Loud Enough to Choose

Chapter 1 Four Days and Somebody Else’s Desk

The Rannoch was a shed. A very expensive shed, purpose-built on the north bank behind the old crane with eleven thousand seats racked up the sides of it, but a shed, and Shona Hasker knew what she was walking into the moment the dock door rolled and the room took the noise of the street off her and gave her nothing back.

High steel roof. Two trucks in abreast on a flat river-side dock, which was the only genuinely kind thing about the building.

Three men would walk out onto that stage at twenty to five, and she had seen all three of them down the side of a bus on the Old Kent Road.

Yusuf Warsame, who sang, and who photographed like a man being handed something.

Emre Bayram on the bass, six foot four of him and the tallest thing in the picture, the only one of the three not looking at the camera.

Solomon Rakoff behind the drums, older, greyer, sat down while the other two stood, looking straight down the lens with nothing on his face at all.

Fifteen years in the same band, and nothing else about any of them that she knew yet, and Shona had one rule that had kept her in work and out of everybody else’s business: never be the person in the room with a want.

Somebody up on the grid dropped a shackle and it rang out and took its time dying, and she stood still in the doorway with her case at her heel and listened to it die.

Nothing came back off the walls. That meant every single problem on that stage would be audible in exactly one place in the building, and the place was hers.

What she had instead was four days and eleven years of somebody else’s show file, which is not a technical document.

A monitor file is three men’s apologies to each other written down in decibels and never once said out loud, and standing there in the dock she already knew she was going to be able to read every line of it, and that reading it was going to be the nearest thing to a private pleasure she allowed herself in a working week.

Four days ago she had been in Peckham with her feet up and a job in her diary starting Tuesday week.

Then Mags Lenane had rung on the Saturday morning, said Shona?

Marguerite Lenane, Slate, I’m on Halfmast — surname first, tour second, no apology for the hour, which Shona had liked immediately — and explained that Halfmast’s monitor engineer of eleven years had gone home from Newcastle with a shoulder that would not hold a flight case and would not hold a fader either.

Deakin. Shona had never met him. She knew the name the way you know a hundred names on the circuit, as a thing other engineers said with no edge on it, which was the only reference that meant anything.

“You were given to me by Ceri Vaughan,” Mags had said. “She’s out on somebody else’s run till the Saturday or I’d have had her. She said you’d say yes if it was four and not fourteen.”

Which was exactly right, and had irritated her for about nine seconds, and then she had got a pen.

Four shows. Glasgow tonight, Manchester tomorrow, a travel day, Birmingham, London. Six weeks of the run would still be standing when she walked out of the Blackwall on Sunday night, and none of those six weeks were hers, which was the entire appeal.

She did her face before she touched anything.

There was a production office off the corridor with a mirror the size of a paperback screwed to the back of the door at the height of a man, and she stood on her toes in front of it, five foot two and unbothered about it, and took the whole waist-length weight of her hair up off her neck in one movement and pinned it, the honey-blonde she pays a Manchester colourist too much for every six weeks and the one vanity she has never once apologised for, because in ninety minutes this room was going to be twenty-two degrees at head height and she worked with her chin down.

Then the liner. The same wing she had been drawing since she was twenty-three, one stroke each side, hard and graphic and sharp enough at the corner to draw blood, and she had watched house crews read it off her face for fifteen years and file her correctly before she had said a word.

Nails: a deep petrol green, done in a shop on Rye Lane on the Monday, because a city got a colour and that was the one thing in the entire economy of her life she bought purely for herself.

Leather bomber, sleeves shoved up to the elbow.

White trainers with nothing on them, and when they marked she binned them.

The mirror gave her back about a third of herself at a time, which was all it was ever going to do and all she needed off it.

Shoulders broad and squared and carried that way on purpose, because she had worked out somewhere around twenty that a woman who takes up the width she has got does not get moved out of a doorway.

A waist that nips in hard between them and out again over the hips.

Thighs and an ass got off fourteen hours of concrete a day for twenty years, and a full heavy bust she had never once in her life dressed down, because dressing it down is an apology and she did not make those either.

Olive skin that took the sun and held it rather than burning, which was academic in a life conducted indoors.

Some of it was vanity. The rest of it was arithmetic. An arena is a room where two hundred people are deciding, at speed, who they can ignore. The fastest way to stop a stage crew explaining your own desk to you is to walk in looking like you cost more than they do.

It did not always work. It was still the fastest way.

Mags found her coming back down the corridor: forty-four, Irish, a radio on one hip and the run sheet in a folder she did not need to open.

“You’re early.”

“I’m on time. Everyone else is late.”

“That’s the tour,” Mags said, and almost smiled, and then did not, because she had a thing to say and was going to say it before Shona got to the desk.

“Right. Halfmast are two men who have been in a van together since they were teenagers, and a drummer who came in from outside, and they are now in an arena, and they do not like change. Deakin’s file is on the desk, it’s built, it works, they know it. Four shows. No adventures.”

“No adventures,” Shona said.

“I mean it kindly.”

“I know you do.”

“A run that goes wrong in public goes wrong on me,” Mags said.

“Not on them. They’ll be grand. It’ll be me.

” She said it flatly, no violins on it, a woman stating the direction the damage would travel, and Shona’s opinion of her went up a full step.

“First one I’ve had outright. Twenty years of carrying other people’s. ”

“Then I’ll keep it boring,” Shona said, which was a true sentence and not a promise, and Mags took it as a promise, because people did.

Monitor world was stage left, tucked in under the wing, close enough to the black drape that she could put a hand through it and be on stage in two steps.

Somebody had already got the desk up and the surface glowing and a fresh roll of tape on the armrest, and there was a strip of old tape across the meter bridge with DEAKIN on it in marker, in the blunt square capitals of a man who has written his own name on four hundred cases.

