Sam
Six days. Friday.
Ruth Kavanagh was smaller than her voice, which was a surprise, since her voice is the size of a lift.
She came into Studio B on Friday afternoon in a camel coat the colour of expensive biscuits, with her lanyard on a red ribbon and a box of pastries from a shop in Leeds, and kissed me on both cheeks. Nobody in Scarholme has kissed anybody on both cheeks since the Romans. Hector, in the engineer's room, put his glasses on, as if to read a document that was about to be served.
"Sam, darling. You look dreadful. Lovely. Mrs Cray!"
Vi was in the guest chair. She'd come by taxi at two, with Gaz, who'd carried the tin up the stairs and then been told to wait on the pavement. Her hat was on. Her left hand was in a clean white bandage to the wrist, resting on the lid of the biscuit tin like something she'd been asked to guard. She looked at the pastries, and then at Ruth, as at a clerk who'd arrived with the wrong form.
"I'm afraid I don't eat in meetings," said Vi.
"Of course not. Of course. I'm so very grateful." Ruth sat on the corner of the desk, which is a thing I've seen people do who are about to ask for something. "I thought you were magnificent. Sixty-one thousand. The network wept. I'd love, love, love to ask you for one more."
"No."
"Of course. Entirely your choice." Ruth smiled. It's a good smile; it has never once been near her eyes. "It's only that you've been so brave, Mrs Cray, and I'd hate it all to end on a pier. Nobody ends on a pier. They end in a studio. With the proper sound."
"I've said no."
"And you've every right." She brushed a flake of something off her knee. "The thing is, you see, that Hector's cassettes were recorded on Northshore premises, on Northshore time. As is the logger. And young Oliver's archive is very, very public. If you'd rather not, we shall simply assemble. Series, tape by tape. The whole of it, from the second of March. No harm in it at all." She turned her head, slowly, like a lighthouse. "And then, I think, we should feel we owed it to the audience to find the bairn."
Vi didn't move.
"Heard the bairn settle," said Ruth, tenderly. "A baby, in the winter of nineteen ninety-three! Thirty-three years old now, somewhere in this town, with a face. The Gazette has an archive. We have researchers."
"My sister's lass is in Perth," said Vi. "She's fifty. She has a cleaning business. You'll leave her out of it."
"Perth! Lovely."
"You'll not send anyone to Perth."
I'd said nothing for four minutes. I count. Somewhere at the back of my head I'd counted something else, too, fifty against a winter thirty-three years gone, and then Ruth said Perth again and it went. "Ruth," I said. "She's seventy-nine. She cut her hand open on Thursday. Give me the tin and a day and I'll make it so perfect nobody will need—"
"Live, darling," said Ruth. "That's what's lovely about it."
"Mr Ketley," said Vi.
She'd turned her head. She looked at me over the glasses, and I stopped, because she'd got to the end of my name and there was no more of it.
"I'll do one," Vi said. "In this chair. At twenty to two. One. And that's the lot, and the tin goes home with me, and nobody goes to Perth, and nobody goes looking for any bairn." She put her good hand flat on the lid. "I'll do it myself. I'll not have it done to me."
"Super," said Ruth.
"Which one is it?" I said.
"I'll know when I've heard her first hour." Vi looked at the window. "I always do."
"Have you listened ahead?"
"I have never heard one before it was played. I've told the whole city that." She said it to the window. "It is the only way I can do it."
At midnight I changed the whiteboard to five.
It was the first time Wren had looked at it all week, and she looked at it as if it were a bill. She'd slept fourteen hours. Her hair was wet. She sat in her chair in the old yellow mac with her cans round her neck, and Vi sat in the guest chair, with the tin on her knee, and the two of them said good evening to each other like two women at a bus stop in the rain.
Hector had the Sanyo on his console, hooked to the board with a lead I'd bought that morning from a shop that sold only leads. A squat, grey, ugly thing from the age of the Walkman, among the faders, with its handle up and a window in its lid, like a man in a cardigan at a gala.
Ruth stood behind Hector in the engineer's room with her hand on the back of his chair. I'd asked her not to. She'd said she'd be a mouse.
"Good morning, Scarholme," said Wren. "It's Saturday. It's midnight. And I'm not going to tell you what it is tonight, because I don't know. I've a lady here with a tin."
I watched her do it. She did it very well. She was slow and warm and funny about Gaz, who'd texted to say he'd been signing autographs on the rank, "mostly for a nun." She took a woman from Morton who'd been given a date for her new hip and a date with a retired fireman in the same week, and couldn't decide which to cancel. She took Kevin, who wanted it known he'd forgiven everybody. She did twenty minutes with Vi on the sound of a Sanyo stop key and what one calls a pension. Vi called her "Wren" without once saying "pet". It was the nearest thing to tenderness I've ever heard on air.
At eight minutes past one Ruth leaned over Hector's shoulder and said something to him about the running order. Hector didn't turn round.
"Madam," he said. "I've been on this desk since nineteen eighty-nine. The running order's me."
Ruth took her hand off the back of his chair.
At twenty-five to two, Hector said, on talkback, "Mrs Cray. It's a tape of a man. I'll be on the key. When you want it."
Vi lifted the tin lid. She ran one finger along the row near the end, slowly, and I saw there was a word pencilled down each spine in a small square hand. She wasn't going by number: she was reading the words for the one that answered her first hour, and her first hour had been a woman from Morton with two dates in one week. Her finger stopped. She took the case out and passed it back through the hatch to Hector, who read the number on the end, "One fifty-five," and then the word on the spine.
