Wren
Three days. Monday.
I hadn't been out in daylight on a Monday morning since I was at school, and I'd forgotten how much of it there is. It was everywhere. It was on the pavements and on the parked cars and all over the sea, flat and white and bright as a dentist's lamp, and everybody in it looked like they'd been up for hours and done something useful.
Ollie Brannigan lives with his mam in Seaton, in a semi with a lion on each gatepost. One of the lions has lost its face. The garage has a sticker on the door, a little bird and the word NIGHTJAR, and under it, in felt pen, on a bit of card: STUDIO. PLEASE KNOCK. ON AIR MEANS ON AIR.
I knocked.
"Okay, so, just a sec?" said Ollie, from inside, and the door went up on its runners, rattling, like a shop opening, and there he was in his beanie with a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST SON.
"Wren," he said. He didn't look surprised. That was the worst thing. "Do you want to come in? It's, like, a bit of a mess."
It wasn't. That was the second worst thing. It was the tidiest room I've ever been in. Egg-box foam on every wall, a good microphone, a ring light. And along the back wall, where you'd keep the lawnmower, a corkboard the size of a door, and on it, pinned in neat rows with coloured string between them like a detective in a film, three years of my life.
The poster was in the middle. Me at the rail, in the red duffel, the beam starting to turn. Beside it, the same size, blown up so the grain was like sand, a black-and-white photo of a woman at the same rail, at night, in a duffel coat, with her face turned away and a bundle in her arms. Under it, in Ollie's careful printing: Gazette, February, nineteen ninety-three.
A red string ran from the bright toggle on my coat to the toggle on hers.
And in the corner, pinned on its own, a photo I knew: my Fiesta by the skip, under the car-park lamp, the windscreen white, and across it, in neat capitals, the three words. Printed across the bottom, small, the time it was taken. Three oh four. I'd found it at ten past.
"You wrote that," I said.
Ollie looked at the photo, and then at the floor. "It was the cold open. For sixty-one. I didn't think you'd ring the police." His ears went red. "I didn't think you'd be frightened. I thought it was, like, atmosphere."
"Oliver!" A woman's voice, through the connecting door, from the kitchen. "Is that the radio lady?"
"Mam, I'm in the studio—"
"Ask her does she want a Penguin."
"She doesn't want a Penguin."
"I'd like a Penguin," I said.
There was a pause. "Oliver, she'd like a Penguin," said his mam, and the door opened six inches and a hand came through with a Penguin in it, and Ollie took it and gave it to me, and the door shut.
I held it. I didn't open it. It was something to hold.
"I've come to make you an offer," I said.
"Okay," he said, as if it might be a question.
"The show's done Wednesday. You'll know that. Everybody knows that." I sat down on the only other chair, which was a kitchen stool. "After Wednesday I'm nobody. I'm a woman with a voice and no slot. So here's what you get. Me. The whole thing, my side, on Nightjar, as long as you want. Christmas. The crying. Producer Sam. The pier. Vi. Six weeks of it, from the chair. Nobody's had me. You'd have me first."
He'd sat down too. He was holding the mug in both hands.
"And?" he said.
"And you take it down." I didn't look at the board. "The photo. The string. Saturday. The song. You leave my family out of it. My nana's three months dead and can't answer you, and my mam's a dinner lady who's never rung a radio station in her life."
He looked at me for a long time. He's got a nice open face, Ollie, like a boy who's never broken anything he couldn't glue.
"Okay, so, I really, really respect that," he said. "Genuinely. Like, that's huge. That's a huge offer."
"Then take it."
"It's not yours to keep, though." He said it softly, as if he were sorry for me. "It's not even hers. It's the city's. The whole city's cried at this for three years, Wren. Every Thursday. You made them. That's the show. You can't make sixty thousand people cry about a woman and then go, actually, that's private."
"It's my nana. She's dead, Ollie."
"Okay, but somebody walked that pram, right? Your nana was, like, fifty-two that winter. In a duffel coat. At two in the morning. Every week." He said it gently, like a doctor. "I'm just saying the city's going to ask who else was up."
"Ollie."
"I'm not doing it to hurt anybody. I'm doing it because it's true." He put the mug down. He turned to his screen and moved the mouse, and something on it changed, and I watched his finger, and I knew before he did it what he was going to do, because I'd have done it, at his age, with a microphone and a mam with Penguins. "So I was going to go Thursday, one forty-one. For the symmetry. But Ruth's going Wednesday. So I'm going Wednesday. Midnight. Same time as you go on." He clicked. "And I'm putting the trailer out now."
"Don't."
"It's out," said Ollie. "Sorry. It's, like, it's out."
I stood up. I put the Penguin down on his desk, very gently, beside the microphone.
"Tell your mam thank you for the Penguin," I said.
I walked back. I left the Fiesta outside the house with the faceless lion and walked forty minutes, in the daylight, down onto Harbour Road where the shops start.
There are eleven bus shelters on Harbour Road. Every one of them had me in it, at the rail, in the red coat, with my back to the street. One had a candle, burnt down. One had a Post-it, low down, in a child's writing: SHE WILL COME.
I was outside the phone shop when I heard it.
They've a speaker over the door, to play whatever's in the charts, to make you come in and get a contract. Somebody inside had put something else on. A lad behind the counter, eighteen at most, with his phone in his hand and his mouth open, looking at the screen and then at the window and then at me.
It was my voice. Coming out of the doorway into Harbour Road, in the daylight, very loud.
"Silver boat on a silver sea,
bring my bairn back home to me."
Too high, from the night of the bet. Laughing in the middle of it. Me, at one in the morning, red to the ears, singing for a forfeit, thinking it was my nana's.