She did not take it off. She put her water bottle down to the left of it and loaded his show.

Then she sat and read it for twenty minutes without touching a fader, which is the part of the job nobody has ever once filmed.

There were nine mixes on the stage. Three in-ear packs, six wedge sends into eleven boxes, and the wedges were the story. She went through them one send at a time, singer first, and by the fourth she had stopped scrolling and started, very slightly, to frown.

Yusuf Warsame’s vocal was four decibels down in the drummer’s wedge.

Fine. Drummers do not need a vocal in their face; they need a kick and a hi-hat and something to hang the two on.

Except the vocal was four down in the bass player’s wedge too.

And in both of the singer’s own wedges. And in the side-fill.

The man’s voice was underneath everything, everywhere on that stage, including in front of his own feet — and none of it was one decision.

You could see the strata of it. Someone had pulled it down in 2019 and someone had pulled it down again the year after that and someone had taken it the last of the way down in 2023, and nobody had ever once put it back.

She kept going. The bass was ducked under the kick in every mix, and the kick was ducked under the bass in two of them, which is a physical impossibility maintained for years by two men politely reaching around each other in the dark.

The drums were rolled off at the top so hard in the singer’s wedge that the cymbals had essentially been agreed not to exist. There was a notch in the midrange on the master bus, a wide one, a full eight hundred hertz of the room scooped out of everybody’s ears, dated in the file’s own scribble page as 2023 — Y asked.

Shona sat back and looked at the empty stage through the gap in the drape.

Three rigs, three sets of marks on the deck, nobody standing on them.

Eleven years of file behind her on the screen and every mix in it pointed at the middle of that stage: sends leaning in, everybody’s ears full of everybody else, three men arranged with enormous care around a mark in the centre that not one of them stood on.

There was nothing in the middle, and every dated layer in that file said there had been nothing in the middle for years, and all three of them had built the show to hold the shape of it.

She looked at the mark a beat longer than reading a file required, and put it down to the room.

The file was not broken. That was the thing.

If it had been broken she would have fixed it by four o’clock and gone and found a coffee.

It was internally consistent, immaculately maintained, and every single number in it had been entered by an engineer doing his job properly, which is to say giving three men exactly what they had asked him for.

What it was, was honest. Eleven years of three people turning themselves down in each other’s ears, written out in decibels and saved with the date on it.

Nobody in this band was in the middle of this band.

There was a hole where the song lived and the file was an exact diagram of it.

She did not say any of that out loud, because there was nobody to say it to, and because she had not heard them yet, and because saying it in the first hour was the single most reliable way to be a woman who had been flown in to have opinions.

“That’s not your gain structure.”

She looked up. Backline tech, mid-thirties, lanyard, a coil of speaker cable over one shoulder and a screwdriver in the same hand, standing about a foot closer to her desk than a man needed to stand.

“Pilbeam,” he said, as if that settled where he stood. “That’s Deak’s layout, yeah, but he runs it hot off the splitter and comes down at the desk, so what you’re seeing on the meters isn’t — the wedge sends are post, so if you start pushing those before you’ve—”

She let him get all the way to the end of the sentence. She had learned at twenty-four that interrupting a man like this cost you the next three days, because then it was about manners and not about the split.

“They’re post-fade on one to six and pre on seven, eight and nine,” she said, “because he flipped seven, eight and nine when he put the side-fill on the same matrix as the drum sub, which is in the scribble as the eleventh of June. He’s got the splitter at plus eighteen with the pads out on channels four, five and nineteen, and nineteen’s the talkback, which is why it’s clipping on the file and not in the room.

Spare pack’s on twelve, not eleven, the sheet’s wrong, the label on the rack’s right.

His high-pass on the bass DI is at forty and I’d leave it there.

And I’m not pushing anything before line check, because I can’t hear the room yet and neither can you. ”

Silence of a very particular quality.

“Right,” Pilbeam said.

“Can you put a spare wedge at the drum riser for me, stage right side, and cable it to nine? If I’m wrong about the notch I’d rather be wrong with a spare in.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can do that.”

He went and did it. She did not look up when he passed her again, and she never mentioned it to him, not that afternoon and not at any point in the following four days, because the only kind of answer she had ever bothered making was the kind that made the next sentence unnecessary.

It was not a victory. It was a tax, and she had been paying it since she was eighteen, and she had long ago worked out that the cheapest way to pay it was quickly, exactly, and without any heat on it whatsoever.

Her phone lit on the armrest. A tour manager in Bristol she had known since 2014 — the woman who had put a twenty-six-year-old on her first arena on the strength of nothing but a hunch and a good handshake — sending her the load-in time for next Tuesday.

Five weeks, arenas and theatres, signed and countersigned in July.

Half the fee already invoiced and already in her account.

0800 Tues, gate 4, bring your own talkback mic, they’ve lost theirs again.

Shona typed Wouldn’t miss it and put the phone face down, and felt the particular warmth of it settle across her chest the way it always did.

That was the trick, the whole trick, the one she had run for twenty years: the next job existed and was dated.

Whatever happened in this building, she was contracted to be four hundred miles away and unavailable on a Tuesday morning.

You could give a room everything it needed for four days if you knew precisely when you were leaving it.

She turned Deakin’s tape label the right way up, pulled a fresh page towards her, and started writing her own scene list: song by song, in order, in her own shorthand, what she was going to ask each of the three of them before she touched a single one of their numbers.

Halfway down the page, next to the third song, she wrote midrange — who’s meant to be in it?

Then she sat and looked at that for a while, with eleven thousand empty seats going up into the dark behind her, and the shed giving her absolutely nothing back.