Wren
Ten days. Monday.
By midnight on Sunday, nine hundred people had rung a phone box, and not one of them had got an answer, which is the least surprising sentence I've ever said on the radio.
Hector told me at twenty to twelve. He slid a sheet under the glass, the way he does gale warnings, and it was a screenshot of a page I knew: a beanie, a bird, a title in lovely clean type. Nightjar, episode sixty-four. The Number.
"Twenty-two minutes," Hector said, through the talkback. "He's put it out at six. I've listened twice."
"What's the number?"
"Turn round," said Hector.
I turned round, in my chair, and looked through the glass at the wall of the engineer's room, over the back of Hector's head. The whiteboard hangs on its nail there, with the days left on it in red and the figures in green and the claimants in blue. I've looked at it four hundred times. I've never once read the corner.
It was a smudge. Down at the bottom, in the right-hand corner, in small neat figures that looked like they'd been done in secret.
Oh one six three two. Three oh four four one seven.
You'll know the last four. They're the four on Hector's screen every Thursday. PAYPHONE, and four four one seven.
"It's in our promo," said Hector. "Twenty seconds. My hands, and the board, and that behind it. The lad's paused it at second eleven. He's put a circle round it. He's a clever lad. It's a shame."
Sam was in the guest chair with his pencil stopped. I looked at him, and he looked at the whiteboard, and then at me, and he went the colour of a postcard.
"Good morning, Scarholme," I said, at midnight, in a voice like the last biscuit in a tin. "It's Monday. It's twelve o'clock. And I'm told some of you have been ringing a telephone."
The phones lit. Hector held up a text and read it out in the flat voice. "'It's the box on the pier. I've sat next to that box eating chips.' 'It's got a crown on it.' 'IT'S BARRED, I RANG IT, A WOMAN SAID UNOBTAINABLE.'" He scrolled. "'Wren, I've rung it thirty times, is he all right?'"
"Scarholme," I said. "It's a heritage phone box. It's from nineteen thirty-six. You can ring out of it and nobody can ring in. I've stood in it. It's a very nice box. Please leave it alone."
Line three lit at twenty-five past.
"Okay so, hi, Wren. Genuinely sorry to ring in. I just thought you'd rather hear it from me."
"Ollie."
"So the, like, thing. I'm not going to say the number on air, because I'm not an animal—"
"You said it for twenty-two minutes."
"On Nightjar? That's different. So. Thursday. One forty-one. I'll be on the North Pier, live, free, on the stream. I've got thirty-eight thousand people registered. I'm not saying come. I'm just saying, if it's the woman's moment, and the whole city's cried at this for three years, shouldn't the whole city be there?" A pause, with a guitar in it. "It's not yours to keep, Wren. It's not mine either. I'm just asking the question."
"It's a public pier, Ollie," I said. "It's open all night. I can't stop anybody walking on it." I looked through the glass. "Can I?"
Hector, on talkback, said, "No."
"Then bring a coat," I said, and ended it, and put on a record before my face did something.
Sam spent the rest of the show looking at the whiteboard as if it owed him money. I knew whose handwriting it was. I put it on the pile of things I was going to ask him, which by now you could sit on, and I went to bed at four with my shoes on.
Ruth Kavanagh rang my mobile at ten past three that afternoon, and I took it in bed, with one eye.
"Wren! Darling. It's Ruth. We've never spoken, and I feel we have."
I'd always imagined her as a woman in a very straight skirt. She sounded like one. She sounded like a skirt that's been told you're on the stairs.
"Super news," said Ruth. "Find Her's been picked up. Eight episodes, the network, a lovely man in Manchester with a very soothing voice. Of course it hangs on Thursday. If Thursday gives me a name and a face, I can sign the lot. And I do mean the lot."
"Does the lot include the show?"
"Darling, everything is on the table."
"Is it a sturdy table?"
"I'm told it's very sturdy. I've hired a van from Middlesbrough. It's an outside broadcast. You'll be on the pier, and I'd love, love, love for you to wear the coat."
"I'm not wearing the coat."
"Lovely," said Ruth, "we'll talk," and she was gone, leaving a faint smell of lilies down the line.
I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. Everything's on the table. I've been in radio ten years. I know what a sentence sounds like when it's not promising. But it was three o'clock in the afternoon and I'd had four hours' sleep, and I let it be a promise anyway, till the bath went cold.
On Tuesday I rang Priya Nair from the Co-op, because that's where she'd got me last time, and it seemed rude to change.
"Wren! I was just about to ring you."
"I'm ringing first. It's a no."
There was a very small silence, with an office in it. "Is it the money?"
"It's a show."
"It's a show with a slot being squeezed. I'm not being rude, I'm being a programme director. Is it a man?"
"It's a producer."
"Is he any good?"
