Wren
Twenty-eight days. Thursday.
The Claimant Chair was Sam's idea. After thirty-one claimants in ten days, he said, we needed a system, and a system, in Sam, means a piece of furniture.
"One a week," he said, at ten to twelve, in the corridor. "Vetted. Tested. Live. Whoever passes the phone check gets the chair."
"The chair's got the stuffing coming out."
"That's what makes it credible."
"Who's passed?"
"Her," said Sam, as the goods lift arrived, groaning, and the cage door was dragged across by a hand in a long white glove.
She came out of that lift like a battleship out of a fog bank. A red velvet cape with a fur collar. A hat, with a feather in it that had clearly seen action. A handbag the size of a small suitcase. A face powdered the shade of a church candle, and lipstick put on by somebody in a hurry, or in a spirit of revenge. She was seventy if she was a day. She stopped in the corridor, put the back of her glove to her forehead, and said, in a voice that had been to a very good school and lost its way home:
"Dear heart. Is this the temple?"
"It's Studio B," said Hector, from behind the glass.
"I am Marguerite Fairweather-Bell," she said. "Of Seaton. One doesn't like to say. But I am, I believe, the woman."
Hector looked at Sam. Sam looked at the ceiling. I took her glove, which was damp, and said "Lovely," and led her into the booth.
The Surgery's one fixed habit is that you give anyone a chance. I gave Marguerite a very long one.
By ten past twelve, on air, she'd done her late husband, Cedric, who'd been "at sea", and her red coat, which had been "a sort of crimson, dear heart, or a rose," and the pier, which she'd walked "in the small hours, with a sorrow on me". She cried. It was a good cry. I'll give her that. It started with a catch in the throat and went up, like a lift, and came out at the top as a kind of wail, and Hector, through the glass, dealt her a tissue off a little tray, one at a time, like a croupier.
"Dear boy," she said, to Sam. "You're very kind to a broken old woman."
"I'm just writing," Sam said.
He was writing. He'd got his pad on his knee and he was doing something with his eyes that I'd seen him do to a fridge. He slid the pad across the desk. It said, in his tiny typed handwriting: Breath before each sob. Same length. Count.
She was winding up for the second one. I counted. In, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Wail.
Two minutes later the third. In, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Wail.
I took a sip of tea and put it down with great care.
Then, from inside the handbag, something went dee-dee-dah, and a bird. A sort of whistly bird, like a bird being sarcastic. Marguerite's glove went onto the handbag and pressed down, as you would on a cough.
Sam wrote four words on the pad, and underlined them twice, and turned it round.
That's Ollie's sting.
"I'm so sorry, Scarholme," I said, into the mic. "My guest's handbag has a bird in it."
At twenty-five to two I leaned across to Sam, with my mic off, and said, "What if she's real?"
"She isn't."
"What if she is, though? What if she's some poor woman who's been in a cupboard for thirty years and she's finally come out in a hat?"
"Then he'll say something to her," Sam said. "He won't. He never does. He's never said anything to anyone."
"He said my name once."
"At Christmas," said Sam, "yes," and for a second he looked as though he wanted to take something back, and he didn't know which end to start.
At one forty-one the board lit, and I sent Marguerite a look across the desk. She'd been getting restless. You can feel a woman getting restless in a chair; it's the same sound a cat makes about a door.
"Marguerite," I said, soft. "I'm going to ask you to be quiet now. Can you do that? For two minutes?"
"Of course, dear heart. I am silence itself."
Hector put him through. The pause came. The hiss. The wind going across the lip of something.
"Thursday again, pet."
I've never got used to it. It goes through the whole building. Even Marguerite sat up.
"Fret's in," said the Lighthouse Man. A long gap. "Thick as a blanket. Foghorn's been at it since teatime, and this time it's got reason."
He coughed. It was shorter than last week's, and wetter, and I put my hand flat on the desk. Beside me Sam had gone very still, with his eyes shut.
"Honey in the flask tonight," the Lighthouse Man said. "Not helped."
Through the glass, Hector put his hand to his mouth. A hundred and nine people had sent him honey. I could feel the texts stacking up behind that sentence like cars at a crossing.
Then a pause, longer than any of the others. The wind went across its bottle. I thought he'd gone.
"Singing her that one about the boats again, were you?" said the Lighthouse Man. "Heard the bairn settle."
I didn't move. My arms did a thing, all the way up, as if someone had opened a window.
"Wrap up warm," he said.
The clunk. The line went.
"He's talking to me," said Marguerite.
I'd like to say I stopped her. I had my hand on the fader, but Hector had the board, and the texts had begun, and what was coming in wasn't about her.
The city said it how it says everything. By text. In capitals.
"I'll read it," said Hector, on talkback, flat as a bus timetable. "'HE HEARD YOU SING IT.' That's forty. 'HE HEARD YOU SING IT WREN.' Sixty. 'He used the honey.' A hundred and nine. 'Wren, he's LISTENING.' 'Is that your nana's song?' 'He said BAIRN.'" He stopped. His eyebrows had gone somewhere near his hairline. "There's more."
"I know there's more." I took a breath. "Scarholme. That's a song about a boat. This is a seaside town. If you can't sing about a boat, you've got no business being in it. And a man with a cold has put honey in a flask, which nobody here has ever done before. I wouldn't read anything into it."
"He said bairn," said Sam, quietly, into the guest mic, which was on.
"It's a word, Sam."
"It's a very specific word."
