Sam
Thirteen days. Friday.
Meet the Team lasted nine minutes, and Hector's part of it was eleven words.
I know it was eleven because I counted, and because he'd sworn on his mug that he wouldn't speak at all, and then Wren said, "Hector, sunshine, say hello to Scarholme."
He pressed the talkback like a man ringing the bell at a house he's been told has a dog in it.
"I'm Hector," he said. "I turn things up and down. Leave the mug."
A text came in saying That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard, and he read it out, and went the colour of cold gravy.
It was the first show since the pier. Neither of us had said the word pier. Every time Wren passed the booth door she said "Term four" under her breath, and every time I said "We never signed it," and she said "You said agreed," and that was the entire conversation we'd had about the dressing gown. It was the best conversation I'd ever not had.
At three, after the pips, Hector put an envelope on the guest chair and walked out with his bag over his shoulder, not looking at it. Inside was a brass Yale key on a loop of green wool, and a note in blue biro.
Reel room. Put them back in order. H.
I read it twice. It felt like being handed the keys to a house in which somebody has recently died.
On Saturday afternoon the carpet warehouse shut at one, and the building went quiet the way a building does when it stops pretending. I let myself into the reel room and put the light on.
The logger holds forty-two days. I took the six Thursdays still on it and laid Hector's cassettes for the same six nights against them. I played each in his old grey deck with the handle, and stacked the two files one over the other. A single copy of a thing is a story. Two copies is evidence.
They agreed. Every pause, every cough, the same wind going past the same hollow thing, lined up to the breath. Hector had kept his Thursdays honestly for three years, with a pen. Whatever the Lighthouse Man was, Hector hadn't touched him.
I put the cassettes back in order, as asked, and went to buy something for Sunday dinner, because I was going as the boyfriend, and the girlfriend had told me I had a face like an unpaid bill.
On Sunday I brought a bottle of ginger wine. Flowers seemed forward. Wine had been vetoed in advance. Ginger wine sat in the gap between the two, like a vicar.
The Archer house has a hall you walk into sideways. There were the six blue bags, queuing against the radiator, and Wren took off her yellow mac. Over her arm she had the red duffel.
"I've brought it back. It's been on the back of the booth door a fortnight. Hector's started saying goodnight to it."
She laid it across the top of the nearest bag and smoothed it twice, as if straightening a picture.
"Wipe your feet," said a voice from the kitchen.
I wiped my feet for eleven seconds. It's the only domestic test I've ever been certain I passed.
Lorna Archer is five foot four and had the carving fork in her hand when I came in, which I took to be a position.
"You're thin," she said.
"I've been told."
"Hm." She took the ginger wine, read the label like the small print on a will, and put it in the cupboard above the fridge, where other people's good intentions went to be forgotten. It was a better reception than I'd had at three companies.
Dennis came in drying his hands on his trousers, enormous in the little kitchen, and took my hand in both of his. "Heard you Friday. Hector. Eleven words. I said to the van, that's the most he's said since the Millennium."
The doorbell went.
It was the woman from next door, Maureen, in a dressing gown and one slipper, with a smell of something burning behind her and a baby in her arms.
"Lorna, the chip pan's gone up, it's not a fire, it's a situation—" and she looked round the hall for the nearest pair of hands, and they were mine.
"Hold him. Neck in the crook!"
And she was gone, one slipper slapping off down the path, and I was standing in Lorna Archer's hall holding a baby.
He was about three months old, with a fat, thoughtful face and a hat with ears. He looked at me with the open contempt of a man served the wrong pint.
"That's Alfie," said Wren, from some way behind me, in a voice that was trying very hard to keep a straight face. "He's not been a problem."
I tried to hand him to Wren. Wren put both hands behind her back. I tried to hand him to Dennis, who showed me both palms: gravy, and a matter of hygiene. Alfie took hold of my tie, his whole fist, and held on like a man at a rail.
"Maureen'll be a minute," said Lorna, who hadn't even looked round. "She goes to tell her sister."
"About the fire?"
"About everything."
So I ate Sunday dinner with a baby on my arm.
