Chapter 10
Pippa
By the fourth day of AJ's assignment, the station has stopped treating him like an unexploded object.
Mostly.
Kev still calls him babyface, because Kev is a man of limited but persistent material.
Dan has started asking him questions about newspapers as if they are slightly suspicious machines.
Mish has discovered that if she leaves anything in an untidy pile near him for long enough, his eye starts twitching.
He has not reorganised the cupboards.
I know this because I checked.
He has, however, cleaned the kitchen twice, alphabetised a stack of community safety leaflets by accident and learned where the biscuits are without telling anyone else, which has earned him a grudging level of respect I am not entirely comfortable with.
It is the last day shift before his four days off.
After that, he comes back for nights, which I am trying not to think about too closely because night shifts do strange things to people.
They strip away the careful edges of the day.
They make silences longer, conversations more honest and bad decisions feel less like bad decisions and more like perfectly reasonable events that happen under strip lighting at three in the morning.
Not that I am planning to make bad decisions.
Obviously.
At the moment, the bad decision is letting him interview me in my office.
“It won’t take long,” he said twenty minutes ago, standing in the doorway with his notebook and his hopeful journalist face.
That was his first lie.
His second was, “Just a few questions.”
There is no such thing as a few questions when a journalist has decided to be careful.
I sit behind my desk, arms folded, watching him arrange himself in the chair opposite. He has his notebook open on one knee, pen in hand, recorder placed between us after asking if I was all right with it.
He asked properly.
That annoyed me more than if he hadn’t.
“Comfortable?” I ask.
He shifts in the chair, then tries not to wince.
“Emotionally or physically?”
“Either.”
“Emotionally, cautiously optimistic. Physically, I’ve made peace with suffering.”
“It’s been four days.”
“It has been four educational days.”
“You walked normally this morning.”
“I performed normal walking.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There is when several firefighters are watching you like they’re waiting for a wildlife documentary to get interesting.”
I should not smile.
I do not smile.
Much.
He looks pleased with himself anyway.
“Ready?” he asks.
“No.”
“Excellent. We’ll start there.”
“AJ.”
“What? Honest answer. Very valuable.”
“If you write that I was difficult, I’ll know.”
He lifts his pen. “Watch Manager Hart opened the interview with a direct threat.”
“I said I’d know.”
“An implied threat.”
“A professional observation.”
“Right.” He writes something down.
“What are you writing?”
He turns the notebook slightly, but not enough for me to read it. “Professional observation.”
I look at him.
He looks back, entirely too innocent.
Four days ago, I thought that face was polished. A practised thing. Reporters must have them, I assumed. Expressions built for access. Friendly but not intimate. Open but not vulnerable. Just enough charm to get someone talking before they realised they had given too much away.
Now I am less sure.
The polish is still there, but it has been scuffed by station life. By hose drills and poor sleep and too much bad coffee. By Kev’s relentless campaign against his dignity. By the fact that he has spent four days being told what he doesn’t know and, to his credit, has mostly allowed it to happen.
“All right,” I say. “Ask.”
His expression shifts.
Not dramatically. He does not straighten in his chair or clear his throat or turn on a voice. He simply becomes more focused. The humour tucks itself away, not gone, but waiting at the edge.
“What do you want people to understand about Fellside station?”
I lean back.
“That’s your opening question?”
“Yes.”
“Broad.”
“Deliberately.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“I’m trying it out. Apparently it’s popular here.”
I glance at the recorder, then back at him.
What do I want people to understand?
There are easy answers. Brave firefighters. Busy station. Vital service. Community work. Prevention. All true. All useful. All the sort of things that sit neatly in a feature and offend no one.
But he is watching me like he knows I have reached for the easy answer and put my hand on something that isn’t enough.
“People think of fire stations as waiting rooms for emergencies,” I say eventually. “They imagine us sitting around until something dramatic happens.”
He writes quickly, but his eyes keep coming back to me.
“And it isn’t?”
“No. There’s always work. Training, checks, prevention visits, school visits, familiarisation, equipment, admin, community safety, planning for things that probably won’t happen but would be much worse if we hadn’t planned for them. The call-outs are the part people see. They’re not the whole job.”
He nods. “Kev said something similar.”
“He would.”
“He said people think it’s mostly fires.”
