Sam
Two days. Tuesday.
The air conditioning on the fourth floor was still a quarter-tone flat. Six weeks, and nobody had touched it. I found that very nearly comforting.
"Sam! Super." Ruth had a new lanyard, a green one, for the network. "Sit. I've only got ten minutes, Manchester's on at eleven. It's very simple." She slid a printed sheet across the desk. "The logger. The raw track, Saturday's show. One thirty-eight to one forty-eight, pre-delay, full quality, nothing dumped. The tape, the song, 'that's my nana's song', the bit about the bairn, the door. I want it on the podcast server by six tomorrow, so we can go at midnight with the network. Hector will show you the buttons."
"No," I said.
"Sorry?"
"No. I won't export it. I won't ask Hector to. I won't show anybody the buttons."
She looked at me the way she'd looked at the overnight figures in week one, turning the screen so I could see. Then she smiled.
"Darling. You're a producer. Producing is what you do."
"I've done it for eleven years," I said. "I've cut breaths out of people's grief so it would fit between the adverts. I've taken a man's stammer out of his father's eulogy because it ran long. I'm very good at it. I hear the bit that hurts and I take it out." I put the sheet back on the desk. "This is the bit that hurts. I'm leaving it in. It's not ours."
"Then I'll get someone who will."
"You can try. Hector won't. And I know where it lives, the beige box in the cupboard behind the lift, and I won't either. Hector told me once it was the law in a box."
"And Hector's lovely terms," said Ruth, quite gently, "are conditional on—"
"On the sale staying quiet until the switch. You brought the switch forward to Thursday, and you told Wren yourself, on a video call, with a cat walking past. She told the city on Sunday. It's not a leak if it came out of your own kitchen. Read his contract. I have."
I took the lanyard off. Northshore Media, Sam Ketley, on a blue ribbon. I'd worn it round my neck into a booth the size of a wardrobe at ten to three in the morning and asked which mic was hers. I put it on her desk, by the printed sheet.
"I resign," I said. "I'll put it in an email so it's dull enough to count."
Ruth looked at the lanyard. The air conditioning went on, flat.
"You'll never work in radio again," she said. It was the first thing she'd said to me in six weeks without a single lovely in it.
"I know," I said. "I'm going to try something worse."
The back door was on the latch.
At twenty to twelve I pushed it, and it went, and I went up the back stairs past the fire door and the smell of carpet glue, and into the engineer's room, where Hector was sitting with his flask and the reel-to-reel on the shelf behind him.
He didn't look round.
"She's in the booth," he said. "She said you're to sit there." He pointed at a stool by the logger. "And do your job, and say nothing to her that isn't in her ear."
"Right."
"She also said," said Hector, "'tell him the green mug's on the side.'"
It was. Chipped. Full. Hot.
Through the glass Wren was in her chair with her cans round her neck and her eyes shut. She had the yellow mac over the back of the chair and Vi's dented tartan flask on the desk by her mic, where somebody had left it on Wednesday and nobody had dared move it. She didn't open her eyes. She put one hand up against the glass, flat, without looking, and held it there, and took it down.
At four minutes to midnight, on Hector's second screen, Ollie's page changed. NIGHTJAR. EPISODE SIXTY-SIX. HER. A counter underneath it, already going.
At midnight the red light came on.
"Good morning, Scarholme," said Wren. "It's Wednesday. It's midnight. It's the last show."
She left two seconds. I counted them. She didn't need me to.
"You'll have heard a trailer, on Harbour Road, outside the phone shop. You'll have heard me singing in it, badly. And somewhere, right now, a lad in a beanie is putting out an hour on who the woman is. So before he does, I'll tell you a thing that's mine."
Her hand went to the fader and took it down a notch.
"In the winter of nineteen ninety-two, I was a baby who wouldn't sleep. Somebody walked me up and down this town in the dark. And on a Thursday, at twenty to two, a man at the top of a lighthouse heard somebody sing me a song." Her voice didn't go. I was listening for it to go and it didn't. "I was the bairn. That's all. That's my part. And the woman is nobody's business. She's not mine to give you. She's not his, and she's not Leeds's, and she's not yours. So I'm asking you, the way I've never asked you anything in ten years. Leave her be."
