Sam
Eight days. Wednesday.
Under every call there's a hum.
It isn't the sea. I'd said it was the sea, to myself, for six weeks, and I'd looped it into a jingle and put a piano on it. The sea doesn't hum. The mains do, at fifty cycles, and I know that note better than my own phone number. Every room in Scarholme has it, the building's one long vowel.
His wasn't fifty.
On the Wednesday afternoon, with the warehouse awake underneath me and four pounds' worth of Oxfam on the console, I put the call from the fifth of February through the big speakers and brought the hiss up until it filled the booth. A shade high at the start. Fifty-three, fifty-four. A small motor, turning. And by the time he got to wrap up warm it had sagged, slow, like a man sitting down.
Hector stood in the doorway of the engineer's room with his arms folded. He'd been asked for four. He'd come at three.
"It's a hum," he said.
"Play the next one."
I put up the twelfth. Same note, same sag, same speed. Then the nineteenth, in the gale, with the aerial bent and the kettle blowing out. I laid the three on the screen, one under the other, and the lines sloped away to the right in exactly the same curve, like three people leaving a party at the same time.
"Then a call from March twenty twenty-three," I said. "Off your shelf."
"MILD AND DAMP."
"Then last August."
"WARM, NO WIND." He'd come in a step. "What am I looking at?"
"The sag. On a cold night it's deep. Last August it's a third as deep. A man on a phone doesn't slow down. A motor does, and a motor slows when it's cold."
"Speed drift," Hector said, finally. "Tape's slowing because the batteries are cold. In plain terms, it's tired."
"It's a tape recorder."
"It's a portable. It runs on four batteries and a prayer. I've been repairing them since before you could walk." He folded his arms again. "That's the hum. That's one thing."
"The sound at the end is two."
I played it. A hundred and ninety milliseconds, the thud and the ring. Then I lifted the Oxfam machine onto the desk, a squat grey ugly thing with a handle and a window in the lid, and a bag beside it with a cassette of Daniel O'Donnell that I'd been obliged to buy to get the price down.
"I don't think it's a handset," I said. "I've stood in that box and tried the hook, and it's a cousin of the sound, not the sound. It's a key. A heavy, old, mechanical key with a spring behind it." I put my thumb on the biggest button. "The stop key."
I pressed it.
A thud and a ring. A shade lighter than his, and a different wood, as if you'd put the same word in a different mouth. But it was in the family. Hector, who has the best ear in the north of England and is not a man who leans on a desk, leaned on the desk.
"The wrong hum," he said, very quietly, "and the wrong door."
"And four seconds. After the key there's a gap, and then the line goes. I'd have said it was the line, for the rest of my life. It's a person. Somebody turns the machine off and stands there with a receiver in their hand, thinking about it. And then they hang up."
I watched a man's whole idea of his week go, on Hector's face. He had his glasses in his hand and wasn't polishing them.
"I put him through every Thursday," he said. "Never listened to the gap."
"You did know it. You just thought it was a person."
"It was a person."
"It was a tape of one."
I'll give Hector this: he doesn't pretend. He fought every point like a man being pulled out of a hole, and when he lost one he said so, in a voice that got ruder with each concession.
I played him the Valentine's gap, the four bars under the hiss, and he said, "First mix. I told you. We changed the lass at Easter ninety-six." I said the Trust's own leaflet had the North Pier light going automatic in April nineteen ninety-six. He said, "Then he's the keeper." I said, "He's the last one." He said, "Then he's dead," and sat down in the chair behind him without looking, the way he does.
"Probably. The archive opens Monday, by appointment, for forty minutes. I rang. I got a recorded message from a woman who sounded delighted to be recorded."
"Translate that," said Hector, "for a man who's put a dead man through for three years."
"You've been giving the best two minutes of your week to a tape recorder."
"In plain terms," said Hector, "I've been in love with a Walkman."
"A big one," I said.
He made a noise, a single dry thing that was nearly a laugh and wasn't, and went on being nearly one, and then he put his face in his hands and sat like that, and I looked at the carpet.
"You've used my own cassettes to prove I'm a liar," he said, into them.
"I've used them to prove you're not."
"From where I'm sitting, lad, that's the same thing."
Ruth rang at six. I took it on the fire stairs, which has a good acoustic, and I'd have liked it to have been worse.
"Darling! Eight days. Twenty-seven thousand on yesterday's figures, against thirty, and you sound out of breath."
"It's a tape. The Lighthouse Man. A man in nineteen ninety-six, and somebody plays it down the phone. I've the proof. The hum, the key, the jingle—"
"Oh, darling." She said it the way you say it to a child who's brought you a worm. "A cassette. Super. A tape's a twist. There'll be someone at that box on Thursday with a tape recorder and a thousand people with phones, and it'll be so much better when the city discovers it live. You'll say nothing to the engineer or the lad in the beanie, and especially nothing to Wren."
"She'll be on the pier."
"She'll be marvellous," said Ruth, and went.
I stood on the stairs in the smell of old paint. Below me a roller door came down, long and metal, like a lid.
She came at nine with a carrier bag of flasks, and a vest in her other hand like something she'd caught.
"Vi said wear one. This is my nana's." She held it up. It was grey, about the thickness of a doormat, and there was a label sewn inside: MRS ARCHER. DO NOT BOIL. "The sleeves are for show."
