Wren
Seven days. Thursday.
Nobody tells you how loud a thousand people are when they're trying to be quiet.
It's a rustle. It's a thousand coats, and a hundred hoods in the wind, and thermoses being unscrewed, and somebody whispering "Is that her?" about somebody else's nan. I'd walked out onto the North Pier at a quarter to one with a radio mic in my fist wearing a dead cat, which is the furry thing you put on a mic in a gale, and which looked as though it had died of exposure. Ten yards behind me a lad called Kieran carried the transmitter in a rucksack, with the face of a man leading a nervous horse.
"Hello, Scarholme," I said. "I'm on a pier."
You'll have heard the wind take the second half of it. It came round the north side, off the black, and it didn't blow so much as lean.
The pier was full. I don't mean busy. From the root, where the road gives up and the stone begins, all the way out past the red box to the lamp at the head, turning its long white arm round the dark, it was people. Bobble hats. A man in a dinner jacket. Phone torches, hundreds, held up like candles at a carol service. Every eleven seconds the beam came round and went over us, and eleven hundred faces turned the colour of paper.
And the red coats. I should have seen it coming. We'd put a woman in a red duffel on forty bus shelters, and now a hundred people had come in something red. Anoraks. Scarves. A girl in a Santa hat. A man with a tablecloth round his shoulders like a cape. They stood in bunches near the box with their backs to the town, looking out to sea at nobody, like the poster.
"Wren." Sam, in my ear, very dry and very low, as if he were talking into a pillow. "Hector says you're fifty-two thousand and he'd like you to know he's not impressed."
"Tell Hector I'm mortified."
"He knows."
By one o'clock the police had been round four times. A sergeant had a loudhailer, and he held it like a man who'd been told it might go off.
"Ladies and gentlemen. This pier has a capacity of four hundred."
"WE'RE ALL VERY SLIM," shouted somebody.
"I make it eleven hundred and a dog." He lowered the hailer. "Madam, I've no power to close a public pier on account of a sad programme on the wireless. It's open all night unless the Met Office go red, and the Met Office say amber with an attitude."
Beside him a young constable said, "My nan's by the box. She's brought a flask. Don't tell her I said."
At twenty to two they turned the torches off.
Nobody told them to. It started at the root. I saw it come up the pier like somebody running a hand along a row of switches, until the whole of it went dark and the only light left was the lamp, going over. And you could hear the sea. I'd not heard it in an hour. It came up from underneath us, huge and slow, slapping the stone.
I walked to the box. It stood where it's always stood, red, with a crown on it, and a candle on the step. I opened the door and it fought me, and Sam wasn't there to put his shoulder to it. I went in and picked up the handset. Dial tone, long and low and ordinary.
"It's one forty-one," I said, to the mic, to the city.
One forty-two.
One forty-three.
"Nothing on the board," said Sam, in my ear. "Hector's looking. Not a flicker."
And that's when I saw it. We'd had it wrong. I'd stood a thousand people round a phone box, rail to rail, and made it impossible for anybody to reach it. If somebody was out here with a coin in her glove and a tape in her pocket, she'd not got within fifty yards. We'd gone to meet a shy woman with a brass band.
"If you're here," I said, to the dark, "I'm sorry. I think we've got in your way."
I put the handset back on its hook. The torches came on again, one by one from the root, and the pier lit up behind me like something being remembered.
At one fifty-eight, nothing from Vi.
I waited. You do. Ten years I've waited, with Hector's two fingers coming up against the glass like a man ordering two pints. She'd missed two Thursdays in her life: a flu, and a Christmas. At two o'clock there was a gap in the night the exact shape of her.
"She's at home. She's got more sense." I said it on air. "Vi, if you're listening, I'm in a vest."
At ten past two, Hector put through Gaz.
"Wren! Gaz. I'm at the foot of the pier in the cab, heater on, two flasks." Tick, tick, tick. "I'm here to evacuate VIPs."
"Who's the VIP, Gaz?"
"I was hoping somebody'd be one." Tick. "I've a blanket and a short cut that is, strictly, a pavement."