Then Ollie's voice, over a slow piano, a bit like Sam's piano and not as good. "Okay, so. Five weeks ago Wren Archer sang you a song her nana made up. Last Saturday there was a hole in her show the length of a song, and Wren walked out of it." A gap, with a bird in it. "Her nana walked this town every night for years. So who was she walking with?" The piano stopped. "Nightjar. Wednesday. Midnight. Her."
Then it started again from the top, because the lad had it on a loop.
People turned. That's what I remember. Not the song. People on Harbour Road, in the daylight, with their shopping and their pushchairs and their dogs, turning in the street, one at a time, towards the sound, and then from the sound to me. A woman with a pushchair. Two lads in hi-vis with sausage rolls. A man at the bus shelter, the one with the candle, who looked from me to the poster behind him and back.
I'd had people listen to me in the dark for ten years and never once seen their faces. They were kind faces, most of them. That was the worst part. They were looking at me the way you look at somebody whose house is on the news.
I went into the Co-op, because it was there.
I got a basket and put a lemon in it, out of habit, and stood in front of the bread like a woman in a dream about bread.
"It is you, isn't it, flower?"
She was about sixty, in a fleece, with a trolley. She had the face of a woman who means well very loudly. Behind her two more had stopped, with baskets, and were not quite looking.
"It's you off the radio. Off the poster. I knew it was." She put a hand on my arm. "And I've just heard that song outside. Our Karen sent it me. And I said to Karen, I said, that's a nana song, that is, that's somebody's family." She leaned in. She wasn't lowering her voice. She was the kind of woman who thinks leaning in is the same thing. "Was it your nana, then? God rest her." And then, because she couldn't leave a lid on anything: "Or is it your mam, flower?"
The aisle went quiet.
I opened my mouth. I've never in my life not had something to say. I had a whole Surgery voice, and a joke for everything, and for a second nothing came out of it at all.
Then something did. Not the Surgery voice. Mine.
"It's a song somebody sang me when I was a baby," I said. "It's mine. And I'm buying a lemon."
She took her hand off my arm. She looked at the lemon, as if it might explain itself, and said, "Well," and went off towards the tills with her trolley, and the two behind her found something urgent in the tinned fruit.
"Margaret Pattinson."
Small. Clear. From the end of the aisle, where Vi stood in her good coat and her hat and her bandage, with the tartan trolley and a tin of pilchards, watching the fleece go.
"Class Four, nineteen seventy-three," said Vi. "She put a frog in the lost property box. I had to take it out. I've not forgotten, and nor has the frog."
Vi stood beside me in front of the bread. She didn't look at me. She looked at the loaves, as if she were choosing.
"You look like something the cat's left on the step," she said.
"I've been to see Ollie."
"I know. The whole street heard." She picked up a small white loaf, considered it, and put it back. "That boy's got a lovely voice and nothing in his head."
"He's not stopping, Vi."
"No. They never stop, that sort. They've never been made to." She turned the bandaged hand over and looked at it. Then she said, so quietly the woman stacking the shelves two yards away couldn't have heard it, "Thursday. Twenty to two."
"What?"
"Thursday. Twenty to two. At the box." Her other hand went into her coat pocket and stayed there. "Tell her."
"Tell her what?"
"That's all," said Vi. "Just that. Tell her." She took her hand out of her pocket, empty, and put it on the handle of her trolley. "Pet. That's the first thing I've ever heard you say that was yours. Ten years on that wireless, and all of it other folk's business. Have you noticed?"
I hadn't. I had now.
She paid for her pilchards and went out into the daylight, very upright, pulling the tartan trolley behind her.
I sat in the Co-op café, which is two tables by the cash machine, with a cup of tea I didn't drink.
I got my phone out. Hector had sent me something on Saturday, a file, no message, just the file, and I hadn't opened it. I opened it.
"It's Sam," said Sam, very small, out of the phone's tinny speaker, in the Co-op. "The producer."
I listened to all forty seconds, in daylight, with a lemon in my basket. I heard the bit where he breathed. I heard the bit where he said he was sorry. I heard him say it was a man being kind to the dark, and his voice go, just slightly, on the word kind, and come back.
Then I played it again.
I'm the one who says in daylight, where it counts and goes to bed with the curtains taped.
Ollie had the photo, and the song, and Saturday with a hole in it. Ruth had the logger. On Wednesday, at midnight, they'd both go on air with my mother, and the city would do the sums, the way she'd told me to.
Unless somebody went first.
Not with her. With me. My part. Just mine. I was the bairn in the pram. That was mine to give away.
Or half mine.
St Hild's does dinners from a quarter to twelve. Jackie let me in the kitchen door without a word and stood aside, custard ladle up like a lollipop lady. My mam was at the hatch in her tabard and her hairnet, with a queue of six-year-olds in front of her and a tray of fish fingers, and she didn't stop serving when she saw me.
"Mam. Wednesday. On air." I said it to the side of her head. "I want to say I was the bairn. That's all. Not who. Just that it was me in the pram."
She put three fish fingers on a plate and a spoon of peas beside them and handed it down to a boy with no front teeth.
"Say bairn," my mam said. "Don't say whose."
"That's it?"
She put three fish fingers on another plate, and pushed it across the steel at me.
"And eat something first. Next."
I ate it standing up by the dishwasher, with Jackie watching me like a soap.
I'd need a desk. I'd need a back door on the latch. I'd need somebody in my ear who could hear a room before I'd walked into it, and who knew where everything was in the building, and who'd kept his mouth shut for six weeks for Leeds and then gone on air with his voice going on the word kind.
I wrote it four times. The first three were too long. The fourth one I sent.
Wednesday. Back door. Don't be clever.
Then I stood with it in my hand in the playground, face up, the way my mam holds hers.
It went in under a minute.
Never.