"It's a Scarholme word. You looked it up." I was starting to laugh and it wasn't coming out right. "I sang once. A week last Wednesday. Badly. To nine thousand people and a mule."
Line three flashed, and I took it, because I'd have taken anything.
"Okay so, hi, Ollie," said Ollie, on air. "Wren, genuinely. Can I just, like, say the obvious thing? Nobody's said it. This isn't a recording. He said, 'singing her that one again.' He's heard it. Which means he's live? And he's listening? To you? To this? That's, like, a man with a radio. In real time. I'm just asking the question, but why is he listening to you in particular?"
"Ollie, sunshine," I said, "you've got a very good microphone, and you've never once said anything on it I can use."
"I'm just—"
"And I don't know why your sting went off in my guest's handbag, either."
There was a gap in which you could have parked a car.
"Okay so, that's a coincidence," said Ollie. "It's, like, an app. Lots of people have my app. I've got four thousand subscribers. I'm basically a household name."
I dropped him. I didn't dump him; I just let him go.
At one fifty-eight, line two.
"Is that woman still in the building?" said Vi.
"Yes, Vi."
"Is she still crying?"
"She's on her sixth tissue."
"I've had more convincing kippers," said Vi, on air, and put the phone down.
I looked at Marguerite. Marguerite looked back at me, a long red look, with her glove going up to her throat. Hector, behind the glass, wrote something on his pad and held it up. KIPPERS. He's got a league table. I'm sure of it.
Sam passed me a note.
She agrees to everything. Ask her something he can't know. Make it up. If she's been coached on facts she won't have been coached on lies.
I read it twice. It was the nicest thing he'd ever written me, and it was about fraud. Under the desk his knee knocked mine, once, like a man pressing a lift button. Go.
"Marguerite," I said. "Before we go. You've been very brave, and you've told us a lot. Just one more. He always asks after your dog, doesn't he?"
"Oh, yes," said Marguerite, and I watched her chin come up, because the chin always knows, "Biscuit. Yes, dear heart. Biscuit's very well, bless him."
The whole of Studio B went quiet. Through the glass, Hector put down his pen as gently as a man laying down a sleeping child.
"Marguerite," I said. "He's never asked anybody anything. He's never answered a question in three years. It's the one thing everybody in Scarholme knows. I've said it on this programme forty times. And I made the dog up."
"Well," said Marguerite. Her glove went to her hat. "One doesn't like to say. I may have been overcome."
"Was there a Biscuit?"
"There was," Marguerite said, with the full height of her dignity, "a cat. Once."
The texts went like a wave over a pier. I read the top one myself. WHO IS BISCUIT. Then Biscuit is a cat. Then Biscuit for the woman. Then, from a lorry driver on the A-one, I've had to stop. Marguerite got up out of the Claimant Chair, put the strap of the handbag on her shoulder, and left Studio B like a liner leaving a harbour it had never meant to enter. At the door she paused, and the bird went again, three notes, and she stopped it with her thumb.
"Sam," I said, into the mic. "Did we just win?"
"I think," said Sam, "the cat did."
At half past two the goods lift made its noise and my dad came out of it with a fishing rod.
It was in a long green case over his shoulder. He had his anorak zipped up to the nose and a foil parcel in his hand, and he came down the corridor chewing, which is how he enters every room. "Don't mind me. I've been down the Quay wall since eleven. Heard it all in the van. Your keys." He held them up. "You left them on the sideboard. Your mother says you'd lose your head if it wasn't screwed on, and I said it's not screwed, it's chewed."
"Dad, you can't bring a rod up the lift. It says four persons or one roll."
"It's a slim rod." He looked at Sam. "All right, lad?"
"Mr Archer."
"Dennis."
"Dennis." Sam was standing at the end of the corridor with his arms by his sides. He looked at my dad's mouth. He looked at the rod. He looked at the foil parcel, and then at my dad's mouth again. "Do you fish on Thursdays?"
"Every Thursday. Bass, if there's any. There isn't."
"And the radio's on?"
"In the van, door open. I can hear your lass from the Quay. I can hear her from Rotterdam." He held out a sandwich to Hector, through the booth door. "Bacon. It's cold. It's still good."
Hector took it like a man being handed a medal, and ate it in three bites, and said "Brown sauce," and my dad said "Always," and that was the two of them done.
Sam went on looking at my dad as if he was a piece of music he couldn't place.
At five past three we stood in the car park with the frost coming down.
"It's Ollie," Sam said. "The sting. The sob. She was coached. He sent her."
"I know."
"You don't know. You laughed."
"I know it was Ollie. That's why I laughed. Did you see his face when I said handbag? Did you hear his face?"
"I can't hear faces." He'd got his hands in his pockets, the way he does when he's decided not to put them anywhere dangerous. "Your dad, though."
"What about him?"
"He's out every Thursday. On the Quay. He listens to the programme. He's up at two in the morning, he knows the pier, he's got a van—"
I laughed. It came out right, for once. A proper one. "My dad," I said, "got his head stuck in a pillowcase at Christmas. He can't work a toaster. He thinks the internet is something you pay for."
"I'm not saying—"
"He brought me my keys, Sam."
"At half past two."
"Because he's my dad!"
My phone had gone in my pocket a few minutes before. I got it out, with my other hand on his coat sleeve, to make a point of some kind. Mam. One minute past three.
Bed.
I put it away.
"Your dad, though," said Sam, again, to the frost.
I got into the car. I put the key in. I told him to go home, and I told him to put his scarf on, and I drove up Harbour Road laughing, with the heater rattling. At the lights I did it again, to check that it still worked.