"Stay where you are."
"I'm on the double yellows," said Gaz. "I'm having an amazing night."
It was twenty past two when I heard somebody shout RED COAT.
It came from the root end, off the Cliff Steps, where they come down on the seaward side. A man's voice, high and jubilant, and then a hundred voices, coming up the pier at me like a train. "RED COAT! THERE SHE IS!"
A red cagoule was coming through the crowd at the speed of a man with a lot on his mind. At its heels, lifted over the heads and passed along by six rows of Scarholme like a saint on a feast day, rose a very small dog in a very small red coat.
"It's ME!" shouted Kevin, from Seaton. "I TOLD you! I'm SLIM!"
"Kevin, stop—"
A crowd isn't a thing you can tell. It had seen red. It went forward all at once, as a wave goes, from the back, from the people who couldn't see and who wanted to. They weren't pushing. They were being pushed. Everybody was being pushed by everybody behind, a thousand people, each of them very sorry.
I went back. I'd been at the box with my feet on the ground, and then I was moving without them, and the rail took me across the top of the thighs.
It's stone, the north rail. I felt it hit. I felt the weight come behind me. I felt my heels leave the pier.
You can't see the black underneath you; it's night. You hear it. Forty feet down, a patient slap on the stone, as if something were waiting for me to be sensible. A phone went past my head, its torch turning over and over, a small white wheel, and then it went out.
"Wren." Sam, very calm; nobody's ever been so calm. "Get off the rail."
"Can't."
"Which way's the box?"
"Behind. Everybody's behind." I couldn't breathe in properly. My mic was on. I didn't know where my hand was. "I'm all right, Scarholme," I said, in the Surgery voice, which came out small and wrong. "I'm just a bit on the edge of things."
"HOWAY," shouted a woman near me, "give the lass ROOM!"
"I'M NOT PUSHING," shouted a man.
"WHO IS?"
The sergeant's whistle went. The young constable, wild: "Back up! Back up!" I had a bobble hat in my face and somebody's sandwich in my hair. My feet were not on the ground, and under me the sea made its slow wet noise.
And then, from the left, I heard a wheel.
It's a very small sound, a trolley wheel on wet stone. A squeak, a clack, a squeak. A two-wheeled shopping trolley, the tartan kind you take to the Co-op on a Tuesday. It came through eleven hundred people like an icebreaker.
"Excuse me." A voice, small and clear and furious. "I said excuse me. Mind your shins."
I'd have known it with my eyes shut. From Vi, excuse me is always an insult.
The crowd split. It had no choice. A trolley came out of the dark at knee height, and behind it, hat pin, glasses on a chain, in her good navy coat, came Vi. She put the trolley in front of me like a plough. She put her shoulder to the nearest man's chest and said, "Back," and he stepped back.
I got my feet on the stone.
"Vi," I said.
"Be quiet."
Her glove was gone. The back of her left hand was open from knuckle to wrist, where a zip had gone across it somewhere on the way, and blood ran down into the cuff of her coat. She hadn't noticed. She'd come down a hundred and eighty steps in a gale with a trolley, one at a time, for forty minutes; she told me after.
"Give me that," said Vi.
I gave her the mic.
She held it wrong, too far from her face, like a woman holding a spoon to a child. She looked at the pier. It had gone quiet. Not because it was told: because there's a kind of person you don't talk over.
"Scarholme," said Vi, into the dead cat. "Stand still."
They stood still.
On the trolley, under a tartan rug, was a big square biscuit tin with a farm on the lid. She pulled the rug off. Across the lid, in black marker, in a square upright hand, somebody had written THURS 1.40.
"These are my husband's," said Vi. "He made them for me." She took a breath and held it. "I'm her."
I've had silence on the radio. I had a man on once who couldn't speak because of a wasp. I've never had one like that, a silence that went down the pier from the box to the root, a thousand people deciding at once to be a church.
Then somebody began to cry. Then a lot of people.
