Wren
Fourteen days. Thursday.
The Met Office gave Scarholme an amber warning at four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, and by midnight the North Sea had come to the studio door to see what the fuss was.
You couldn't hear it from Studio B. You could feel it. The whole building had a lean on, like a pub at closing time. The carpet-warehouse sign on the roof had come off a screw and was banging, three bars at a time, in a rhythm Hector said was nearly a waltz. At twenty to one the lights went down to half and came up again, and Hector said, "It's fine," in the voice of a man whose building is not fine.
"Good morning, Scarholme," I said. "It's Thursday. It's midnight. It's fourteen days to the end of the world, according to the whiteboard, and tonight, according to the Met Office, it might come early. I'm Wren, I'm perfectly fine, and this is Who's Out In It."
Every line lit.
A nurse, driving home from a double on the Seaton road with her hazards on, doing nineteen miles an hour behind a skip lorry. A man in a bus shelter on Harbour Road, with his hood up, shouting over the wind.
"Wren, I'm sat under your face."
"Sorry?"
"The poster. I've come in out of the rain and I'm sat right under it. You're in a red coat with your back to me, looking at the sea, which is rude, and you're the only thing in this shelter that's dry."
"It's laminated, sunshine."
"You look good wet," he said, and the phone went dead, because a bin lid had hit him.
A woman in Saltby on her roof, with her husband, holding a tarpaulin and a baby monitor, for reasons she'd explain later. I did the sea fret forecast, which tonight was a joke, because there was no fret in it, only wind, going sideways, with intent.
And at one forty-one, the board didn't light.
Nobody's looking at the clock at one forty-one on a Thursday, and everybody is. I'd a record on, a man with a very sad trumpet. The second hand went past the nine. Hector had his eyes shut.
One forty-two.
One forty-three.
"He'll be late," I said, to the guest mic. "It's a night for it."
"He missed Christmas," Sam said, from beside me. "And he came back."
It's a terrible thing to say, and he'd said it so softly. I looked at him. He'd stopped trying to look like Leeds around Tuesday, and in his shirtsleeves with a pencil behind his ear he looked like a man who'd been left in charge of a nursery.
"He's late tonight," Sam said. "That's all it is."
"Sam. If you're being nice to me, I'll cry on the desk, and Hector's put a bowl of crisps on it."
"I'm not being nice. I'm being accurate."
"It's the same," I said. "From you. It's the same." I put my hand on the fader and, for once in my life, I didn't turn it down.
"I'll tell you something, Scarholme. Then I'll play you a record." The sad trumpet fell away. "I'm frightened. That's all. I've never been frightened on this show. I've been annoyed, and sleepy, and once I was on air with a wasp. But he's out there somewhere on a night like this, and it's one forty-three, and I'd like him to ring." I breathed. "That's all I've got. That's the lot. I've not got a joke."
"That's the best thing you've ever said," Hector said, on talkback.
One fifty-eight. Nothing from Vi.
Two o'clock.
"It's Vi," I said. "She'd ring in if the sea took the building. She'd ring in to tell it off."
"I know," Hector said, and put his hand flat against the glass, all five fingers spread, which is not a signal I'd ever seen, and I think was just a hand.
At one minute past two the board lit.
Hector didn't check it. He put him through. I faded the record, and under it, the second it opened, came the sea.
For three years the sea on that line has been a soft wide hiss. This wasn't that. This was a bass note, something huge and slow being dragged across a floor in another room, and over it a wind with a lot of teeth in it, going round something hollow.
"Thursday again, pet," said the Lighthouse Man.
I said, "Hello, you." My voice came out about a third of its size.
The pause went on longer than it ever had. The sea came and went and came, and beside me Sam breathed out.
"Gale's been at it since teatime," the Lighthouse Man said. "Bent the aerial." Pause. "Lamp's steady, mind. Steady as a rock." Something being set down on metal. "Kettle's on the stove top, wind keeps blowing the ring out. Daft." A long breath. The boom of something enormous hitting a wall. "Hope you're in tonight."
And the clunk.
"I'll tell you what," I said, to the whole city. "He's all right, Scarholme. He's only complaining about the kettle."
Hector put his head down on the board. Sam had his eyes shut. When he opened them they were wet, and I didn't say a word. I looked at the desk, where there was a bowl of crisps, and a pencil, and my own hand, shaking.
Vi rang at twenty past two.