I had the Oxfam machine on the desk in Studio B with its back off, putting in the batteries. She pulled the vest on over her head, and got her arms up, and stuck.
"Don't be clever," said the vest.
"I'm going to be plain."
"Go on, then."
I fed in a battery. I'd thought about the order of it for four days, and now I'd got a woman in a vest and a screwdriver, and the order went.
"I found the box on the thirtieth of January," I said.
The vest went very still.
"The number on the whiteboard is the kiosk halfway along the North Pier. I matched it on the thirtieth, in my room, at five in the morning, and by eleven I was standing in it. I rang it from my phone. It doesn't ring back."
"You what."
"I didn't know it was anything. I didn't tell Hector, or Ruth, or you." Second battery. It wouldn't seat. "I went again the day of the poster, and stood fifty feet from it while a man took your picture. I wrote the number on the board, small, so I wouldn't say it. And I stood in it with you in the storm, and I counted the waves."
One arm came through. Then her head, with her hair standing straight up, like a woman who'd been through a hedge.
"You counted the waves."
"Eleven. Then one more."
"I could have been drowned, Sam, and you were—" She tried to storm to the window, and the other arm of the vest was still above her head, and she went three steps like a thing with one wing. "I can't even do this properly. Help me."
I helped her. She stood still and let me pull the vest down, and her face over the neckline was pink and furious and about eleven. I did the third battery with my hands not quite steady.
"Is that the lot?"
There was another drawer. It had a signature in it, and a date, and a boardroom. There wasn't time. That's not true.
"That's the box," I said.
"Right." She breathed out through her nose. "I'm cross with you in a way I haven't got the space for. It's going on a list." She picked up the Oxfam machine, looked for the button that said what it did, and pressed the wrong one.
Daniel O'Donnell, at full volume, offered to take someone home.
We stood there with it. Neither of us moved to stop it. At the end of the line she said, in a very small voice, "Is that him?" and I said, "That's the shop," and the laugh came out of her like a bus out of a tunnel, and she had to sit on the desk.
"Show me," she said. "The proper button."
I took out Daniel O'Donnell. "That one," I said, and showed her the stop key, and she pressed it.
It went through the studio like a thing she'd lived with. The weight, the ring. Her face did nothing. I've learned this about her: when it's very bad, her face goes to rest, like a swimmer's on her back.
"I said hello to that," she said.
"You said hello to a man."
"I said it every Thursday. To a Walkman." She laughed once, and it cracked. "Nineteen ninety-six, you said? I was three. I'd have been eating paste. He never said my name, did he? Not once. He'd never met me. So it's not me. It was never me."
"It was never you."
"And they sent me flowers. A hundred lemons. I stood in that box and said hello to a dial tone." She looked out through the glass at the whiteboard on its nail. "Did you tell Ruth?"
"Ruth knows. She said I wasn't to tell you."
"And?"
"And I'm telling you."
She looked at me for a long time. I'd have liked to be able to hide in a hum.
"Somebody's playing it," she said slowly. "Somebody stands in that box on a Thursday with a cassette recorder and holds it to the phone. Every week. In the cold. And on Thursday there'll be a thousand people on that pier, and a poster of me on every bus shelter on Harbour Road, and they'll all be looking for a woman." Her voice was even. "Hector? Ollie?"
"One of them has to have the tapes."
"And if it's neither?"
"Then it's somebody we've never heard of," I said, "and she's going to be standing in a phone box, with a recorder, and the city's going to be looking at her."
She went to the window in the corridor, which looks out at the car park and the wall.
"Right," said Wren. "Then I'm not letting them have her."
She hadn't turned round, so I couldn't see her face. I could hear it. Her breath went in, and held, and came out in a long gust, like a woman setting something down.
"It isn't a case, Sam. It's a person with a coin."
"I know."
"Then why's your voice like that?"
"It's the hum," I said. "It's in the corridor."
"There's no hum in the corridor."
"There is. You can't hear it. That's the job."
She came back and kissed me, in the corridor, in front of the red light, which wasn't on air, and it was a short, hard, unromantic kiss. Then she picked up her bag. Her nana's vest rode up at the back, and I didn't tell her.
She went at a quarter past ten. Ruth's van from Middlesbrough was at the foot of the pier with its generator going and a lad called Kieran in a hi-vis, who'd been told it was a fun run.
At midnight Hector put her on from the van. At one minute past she said, "Good morning, Scarholme. It's Thursday. I'm in a van," and there was a boom in her voice, a hollow, as if she'd been put in a tin. The wind went past the van door. Under it, a long way off, the sea.
I sat at the desk with the cans on and my hand on the talkback. I'd never been the man in her ear before.
"Fifty thousand," said Hector.
On the monitor, Ollie's page had gone to a picture. A drone shot. I hate drones. It showed the North Pier from above, a long dark stroke across the harbour, and on it, from the root to the lamp, from rail to rail, lights. Hundreds of them. Phones, held up, white and blue, nodding in the wind like a field of something. I put the number at a thousand. Hector said, "More."
At a quarter to one, through the cans, she said: "I'm going out."
"Wren," I said. "Keep the vest on."
"I'm wearing the vest."
"Keep it on."
"Hello, Scarholme," she said, not to me, to all of them, and the van door opened, and the wind came in over the mic like a hand.
On the screen a small yellow figure came round the corner of the van and walked into the lights.