"He's from Reading."
"Oh, you poor love," said Priya, and I laughed, a proper one, in the middle of the Co-op, in front of the soup. "My door's open. I mean that. Till you're forty." She hung up first. I stood there with a basket and a tin of mulligatawny feeling like a woman who's put her coat on and stayed in.
I told him at ten past midnight, in the kitchen, which has a kettle and no room.
"I rang her. I said no."
He had his back to me. He turned round slowly, with the chipped mug.
"For the show," I said. "I can't go while it's on. I'm not leaving Hector on his own with you."
"Wren."
"And because of you as well." I said it to the kettle. "I turned down a daytime drive and a flat with a window, and I did it for a man who winces at my levels. Don't say take it."
"I wasn't going to."
"What were you going to say?"
He gripped the counter, the way my dad does on a boat. His face did a thing I'd never seen it do, a very small, very quick thing, like a man being handed the one object in the world he's not allowed to carry. He opened his mouth.
The kettle clicked off. Hector put his head round the door.
"Brannigan's in the lift," he said. "He's brought a lamp."
Ruth had said Ollie was to be on the show. She hadn't asked.
He set up a ring light in the corner of my booth, a big white hoop that made Studio B look like a hospital. He sat in the guest chair, with his own microphone, and said, "Hi, this is genuinely such an honour, I grew up on this." I said he'd been in the building twice. He said it felt like growing up.
At twenty-five past one I'd done the safety bit. I'd had to. "Scarholme, I've stood on that pier. It's six hundred yards of wet stone and a rail up to here." I put my hand at my hip. "And Ollie says there'll be a thousand of us."
"It's, like, a thousand, based on registrations. It'll be fine? There's a stream. Everybody's going to be so respectful."
"I'm frightened," I said, to the city. "I'll say it. Not of him. Of us."
The booth door went. You have to put your shoulder into it and say something rude. Somebody did. A small, clear, furious voice said "Bother," and the door gave, and in the gap, in a navy coat and a hat with a pin in it, with a tartan shopping bag on wheels and her glasses on a chain, stood a woman of about five foot one.
Ten years. I'd had her in my ears every night for ten years and never seen her. I'd given her a hat in my head. I'd got the hat right.
"Vi?" I said.
"It is not a booth," said Vi, on air, for the guest mic was open, "it is a cupboard with a lock on it. Move the young man."
Hector came through from the engineer's room, took Ollie by the elbow, and sat him on the bin. Vi took the guest chair. She looked at the stuffing coming out and put her bag over it. Then she took out three flasks.
Two were chrome. One was tartan, with a dent in the base. She stood them on my desk in a row, like exhibits.
"Leek and potato," she said. "One for the engineer. One for the girl. One for the producer, who looks as if he's been left out in the rain." She looked at the lens on the ring light. "And what is that?"
"It's a ring light, Vi," said Ollie, from the bin. "It's, like, for the stream. Big fan—"
"I am not a fan. I'm a pensioner." Vi folded her hands on her bag. "Young man. I've listened to you for three years. You have a lovely voice and nothing to put in it."
"It's—"
"You rang a telephone box, and told nine hundred people to do the same. Which of you is supposed to be the adult?"
"It's, like, a public interest thing? He's a public—"
"He is a man on a telephone. Not a bus timetable." Her voice hadn't gone up. It never does. It gets very precise, like a woman cutting something with a clean knife. "You have recorded him every Thursday for three years, and I've waited, young man, I have waited, and not once have I heard you say thank you."
I looked at Sam through the glass. He'd stopped writing and was holding his pencil, very hard.
"It's not, like, hers to keep," said Ollie, faintly. "The woman. It's the whole city's—"
"Whose?"
"Hers. The woman's."
"Then it is hers to keep," said Vi, "isn't it? That is what 'hers' means."
The phones went like a firework. Hector read nothing out. He simply pointed at the screen with one finger and shut his eyes.
Vi turned and looked at me. She did it the way she must have looked at a register: slowly, and for absences. I'd just said I was frightened on the radio, and I'd gone red up to my hairline, and I'd not a joke left in the building.
"Eat your soup," she said.
"Vi, I'm on air."
"Then you can eat it on air. It's a very good soup. It's only leeks." She stood. Hector had the booth door open for her, and she stopped in it with her bag on its two small wheels. The meters were jumping behind me. I'd never seen the room so quiet.
"Wear a vest on Thursday," said Vi. "It's a cold pier."
She went. The door swung on its spring and stuck, halfway.
The tartan flask stayed on the desk with its dent. I unscrewed the cup and poured. It was hot, still, and tasted of pepper and somebody else's kitchen. I drank it on air, in front of twenty-four thousand people and a young man on a bin, and for about the length of a record I didn't think about Thursday at all.