"The date," he said.
"Don't tell me what's on it," said Vi.
He put it in. He closed the lid with the heel of his hand. In the booth, Wren put her fader down. I had never seen Vi's hand so still. It had a bandage on it, and it was lying quite flat on the tin, and under it I could hear her, a small dry breath going in and out of an old woman, in time with the clock.
One forty.
"Scarholme," said Wren. "It's twenty to two on a Saturday. It's a Thursday somewhere. Vi's never heard what's on this. Nor have I. Nor have you." Her voice dropped a gear. "We'll hear it together."
One forty-one.
Hector pressed play.
I hear everything. It's all I've got. I heard the motor come up, that small high turn, a shade fast, and the hiss, and then a room: a lamp room, with brass in it and cold. A kettle that had gone off the boil. Somewhere under the room, a radio, very low, and a woman's voice from further off than the radio, saying, …nineteen minutes to two on The Night Watch, and that was the Carpenters, and in the engineer's room I heard Hector breathe in.
"Rita," he said, to nobody.
"Thursday again, pet."
It came out of the speakers into the booth, slow, rough, like a cart on gravel. It was the voice the city has stayed up for, three years running. Here in the room with us it was smaller than I'd thought, a cheap-tape voice, very close, as if he'd leaned in from the corner. Vi sat bolt upright. Her face didn't move.
"Wind's gone round west," said the Lighthouse Man. "I've done the brass. Two hours with a rag, and not a soul to show it."
A pause. The sea. Not the sea: the tape.
"They've sent a date," he said. "Beginning of April."
A longer pause. Beside me the whiteboard said five.
Then a sound I hadn't expected. A man clearing his throat in an empty room, and then, low, a hum. Three notes, up and down. A man trying a thing he had never done in front of anybody, and having nobody there.
He sang.
"…silver boat on a silver sea…"
He was flat. He was very flat. He sang it like a man carrying a cup that's too full: slow, and a bit under, and very careful of every word. A dry, cracked baritone with the gravel gone soft. It was only the one line. And it went through the room, I know, because I felt it go through Hector's glass.
Wren said, "That's my nana's song."
I'll tell you how she said it. She said it into the mic, with her hand flat against her chest, in a voice that wasn't the Surgery voice or the show voice or any voice I'd heard on her. A small, level, surprised voice, the voice of somebody who'd once been sung to.
Hector's hand came down on the dump button so hard that the desk rang.
Seven seconds. It's all the delay is. It's the distance between a thing being said and the city knowing. It had been seven seconds since the first note, and he'd brought his palm down on the fifth, and what the city got was a man who'd done the brass, a throat being cleared, and then nothing.
The dump only bins the seven seconds in hand. It doesn't stop the next seven. His other hand had already taken the Sanyo off the feed to air and left it up on the studio monitor. What the studio got was the rest.
"…That daft song you sing her," said the voice, small and rough, in the empty booth, to the woman who wasn't there. "I've had it in me head all week."
Nobody moved.
"Mind how you go home."
Then a pause. Then Hector's thumb came down on the stop key, and the sound went through the glass, heavy and settled, the sound I'd been chasing for six weeks. He'd waited for the end of it. He'd known where it would be.
It was a quarter to two. I'd have said it was an hour.
Wren took her cans off. She did it slowly, like somebody setting down a glass she'd meant to throw. She put them on the desk. She didn't look at me. She didn't look at Vi. She stood up out of the chair, and she put her shoulder to the booth door, which sticks, and it gave the first time.
"Wren," said Ruth, from the gallery, in a voice I'd never heard her use. It was not bright.
The door shut on its spring. It stuck, halfway, the way it does.
Hector, on talkback, to me, very low: "Forty seconds, lad. I've a record to cue. You're on."
I'd never had a minute with nothing in it. I looked at the guest mic in front of me, which has been open since the council leaned on it. It was open now. It's always open. I slid into Wren's chair. It was warm.
"It's Sam," I said. "The producer."
I didn't have a sentence. I'd always had a sentence, with a number in it.
"Wren's stepped out. She's every right to." My voice was plain. I listened to it as I'd listen to someone else's. "I'll tell you what I can hear, because it's what I'm any good at. A lamp room. A kettle gone cold. A man on his own at the end of a pier, nearly thirty years ago, who's polished all the brass because he'd nothing else to polish, saying a thing out loud to somebody who wasn't there." I breathed. "I spent six weeks trying to make that into something you'd tell people about in a queue. I'm sorry. It's a man being kind to the dark." I could hear the seconds going by. "There was a bit at the end that we haven't played. It wasn't ours. I'd ask you not to ask."
And the record came up under me, a long, sad trumpet, and Hector's finger came off the cue.
I took the cans off. I put them down. My hands were not good.
I scrub back. I can't help it. My nana's song. The one her nana sang her when she babysat: she'd told the city so on the twenty-eighth of January, in this room, red to the ears, and I'd put my pen down halfway through. That daft song you sing her. Her. A bairn in the dark on a pier, thirty-odd years ago, being sung to, who'd grown up and sat in this chair and said hello to him every Thursday for three years.
The chair was still warm. I sat in it, with the trumpet going, and didn't get up.
A little after two I went to the window in the corridor.
It looks out at the car park, the skip and the little wall. Under the one lamp the frost was coming on. I could see the whole of it: eleven spaces. Hector's Rover, nose to the wall. Ruth's hire car, parked across two.
Where the Fiesta had been, by the skip, there was an oblong of clean, dry tarmac, with the frost drawn tight round it on all sides, as if round something that had been lifted out.