Chapter 2 The Hole in the Middle
By half four the building had stopped being empty and started being loud in the wrong way: the flat clatter of a riser deck going down, a vacuum somewhere up in the seats, two riggers having an entire conversation in shouts across a hundred feet of air.
Shona liked it. A room under construction told you more about itself than a room at doors did.
She stood at her desk with one hand flat on the armrest and did her line check the way she had done it since she was nineteen: herself, channel by channel, out loud, with nobody helping.
“One. One, one. Two. Two, two.”
Her own voice came back at her out of the wedge at the singer’s centre mark and she did not like what the room did to it at four hundred hertz, and made a note, and moved on.
Kick. Snare, top and bottom. Hats. Eight toms that were four toms counted twice, because Deakin had left a spare patched beside each one of them and dated on the sheet, which told her exactly the kind of engineer he was.
Overheads. The bass DI at forty, where she had already decided to leave it.
Two guitars, both of them the singer’s. Nine vocals’ worth of talkback and spare and nothing.
Pilbeam had put the extra wedge in at the drum riser, stage right side, exactly where she had asked for it and cabled to nine, and had not said anything about it when he did.
She keyed the talkback and said, “Ta for that,” and he lifted a hand without turning round, and that was the entire remainder of the conflict, which was how she preferred to spend one.
At twenty to five the band came up onto the stage, and they came up in the order she would afterwards have bet money on.
The bass player first, and alone, in from the wing with a cab on a sack truck he did not need to be pushing, because two hundred quid a week of stage crew were standing right there and one of them had already started towards him.
Emre Bayram. He was six foot four and he arrived without any of the noise a man that size is entitled to; he parked the cab on its mark, squared it with one boot, and had his hair tied back off his face before he straightened up.
Long-boned through the shoulder and narrow at the waist, olive-brown skin and black hair, and dressed in nothing much — a plain black vest, arms bare, the day’s shadow still on his jaw because he had not shaved yet and would at six, if the file Deakin kept on the band’s timings was as honest as the rest of it.
He plugged in. He tuned. He did not look at her once, and it read, very clearly, as a man who knew exactly where she was standing.
She came out through the drape with her tablet. Two steps, and she was on stage, and that was what she had liked about the Rannoch since one o’clock.
“Shona,” she said. “Monitors, four shows. Yours is the one nearest your pedals and there’s a side-fill coming up on your left.”
“I know who you are.”
“Then you’re ahead of the building.” She flicked to his sends. “Tell me what you want in it.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s Deakin’s. It’s built for Deakin’s room and this isn’t Deakin’s room, it’s a shed in Finnieston with nothing on the walls. So: more of you, less of you, more kick, less kick, vocal up. Any of it. All of it.”
Emre looked at the wedge at his feet for slightly longer than the question needed.
Then he said, “It’s fine,” again, in precisely the same flat register, and Shona understood that she had been given an answer twice and that the second one had been the real one.
He had not said I’m easy and he had not said don’t worry about me, which were the two sentences she had been handed in every room she had ever worked in.
He had said the thing was fine. He meant it the way a man means a principle.
“Right,” she said, and wrote EB — nothing and underlined it, and then, because she had been doing this for twenty years and the underline was not a note, it was an opinion, she scribbled it out and wrote EB — asked, declined instead.
He went past her to the drum riser, picked up the loose end of nine, and dressed the cable under the deck where it would not be stood on for the next four hours. Then he went back to his mark. He did not tell her he had done it. She looked at the tidy line of it and thought: there you are.
Solomon Rakoff came up next and sat down, and that, she would learn, was the whole of him.
Forty-one, the oldest of them by a distance you could see in the way he arranged himself behind the kit — no ceremony, no windmill, no declaration — six foot one, flat and wide across the shoulders and no bulk anywhere on him, the pale indoor skin of a man who has spent forty-one years in buildings with no windows, dark hair clipped down to nothing over a high forehead with the grey coming through the crown of it.
White shirt. Towel already over the snare stand.
He played eight bars of nothing in particular at a volume that filled eleven thousand seats without any apparent effort, stopped, and adjusted the hat clutch by a sixteenth of a turn.
“Solomon. What do you want in yours?”
He looked at her with pale grey eyes and did not answer, and did not appear to find the silence a problem, and after four seconds she accepted that this was not rudeness but a man declining to fill a space that did not need filling.
“He’ll want the hat,” Yusuf said, arriving.
He arrived the way weather does. Yusuf Warsame was the shortest of the three and the only one of them the room turned to look at, and he came up the stage-left steps with a tray of four coffees balanced on his forearm and started handing them out before he had got to his own mark — one to the drum tech, one up to Solomon, one held out towards Emre, who took it and nodded, and one left.
Dark brown skin, a crop of soft curls that had been shaped inside the week by somebody who knew what they were doing, clean to the jaw.
Fine black mesh shirt buttoned to the throat, which on anybody else would have been a costume and on him was closer to an argument.
He was built long through the muscle and he had gone to some trouble about it and was not pretending otherwise.
“There’s this one, or there’s a tea coming up from catering in about a minute,” he said to her. “The tea’ll be better. The coffee’s here.”
