good.
"So he took it, did he?" Jackie said. "The lad. The thin one."
"Sam."
"Sam," said Jackie, to the custard, in a voice like a girl in the playground.
"He's my producer."
"Is he producing a lot?"
"Jackie."
"I'm asking about the poster, Wren. I'm asking about the quality of the work." She'd stopped stirring. "Did he move you about?" This was the real question, and the whole kitchen knew it, and even Tasha, who's nineteen and does the pots and has never been known to say a word that wasn't "Miss, it's boiling," had turned her head. "For the shot. Did he put his hands on you?"
"He directed me."
The kitchen went up like a firework.
"With what?" said Jackie.
"Two fingers. He did it from the floor, with two fingers, like a man landing a plane. To get the light. He didn't even look at me, he was looking at a bit of the sky."
"Two fingers," said Jackie, and put the spoon down. "Right. Hands. What sort of hands?"
"I haven't got a view on his hands."
"Big or long?"
"What's the difference?"
"Big hands is a man who'll move a wardrobe," Jackie said. "Long hands is a man who'll play the piano and won't help you with the wardrobe. My first had long hands. I've still got the wardrobe." She picked the spoon up again, delighted. "He did the piano. On the radio. The little tune. Long." She looked at me with the pity of a woman who has been married twice and is very happy to be done.
"He's a colleague," I said. "He's from Reading."
"Lorna," said Jackie. "Lorna. She's got a long-hands lad."
"She's got a plate going cold," said my mam, to the hatch, and slid a tray of apple crumble out to a lad in a Spider-Man jumper. "Jackie. Custard. Tasha. Pots." And then, still facing away from me, "Your hair's a state."
"It's windy out."
"It's January."
"It's February, Mam."
"It's still a state."
That was as near as she came to the poster. She's got her back to it all day. She looks at the crumble.
"What're you doing Saturday, Lorna?" Jackie said. "Valentine's. Has Dennis got you anything?"
"Harvester," my mam said. "Eight o'clock. A table for two."
"Ooh."
"He booked in October."
"October!" said Jackie.
"He didn't want to be told no." My mam wiped her hands on her whites. "I'll have the salmon. He'll have the mixed grill and ask for brown sauce and they'll say they haven't got brown sauce, and he'll say, what sort of a restaurant, and he'll bring his own in his pocket." She shut her eyes for exactly one second. "He's done it four years."
"That's love, that is," said Jackie.
"That's a sachet," said my mam.
I laughed so hard I got a pea up my nose. When I'd finished, a foil parcel was on the crate beside me, still warm through the bottom.
"Shepherd's pie," Mam said. "For the thin one."
"He's not that thin."
"He's thin enough that you said it." She'd already turned back to the hatch. A queue of seven-year-olds was staring at me through it with enormous respect. "Next."
Monday night was Ring a Regular. You ring round the people who ring you. You find out how they are. It's mostly an excuse to check nobody's died, which in my audience is a reasonable thing to check.
"Our first regular tonight," I said, "needs no introduction, because she's already introduced herself to half of Scarholme with a tray of barms. She owns the Lamp Café on Fish Quay. She's been named on a podcast by a boy in a beanie. She's had journalists on her step. Bev. Hello, petal."
"Hello, petal," said Bev, down the line, like a woman who's been up since yesterday on purpose. It's husky. It sounds like sugar being poured slowly into a paper bag. "I've had a man with a ukulele on my step, Wren. He sang. I charged him for a bacon barm."
"Did he pay?"
"Eleven pound forty. He'd had the egg." She laughed before I could. Bev always gets there first. "I'm not her, you know. I want that said. I'm sixty-three, I've got a hip, and I've not been on a pier since the Silver Jubilee."
"We know, Bev."
"I'm just saying it to the ukulele." Pause. Kettle somewhere behind her. "Is Hector there?"
Through the glass, Hector did something with his shoulders I've seen him do once before, in twenty twenty-two, when the roof came in.
"Hector's engineering," I said.
"Hector," said Bev, "if you're listening. I've done you an egg on the side for Thursday. Like you like it. With the yolk not broke." Her voice went down and filled up. "I've seen the way you come in on a Saturday and sit at the end. Forty years you've been sat at the end. You've got lovely hands, you know."
"Thank you, Bev," said Hector, on talkback, on air, in a voice like a man being read his own will.
"Hands like a man that irons."
"I do iron."
"I know you do!" said Bev. "I can tell."
The phones lit. Sam, in the guest chair, had his hand over his mouth and his shoulders going. I looked at his hands. They were long. I looked at the desk instead.
By half past three I had the booth to myself.
I'd told Sam in the first record, in the voice of a woman who's never been less nervous, that I'd cut the Valentine's special on my own. Three hours for Saturday, the best of the love calls and a few of the texts, and a bit of him at the end, sixty seconds, because on Valentine's night you've got to give them the Lighthouse Man, you'd be lynched. Sam had said he'd be happy to help. I'd said I knew he would, and that I'd like to see if I could run a hunt without a man in a coat standing behind me.
He'd looked at me for a second. Then he'd said, "Okay," and, "Go home when you're done," and gone out into the corridor, and I'd heard the goods lift start its long fall down the shaft.