“Kev likes to sound simple and then say something accurate.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“That’s his method.”
“Does everyone here have a method?”
“Yes.”
“What’s yours?”
The question is quick.
Too quick.
It slips through before I can build a wall in front of it.
I lock eyes with him and he holds my gaze.
“My method?”
“At work.”
“Be prepared.”
“That’s not a method. That’s a principle.”
“Fine. Be more prepared than everyone expects you to be.”
His pen pauses.
The room goes quiet around the sentence. Outside the office, someone opens a cupboard, laughs, shuts it again. The station carries on. My own words sit between us, too specific to pretend they are general.
AJ’s voice is careful when he says, “Because you’re Watch Manager?”
“Because I’m me.”
He does not ask immediately.
That matters.
He gives the answer a second to exist. It makes it harder to take back.
“Because you’re a woman in the job?” he asks.
There it is.
Not thrown like bait. Not softened so much it becomes useless. Just placed where we both have to look at it.
I could give him the media answer.
I have one. Every woman in a job like this has one.
You keep it polished for panels, events, school talks and anyone with a microphone.
You say the right things about progress and representation and brilliant colleagues and the importance of encouraging girls into the service.
You mean it too, which is the complicated part.
You can mean every word and still know it is not the whole truth.
“Yes,” I say.
His pen moves.
Then stops again.
I frown. “You’re not writing?”
“I can. I just thought you might want to finish the answer first.”
That gets under my ribs.
Not in a romantic way.
In an irritating, human way.
I look at the desk. The forms stacked in the tray. The pen Josh chewed during a budget meeting last month and left here like evidence. The mug Amanda bought me that says CALM IS A SKILL, which I keep turned towards the wall because it feels judgemental.
“You learn early that mistakes are not always allowed to stay the size they are,” I say. “For some people, a mistake is a mistake. For others, it becomes proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“That you were promoted too soon. That standards were lowered. That someone wanted a headline. That you’re too emotional, too hard, too soft, too ambitious, too bossy, not confident enough, too confident. Depends on who’s talking.”
His face has changed.
Not pity.
Good.
I do not want pity from him. I do not want it from anyone.
“That sounds exhausting,” he says.
“It is boring more often than exhausting.”
“Boring?”
“Exhausting sounds dramatic. Mostly it’s repetitive.
A comment here. A look there. Someone asking a question they wouldn’t ask Josh.
Someone deciding you’re making a point when you’re just doing your job.
Someone praising you in a way that somehow still manages to remind you they didn’t expect you to be competent. ”
He is very still now.
I should stop.
I do not.
“And then you get promoted, and you’re proud because you’ve earned it, but you also know everyone is watching what you do with it.
Not everyone. Enough. If I get something wrong, I get something wrong as Pippa Hart, first female watch manager in the county.
Not just Pippa. Not just a watch manager.
The whole sentence comes with me whether I want it or not. ”
AJ looks down at his notebook.
He has written almost none of that.
Strange man.
“Is that why the article bothered you so much?” he asks.
My stomach tightens in the old, familiar way.
“Yes.”
He takes that in.
“Because I put my question in the wrong place,” he says.
It is not defensive. That is worse.
“You put the question next to my appointment,” I say. “Not directly. You were careful. But careful isn’t the same as harmless.”
His mouth pulls tight.
“No.”
“And the farm fire was already messy. Everyone was tired, emotions were high, people were scared, and then there was this lovely little implication that maybe me being a woman was the real issue.”
“I did know what I was doing,” he says quietly.
That surprises me.
“I don’t mean about you,” he adds. “Not the full impact. But I knew how to place uncertainty. I knew how to make a piece feel sharper without saying anything I couldn’t defend.”
He gives a small, humourless smile.
“I was proud of that, actually.”
I say nothing.
“I thought it was skill,” he says. “And maybe it is. But it’s also…” He stops, searches for the word, then shakes his head. “Lazy feels too simple.”
“It can be skill and still be careless.”
His gaze comes up.
I did not mean to let him off.
That is the annoying thing.
I meant to be accurate.
He nods once. “Yes.”
The office seems smaller than it did five minutes ago.
I shift in my chair, suddenly aware of the recorder between us, of my own voice in the room, of the fact that I have said more than I meant to and have not once told him to move on.
He looks at the recorder too.
“Do you want any of that off the record?”