Sam
Twenty days. Friday.
Ruth rang at nine on Friday morning, while I was standing in the launderette holding a stranger's duvet cover that had come out of the wrong machine.
"Darling. The regulator rang."
"Which regulator?"
"The one with the hat. A very nice woman called Gwen. She's had a complaint. It says Thursday's call used the words of an internal Northshore document, to wit your lovely booklet, and that the Christmas call was of doubtful origin, and that we're staging the whole mystery to pump the figures." A cup went down on a glass desk. "It's signed Oliver Brannigan. Underneath he's put genuinely concerned."
"It's a hoax claim."
"It's a very well-written hoax claim. He's used bullet points. I haven't had bullet points from Legal since the Christmas party. I need the Christmas call by Monday, for Gwen. Hector says it's dropped off the logger."
"It went off last Thursday. Forty-two days."
"Then where is it?"
I looked at the duvet cover. It had rockets on it. "I'll find it."
"You always do," said Ruth, and rang off.
Nineteen thousand listeners, against thirty, with twenty days left. It was a target built to be missed, on a show that was already signed away, and I was the only man in the launderette who knew it.
It took eleven minutes, because a boy who records everything publishes everything. Nightjar has a page called The Complete Lighthouse, every call since the second of March twenty twenty-three, each with a timestamp and a little graphic of a lamp. Christmas sat between two Thursdays labelled No sign and Nothing yet. Ollie had given it four lamps out of five and written underneath: The only time he said her name. Heartbreaking. Genuinely. Underneath that, a woman called Denise had asked whether anyone knew a good plumber.
I listened in my room with the cans on and the dryers going round below, and I did what I'd done on the thirtieth of January and not done since, which was listen to the room.
Down the cans, the old voice: "Merry Christmas, Wren. Still no sign."
There's no sea in it. I'd noticed that at the time, put it in a drawer, and forgotten the drawer. Now I pulled it out and turned the gain up. A radiator ticking as it cooled. A small fan on its lowest setting, with a bearing that wanted oil. A chair, shifted. A phone set down on a desk, not held, with the slight boom a mouthpiece gets against wood.
And, before the first word, a throat-clear.
A quarter of a second. I played it nine times. A small dry cough, the sort a man does before a speech he doesn't want to give. I'd heard it before, on my second night in the building, through a pane of glass, a second before the shipping forecast.
Wren had said so on air, to the city. Hector clears his throat before the shipping forecast. She'd meant it as a joke.
I took the cans off. Downstairs, a woman was folding someone else's duvet.
Hector got to Studio B at eleven that night, as he always does, with his flask and his bag. He found me already in the chair.
"You're in my seat."
"I'm in the guest chair."
"You're in the guest chair with my speakers on." He put his bag down. He's sixty-six. He doesn't walk, he arrives. "Go on."
I'd brought two files, on a stick. I put in the Christmas call, and let it play out of the board's big speakers, in the empty booth, at a decent level: Merry Christmas, Wren. Then I played Thursday's. Wind. The hollow thing. Sea. Come spring they're automating us.
"The first has no sea in it," I said. "A desk phone. A radiator. A fan with a bad bearing, which I think is that one." I nodded through the wall at the back office, where a little fan sat in its dust. "And before the first word, a throat-clear."
Hector took his glasses off and held them.
"You can't hold that against me," he said. "I've done it thirty-seven years. It's a tic. It's practically a fixture."
"I'm not holding it against you. I'm asking."
For a long time there was nothing in Studio B but the hum. Then his breath changed. I'd heard a breath change like that once, on the phone to my mother, when she said she'd sold the house.
"I was stood in the corridor," Hector said.
He put his hands on the board, as if he needed something to take his weight.
"Christmas night. A month since her nana. She was on air on her own, because who else is daft enough. One forty-one, and the board didn't light. She said, 'He's late.' Then she said, 'He'll be along,' and then she said it a third time and it wasn't about him." He breathed. "I went in the back office. There's an extension. I put the phone on the desk and did it in a voice, and put myself through."
"What voice?"
"I was aiming for gravel."
"What did you get?"
"A bishop, mainly." He looked at the board. "Eleven seconds. I've broadcast a wedding with the wrong bride. This was worse."
"Hector—"
"And I'll tell you what's worse than that. It worked." He put the glasses on, with some difficulty. "It's the thing that got her through. She still talks about it."
I'd had a lecture ready. I'd had it in the car, and in the launderette, and on the fire stairs. It had a number in it. There wasn't any use for it now.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you'd have written it down."
He was right. I write down what I hear.
"Is there anything else?" I said. "That you haven't said."
"Come in the reel room," said Hector.
The reel room's the size of a pantry. It smells of dust and old tape and the inside of a coat. There's a shelf along each wall, floor to ceiling, and on every shelf, in rows, in plain white cases, are cassettes. Each with a spine, and on every spine, in blue biro in a small neat hand, a word.