"Vi," I said. I'd no mic. I said it into the dark between us, and Kieran had the sense to hold up the rucksack. "You."
"Yes."
"I am the woman who didn't come," said Vi. "He sat up in that lamp room three years, and I never walked down this pier." She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the box. "It's very simple, and I'm sorry it isn't more."
She lifted the tin lid with both hands. The lamp came round, and in it I saw rows of white cassette cases, each with a word pencilled down its spine in a small square hand, and on top, on its side, a squat grey machine with a window in the lid.
She pressed the key with her bleeding hand, in front of eleven hundred people and Hector and the north of England.
It went through the pier. Heavy, settled. And a thousand people heard what it was, all at once, the way you hear a joke. Somebody near the rail said, "Oh."
"Abel Cray," said Vi. "Keeper of this light, nineteen seventy-nine to ninety-six. I'm Violet Cray, Headland Terrace. I've a surname, Wren. I've simply never been asked."
"The flask," I said. "'Heard the bairn settle.'"
"I took him a flask once, to this rail, that one winter. Cold, I took it home." She said it as if it were somebody else's weather. "The bairn was my sister's lass. A terror. She's fifty now, in Perth, and still won't settle."
"What did you sing it?"
"I'll not sing on a pier."
And all of Scarholme, in the dark, in the wind, laughed and cried at once.
I had my hand over my mouth. I'd never in my life had to stop my own face with my hand, and I was doing it in a vest, in front of a woman who'd heckled me for ten years and was now holding a biscuit tin.
"Don't," said Vi. "You'll set me off."
"I can't."
"You can. Go on. It's allowed."
I cried on air. The second time this winter. Not like Christmas; at Christmas there was nobody there. This was eleven hundred people and a dog and a pensioner dripping blood on a cracker tin. It was something about hello. I'd said it every Thursday for three years to the wrong one.
"Hector says," said Sam, in my cans, thick and dry, "he'd like it known he isn't a lighthouse. And Ollie's on sixty-one thousand and hasn't said a word for three minutes. Hector says that's a record."
I laughed, and cried. "Hector, sunshine. You're cleared."
The sergeant cleared the pier in eleven minutes. He didn't use the hailer. He walked down the middle of it saying "Home now, thank you, there's nothing more," and they went, a thousand people, slowly, with their torches pointing at the stone, as if it were the end of a service.
Gaz had the cab at the root. Vi said she'd not be put in a taxi. Gaz said she wasn't being put, she was being sat, and handed her a plaster with a dog on it. "Peppa Pig," he said. "They're for the fares." She let him do her hand. She sat very straight, in the back, with the tin on her knee.
I got in beside her with the mic. Hector said, in my ear, that we'd ten minutes and he'd not be dumping any of them. The heater was on. The indicator ticked, with nowhere to go. Through the window the pier lay empty, six hundred yards of wet stone, and out at the end the lamp went round.
While Gaz fiddled with the plaster, Vi lifted the tin lid again, to see that it was all there. She took one white case from the end of the last row and put it in the pocket of her good coat and pressed the lid down.
I did the sign-off.
"That's us," I said. "Thanks for staying up. Thanks to Hector. To Sam. To Gaz, in the cab, with his blanket. Thanks to Kevin, who was right all along, and I'll never say it again." The meters went up. "Thanks to him, wherever he is. And to her, who's sitting next to me and has told me not to say her name." Vi looked out of the window. "Go to bed, Scarholme. Ring her in the morning."
"I shall not answer," said Vi.
The pips. The news. Hector took me out of the air.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. One minute past three. Leave that poor woman be now. Alive?
My mam doesn't send two sentences. I thumbed her the usual, and put the phone face down on my knee, and it went again at once, in my hand, a number I didn't know.
"Wren! Darling." A voice like a skirt, very bright, in a lift. "Lovely, lovely, super. I've a boy in Leeds telling me sixty-one thousand. Now, don't say anything. Saturday. Twenty to two. One more tape, live, in the studio. With Vi."
I held the phone against my chest.
In the back of the cab Vi put her good hand in her pocket. She didn't take it out.