At the table nobody sat in Nana's chair. It stood in the corner with a plumped cushion and a cardigan over the back that I think had been there since November. Nobody looked at it.
I sat with Alfie in the crook of my left arm and my fork in my right, and Dennis cut my chicken into pieces without a word. Alfie watched each forkful go up with the interest of an investor.
I'd just got a potato to my mouth when Lorna said, "What is it you do, exactly, besides finish things?"
Wren put her glass down. Dennis, mid-sprout, chewed with great attention. I couldn't lean back or fold my arms or put a hand flat on anything, because I had a baby, and I think that's the only reason I said what I said.
"I take things out," I said. "A cough. A hum. There's something in every room that shouldn't be there, and I hear it, and I take it out, and then I'm sent to the next room."
"Sent."
"I do what I'm sent to do."
"And what were you sent to do here?"
I'd had that answer ready since Wednesday. It was true, as far as it went.
"Improve the figures."
"And have you?"
"Twenty-two thousand," I said. "Up from nine. They want thirty."
"Is that a lot?"
"It's more than double, Lorna," said Dennis.
"And then it's safe."
It wasn't a question. She was looking at her plate, cutting a carrot into three equal parts. Under the table, Wren's foot found mine and stayed. Alfie chose that moment to be sick, quietly and thoroughly, down my tie.
Nobody said anything. Lorna got up, took a tea towel off the oven door, and mopped me without ceremony, tie and shirt and baby, like a woman wiping down a bus seat.
"He'll do, Lorna," said Dennis.
"He might," said Lorna, and sat down, and that was the end of my cross-examination.
"You'll find out," Dennis said to me, comfortably, nodding at Alfie. "Don't expect to sleep. Wren never slept, this one. Four months of screaming at the gulls. I walked miles."
"You were on the boat," said Lorna, to the peas.
"Nights I was off. I'd carry her out of the house and walk the boat road home past the pier, the long way, two hours, to give your mother a kip." He pointed his fork at me. "Best sleep I ever got was her on my shoulder with her mouth shut."
"Did you," said Lorna. "Two hours. You can't walk to the Co-op without stopping for a sit."
"I had a lot to carry," said Dennis, and Lorna cut another carrot into three.
Maureen came back at ten past three, in both slippers, to say it had only been the oven glove, and took Alfie off me and carried him away over the wall. My arm stayed bent for some time afterwards, in the shape of him.
At the door in the hall Lorna put a plate in my hands. Foil. Hot through the bottom. Chicken, three potatoes, sprouts.
"It's not for you," Lorna said. "It's for the thin one."
"I'm the thin one."
"Then it's for you." She did up my top button, over the sick. I couldn't remember anybody ever doing that for me. She looked at the button, and then at the wall, and she said, "Mind how you go."
In the car Wren drove with both hands on the wheel, the way she does when she's about to say something. Gravy off the foil on my knee, and faintly, baby. The goose noise started up on the corner by the Co-op, a long indignant honk, and she didn't even say sorry to it.
"They like you," she said. "She did your button." She indicated, which she never does. "I've been thinking."
"Dangerous."
"Don't." She said it softly. "It's eleven days. And Tuesday is the answer to Leeds. And I'm going to ring Priya Nair on Tuesday morning and tell her no."
The goose started up again at the lights. I counted the silence. I got to nine.
"For the show," Wren said. "I can't go while the show's on. Not with the hunt. Not with Hector." She looked at the red light. "You can say something, you know."
"I know."
"You said take it. Twice."
"I said take it if you want it."
"I want it," Wren said, "less than I want the other thing." She went through the lights on green. "Say something, then."
I had it ready. It was four words long. I'd counted them on Saturday.
"The baby was excellent," I said.
"Coward," she said, and she was smiling, and she put her hand on my knee, on the foil.
At twenty to ten I sat on the bed in the room above the launderette, with the Sunday plate on the floor and the dryers going round below. A sock caught the drum and knocked.
I opened my phone and wrote it. It came out in one go.
The show's already sold.
I looked at it. I looked at what it would do. I gave it the next line, and the one after, and took them out again, the way I take out a breath.
I didn't send it. I put it in drafts, where there was nothing else, because I'd deleted the other one.