Hector didn't hold up two fingers. He held up a single one, slowly, as if it was a thing in a museum.
"Vi," I said. "Vi from the Headland. You're late."
"Lines were down on the Headland, pet," Vi said, on air. She sounded like she always does, upright, finished, with a full stop at the end like a nail. But there was a roughness in it, a breath under the sentences. "I've been without a telephone since teatime. It has just come back. I thought I'd see if anybody had been foolish enough in my absence."
"Did you hear him?"
"I heard him."
"He's all right. He's got the lamp on, he's had trouble with a kettle—"
"I have heard him," said Vi. "You've sent half of Scarholme out in a gale looking for an old man. Nurses on the Seaton road. A man in a bus shelter with a poster. You are an irresponsible woman."
"It's called a segment."
"It's called a liability," said Vi. "Stay in tonight. Don't be daft." The mantel clock behind her went on, slow and steady. "Are you listening to me, Wren?"
"I'm listening."
"Good," said Vi, and was gone.
Gaz rang at twenty to three, his indicator going every other tick, like a man at a bad funeral. "Wren, it's biblical down the Quay. The rank's under two foot of water. It's like Noah's Ark, only nobody's done the two-by-twos." Tick. "I've had a fare wants the North Pier. Lad in a suit. I said, mate, it's a gale. He said, I've come for the atmosphere." Tick, tick. "I said, you'll get plenty, it's very inconsiderate out. Fourteen days to go, Wren, I've got it on me dashboard. Gaz, rank two, over and out."
I put a record on. I had hiccups. It's the kind of laugh you only get on the night you thought you'd not.
At five to three, on the sign-off, I did something I shouldn't.
"That's us," I said. "Thanks for staying up. Thanks to everyone who was out in it. Thanks to Hector, who held the building. To Sam, who did the crisps." The meters went up. I run hot. "And I'll tell you, because I'd not sleep otherwise: I'm going to have a drive down the front. I'm going to look in the phone boxes on the prom. Just to see. Because if somebody's out in this in a flat cap with a pocketful of coppers, I'd like to know. Go to bed, Scarholme. Ring her in the morning."
The pips. The news. The red light off.
"No," said Sam.
"I'm not asking."
"Wren, there's an amber warning."
"Amber's not red. They shut the pier on red."
"There's a wind gusting at seventy miles an hour. There's a surge on the tide at three. There are a hundred and one ways of dying on a promenade and I've just thought of a hundred." He had his coat on already. "For the minutes, I'm against it."
"Minuted."
"I'm coming with you."
"You hate the sea."
"I've a lot of opinions about it," said Sam. "I don't see why it should have them all to itself."
My mam's text came as I got in the car. Alive? Three minutes late, by the dashboard, and I'd never been so glad to see it. I thumbed her a thumbs-up at a red light that didn't need to exist, with the wipers going like a man fighting wasps.
The first box was on the prom by the bandstand, with a seagull sat inside it like a landlord. The second, a quarter of a mile on, had two people of about seventeen steamed up to the glass who weren't speaking to us at all.
"Sorry," I said. "Wrong box."
"Your poster's on that shelter," said the girl, through the crack of the door. "You've got your back to us."
Sam, in the passenger seat with his hands on his knees and his eyes shut, said, in a very reasonable voice, "Three things. One, spray. Two, the rogue wave. Three, being on a pier."
"We're not going on the pier."
"You said you'd do the prom."
"I said the prom first."
The road runs north along the sea wall and ends at a gate, and the gate's the North Pier. There was a sign. PIER OPEN. CAUTION: HIGH SEAS. It was banging on its post.
"It's the last one," I said.
"It's a postcard." He didn't open his eyes. "It's the red box on the postcard. Nobody rings from a postcard."
"It's the last one."
"I could be on the A-one by now, you were going to say."
"I was," I said. "I could. Dry. With a heated seat, and a man in a booth called Barry who never once tested my family." I put the handbrake on. "I'm going to look in the box."
I thought he'd argue. He's very good at it, he has a list. What he did was open his eyes, and look at the sea, in the big gulping dark beyond the rail, and I saw him make up his mind. He got out of the car first.
A pier in a gale is six hundred yards of wet stone with the whole North Sea trying to get in at the sides. The wind came at us flat, with water in it, and you couldn't hear a thing you said, so you didn't. I had a torch. Sam had the cuff of my coat, like a boy being walked to a school gate.
Halfway along, a red shape came up out of the dark. The box.
