Chapter 10 Friday, No Show
The run from Manchester to Birmingham is ninety miles and the day was eight hours long, which is worse.
Shona had slept from twenty past four until ten to eight and woke up feeling as though somebody had taken her out of the case and put her back in it wrong.
The back lounge of that bus was a bench along three walls and a fold-down table and a window with the motorway going backwards in it, and a kettle bolted down because a kettle that is not bolted down is a story about a burn.
By half nine there were four people in it and nothing whatsoever to do, and Shona understood, sitting with her hands round a mug, exactly how much of her life she had arranged so that this would not happen to her.
Because there was no work. That was the entire event of the day.
There was no desk, no line check, no room to walk, no scene list, no eight-hour stretch of being the most necessary person in a building.
There was a kettle and a packet of the good biscuits Mags had bought in Glasgow and three men she had spent two days handling, and nothing at all to be useful about, and the first hour of it was so unbearable that she cleaned her nails.
Emre made the tea. He did not ask anybody how they took it.
He had watched her make one on Wednesday and he built hers exactly the way she had built it — strong, one sugar, the bag left in — and put it down in front of her and went and sat at the far end of the bench with his own, and said nothing, and that was the entire conversation they had had since he had looked at her screen in Manchester and told her she had put him back.
Yusuf came through from the front at ten with his phone in his hand.
“There’s the services at half eleven or there’s one further down at one,” he said. “Half eleven’s better for food and one is better if anyone wants to sleep.”
“Half eleven,” Solomon said, from behind his book.
“Half eleven, then.”
He did not sit down. He never sat down; that was the difference between him and Solomon and it was the difference in a single movement.
He stood in the gangway with one hand on the luggage rail, the bus rocking gently under him, and he offered the room four more things across the next twenty minutes — a window open or shut, the good biscuits now or after, a playlist or not a playlist, and whether Shona wanted the bench or the bunk, because he had noticed that she had not slept and he was going to do something about it.
She said the bench was fine. He said the bench was fine then.
Then he went and made a coffee nobody had asked for and brought it back and put it beside her anyway.
She watched him do it and thought: this is a man building a room in which no one has to look at him, and he is doing it at half past ten in the morning on a motorway, to three people who have nowhere else to go.
The services came up at twenty to twelve, a wet apron of tarmac and a flat brown building and a coach bay at the far end where the bus could get its length in, and the four of them went across it in the drizzle with the rush of the carriageway behind the bank of grass like weather.
The driver got his folded paper out and went to find a table and wipe it. He has opinions about who has touched what, and twenty-two years of them.
Inside it was strip lights and franchise signs and the particular smell of warmed pastry, and a coach party of pensioners reassembling itself by the doors, and two men in high-vis at a table by the window not talking to each other.
The coffee came in a size called regular and a size called large and the large was a pint.
Shona was six feet from the counter when she watched a man see Emre.
He was an ordinary man of about fifty in a fleece with a carrier bag, and he came round the end of the queue rail and looked up, and up, at six foot four of black hair tied back off the face and a jaw shaved at six the previous evening and shoulders that went most of the way across the aisle, and his whole route changed.
It was not dramatic. Nothing about it was.
He simply put two extra feet between himself and Emre and went round the long side of the stand with the maps on it, and did not look back, and was gone, and had no idea he had done anything at all.
Emre had seen it. Emre had seen it before it happened, from the way he was already not looking at it.
“Three of them have written that I’m menacing,” he said.
Nobody had said anything. There was no conversation for that sentence to belong to. He had said it to the middle distance, flat, in the voice he used for that’s the wrong lead, and Yusuf stopped with his hand out for the card machine.
“One of them used the word heavy,” Emre said. “About my hands. That was in a broadsheet.” He looked at the menu board as though he were reading it. “I’ve stood further away from people than I wanted to for fifteen years. That’s all. It’s a thing I do.”
Then he stopped.
Shona has been in rooms where a man says a thing like that and then waits, and what he is waiting for is for somebody to lower the temperature and hand it back to him in a shape he can carry.
She has done it four hundred times. She had the sentence ready before she knew she had it — something about how stillness reads on a stage, something true and useful and about him — and she got as far as opening her mouth.
Emre took out his card.
“I’ll get these,” he said. “Four coffees. Who’s eating.”
It was not a question. He had not shaped it as one and was not going to wait to find out, and he was already turning, and the entire subject had been picked up and put away on a high shelf by a man tall enough to reach it, and Shona stood there with her useful sentence still in her mouth, unspent, which was a new sensation and she did not care for it.
Through the window she could see Solomon out on the forecourt.
He had walked out past the fuel pumps into the open, between the bays where anybody coming out of the building could see him, and he was standing with his phone at his ear and his other hand in his jacket pocket, doing nothing, saying something, and then listening for a long time.
Friday, near enough noon, unhurried, standing where the whole crew could watch him do it.
He rang, and he listened, and at one point he laughed, once, which was a considerable event.
He came back in with the rain on his shoulders and took a coffee off the tray and said, “Ta.” And then, on his way past, to nobody in particular, in the voice he uses for the kick being a hair early: “My mother. Plymouth. Before sundown.”