Then she played a record. A short one. It was the bravest thing I've heard anybody do on the radio, and she followed it with Dolly Parton.
The phones didn't light.
That was the first thing. For two minutes and forty seconds, the length of the record, nothing. Not a line. Hector sat with his hands flat on the desk either side of the board. I watched the counter on Ollie's page go up. Eleven thousand. Fourteen.
Then line one.
Hector looked at the screen, and his face did a thing I'd only seen it do on Thursdays.
"Bev," he said, on talkback. "Lamp Café."
Wren put her up.
"Wren, petal," said Bev, down the line, husky, with a fryer going behind her and somebody laughing near the till. "It's me. I've rung to say. I'm her."
"Bev—"
"Red coat and all, petal. I've got it on. I've got it on over me pinny, I look like a post box. It was me on that pier. Every Thursday. I'd leave Kyle with the fryer." She laughed, at herself, first, the way she always does. "So that lad can put that in his podcast and smoke it."
Line two lit. Line three. Four, five, six, all at once.
I stopped being able to keep a log at about ten past twelve. I tried. I had the pad. I wrote Bev and Jackie, St Hild's, the custard one and a vicar, St Columba's, very posh, says she's "frightfully her", and then the pad wasn't enough and Hector stopped putting them through one at a time and started putting them through in pairs.
"I'm her," said Jackie, from St Hild's. "I was on that pier every night that winter, me. I had a red mac off the market." Through the glass Wren put her hand over her mouth.
"I'm her," said Maureen, who'd rung on the first night to ask if Hector was all right. "And so's our Pauline."
"I'm her," said a nurse on her break at the General, with a monitor beeping behind her. "We're all her on Ward Six. We've put tinsel on the fire extinguisher."
At half past twelve, Hector turned his second screen round so I could see it. Ollie's page. Under his episode, where people leave comments, there weren't comments any more. There were pictures. Hundreds, coming in faster than the page could load them. Women in red coats, red scarves, red dressing gowns, a red tea towel held up under a chin. A girl in a red school jumper. A man in a red cagoule with a dog in a red coat, captioned STILL HER. KEVIN. A whole bowls club in a prefab, thirty-one pensioners, in red, with Dorothy at the front holding up her knitting. Every one of them with the same two words underneath.
You couldn't see the episode for them. You'd have had to scroll for an hour to find his photo. At one o'clock a new picture went up at the top, posted by the page itself: Ollie, in his garage, in a red beanie, holding a Penguin. No caption.
At half past one my phone went in my pocket. I'd forgotten I still had a work one. Ruth. She didn't text. She rang.
"Sam." No darling. She was in a car; I could hear a motorway and an indicator. "I'm listening. Everybody in Leeds is listening. Hear me out, because I'm not a monster, whatever your engineer calls me. Scarholme Sound loses four hundred thousand pounds a year. There are thirty people in Leeds whose jobs ride on Manchester buying a story with an ending. Not my job. Theirs. A woman in accounts with twins. That logger is the ending. Export it tonight and I keep thirty people in work."
It was a good argument. It was the only good one she'd made in six weeks, and it was true, and I'd have made it myself in December.
"No," I said.
"Sam—"
"Listen," I said, and held the phone up to the monitor.
Hector had a line up. A woman in Saltby, eighty-one, she said, who'd never set foot on a pier in her life. "I'm her," she said. Then a woman who just said "I'm her" and rang off.
I held it there for a full minute. I counted.
"Which one of them is she?" said Ruth, at last.
"All of them."
There was a long pause in the car, with the motorway in it.
"Super," said Ruth, with nothing behind it at all, and rang off.
At a quarter past two, Gaz.
"Wren! It's Gaz, rank two." Tick, tick, tick. "Listen. I've been thinking about it, and I'll come clean. I'm her."
"Gaz."
"I've a red fleece. It's in the boot. From a distance, at night, with the hood up, Wren, I could be anybody—"
There was a scuffle on the line, and a woman's voice, very close and very tired.
"Give it here. Wren? Sharon. His wife. He's not her. He's never been anywhere at twenty to two in his life but that rank and the chippy." A pause. "I'm her, though."
