Chapter 11 How This Holds
Yusuf’s room was on the ninth floor and had a kettle, two beds pushed together by somebody who had assumed something, and a window looking down at a ring road with the wet lights going round it.
It was ten past seven. Shona had been in it for four minutes and had already counted the exits, which is a thing you do in a venue and not a thing you do in a hotel room, and she noticed herself doing it and made herself stop.
“Right,” Yusuf said, from over by the desk, with his phone out. “There’s chips. There’s a burger that is going to be a disappointment, and there’s a chicken thing that I have had in this chain before and cannot recommend, and there’s chips.”
“Chips,” said Solomon.
“Chips for four, then. And the bread. They do a bread.”
He rang it down. He had not sat on either of the beds and was not going to; he stood at the desk with one hand resting on it and ordered food for people who had not asked for any, and Shona watched him do it with the particular tenderness of somebody who recognises the move, because it was hers.
Emre had come in last and put a bottle on the low table by the window without saying anything about where it had come from.
It had come from Glasgow. It had been in the Rannoch’s dressing room two nights ago with a Slate compliments slip round its neck and it had ridden three hundred and five miles in a flight case of spare strings, and there was no corkscrew in the room, and he opened it with the small blade on his keys in about seven seconds in a way that suggested a whole history nobody was going to be told about.
He poured one glass. He handed it to Shona.
Then he poured a second one for himself and put the bottle down and sat on the floor with his back against the radiator and his long legs out, which put the top of his head at roughly the height of the windowsill and still made him the biggest thing in the room.
“Yusuf?” Shona said.
“I don’t.” He said it easily, without looking up from the phone. “Never have. Not a thing, don’t make it a thing.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Everybody makes it a thing.”
“I’m a monitor engineer,” she said. “If I made a thing of every man on a stage who won’t drink I’d never get a line check done.”
Solomon laughed once, through his nose, and sat down in the chair by the wardrobe.
That was the shape of the room, then, and she read it off the floor in a second and a half the way she read a stage: Emre against the radiator under the window, Solomon in the only actual chair with his hands on the arms of it, Yusuf on his feet in the middle with nine feet of carpet to move around in, and Shona on the end of the bed with a glass of somebody else’s red in her hand and her boots still on.
She had come up in the bomber and dropped it over the end of the bed, and what was sitting in that room was all of her: five foot two, hair still up off her neck on the same three grips, built dense and strong the whole way through, and three very tall men arranged around her at three different distances, not one of whom had yet worked out where to put his eyes.
She had never in her life minded being looked at.
Looking was the only kind of attention that had never once cost her anything.
Nobody started it for six minutes. They talked about the Ironside, which is nine thousand and has daylight coming into the soundcheck through the roof glass, and about whether the pool was open till ten or eleven, and Yusuf offered the room three separate things, and then the food came and there were chips, and everybody ate some, and it got no easier at all.
It was Shona who put it on the table, because she cannot stand a room with something in it that nobody is naming; it is the same nerve that makes her good at her job.
“Mags,” she said.
Yusuf stopped with a chip.
“What does Mags get told,” Shona said. “That’s the first one.
Because she’s the person whose run this is, she’s got six weeks left of it, it’s the first tour she’s been given outright in twenty years and if this goes sideways in public it’s hers, not yours.
You three would be a story. She’d be a woman who couldn’t keep a run tidy. ”
“She’d not care,” Yusuf said.
“She would care enormously.”
“She’d—”
“Yusuf, she’s already worked it out.” Shona put the glass down on the carpet.
“She’s been doing this as long as I have.
She came and stood next to me at the back of the room in Manchester and she didn’t ask me one question and that’s how I know.
So it isn’t what she gets told. It’s whether anybody makes her say it out loud, because the second she has to say it out loud she’s got to have a position on it, and she doesn’t want one, and she shouldn’t have to have one. ”
“So nothing gets said,” said Emre.