I'd stood at it a fortnight ago, in daylight, in a coat that wasn't mine, with a man lying flat on the boards behind me to avoid looking at the water. A little red room with a crown on top, standing in a storm and not minding.
The door's heavy. It's got a spring, and it fought me, and Sam put his shoulder next to mine and it gave. Inside was dim and smelt of old pennies and coats. A shelf. A black steel phone with its cord in a silver plait.
I'd never picked it up.
I lifted the receiver. It was cold as a stone. Against my ear, a dial tone, long and low and perfectly ordinary.
"Hello, you," I said.
I don't know why. I said it to a dial tone, in a box, on a pier, at twenty past three, in a gale, like a woman talking to a dog. Sam was behind me in the doorway and he'd gone absolutely still. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the phone.
"There's nobody here," I said. "I knew he wouldn't be. It's a stupid—"
I didn't hear it come. You don't hear a wave like that. It's a hush in the middle of the noise, and Sam shouted my name, sharp, and then the whole sea came over the rail.
It hit me like a bus made of water, from the side. It knocked the phone out of my hand. It knocked me, flat, onto the boards, and then it started to take me back with it, along the stone, towards the gap in the rail, with its hand round my ankle like it had been waiting.
I've heard Sam count a silence, and measure a hum, and list the ways a thing can go wrong. I'd never heard him be quick.
He had me by the hood. He had me by the hood of my yellow mac with both hands, and he'd braced a foot against the box, and he dragged me backwards across the wet like a sack of coal. I hit the box with my shoulder. He hit the rail with his ribs, with a noise I'll not forget, and held on.
Then the water was gone, pouring out through the gaps in the stone, and it was quiet for a moment, as if the sea had said its piece.
"Wren," Sam said. He'd got me by the front now, both hands in my coat. He was lying on his side on the pier in a puddle with his face six inches from mine, soaked to the bone. "Wren. Say something."
"Hello, you," I said.
He laughed. It cracked in the middle. He put his forehead on mine, and we lay there on the North Pier in the dark with the sea still coming at the stone, and I couldn't stop laughing, and neither could he.
He shook, all the way home, like a dog after a bath, and he never once mentioned the sea.
My flat's over the dentist's on Alma Road, and the dentist thinks I'm a nurse. I put him in the bathroom with a towel and my dressing gown, the pink one, with the ducks, and I heard him in there say a short word, in a clear voice, to a mirror.
I was in the kitchen, in a towel of my own, making tea I didn't want, when his phone went off on the counter, buzzing itself round in a circle. Ten to four. He came out in the dressing gown with his hair on end, picked it up, looked at the number, and went a funny colour.
"Vi?" he said.
I turned round with the kettle in my hand.
"It's ten to four," said Sam. "Yes. I— Yes. Hector. I see." He listened. I could hear the shape of her down the line, tiny and distinct. "Yes. She's home. She's in the kitchen. She's fine. She's a bit—she's wet." He listened. "I will. I'll tell her."
He put the phone down.
"That was Vi," he said.
"I gathered."
"Hector gave her my number. She wanted to know if you'd got home."
"Vi doesn't ring," I said. "Vi issues warnings."
"She said, 'Is she home? Good.' And then she hung up."
"Good?"
"Good."
I put the kettle down. I leaned on the counter and laughed, and it wasn't the kind that comes out wrong.
"Strictly professional," Sam said.
"Term four's the goods lift."
"I'm in your dressing gown."
"It's got ducks on."
"It's got a duck on each pocket," said Sam, with dignity.
I took the tea out of his hand and put it down.
I shut the door.
In the morning, which was the afternoon, his shirt was on the radiator in the front room, hung out to dry like a flag of surrender, with the sleeves still wet. I stood in the doorway in his coat, which smelt of sea and carpet glue, and I could hear him in the kitchen not knowing where anything was. The dressing gown had slipped. Across his ribs, left side, from the armpit to the hip, ran a long straight bruise, purple going yellow at the edges, as even as a pencil line. The exact shape of a rail.
"That's going to be a good one," I said.
"It's very straight." He'd gone pink to the ears. "I'd call it craftsmanship."
I put my hand flat on it. Gently. He stopped breathing altogether.
There was a text from Coastline One-oh-Two on my phone, face down on the table, waiting for an answer. It'd been there since Saturday. Neither of us looked at it.
"Tea?" said Sam.
"Please," I said.