Sam
Four days. Sunday.
Ruth's kitchen had a dishwasher in it, on its final rinse, and a fridge with a fault in the compressor that came and went every forty seconds like somebody sighing in the next room. It was the only thing in that kitchen that sounded unhappy.
"Darling," said Ruth, from Leeds, in a cashmere jumper, with a glass of something pale at her elbow. "You look like you've been dug up."
"I haven't slept."
"Lovely. Neither have I." She smiled. Behind her a grey cat walked along the worktop as if it owned the building. "So. You wanted to talk about the finale."
"I want to cancel the finale."
"Gosh."
"Vi's played her tape. She did it live. She gave you sixty-one thousand on a pier and she gave you the old man singing in a lamp room. You've got your eight episodes. End it on the pier. End it on 'I'm her'. Nobody's going to want more than that."
I'd rehearsed it in the car. It was clean.
"Sam," said Ruth, gently. "I was standing behind your engineer on Saturday. I heard her say it. 'That's my nana's song.' In the room. With her hand on her chest." She picked up the glass. "And the logger heard it seven seconds before the city would have, and the bit after, about the bairn. It's sitting there. Pre-delay. Clean."
"The legal log's what went out, and that never went out. The raw track's a house rule, for complaints. It's not programme material."
"It's Northshore's house rule, on Northshore's machine, in Northshore's building." She put the glass down without drinking. "Her nana's dead, darling. So it's the mother. Somebody walked that bairn up and down a pier in nineteen ninety-three, and the nana's in a cemetery and the mother's in a school kitchen. A living woman, about sixty, our presenter's mam. That's not an ending, Sam. That's a series two."
The fridge in Leeds sighed.
"And if I'm squeamish," Ruth said, "I've the boy in the beanie to make me brave. He emailed me at four this morning. He's got Wren singing the song on air, from the night of the bet. He's got the bit of Saturday's tape that went out, with a hole in it the exact length of a song, and Wren walking off. And he's found a photograph." She turned her phone to the camera. It was too small and too far away and I knew what it was anyway. "The Gazette, February nineteen ninety-three. A woman at the pier rail at night, in a red duffel, with her face turned away. He's put it next to our poster. Same coat. Same odd toggle. He's very proud of himself. He's publishing Thursday at one forty-one."
"Then tell him no."
"I'm not his mother. I'm not anybody's mother. That's rather the point." She sat back. "So we'll go first."
I'd had a plan. I always have a plan. It went in my head like a dropped plate.
Hector came in at half eleven, as he always does, with his bag and his flask and a face that said he'd heard the last minute of it from the corridor and wished he hadn't. He hung his coat on the nail under the whiteboard and sat down where he could see down the corridor to the cupboard behind the lift.
The logger lives in there. A beige box from two thousand and nine, with one green light, that has never in its life been switched off. Everybody in the building knows where it is. That's rather the problem.
"Can it lose a night?" I said.
"It's a statutory recorder." Hector didn't look round. "Forty-two days, every word that goes to air. A licence condition." He unscrewed his flask. "And the desk before the delay, on the same clock, because Leeds like it. Same box, same lock. In plain terms, it's the law in a box. You touch it, you go to prison, and I go with you for holding the door."
"When does Saturday drop off?"
"April." He poured. "Long after anybody in Leeds wants it."
"Then it's there."
"It's there," said Hector. "Like a filling." He drank his tea and looked down the corridor at the cupboard door, and I looked at it too, and neither of us said anything for a while, and the hum of the building went on underneath us, the one long vowel.
Wren came in at twenty to twelve.
It was the first time I'd seen her since she'd put her shoulder to the door and it gave. She hadn't answered any of the three. She had the yellow mac on and a woolly hat I'd never seen, and she came along the corridor and through the door without looking at the glass, and stopped, because Ruth was on her desk.
"Wren!" said Ruth. "There she is. How super. Come and sit, it's only us."
Wren didn't sit. She stood behind her own chair with her hands on the back of it.
"Ruth."
"I was just telling Sam. We're bringing the handover forward. Manchester would rather launch on the back of our finale than a month after it, so they take the slot from Thursday the fifth, a lovely man with a soothing voice. Which makes Wednesday the last show, and the finale. You'll love him. Everybody does." She tilted her head, and the cat went past behind her again. "Oh. Did he not say?"
I said, "Ruth."
"We signed with Manchester on the tenth of February, darling. Sam's known since that morning. He's been very good about keeping it quiet. We had our reasons." She lifted the glass, finally. "I'll leave you two to it. Wednesday. Have a think about your mother."
The screen went black, and in it, faintly, I could see the two of us. Wren behind her chair. Me beside the desk, with my hands doing nothing.
She didn't shout. I'd have known what to do with shouting. I've cut a lot of shouting.
She turned her head and looked through the glass into the engineer's room, over the top of Hector's head, at the whiteboard on its nail. Four, in red, in my hand.
