Chapter 5 Two Askings
The dressing room at the Rannoch was a breeze-block box painted the grey of a council swimming pool, with a rider table nobody had touched and a bowl of oranges going soft under the strip light, and by twenty to eleven it held three men who had just played the best show of their run and not one of them was sitting down.
Except Solomon, who was.
Shona stopped in the doorway with her sheet rolled in one hand and did the thing she had done in four hundred rooms like this one, which was count the exits and work out what each person in the room was going to need in the next ten minutes.
It took her about four seconds and it came back wrong, which was new.
Solomon was in the plastic chair by the flight case with a towel round his neck and his shirt dried stiff at the collar, and he was not looking at anybody, and he was not reading either, which she had learned in four hours was the difference.
Emre was standing with his back against the far wall and his arms folded, hair still down, an untouched bottle of beer on the shelf beside his elbow with the label peeled off it in one piece. And Yusuf was moving.
He had got as far as unbuttoning the mesh shirt and no further; it hung open and he had not towelled off and the sweat had gone cold on him, which she knew because she had seen the way he kept rolling one shoulder. He was at the rider table. He was picking things up.
“Right,” he said. “So there’s the driver wanting to pull at half eleven or we can hold him to one, that’s fine, that’s a phone call.
Sol, there’s a proper kettle in production if you want tea rather than that thing.
” He put a bottle of water into Emre’s hand without breaking stride, and Emre took it and did not open it.
“Emre, you’re fine, that was the best you’ve played since Berlin.
Sol, you’re fine. That outro’s going on the record, I’m not joking, we’ll cut it in. You were both—”
“Yusuf,” Shona said.
“—brilliant, actually, both of you, and I’m sorry about the end of it.”
He said it to the oranges.
Nobody said anything. Emre looked at the floor by her feet, which she had noticed was as close as he got. Solomon’s hands rested on his knees.
“Right,” Yusuf said, and turned round, and now he was looking at her, warm and quick and absolutely nowhere near the subject.
“So. Options. We can put out that the monitor engineer’s new on the run, which is true, everyone knows Deakin’s gone home, nobody blinks at that, and Mags can have it in the promoter’s ear in ten minutes.
Or there’s the throat — I’ve genuinely had a thing since Newcastle, you can ask Sol, I’ve been steaming every day — and we pull the solo intro out of the encore for the rest of the leg, which is six weeks, and we come back to it in November when I’ve—” a hand, turning over, generous, offering “—or we leave it exactly as it is, say nothing at all, and it’s a pause.
Singers pause. Three seconds is nothing.
Nobody in that room is going to remember it by Tuesday. ”
He had laid all three of them out on the table between her and the oranges, the way you lay out three plectrums, and he stood back from them with his shirt open and waited for somebody to take one.
That was the moment Shona understood what she was looking at, properly, as a piece of engineering rather than as a man.
He had not made a complaint. There had been a thing done to him, on a stage, in front of eleven thousand people, by her, on purpose — she had put four decibels of his own voice in front of his own feet and let him hear what he was — and he had come off that stage and walked into this room and the first sentence out of him had been I’m sorry, and then he had built, at speed, three separate structures in which the problem belonged to the room, to his throat, or to nobody at all.
Not one of them had him in it.
“None of those,” she said.
Yusuf’s smile did not go anywhere. “They’re all fine.”
“They’re not all fine, they can’t be, they contradict each other.
If it’s my mix you don’t need the throat.
If it’s your throat we don’t touch the encore, we steam it and it comes back in a week.
If it’s nothing at all you don’t put anything in the promoter’s ear at all, because putting something in a promoter’s ear is how a pause becomes a story.
” She unrolled the sheet and rolled it up the other way.
“Pick one and I’ll work to it. That’s the whole of my job in this room and I’ll do it without a word. Which one do you want?”
She watched it hit him.
It was not a big thing. It was about the size of what she had seen go through him in the second verse of song nine: a very small physical event, a man coming off a hot handle. His hands stopped. He had an orange in one of them and he put it down like it was somebody else’s.
“Whichever’s least trouble for you,” he said.
“That’s not an answer to the question I asked.”
“It’s the answer I’ve got,” said Yusuf Warsame, pleasantly, and by this point Emre had lifted his head off the wall and was watching him, and Solomon had not moved at all and was watching him harder.
She should have let it go. She had a scene list, a dark room and a bus call in fifty minutes, and she was six days from a different band in Sheffield, and the entire architecture of her working life was built out of not being the person who says the next sentence.
“No,” she said. “Try again. I’m not asking you what’s convenient, I’m asking what you want. In your ears, tomorrow, in Manchester. You’re the only one of the three of you who’s got to stand in front of it.”
The strip light buzzed. Somewhere down the corridor a case went over a threshold with the particular double bang of a wheel that needed replacing.
