Sam
Thirty days. Tuesday.
"No," Wren said.
She said it on the North Pier at ten to four on Tuesday afternoon, with the wind taking the word out of her mouth and handing it back to me.
"You haven't heard what I—"
"You're going to put me on a poster. I know you are. You've got the face of a man who's bought a tripod."
I was carrying the tripod. I'd also bought a lens, a reflector I couldn't open, and a flask. The camera was borrowed from the Leeds marketing department under a form that used the word urgent four times.
"It's not a poster of you," I said. "It's a poster of a woman. In a red duffel. At the rail, with her back to us, on the pier, with the light behind her. Have you seen this woman. Ring Wren After Midnight."
"And she's me."
"She's a woman who happens to be your height."
"She's me, Sam. In a coat. In every bus shelter in Scarholme, with my back to the nation, like I've been stood up." She turned her collar up. "And I'll tell you what else. She hasn't been asked."
"She's been asked every Thursday for three years."
"By him." Wren had stopped walking. The wind put a strand of hair across her mouth and she didn't move it. "Not by us. We're doing it with a camera. There's a difference, and I can't say it, and I know you can hear it."
I could hear it. That was the trouble. I stood on the pier with the North Sea going on both sides of me, and a flask, and I heard exactly what she meant, and then I thought about Ruth saying a stunt people tell each other about in a queue.
"Ring me when you've found a better one," I said.
She looked at me. Then she looked at the sea, which was the colour of a wet pavement, and said, "Three goes. Then I'm having a chip."
We'd said very little about the Lamp. She'd had my text. I'd had her thumbs-up, which is not an answer, it's an emoji's idea of one. What I'd meant on Sunday was Take it, because Ruth is minded to sell the slot, and the thing you love may already be a corpse, and I can't tell you. What I'd said was Take it. I'd said it the way you'd say duck.
We passed the box halfway along, with its back to the town. I'd been out to it three times now. I hadn't told anybody. I kept the tripod between Wren and the door of it and walked at the speed of a man with somewhere to be.
"Where are we going?" Wren said, trotting.
"The rail, by the lamp." I pointed along the pier to the head, where the little white lighthouse stood with its lamp room dark, like a candle nobody had got round to. "There's a lamp on a timer. Comes on at dusk. Red coat against grey, with the beam behind. If I'm lying down, I get the rail, you and the light, all in one."
"Lying down."
"For the angle."
"Lying down," Wren said, with immense pleasure, "on the pier."
I didn't answer. I was looking at the parapet.
There's a kind of person who can stand next to a drop and be fine. I'm not that person. The parapet on the North Pier comes up to a grown man's hip and has a gap in it every thirty yards for a ladder, and beyond it, a long way down, the water goes in and out of the stones, in and out.
"Sam," Wren said. "You've gone the colour of putty."
"It's the light."
"There isn't any."
A van horn went, down at the pier root. Two short ones. It was a white van with a dent in the wing, nosed up against the barrier, with its engine running and a long shape in the driver's window, one hand out, waving a sandwich.
"That's my dad," Wren said. "I asked him to bring a coat."
Dennis Archer came along the pier in an anorak with his hands full. In one he had a bacon barm, three bites down. Over the other arm he carried a coat, like a waiter with a towel.
"Right," he said. He didn't stop chewing. "You wanted red. I've got red. Wind's blowing a hooley out there, I've left the van in gear, I'm not stopping." He looked at me. "Sam. Dennis. You look like you've been told where the lifeboat is."
"Hello, Mr Archer."
"Dennis. Mr Archer's my dad, and he'd have had you off the pier." He swallowed his bite. "Heard you said the gravy was excellent. Granules, that was. She's been unbearable since. She's had it on the fridge."
Wren said, "Dad, the coat."
He held it out. It was a duffel. Red. Hood and loops, the old sort, a heavy wool gone slightly soft with years. It was a very good coat. It looked like a thing a woman wore for twenty years and was fond of.
He didn't hand it over. He stood there, holding it in both hands, in front of him, the way you'd hold something somebody had asked you to look after. It was perhaps two seconds. I looked at the sea, because you do. You give a man room.
"From your nana's bags," Dennis said.
It came out all in one go.
"Oh," said Wren. "Dad."
"She'd have liked it. You in it." He put it in her hands. "Go on. It's cold."
She put it on. It was big in the shoulders and right in the arms, and when she did it up she looked like a woman who'd come down off a boat in a better decade. The fastenings were bone-coloured, all except the third one down, which was a bright, clean, shouting red, a shade brighter than the coat, as if somebody had once lost one and replaced it with the best they could find.
"Look at that," Wren said, flicking it. "Nana did her own repairs. She lost a toggle once and went to a post box."
"It's in the frame," I said.
"What?"
"The wrong one. It stays in." I had it in my eye already. Every good thing has one wrong note in it, and if you cut it out the whole chord goes to sleep. "Don't fix it."
"I'd never," Wren said, "fix a thing."