“The coffee’s here,” Shona agreed, and took it.
“You’re the new ears.”
“I’m the four-day ears.”
“Right.” He put the empty tray down on the wedge she was about to ask him to stand in front of, noticed, and moved it.
“Solomon wants more hat and he won’t say, and he wants it in the one at his left, not the new one you’ve put in on the right, and he’ll play round it all night if you don’t.
And Emre needs his own cab down in his wedge more than Deak had it, because he’s been reading the room off the cab for about four years and that’s not going to work in here. ”
Shona let all of that land and waited for the rest of it. It did not come.
“That’s them,” she said. “What do you want in yours?”
“Mine’s grand.”
“Yusuf.”
“No — it is. It’s —” and he stopped, and turned his hand over, groping for it, “— when it’s all coming up at once and it’s all fighting to get through the same — the whole thing’s sat wrong before it even gets to the box, it’s —”
“Gain structure,” Solomon said.
He had not moved off the throne and he said it the way you hand somebody a spanner: without weight, half a beat before Yusuf got there, so that Yusuf could carry straight on holding it.
Then he tapped the hi-hat twice with a stick, and added, “And mine’s stacked.
Everything’s on top of everything in mine and it comes at me from about a foot off the floor.
Fix mine and you’ll have done most of it. ”
So that was the shape of the thing. Shona stood in the middle of the stage with a coffee she had not asked for in one hand and her tablet in the other, and what she had, four minutes into the first conversation of the job, was three men and no wants.
One of them had declined twice and meant it as a virtue.
One of them had answered a question about himself with a specification for somebody else’s wedge.
And the third had reached into the singer’s mouth, found the exact word the singer was short of, put it in his hand, and then used it on his own kit.
Not one of them had repaired it for the others. That was the part she wrote down. Yusuf had listened to Solomon take his sentence somewhere else and had looked, if anything, relieved. Emre had not raised his head.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll do it the boring way. Give me half of something with everything in it.”
“There’s Colours Down, or there’s the one we open with,” Yusuf said. “Colours Down’s got more in the middle of it.”
Third in the set. It was already circled on her page.
“That one.”
They played it, and she went back through the drape and stood at the desk with her hands off everything and listened to a band she had been flown four hundred miles to hear, and inside eight bars she knew exactly what she had.
They were good. That was the first thing, and it mattered, because the other thing she was about to hear would have been easy to blame on being bad.
Solomon played like a man who had never once needed to prove anything, dry and slightly behind, kick and snare so unfussy they were almost rude.
Emre sat under him and did not embellish a single note, a low warm floor of a bass line that moved about four times in thirty bars and moved correctly every time.
Yusuf sang. God, he sang — she got a full, unhurried, gorgeous top of a voice, tipped forward off the beat, and it went up into the dark of the roof and eleven thousand empty seats swallowed it whole and did not return so much as an edge of it.
And underneath the voice there was no band.
Not gone. Worse than gone. Everything was present and accounted for — it was just that all of it was living at the bottom and all of it was living at the top, and between about two hundred hertz and two and a half thousand there was a space the size of a room.
The bass was below it. The kick was below it.
The cymbals and the top of the voice were above it.
The guitar was in there and had been politely turned down and rolled off until it was a texture rather than an instrument.
The place where a song puts its chest — where you feel it in the sternum rather than the feet — was vacant, swept, and had been for years, and three men were playing around the edges of it with enormous care, the way you walk round a hole in a floor you have stopped seeing.
She could hear all four decibels of Yusuf’s voice sitting under where it should be. She could hear the notch on the master bus, eight hundred hertz wide, 2023 — Y asked, and she could hear that it had worked, in the sense that a tourniquet works.
She let them get to the middle eight and keyed the talkback.
“That’s me. Thank you.”
They stopped. Somebody up on the grid dropped something into a bag. Yusuf turned round to the drums and said something and Solomon shook his head about a centimetre, and Emre had already unplugged and was crouched at the back of his cab doing something to a lead that probably did not need it.
And here was the thing Shona sat down with, alone at somebody else’s desk with the surface glowing under her hands and petrol-green nails on the faders.
She could give them it. All of it. Solomon wanted more hat in the left wedge and a clean one — twenty minutes.
Emre wanted nothing, and nothing was free.
Yusuf wanted his band sorted out and would go home happy the night everybody else was happy, which meant that the fastest route to a delighted singer ran entirely through two other men’s monitors and never once through his own.
She could have every one of those three satisfied by six o’clock, keep Deakin’s file essentially intact, keep Mags’s four shows precisely as boring as Mags had asked for them, collect a fee on Sunday night and be on a train south before the truck was loaded.
It would be the easiest four shows of her career.
It would also be the exact thing that had been done to this band, immaculately, by a good engineer, for eleven years, on the instructions of three men who could not say what they wanted — and she was sitting here at ten to six working out how to do it faster.
“Alright?” Mags said, going past behind her with the radio up at her ear.
“It’s fine,” Shona said.
She heard the word come out of her own mouth in somebody else’s register, turned back to the desk, and did not touch a single fader for a long moment afterwards.