Hector had said goodnight at half past three, put three till six over to the Leeds relay, which he does on the odd night he goes early and never likes, and gone down in the lift after him. The reel room was shut. I had Studio B, the old playout machine, and a cup of tea that had gone cold and was now just a brown opinion.
I'd taken the call off the logger, the beige box behind the lift that Sam found in week two. Last Thursday, one forty-one, the full two minutes forty. I only wanted the back end: the weather bit, the last line, and the pause before the door shuts. Sam had shown me how to find the edges. You put your cursor in the quiet and you look at the shape. I put mine at the end of the last word and there it was, a little flat meadow of grey where the pause lives, four seconds, and then the blunt spike where the key comes down and the line drops.
And in the meadow, something moved.
I'd have missed it. I've listened to the pause on a hundred Thursdays and it's always been the sea getting into the wires. But the playout machine squashes everything: it makes all the quiet things loud and the loud things the same. Someone with Sam's ears would have heard what was in it live. I just had a smudge of green on a screen that didn't look like the rest of the hiss. So I pulled the fader on the clip up. And up. Past where you're supposed to.
Under the hiss, three voices. A lad and two lasses, singing flat out, cheerful as a mattress advert, at a distance, through a wall: The Night Watch, the Night Watch, we're up so you don't have to be.
Four bars. Then the clunk.
I sat there with my hand on the mouse.
I know that jingle. I'd know it in a coma. It's from The Night Watch, the show on this station in the nineties, long before anyone thought of me; Hector kept the reel, and in my first week he played it to me, in the reel room, with his eyes shut, to show me what we'd come from. He sang the baritone at the Christmas do in twenty seventeen, and I've never fully got over it. It's three strangers telling you to go to sleep. You don't forget that.
It was a quarter to four in the morning. I played it again. I played it a third time with the fader down to nothing and the cans on, to see if I'd made it up.
I hadn't.
Who's got the Night Watch reel? Hector's got the reel. Hector's the only person left in Scarholme who has ever so much as touched that reel. Hector puts the Lighthouse Man through, always, never checks the board, never makes him wait. And in week one a man with a lanyard put it in writing that Hector would be cut to two nights.
I don't think Hector's the Lighthouse Man. I'd swear to it. I've known him ten years; he can't do a voice, he can't do a face. I think Hector is the one person in Scarholme who would know what that sound was, and I think that isn't the same thing, and I know exactly how it would look on an overnights paper with a pie chart.
So I did what you shouldn't. I cut the tail. I ended the sixty seconds on his last words, a slow fade, nothing after it. No pause, no jingle, no door. I saved it. I closed the logger file. I put the cold tea in the sink.
If you're listening and you're me: don't.
He was in the car park.
Of course he was. Since the Saturday of the frost on my windscreen, Sam Ketley has waited for me every night until I'm in my car and gone, and he pretends it's an accident, and I pretend I haven't noticed. He was at the far end by the little wall, with the sea coming over it in the dark, in a car with the engine off and the windows steamed in a ring.
I went and knocked on the glass. He wound it down.
"I wasn't waiting," he said.
"You've been sat there forty minutes."
"I was listening to the sea. From a safe distance."
"You hate the sea."
"I'm having a relationship with it."
I held my phone through the window. "Listen. Sixty seconds. The end bit. Tell me it's good, or tell me where it's bad, and then go home."
He listened with his eyes shut, with the phone against his ear like a seashell. He goes completely still when he listens. It's like watching someone read a letter from far away.
"It's good," he said. "It's clean. You've faded out on 'wrap up warm.'"
"That's where it ends."
"It doesn't. It ends on the clunk." He opened his eyes. "You've taken the clunk off."
"It's Valentine's."
"That's the bit people cry at."
"Then they can cry at not having it. It's called an absence, sunshine. Nobody wants a door shutting on Valentine's." I took the phone back. "It's my cut. My show. Term two."
"Term two," he agreed. He was looking at me too carefully, with the gaze he gives a waveform when it's too straight. I'd never lied to him before. It turns out I'm a terrible liar, and I'd gone red to the ears.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing," Sam said. "There's a join. Right at the end. It's a very clean join."
"I'm good at joins."
"You are," he said. And then, to the steering wheel, as if reading it off, "Wren, I've been sat here forty minutes trying to think of a reason to still be here, and the only one I've got is that I didn't want to go home."
I don't know which of us moved. I'll say that on oath. His window was down and I was bent in it and he turned his head, and it was cold and a bit damp and absolutely nothing like I'd planned, and we were both so surprised that for about four seconds neither of us breathed out.
"You kissed me," I said, afterwards.
"You leaned."
"I leaned into the window to hear you. You leaned into my mouth."
"You were in my window."
"It's a public car park!"
"I'm not disputing the car park. I'm disputing the leaning."
"Three weeks," I said, "I've known you three weeks, and you want to do forensics on this—"
I stopped, because I'd looked over his shoulder.
Hector's car was still in the car park. Same space as at midnight, nose to the wall. It's a long old Rover the colour of gravy. He'd said goodnight at half past three. He'd gone down in the lift.
It was four in the morning, and its lights were off and its engine was running, a thin grey breath going up into the cold, and there was a man behind the wheel not going anywhere.