And then Yusuf did the only straight thing he had done all night, and she did not see it coming, because she had been so busy holding the door open for him that she had forgotten she was standing in it.
He looked up. He looked at her — the wing of her liner, her pinned hair, the sheet in her fist, all of it, and not the way men in arenas usually looked at her — and he said, “What do you want, Shona?”
Four words. No options in it anywhere. No there’s this or there’s that. Nothing on the table for anyone to pick up.
Her chest did something she had no reading for.
“Gain structure,” she said.
Yusuf blinked.
“You’ve got eleven dB of headroom on that vocal channel you’re not using because Deakin was driving the input hot to get level and then pulling it back at the send, which is why it’s been sounding like that and why it’s been costing you at the top of your range.
I’ll rebuild it at line check tomorrow. Fielding runs the Manchester room and he’s fine, I’ve worked with him, he’ll give me the stage at half two.
” She heard herself doing it and could not stop.
“So what I want is forty minutes and nobody on the deck. That’s what I want. ”
There was a pause about three seconds long, which she was, by then, in a position to recognise.
“Right,” Yusuf said gently. “Yeah. Forty minutes. You’ll have it.”
And he picked the orange back up, and started peeling it, and said, “Sol, is that kettle thing a yes or a no?”
Solomon Rakoff, who had spent fifteen years watching this exact manoeuvre from five feet behind a snare drum, said, “It’s a no,” and got up, and walked out past her, and did not look at her either, and that, she thought, was three of them now.
She was on the dock at half past midnight because the bus was not pulling until one and the production office smelled of other people’s dinner.
The Rannoch’s get-in is a flat run on the river side, two trucks abreast, and by that hour one truck was gone and the other was three-quarters loaded and the night had come in off the Clyde wet and orange under the sodium, with the old crane standing out over the water doing the thing it had been doing since before any of them were born.
Somebody’s wet-hire boys were arguing about a ramp in Polish.
There was the diesel-and-rain smell she had been breathing since she was eighteen, and the bang of aluminium going up steel, and the particular comfort of a room being taken to bits by people who knew how.
She had her jacket on and her hands in the pockets and she was, she would have said, entirely fine.
Emre came down the ramp with a cigarette.
She clocked it before she clocked him, because it did not make sense: Mags had said it in the production office that afternoon, as a lobby-call fact, that the man wanted an hour in a hotel gym at six at every hotel on the run, and she had watched him drink one third of one beer across a whole night and put it down.
He was smoking it badly, too — held too far out, not inhaled properly, the way you smoke something you have accepted off a truck driver because refusing would have made it a conversation.
He stopped about six feet away, which she was learning was his distance, and looked out at the water instead of at her.
“You’ll want a coat on the bus,” he said. “The heating on that one’s broken at the front.”
“I’ve got a coat.”
“Okay.”
He smoked about a third of it. The load-out banged on behind them. She thought about saying something useful and could not immediately identify what, which had not happened to her in about a decade.
“Leave it the way it was tonight,” Emre said.
Flat. Level. Not a syllable of lift anywhere in it, no rise at the end, no could you, no would it be possible, nothing you could have answered yes or no to without the answer sounding like an argument.
“Tomorrow’s a different room,” she said, because it was the true thing. “Eight thousand, low roof, and the room does half the work for you. I can’t put the same numbers in and get the same result, it doesn’t transfer, it’s not—”
“I know what a room is.”
“Right. Sorry.” She did not usually say sorry. “Then — yes. I’ll get it as close as the building lets me.”
“Okay,” Emre said, and dropped the cigarette, and put it out with his boot, and picked the end up off the concrete and took it with him, and went back up the ramp past two men and a ramp they were still arguing about, and was gone.
Shona stood on the dock in the orange wet with her hands in her pockets.
She got through about forty seconds of the load-out.
She got as far as watching the last four cases go up and thinking about whether Ceri Vaughan was off her own run by Saturday and whether the Sheffield people had sent the advance yet, and a truck door came down with a crash you felt through the soles, and she stood there with the Clyde going past black behind the wall, and then, at about the minute mark, it arrived.
He asked me for something.
She took her hands out of her pockets.
Not the band. Not Yusuf’s voice, not the arrangement, not a decibel of anything for anyone else.
A man who had spent the whole of that day carrying other people’s cases up that ramp and had not once asked anybody for so much as a hand with one of them, had come down a wet ramp at half past midnight holding a cigarette he did not smoke, and had put it in the only grammar he had — an instruction, no question mark, six feet away, facing the water — and had handed her a thing he wanted.
And she had told him about the room.
She looked up at the crane, and the sodium, and the rain coming in at the angle Glasgow does it, and she said, out loud, to nobody, in a voice she barely recognised as her own working one, “Oh, you absolute idiot.”
It was, by then, Thursday.