Sam
Twenty-three days. Tuesday.
At fourteen minutes past nine on Tuesday morning I sent Wren a text I'd drafted four times. I know it was four because the launderette downstairs runs a twenty-two-minute cycle and I'd been through most of three.
Re last night. I'd like to keep work and the other thing separate. Strictly professional on shift. Apologies if that reads like a memo.
The dryers went round beneath me. When a sock catches the drum it knocks, once a revolution, like a very patient person at a door. I'd replayed the car park forty times since four, and the end was always the same: window, breath, a short surprised noise I'd made that I'd have paid good money to cut.
My phone went.
It reads like a memo. Agreed. Terms.
Then, a second later: One. Not in the booth. Two. Not on air. Three. Not in front of Hector.
Then: Four. Not in the goods lift.
Why the goods lift?
Dunno. Seemed likely.
I put the phone face down on the bed and looked at the ceiling, where there's a stain the shape of Norfolk, and said out loud, "Strictly professional," to see how it sounded. It sounded like a man asking a dryer to stop.
We shot the promo at eleven, with forklifts in the floor and the hum in Studio B sitting a shade low, as if the room had a cold.
The promo was twenty seconds, for the station's social pages. Find Her, Thursdays at one forty-one, the lights on Hector's board going up in a row, a voice saying ring in. It needed a picture. I framed it in a minute, the way you frame a thing you won't be watching: Hector's board in the foreground, his hands, Wren leaning in at the side, the wall behind. I'd spent the real time on the sound.
"I'm not being in it," Hector said. He'd arrived at ten, in a cardigan, with the face of a man who'd driven somewhere in the night and was now being asked to be cheerful about it.
"You don't have to be in it," I said. "Just your hands."
"My hands."
"On the board. When the lines light."
"They're nice hands," said Wren, from the other side of the desk, in a voice with no expression in it whatsoever. "Bev says."
Hector put his hands on the board. He looked at the lens as if it had asked for his passport. Behind him the whiteboard hung on its nail over his chair, with DAYS LEFT in red and the claimants in green. I'd asked Hector for three weeks to let me move it out of shot, and he'd never once let me.
I said, "Your car was in the car park at four."
"It's got a heater."
"The engine was on."
"That's how heaters work." Hector didn't look away from the lens. "I sat a bit. I do that. Nobody needs to write it on a pad."
Wren was suddenly very interested in the carpet.
"Lines," I said. "Light them."
He pressed six buttons. Six little amber lights went up in a row, and I held the phone steady with my eyes shut, listening for the click of the relays, which was the real shot.
At one o'clock Ruth rang. I took it on the fire stairs, which have a good acoustic and no witnesses.
"Nineteen thousand, darling," she said. "Nineteen! Lovely. Super. The pink wafer's trending."
"Is it."
"There's a woman in Hull who's knitted it. I'm going to be honest with you, because I'm very fond of you. Nineteen's not thirty. I love the energy. I love the hunt. But a hunt needs a quarry, and I need a body by week five."
"A body."
"A woman. A name. Somebody who'll cry on a sofa. Otherwise I've got eight episodes about a boy with a beanie complaining that he's been right all along, and I'll have to sign his."
"We're working on it."
"Of course you are. Super. And that lovely Ollie Brannigan emailed me this morning with some thoughts about the process. I won't read them to you. I've a very low tolerance for emails with the word genuinely in." There was a pause, with her air conditioning in it. "Which brings me to my other lovely bit of news. We signed this morning."
"Signed."
"Manchester. Midnight to six, from the first of April. Nine o'clock, a pen, a very nice man. I did say I was minded."
"You said thirty thousand would make you think twice."
"And I've thought, twice. It's a lovely round number and it's a long way off." Her voice didn't change. "You'll keep that to yourself, of course. If a word gets out before the switch, Hector's terms are void, and I'd so hate that for him." She hung up.
I stood on the fire stairs with the phone. Two floors down a forklift reversed, beeping at nobody. I'd been carrying a maybe for fifteen days. It was a good deal heavier signed.
We lasted until twenty-five past one.
We were going down for chips, which was professional, because chips were a working lunch. She pulled the cage across. The lift thought about it. There's a sign inside the cage, MAXIMUM FOUR PERSONS OR ONE ROLL, and she tapped it with her finger and said, "Technically we're two persons and no roll, so we've room."
"We said not in the lift."
"We're not in the lift. The lift's got us in it."
"That's not a distinction."
"It's a very good distinction."
The cage went down past the brick. She was leaning on one wall and I on the other, and the whole thing's four feet square, so that's no distance.