Dennis looked at his daughter in his mother-in-law's coat. He cleared his throat. "Right," he said, and then, in the voice of a man who has never once wanted to be a witness, "Eat something," and went back along the pier a good deal faster than he'd come.
I lay down on the North Pier at twenty-five to five.
The camera needed to be four inches off the stone. That meant the camera needed a person, and the person needed to be flat. I put my coat down first, the one that had been rained on at last, and then myself on it, face to the rail, feet to the sea. That way, I told myself, I would never see the water. I'd only hear it.
I heard it. The swell came in under the stones with a long breath and a slap, eleven seconds, and somewhere under my left hip a sea the size of a county put its shoulder against my shoes. I started to count. By the fourth swell I had my eyes shut, and I was giving the camera a very detailed view of nothing.
"Sam," said Wren, from the rail.
"I'm fine."
"You're lying on a pier with your eyes shut."
"It's a technique."
"You look," Wren said, "like a man who's been shot by a very polite sniper."
"Could you stand a bit to your left?"
"I'm on your left. You're facing the wrong way."
She was laughing. I could hear it. She had her hands on the rail and her back to me and her collar up, and she was laughing at the sky, and I opened my eyes and put them on the little screen.
I want to say what I saw. The rail. The grey sea, which in the screen I could bear, because in the screen it was a rectangle. The woman in the red coat with her face turned away, one bright wrong note at her ribs. The dark head of the pier going off behind her, and, at the end of it, the lamp room, still dark, a candle waiting.
At six minutes to five the light came on.
It was automatic. It was a timer. I know what it was. A small computer in a box, as Pauline said, and a motor, and a lens the weight of a car, going round on a bearing in a cage of glass. But when it started to turn, that long pale beam laying itself along the top of the water and coming round to find the rail, and the back of a woman's head, it did what a very good piece of editing does. It made a whole room go silent at once.
I held the button down and the camera went off like a small gun.
I did forty frames, lying on my face in the middle of the pier, and I didn't count a single swell.
"Show me."
She'd crouched down next to me, in the coat. Her hair was all over. I turned the screen. She looked at it for a long time.
"That's good," she said, at last. "Isn't it? You can tell."
"It's not bad."
"It's her. That's—" She stopped. "That's what he's looking at. Isn't it? Every Thursday. That's what he sees."
"I don't know what he sees."
"No," Wren said. "But that's what I'd want to be."
She put a hand under my elbow. I got up the way a hinge gets up, one piece at a time. I'd lain in a puddle. She brushed my sleeve, then the front of my shirt, in short brisk strokes, like a mother at a school gate, and said, "You've gone all over in dirt, you daft article," and then she stopped brushing.
Her hand was flat on my chest. We were very near the rail. The light came round again, slow, and laid itself over her face and went on, and in the dark afterwards I could see she was about to say something and had decided against it.
I have been told that I'm bad at timing. It's the one thing I would deny.
The van horn went. Not a toot. Two long blasts, flat, enormous, the sound of a ferry leaving Rotterdam, rolling the whole length of the pier and hitting the lighthouse and coming back.
Wren said a word her mother wouldn't have liked, and put her forehead against my collarbone for a moment, and laughed into my shirt.
"He's been parked there the whole time," she said. "He's been listening to the cricket."
That night, at ten past twelve, she put her hand on the fader and told Scarholme.
"Good morning. It's Wednesday. It's midnight, and ten past. And Sam Ketley, who is a producer, and thin, and has lain down on a pier for you, has made a poster."
"I've made a photograph," I said, into the guest mic.
"It's coming to a bus shelter near you." She leaned in. "The Lady in the Red Coat. Back to you, face to the sea, and a very good light. I can't tell you where. Sam says if I tell you where he'll leave me on the pier. I'll tell you this. If you've seen her, if you've been her, if you know her mam, her cousin, her cat. Ring. And be kind, because she hasn't been asked."
I looked at her. She didn't look at me. She'd said it twice now, and it had gone out on the air, and I wrote it on my pad and didn't know why.
Ruth rang at one in the morning, which she never does, and said "Lovely!" eleven times, and Hector held the phone away from his ear and counted them on his fingers. Under the lovelies was one figure, fifteen thousand one hundred, which I wrote on my pad. Fifteen against thirty, with twenty-nine days left. It looked smaller in my handwriting.
At four, in the room above the launderette, with the dryers going round downstairs, I went through the frames on the laptop.
Frame forty was the poster. It was the best thing I'd ever made that wasn't a noise, and I knew exactly where it was going, and exactly how far it had been taken from a certain phone box.
Frame fifty-one wasn't the poster. The camera had gone on firing, in my hand, on the pier, after the horn. She'd turned. She was laughing, with her whole face, at her father's ferry, with her hair across her mouth and the beam coming round behind her, and one hand up as if to keep the noise off. She wasn't looking at the lens. She was looking at me, lying in a puddle.
I didn't send it to Ruth. I didn't put it on the board.
I made a folder. I didn't give it a name.