That was all of it. He did not say what the hour was for, or why it had to be before and not after, and he did not offer one word more about any of it, and the astonishing part — the part Shona turned over for the next forty miles — was that he had done it outside.
In the open. In front of everybody, on purpose.
“Every Friday,” Emre said, from the other side of the table, not looking up from his phone. “Fifteen years of it. He’s never said what it’s for and I’ve never asked.”
It was the only thing about himself Solomon had ever let anybody have for free.
He told them nothing and he hid nothing. She had not previously understood that those were two different operations.
They got back on at half twelve and the bus pulled off the kerb and the tyre note came up through the floor, and it started, as these things do, with a joke.
“Right,” Yusuf said, dropping into the bench opposite her at last. “Tonight. There’s the hotel, which is a hotel, or there’s the bus, which is free. Solomon wants the pool.”
“There’s a pool,” Solomon agreed.
“So that’s you and that’s Emre in the room next to him and that puts Shona—”
“On the bus,” Shona said. “I’ve got Deakin’s bunk. Middle, driver’s side. I’m very happy in it.”
“You’re in a dead man’s bunk,” Emre said.
“He’s not dead, he’s in Wakefield with his arm in a sling.”
“Same thing to a bus.”
And everybody laughed, and it went on one beat too long, and then it went on a second beat too long, and in the second beat everybody in that lounge worked out simultaneously what the conversation was actually about, which was not bunks.
Yusuf put his coffee down.
“Okay,” he said. “So. Last night.”
The door at the front end banged and the driver came halfway down the gangway and said there was a queue building at fourteen and he was going to come off and run down the A-road for twenty minutes, and did anybody want the toilet before he did it, because he would rather nobody used it on the A-road, and then he went back and the door banged and the bus slowed and swung and the light in the lounge changed from motorway grey to hedges.
“So,” Yusuf said again.
“Say it,” said Emre.
“I’m going to.” He rubbed his face. “Last night Shona and I — there isn’t a good way to do the next part of this sentence.”
“There is,” Shona said. “You just did it.”
“Right. Yes.” He laughed, and then did not. “And I’ve spent all morning deciding what everybody in this room feels about that, and handing round biscuits, and I’d like somebody to stop me, because I’ve been at it since eight o’clock and I’m exhausting.”
“You are,” said Solomon.
“Thank you.” He turned to Emre. “So what do you want? Genuinely. Say the thing and I’ll—”
“Don’t poll the room,” Shona said.
She had not meant to say that out loud either. It was becoming a habit and she did not like it.
“I’m not polling the—”
“You’re polling the room. You did it in the dressing room on Wednesday and you’re doing it now.
You go round everybody and you find out what they want and you build the answer and then it’s done, and nobody ever has to ask you a single question about you, and it is a beautiful piece of work, Yusuf, honestly, I do the same thing for money. ”
There was a silence of about two seconds, which on a bus is enormous.
“Look,” Yusuf said, “nobody here needs to be worried that there’s a—”
“Seating plan,” Solomon said.
It came out flat and half a beat early and landed on the exact word Yusuf had been reaching for, and it was the joke — it was precisely the joke Yusuf had been three words away from making — and the lounge went up.
Emre put his head back against the window and laughed without any sound coming out, which is how Emre laughs.
Yusuf said seating plan twice, delighted, and the whole thing was suddenly light and warm and safe, and Shona laughed too, and underneath the laughing she watched a door swing shut, because the funny version had arrived exactly in time to save Yusuf from the end of his own sentence, and he had taken it, the way anybody would.
She waited for him to go back for it.
He looked out of the window at the hedges for a while. Then he said, “It isn’t a seating plan. That’s not the bit.”
“Go on,” said Solomon.
“The bit is that somebody asked me for something last night,” Yusuf said, “and I can’t tell you how that was.
I don’t get asked. I get thanked.” He was talking to the table.
“I’ve been in this band fifteen years and I know exactly what everybody in it needs and I could not tell you one thing I want, and I keep waiting for one of you to want something so I’ve got something to do with my hands. ”
Nobody rescued him. Solomon did not finish it. He let the man carry it all the way to the end himself, and Shona understood, watching the drummer look carefully at nothing, that he had let it run on purpose.
“Right,” Yusuf said, and cleared his throat. “So. Anyway. Emre. Are we—”
“I’m not jealous of you,” Emre said.
The bus came back up the slip road onto the motorway and the tyre note rose and the grey came back into the window.
“I’m jealous of the part where she asked,” he said.
Four people in a back lounge and nobody said anything, and the mug rings slid half an inch across the fold-down table, and Shona sat there with the whole useful apparatus of her life going through her hands like a cable with no connector on the end of it, because that sentence was about her and there was nothing in it to fix.
“Emre,” she said.
Emre picked up his coffee.
“That’s all of it,” he said, and turned his face to the window, and the door at the front banged and the driver said he would be sitting the rest of the afternoon out in a lay-by the far side of Lichfield, because he had been doing this for twenty-two years and had never once put a band into a lobby before the rooms were ready, and they would be forty minutes out when he moved, and they would be there at four.