“Nothing gets announced. Different thing.” She looked round at the three of them. “Nobody’s hiding. Hiding is a full-time job and it’s a horrible one and it would show in the mix inside a week. You just don’t hand your tour manager a thing she has to have an opinion about.”
“That’s the same answer I’d have given,” Solomon said.
“I know.”
“I’d have taken longer.”
She laughed, and Yusuf was looking at her with an expression she did not have a label for and would have preferred not to be receiving, and she moved straight on, because moving straight on is free.
“Second one,” she said. “The crew. Which is nineteen people and a van, and half of them have known you fifteen years and none of them have known me since Wednesday, which means anything that gets noticed gets noticed about me, and I’d like everybody in this room to understand that’s not a complaint, that’s a weather forecast. I’ve worked with lads who’d have a view.
There are two on this run who’d have a view. ”
“Name them,” Emre said.
“No.”
“Name them and I’ll—”
“Emre.” She said it kindly and fast. “You’re about to offer to go and stand near somebody, and I know exactly how effective that is, and I’ve spent twenty years making sure I never need it. Don’t. Please.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he tipped his head back against the radiator and said, “All right,” and drank about a third of his one glass, and that was that, and she felt the ugly little click of having handled him perfectly.
Yusuf had started walking.
“Right, so, that’s the crew, that’s Mags, that’s—” he turned at the wardrobe and came back “—the other one’s who’s allowed to be upset, and where.
Because somebody in this is going to have a bad hour.
That’s not pessimism, it’s four people, somebody’s having a bad hour by Sunday, and I’d rather we’d agreed—”
“Don’t say terms,” Shona said.
“I wasn’t going to say terms.”
“You were four words off it.”
“I was going to say worked out.” He grinned, and it wobbled. “Which is different and you know it’s different.”
“It is different. Go on.”
“So somebody’s got a bad hour,” Yusuf said.
“What I don’t want is the version where the person with the bad hour goes and has it on their own in a corridor, because I’ve had fifteen years of that in this band and the corridor version takes about eight months to come back round and it comes back as a guitar part. ”
“It comes back as a tempo,” Solomon said.
“It comes back as a tempo.”
“So have it in the room,” Shona said. “Whoever it is. Have it out loud and have it badly, and nobody fixes it inside the first five minutes.” She heard herself doing it — hearing the room, building the answer, handing it round — and she could not have stopped if the ceiling had come down.
“And it doesn’t get converted into a decision that night.
That’s the actual trap. Somebody’s upset at two in the morning and by half two there’s a policy about bunks.
Be upset. Have a bad hour. Then go to sleep and have a look at it on a Tuesday. ”
“Tuesday,” said Emre.
The room went a particular kind of quiet, and Shona picked her glass up off the carpet because it gave her hands something to do.
“Tuesday I’m in a room in Sheffield at eight in the morning with somebody else’s drum riser,” she said, exactly and pleasantly, like a call time.
“Five weeks, arenas and theatres, signed in July. I’ve taken the mobilisation half of the fee, which is two thousand six hundred pounds, and if I pull out inside fourteen days of first load-in I pay every penny of it straight back, and I’m already inside the fourteen days.
And the tour manager holding that contract put me on my first arena in 2014 when I had no business being on one, and she’d have the Monday — one day — to find a monitor engineer. ”
“That’s the money and the favour,” Solomon said.
“That’s the money and the favour.”
“And the third one.”
She opened her mouth to say there wasn’t a third one, and the third one was right there, and it was a phone call to a twenty-six-year-old in Cardiff who had given Mags her name in the first place and who would say yes in about four seconds, and saying that out loud would mean she had been thinking about it, which she had, since Glasgow, at four in the morning, in a bunk that was not hers.
“There isn’t a third one,” she said.
Solomon let that sit where she had put it, and did not pick it up, and went on looking at her with those pale grey eyes in a way that was neither kind nor unkind, and after a moment he shifted in the chair, which for Solomon is an announcement.
“Can I say a thing,” he said.
