Wren
Thirty-nine days. Sunday.
I had one job at Sunday dinner, which was not to say the word Sam.
Not "Sam", not "the man from Leeds", not "the pink wafer lad", which is what half of Scarholme had been calling him since Friday. I'd practised in the car, at the lights on Harbour Road, and the woman in the next car had looked at me like I'd licked the window.
I tripped over Nana's bags on the way in.
They were in the hall, where they'd been since the funeral. Six big blue ones from the Co-op, tied at the top, lined up against the radiator like they were queuing for a bus. Everybody agreed they were going to the charity shop. Nobody had taken them. My dad had got as far as putting two in the van, once, in December, and then he'd brought them back in, and nobody said anything, and that was the bags.
"Mind them," my mam said, from the kitchen, as I picked myself up off them.
"I'm minding them. They're minding me. We're all minding each other."
"Wipe your feet."
My mam is Lorna Archer, fifty-nine, and she runs the canteen at St Hild's Primary, where she feeds three hundred children a day and has never once been seen to smile while doing it. She loves through instructions. You learn to read them, like the shipping forecast. Wipe your feet means hello. Eat that means I've missed you. Sit down means sit down.
"Sit down," she said.
My dad was carving.
My dad carves a chicken like a man defusing a bomb. He stands over it with the knife held up and his tongue out the side of his mouth, and he goes in very slow, and every so often he stops and looks at the chicken as if it might go off.
"Red wire or blue wire, Dad?"
"Don't talk to me while I'm in the joint," he said. He's sixty-four. He was an engineer on the Rotterdam ferry for thirty years, and he talks the way he eats, quick and in bits. "Leg or breast?"
"Breast."
"Your mother wants the breast."
"Then why did you ask me?"
"Politeness," he said, and gave me a leg.
The gravy came in. My mam makes it with granules. My dad says granules are a crime against the Sunday. This has been going on for longer than I've been alive, and I've never once heard either of them win.
"It's lumpy," my dad said, pouring.
"It's not lumpy."
"There's a lump. Look. That's a lump. That's an island. I could moor on that."
"Then don't have any."
He had loads. He always has loads. That's the argument.
I lasted until the roast potatoes.
"So," my dad said, through one. "Heard you Friday."
"Did you?"
"Biscuit tin." He chewed. "That lad. Pink wafer. Funny."
"He's not funny. He's from Leeds."
"He's not from Leeds. You can hear he's not from Leeds. He's from somewhere with a Waitrose." Chew. "What's he want?"
That was it. I'd said nothing. I'd said "he's from Leeds", which isn't his name, so technically I'd won, and then my mouth went on without me, the way it does on air when there's a gap and nobody to fill it.
"He wants to cut Hector to two nights and put a computer on after three. He wants thirty thousand listeners by March. He wears a coat that's never been rained on and he winces at my levels, and on Monday night we're starting a thing where we ask the whole city to help us find the woman the Lighthouse Man rings about."
I put a sprout in my mouth to stop any more coming out.
My dad stopped chewing.
He just stopped, with his fork halfway, and looked at his plate, and for about the length of a breath he was a man looking at gravy. Then he put the fork down, picked up the jug, held it up to the light, and said, "Your mother's made an archipelago."
"It's not lumpy," my mam said.
"I'm going to need a ferry."
My mam had got up. She doesn't sit through dinner. She'd gone into the hall and I could hear her undoing the knot on one of Nana's bags.
"What are you doing, Mam?"
"Sorting."
"They're sorted. They're for the charity shop. They've been for the charity shop for two months."
"There's things in here want washing first. You can't give folk things that want washing."
I went and stood in the doorway. She was on her knees on the hall carpet with Nana's cardigans in her lap. The fawn one with the leather buttons, that Nana wore so much the elbows went shiny, that smelt of Polo mints and the prom wind. My mam was folding them into thirds, for a drawer, not for a shop.
"Grown woman," she said, not looking up. "Shouting at strangers at two in the morning."
"I don't shout."
"Every night. Strangers. In the dark."
"Nine thousand of them, Mam. It's a living."
"It's not a living. It's a habit." She folded.
"It's a good habit. People ring me who've got nobody else to ring."
She didn't answer. She tied the bag up again. She tied it tight, a double knot, like a bin bag, and put it back against the radiator with the others, and stood up, and went past me into the kitchen.
"Eat that," she said, on the way past. "You're grey."
My dad was mopping his plate with bread when I came back in. He looked up at me with that face he does, the one that's half a wink without the wink.
"Your nana," he said, "would have been down that studio with a bag of toffees, telling you to go for it."
"Would she?"
"She'd have been out anyway. Your nana did more miles than the ferry. Every night God sent, up and down that prom." He chewed. "Rain or shine. Said it cleared her head."
"I didn't know that."
"You were small." He pushed the gravy boat at me. "Go on. Brave the islands."
At the door my mam put a plate in my hands, wrapped in foil, still hot through the bottom. Chicken, three potatoes, sprouts, and gravy in a jam jar with the lid screwed on.
"I'm not hungry," I said. "I've just eaten. You watched me."