"You told me about the box," she said. "On Wednesday. In the corridor, with your batteries. I thought that was the lot. I thought that was you being brave."
"It was the lot I could—"
"The tenth of February." Her lips moved, the way they do when she's counting texts. "You've known for nineteen days." Her voice was very level. It was the voice from Saturday, the small surprised one. "You kissed me in a goods lift knowing. You drank round the chip on that mug knowing. You let me turn down Leeds for a show you knew was sold."
"You hid the jingle," I said.
It came out before I'd checked it. I heard it go out into the room and I'd have given a great deal to dump it. Seven seconds. Hector's palm. Gone.
"I hid it for Hector," she said. "You hid this for Leeds."
I knew it like a wrong note. What I'd said was small and mean and true, and it was still in the room.
"Ruth wants my mam," Wren said.
"I know. I tried to stop her. Tonight. Before you came. I—"
"You tried." She took her hands off the chair. "You always try. You try in lifts and on fire stairs and in my car. You've tried for six weeks." She looked at me, properly, for the first time. Her eyes were very dry. "Get out of my booth."
I got my coat off the hook. I got my bag. At the door I stopped, because I always stop at doors, and I thought of something to say, and it was a good sentence, and it would have made it worse.
The door sticks. I put my shoulder to it. It gave.
I sat in the car and made a list, because that's what I do instead of feeling things.
The show. Gone, but it was gone in December. Hector's money. Safe: his terms only ran until the switch, and the switch was now Thursday. Wren's trust. Gone tonight. Lorna Archer's Thursday mornings, for the rest of her life, if Ruth got her finale or Ollie got his. And at the bottom, small, in the corner, where I put the things I don't want to read: a woman in a yellow mac who'd turned down a flat with a window for a man who winces at her levels.
It was a short list. All of it was my fault.
I always parked by the skip by then. Since the windscreen I'd sat there every night until her Fiesta went, and then followed it to Alma Road at a distance I'd have called respectful and she'd have called creepy. I sat there now with the engine off and the radio on, and the sea forty yards behind me making the noise it makes, and I listened to her do the show.
She was good. She was always good. She was good the way a bridge is good with a crack in it: you'd never know from the top. She did the Surgery. She said "Wednesday" on air, once, flatly, as a fact: "We'll be off the air from Thursday, Scarholme. Northshore's sold the slot. I found out tonight, same as you." Ruth would hate that.
At ten past two she put on a long record, the longest we've got, eleven minutes of a man with a harmonica, and the back door opened under the security light and she came out into the car park.
She didn't look at my car. She walked past it to the wall at the end, the one that comes up to your knee, and stood with her hands in the mac pockets looking at the sea. I watched her. Forty yards. I didn't get out. I'd been told to get out of a booth, and the car park felt like part of the booth.
At a quarter past two, in the empty studio, the phone line lit, and Hector put through Gaz.
I heard it on the car radio. Hector must have reckoned the city would rather have Gaz than a harmonica, and he'd have been right. The record faded under. The line came up. Tick, tick, tick.
"Wren! Gaz, rank two. Quiet one. Quiet as a mouse's library."
Nobody answered him. There was nobody in the chair. Through the windscreen Wren stood at the wall with her back to the building.
"You'll be gutted," said Gaz, to the room. "We're all gutted on the rank. Wednesday. Kev's took it very bad. He's put a black ribbon on his aerial. It's a bit of a bin bag, but it's the thought." Tick, tick. "And I want to say, Wren, on behalf of the rank, you've been a very good friend to the taxi community, and we'll be having a minute's silence on Thursday at twenty to two, or as near as we can with fares. A proper vigilante."
Nobody answered. He didn't seem to need it. He'd had years of the radio not answering back, and he was a man who'd talk to an indicator.
"Anyway. You're probably busy. I can hear you're busy. You've gone very quiet, that's how I know." Tick. "I'll leave you to it. Chin up. Don't let the beggars grind you. They're only lanyards. Gaz, rank two, over and out."
The harmonica came back up, a bit too fast, where Hector's hand had gone to it.
At the wall Wren put her face in her hands for about the length of a breath. Then she took them away, and turned round, and walked back past my car to the door, and still didn't look at it, and went in.
At ten past three the back door opened again and it was Hector, with his bag over his shoulder and his car keys in his hand.
He came across the car park to the Rover, two spaces down, and stopped. Then he came on, to mine, and stood by my door. I wound the window down. The cold came in like a dog.
"She's gone out the front," he said. "She asked me to tell you not to follow her home tonight."
"Right."
He didn't go. He stood looking at my windscreen, which had frosted while I sat there, a fine white skin all over it.
"She's not stopped being angry," he said. "I'd not want you thinking it's gone off. It's only gone quiet. Quiet's worse, with her. Quiet's when she's thinking."
"What's she thinking?"
"If I knew that," said Hector, "I'd have a better job." He turned to go, and then turned back, the way he does, with the plain version, after. "Back door'll be on the latch Wednesday."