“You’ve never asked that before in your life,” Yusuf said.
“No.”
He put his palms on the arms of the chair, and did not stand up, because he does not stand up.
“I’ve been right about you two for fifteen years,” Solomon said.
“That’s not a boast, it’s nearly the opposite.
I’ve known about the midrange for three years.
I heard what was happening to Yusuf’s voice about three years before anybody used the word, and I could have told you the day it started.
I’ve watched Emre carry other people’s cases for a decade and I have never once taken one off him.
” He said it mildly, with no weight on it at all, the way he’d say the kick was a hair early.
“And every single one of those years I was sat at the back of the room with all of it in the drawer, being right.”
Nobody said anything. Emre was entirely still against the radiator.
“Here’s the part,” Solomon said. “Being right about a person has never once been the same as being in the room with them. Not once. Not in fifteen years. It feels like it is. It feels exactly like it is — you’re paying that much attention, you must be involved, you’re practically doing them a service — and it’s the cheapest seat in the house and it’s got the best view and you never have to say a word about yourself for the whole show. ”
He stopped. Then, because it was true and he is exact:
“And I’d have stayed in it. I wasn’t going to get out of it. She turned up on Wednesday and put every one of us four dB up in each other’s ears and now I’m sat here at ten past eight talking about myself, which is not a thing I do.”
Yusuf said, “Sol—”
“Don’t find me a better word for it.”
And Shona Hasker, thirty-eight years old, twenty years on the road, four hundred rooms, heard a man in a hotel chair in Birmingham recite her own job description back to her in the flat voice he used for tempo, and it went through her the way his sentence in the empty bowl had gone through her, sideways and straight out the other side.
“That’s mine,” she said.
It was out before she had decided anything.
“That’s my whole job,” she said. “That’s what I sell.
I come into a room four days from falling over and I hear every single person in it — what they need, what they’re frightened of, what they’re not going to ask for — inside an hour, and I give it to all of them, and it is genuinely the best version of that work you will get in this country, and I have never once in twenty years put myself in a room.
I’ve put myself near rooms. I’m brilliant at near.
” She was talking very fast. “And the contracts are four days and five weeks and a fortnight for a reason, and I have always told everybody the reason is the money, and the money is actually quite bad.”
The ring road went round underneath the window.
“Shona,” Yusuf said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going to tell you what you need.”
“You’ve told me what I need eleven times since Wednesday.”
“I know.” He came and sat down. On the floor, three feet from her, which she had not seen him do in three days and which put his face lower than hers and meant he had to look up at her to do it, and she understood, far too late, that he had worked that out. “I know. I’m not doing it. I’m asking.”
“Yusuf—”
“What do you want.”
Four words. No options in it. He did not offer her the early car or the late one, he did not hand her two things to choose between, he did not say you want this and you aren’t going to say so, and there was nowhere in the sentence to stand.
And then he stopped talking.
That was the thing she had not been ready for.
He stopped, entirely, and did not fill it, and did not soften it at ten seconds or take it back at twenty, and Solomon did not finish it for her, and Emre did not do a single thing with his hands, and the three of them sat in a room on the ninth floor and let it be quiet, and the extractor fan in the bathroom ticked, and somebody’s phone buzzed once against a hard surface and nobody reached for it.
She got through about forty seconds of it. She has worked a room with eleven thousand people in it and not minded. She could not do a minute of this.
“Tonight,” she said.
Her own voice sounded wrong to her, small and level, the way Yusuf’s had sounded to Yusuf in his wedge in Glasgow.
“That’s not the answer to the question you asked,” she said.
“I know it isn’t. I can’t do the one you asked.
Ask me Sunday.” She made herself keep her chin up and her eyes where they were, because looking at him was easier than the alternative and she knew that about herself now.
“Tonight. All three of you. Here. That’s what I want, and I’ve never said a sentence like that to anybody in my life, so somebody say something quite soon. ”
Emre put his glass down on the carpet.
“Right,” he said.