"Forty seconds," I said.
"You time everything."
"It's forty seconds a floor. It's in the maintenance log. I'm saying that's about as long as—"
I don't remember how the sentence ended. For the record, she moved. She'll say I did, and we may both be right, and it turned out forty seconds is a lot longer than you'd think and a lot shorter than you'd like.
The lift stopped, and the cage went back with a bang, and Hector was standing in the hall with a mug.
"Fifty-one," he said.
"Hector—"
"It's forty a floor. You took fifty-one." He drank his tea. "I'm not in it. I'm just stating the timing." And he went back down the corridor to the reel room, very slowly, not looking round, like a man who's seen something at the zoo that he'll describe later to his wife.
Wren put both hands over her face.
"Term four," she said, through them.
"We never signed term four."
"We did. By text. You said 'agreed.'"
"I said 'it reads like a memo.'"
"That's agreed," said Wren, and it came out as a laugh.
Bev had asked us to come. Not in so many words; Bev doesn't ask, she puts a chip in front of you. So at ten at night we went to the Lamp and apologised, to a café full of teenagers filming the counter like candles at a vigil.
"They think I'll crack," Bev said. "Best takings since the Millennium. Eat your chips."
We'd got as far as the vinegar when the bell went, a flat brass note with a spring that had lost its nerve. A small man in a flat cap came in with a bag from Boots and a whistle at the top of every breath, and a girl of fifteen holding up a phone behind him.
"Bev Lumsden," he said, high and thin and from further up the coast. "It's Tony."
He'd come on the bus from Hartlepool because his granddaughter had played him the podcast. He'd never rung a radio in his life. He couldn't work his phone. They had thirty-three years to get through, and they started with the gas bill, which was two hundred and eleven pounds, or two hundred and forty with the reconnection, depending who you asked and how loudly. Then the apron.
"It were that colour," Tony said.
"It was a different apron, Tony," said Bev.
By the end a taxi driver had started to clap, and then the lad in the beanie, and nobody was filming, and Bev was standing in the middle of the Lamp with her tea towel over her face, laughing, or the other thing. Whatever she'd walked on in nineteen ninety-three, it wasn't a pier. She'd never left that counter.
I rang Dennis Archer from the pavement outside, with the sea behind me.
Bev was gone from the field. That left the other half of the question, which had sat with me since a car park five nights before: Dennis Archer at half past two in the morning with a set of keys in one hand and a sandwich in the other, saying he'd only popped in.
It was a clean idea. A man in a room can't be on a phone. You put him in Studio B at one forty-one, beside the desk, where Hector can see him and the whole city can hear him chew, and you wait. If the call comes, it isn't him. If it doesn't—
I didn't finish the if. Cut that.
Wren, inside, had bought Tony a tea and was asking him if he'd like a copy of the poster signed. Through the window she looked at me, and I held a thumb up as if I'd just thought of it.
"Dads After Midnight," I'd said to her, on the way out. "Thursday. A father's-day sort of segment. Dads ring in. A dad in the studio. Maybe yours."
"My dad?" she'd said, and her whole face had lit up. "Oh, he'd love that. He'd bring a sandwich. He'd bring me a sandwich and a sandwich for you, and he'd tell the city about the time he got locked in the engine room at Rotterdam."
"That's what I thought."
"You're lovely," said Wren. "You know that? When you think of a thing that's not for a number."
It was for a number. It was for one number, and it was in blue pen in the corner of a whiteboard, and I'd put it there to stop myself saying it out loud.
Dennis picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear the van around him: something with brass in it on the radio, and a mouth that was eating.
"Dennis, it's Sam. Sam Ketley."
"The lad with the biscuit."
"I'm sorry to ring so late."
"I'm night-fishing. Everybody's late." Chew, swallow. "What's up? Is she all right?"
"She's fine. I wanted to ask you something. We're doing a segment, Thursday, on the show. For dads. A dad in the studio, if you'd—"
"Yes," said Dennis.
"You don't want to think about it?"
"What's to think? I've sat in that van listening to her for ten years. I'd like to see where it comes out." The radio changed behind him, a song, a lorry driver. "Do I get a mic?"
"You get a chair. The mic's—stuck."
"I know it's stuck. I heard the council." A flask lid went round. "I'll do you bacon sandwiches. Do you want bacon? I'll do bacon. Lorna won't let me near the cooker, I'll do it on the van ring. Crispy or soft?"
"Soft."
"Good lad," said Dennis. "Never trust a man who wants it crispy."