"It's not for you." She did my top button up, which I am thirty-three years old and can do myself. "The thin one. The Leeds one. Your dad says he's thin."
"I never said he was thin."
"You said his coat's never been rained on," my mam said. "A man who's dry is a man who's not been fed."
I took the plate.
When I left it was already dark, and the bags were still in the hall. I stepped over them very carefully. I don't know why. You'd think they were asleep.
Monday's show started at midnight, which makes it Monday, which nobody in the building has ever believed.
At four minutes to twelve Sam put a pair of cans over my ears. He did it from behind, without asking, the way you'd fit a seatbelt on a child.
"Listen," he said.
"I'm listening."
"No. Properly. Shut your eyes."
I didn't want to shut my eyes. I shut them.
It was the jingle bed, the bit of music you talk over. He'd made it on Saturday on his laptop, sitting on the kitchen floor because there isn't a chair, and he'd been very shifty about it. It started with a piano, slow, a few notes, like somebody trying a tune out in an empty hall. Under the piano there was a hiss. Very low. I knew that hiss. It's the line when he's on.
"Where did you get that?"
"Off last Thursday. I lifted it out from between his words. There's about a second and a half, after his second line. I looped it."
Then, over the piano, very quietly, just a clock. Not ticking. Just once, at the end, a single chime, like the clock in a front room when everyone else has gone up to bed.
It was good. It was really good. It was the best thing anyone had ever made for this show, and he'd made it on a kitchen floor in two days, and I wanted to put my foot through it.
"It's all right," I said.
"It's good."
"It's all right."
"Your eyes are wet."
"It's the cans. They're old. They leak."
"Cans don't leak."
"These do. They're from the nineties. Ask Hector."
Through the glass, Hector didn't look up, and said on talkback, "They don't leak."
"Is he in it?" I said. "His voice?"
"There's none of him in it," Sam said. "I checked twice." He was looking at the desk, not at me. "Your first term."
I'd forgotten I'd said it. He hadn't. That was worse than the piano.
The red light came on.
I said, "Good morning, Scarholme. It's Monday. It's midnight. And for the next six weeks, you and me are going to do something."
Sam brought the bed up under me. The piano. The hiss.
"You know him," I said. "Every Thursday, one forty-one. 'Thursday again.' 'Still no sign.' Three years. And every Thursday he's waiting for somebody, and every Thursday she doesn't come. So here's what I'm asking. If you've seen her. If you know her. If you are her. If you've ever been out after midnight in a red coat and seen an old man looking at you like you were the last bus home, ring me." The clock chimed, on the bed, at exactly the right place. I hated that too. "We're going to find her. Live. Six weeks. That's a promise. This is Find Her."
The phones went.
Not like Friday. Friday was angry. This was slower, and more, and it didn't stop. As soon as Hector cleared a line it lit again.
A man in Seaton who'd seen a red coat on the bus in two thousand and nineteen. A woman on line five who said it was her ex-husband, Raymond, definitely, because Raymond had always been dramatic and had never once answered a question in thirty-one years of marriage either. I asked where Raymond was now. "Bridlington," she said darkly. "With a woman called Pam."
A lad who'd made a map of everywhere in Scarholme you can see the sea from at night, with pins, and wanted to know if Sam was hiring.
"He's hiring nobody," I said. "He's firing. It's his thing."
Sam, in the guest chair, wrote something on his pad and turned it round so I could see. It said: Not true. I'm cutting.
At half past twelve Hector held up three fingers and then made a face I'd never seen him make, which was the face of a man who'd been handed something by the tail.
"Line three," he said on talkback, off air, just to me. "It's him."
"Who?"
"Nightjar. The podcast lad. Brannigan." He pulled a face. "Started up March twenty twenty-three. Same month as our man. Been recording every Thursday off air since. Bedroom job."
"How do you know that?"
"I listen," Hector said, "to everything."
I took him. I can't resist an audience, and Ollie Brannigan was an audience who'd brought his own microphone.
"Ollie," I said. "Welcome to the real radio."
"Okay, so, hi, Wren, genuinely love the show," Ollie said. He has a voice that goes up at the end of every sentence like it's checking you're still there. "Big fan, long time. I just wanted to come on and ask, like, a question. What you're doing. Like, ethically?"
"Ethically."
"Okay, so, there's a real old man. Who's clearly, like, going through something. And there's a real woman, maybe. Who's chosen not to come. For three years. And now a radio station in trouble is putting a piano under it and asking the whole city to go and find her?" A pause. "I'm just asking the question. Is that grief tourism? Genuinely?"
"You've recorded him every week, Ollie," I said. "For three years. You've got a podcast called after a bird that only comes out in the dark. Don't come on my show and tell me about tourism."
"The difference is, I don't need thirty thousand by March."
The whole booth heard that. The whole city heard that. I looked at Sam, and Sam looked at the desk.
"How do you know about March, Ollie?"
"Wren," Ollie said, kindly, like he was sorry for me, which was the worst thing he'd done so far. "Everybody knows about March."
I could have dumped him. Seven seconds, the big button. My hand was on it.
"See you in six weeks, Wren," Ollie said. "Or I won't need to."