SEA FRET. SEA FRET. SEA FRET. CLEAR AND COLD. GALE. MILD AND DAMP. DRIZZLE (LIGHT). DRIZZLE (HEAVY). SEA FRET, WITH FOGHORN. DRIZZLE (PERSONAL). SEA FRET, WITH SEAGULLS ARGUING.
"Every Thursday," Hector said. "Since the second of March twenty twenty-three. Off air, the whole call, the way the lad does. I label them by what it was doing outside. It's easier than dates." He ran a finger along. "There's no Christmas. I've put an empty case."
A hundred and fifty-odd tapes in a man's careful hand. I thought, with a clearness I didn't enjoy, of an overnights paper, and a pie chart, and the line on page four.
"You've kept them all," I said.
"I keep everything," said Hector. "It's the only thing I'm good at."
"Hector. I'm sorry about the plan." It was the smaller half of what I owed him.
"Not yet," he said. "There's a long way to go with that."
She came in at twenty to twelve, in the old yellow mac, with a face like a closed door. She stopped in the reel room doorway and looked at the tapes, at Hector, at me. I don't know what she'd come to say. I know that she didn't say it.
"I've something to tell you both," she said instead. "I should've said it on Tuesday."
She put her phone on the board. She'd got the Thursday file up, from the fifth, from the logger, and I knew the one. She turned the volume up, and up, and after the last word she pressed play on the gap, and under the hiss, at the very bottom of it, three people started to sing.
The Night Watch, the Night Watch, we're up so you don't have to be.
Hector sat down.
He'd found the chair behind him without looking. He sat in the reel room with his hands in his lap, and listened to four bars of a song he'd known the way you know a front door, and when the last one finished he said, quite quietly, "That's the first mix. Before we changed the lass."
"I cut it out of my Valentine's," Wren said. "The whole tail. I thought it'd look like Hector. To somebody with a spreadsheet." She'd gone red.
"I said it was a very clean join," I said. "In the car park, on Tuesday. Nobody cuts a thing that clean who hasn't taken something out. I knew, and I let you go."
"So you can't be cross."
"I can. I'm working on how."
Hector said, from his chair, "I haven't played that to air since nineteen ninety-eight. I'm the only one left with the reel. Who's got my jingle?"
Neither of us could answer him.
"We'll find out," said Wren.
"I put him through," Hector said, to nobody. "I put him through every week and I never once listened to the gap."
I looked at her. She looked at the cassettes. Three people in a cupboard, each with a drawer locked, and two of us had just opened ours.
Mine stayed shut. The signed sale was in it, and the box, and the number, and a day in January when I walked out to the end of a pier and rang a kiosk that doesn't ring back.
"Level," I said.
"Level?"
"I put your father in a chair. You put Hector in a drawer. I move that we call it even." I could hear that it sounded like a motion at a parish meeting.
"That's a terrible thing to be even at," said Wren.
Hector did his apology at ten past one.
He'd insisted, in the corridor, with his arms folded. Wren cued him, sitting very straight. I stood behind the glass with my hand over my mouth like a man at a graveside, and Hector came on the talkback mic, where he has never once been asked to speak at length.
"Good morning," Hector said. "It's Hector. I'm the engineer. I'll be brief, because I've a lot to be brief about."
He cleared his throat.
"On Christmas night, a man rang this show and said Wren's name. In engineering that's called a fault. In plain terms, it was me. I rang from the back office, in a voice, because the real one didn't come. The voice has been described to me as a bishop." A pause, exactly the length of a held breath. "Wren. I'm sorry. It was a daft thing to do and I did it badly and I did it because I couldn't stand there and not. I've filled in an incident form. It's in triplicate. Nobody has asked for it. There's also a fan in that office with a bad bearing, and I've been meaning to oil it."
Nothing happened for four seconds. I counted. Then all six lines went at once, and in the booth Hector looked at his board as though it had bitten him, and Wren had to look at the ceiling.
"Hector," she said, into the mic. Her voice did the thing. "Hector, sunshine. I've told this city about that call for six weeks. I said it kept me alive on Christmas night." She had a grip on the desk as if it might leave. "I'd have liked it to be him. I'd have liked it to be him a lot. But it was someone in this building at one forty-one in the morning who couldn't bear to let me sit there. I'll take that. I'll take it any night."
She turned the fader down before the end of the sentence, which she does.
It was twenty to four, in the car park, with the sea coming over the wall like someone being told off in a library.
I was leaning on my car. I'd said I wasn't waiting. She came out in her yellow mac with her bag over her shoulder and walked straight up and stood in front of me, close, and said nothing for a while.
"I've been thinking," Wren said.
"Dangerous."
"About what you do. You catch people. It's your trade. You've caught my dad and you've caught Hector, and you've nearly caught the lad with the beanie, and you've caught me with a very clean join." She had her hands in the pockets of her mac. "I'm not saying don't. You're good at it. You hear things. I'm only saying."
"Saying what?"
"Next time you want to catch someone," Wren said, "catch me."
She didn't wait for it. She took her car keys out of her pocket, and held them up between us on one finger, a small bright flag, and walked away across the car park. I stood with my back against the car, and the sea at it again behind me, breathing on my neck.