"Thank you, Sharon."
"He's crying," said Sharon. "He says sorry, he's got something in his indicator," and the line went.
"Forty lines," said Hector, quietly. "We've not got forty lines. They're ringing the switchboard and the fax." He looked at the old grey fax in the corner. It was printing. "Somebody's faxed a picture of their nan."
At a quarter to three, line one went, and Hector looked at the number and didn't need to say.
"Vi," said Wren.
"I'll be brief," said Vi, on air. "I've said it once." A small pause. "That's all. I said it on the pier and I'll not say it again. I'm too old to say a thing twice."
"Vi—"
"And you sounded very well tonight, pet. You sounded like yourself." Another pause. Then Vi laughed. On air. A short, dry, startled laugh, like somebody who'd tripped on a step she'd known was there. I'd never heard it in six weeks. Hector, I think, had never heard it in ten years. "Go on. Ring off. There'll be somebody else wants you."
She went. Wren sat back in her chair with her hand flat on her chest.
It was ten to three.
I'd known where I'd do it since the Co-op text. I went down the back stairs and out of the back door into the car park, and the frost had come on over everything, the skip, the Rover, my car, the wall. Forty yards away the sea was doing its slow thing. It had been trying to kill me for six weeks. It hadn't managed. I stood with my back to it, which is how I prefer it, under the security light, and I rang the studio line.
Hector picked up.
"Scarholme Sound," he said, in the voice for strangers. "What's your name?"
"Sam."
"And where are you calling from, Sam?"
"The car park."
"Hold the line," said Hector, and I heard him, through the phone and faintly through the wall, not put me in the queue.
"We've time for one more," said Wren, on air, in my ear, from the phone, warm and slow. "Small Hours Surgery. You're through to Wren. What's broken?"
"Hello," I said. "It's Sam. From the car park." I stopped. "First-time caller. Long-time idiot."
I heard her breathe in on the line. It didn't come back out for three seconds. I counted. It's what I do.
"Go on, Sam," she said. "Take your time."
I didn't have a sentence. I hadn't written one. I'd decided in Leeds that I wouldn't.
"I was sent somewhere," I said, "to close a thing down. That's my job. Was my job. I'm good at the end of things. I hear what's wrong in a room and I take it out and I go home. And this time I got sent to a place by the sea, and the sea frightens me, and the room had a hum in it I couldn't take out, and there was a woman in it. And I lied to her. For six weeks. Because it was easier to be clever than to say it. And she found out, and she was right, and she told me to get out of her booth, and I did." I breathed. "And I'd like to stay. Here. In the town. With no job, and shoes the bowls club says are for a funeral where nobody liked me. I'd like to stay even if she never says another word to me. I don't know how. What do I do?"
The line went quiet. Wind came over the wall and hit the phone.
"Sam," said Wren, on air, in the Surgery voice, the one that's braver than she is. "Here's what you do. You buy some new shoes. You learn the bus times. You stay. And tomorrow, you ring her. In daylight. Where it counts."
"She doesn't do daylight," I said.
"She's thinking about it," said Wren. "Thank you for calling, Sam. Don't be a stranger." Then, very slightly differently, as if she'd leaned an inch closer to the mic: "Sunshine."
The pips.
I stood in the car park with the phone against my ear and listened to the news from London tell Scarholme what had happened to other people. The back door banged open under the security light. She came out without her mac, in her nana's vest and a jumper, across the frost, quick, and I put the phone in my pocket.
She stopped in front of me.
"Long-time idiot," she said.
"I meant it," I said. And then, because it was the one word I'd never once used, in six weeks, in a town where everybody uses it for everybody: "Love."
"I know. It was the only line you didn't rehearse."
Then she kissed me, in the car park, by the skip, in the frost, with the sea behind me where I'd put it, and it was not short, and it was not hard, and for once I didn't hear anything at all.
Her phone buzzed in her jumper.
She took it out without letting go of my coat and held it up between us so I could see. One minute past three.
Alive?
She typed with her thumb, slowly, so I could watch every letter.
Yes. Tomorrow. Twenty to two. Wear your coat.