Chapter 13 Sums at Four in the Morning
The arm under her shoulders had gone past numb and out the other side into something medical.
“Yusuf.”
“Mm.”
“Your arm’s dead.”
“It isn’t.”
“Move it and tell me it isn’t.”
There was a pause of the kind a man makes when he is deciding whether the information is worth having, and then Yusuf Warsame said, in the voice of someone reading a very bad monitor report, “It’s dead.”
“Right.”
“It’s been dead since about one. I thought if I kept still it’d come back on its own. That’s not — that’s apparently not how arms work.”
“That’s not how anything works,” said Solomon, from the other side of her, awake, and had presumably been awake for some time, because that is the man’s entire hobby.
They got the arm out from under her by committee, which involved her sitting up, and the duvet going somewhere, and Yusuf making a noise as the blood came back that she would remember for the rest of her life and would not be describing to anybody.
Emre, who had not said a word in three hours, said, “Window,” and got up, and opened it, and got back in, all without a single word more, and the cold came off the Birmingham ring road and over all four of them, and the room, which had got to the temperature of a kettle, began to be liveable again.
“Oh, that’s good,” Shona said.
“Too much,” said Yusuf.
“Not too much.”
“Two of us are used to a bus,” Solomon said. “A bus is nine degrees and a Yorkshireman’s opinion. She’s right. Leave it.”
“I want it on record,” Yusuf said into the dark, “that I am freezing, that nobody asked me, and that I’m going to be lovely about it.”
“You are going to be lovely about it,” she said.
“I’m being lovely about it right now.”
The fault line between the two pushed-together beds ran diagonally under her hip, and there was nothing whatsoever to be done about that.
She had spent twenty years sleeping in bunks four feet wide with a motorway going past underneath.
She had never once had a bad back off a bed.
What she had, tonight, at four in the morning on a mattress join in a chain hotel off a ring road, with a dead arm on one side of her and a swimmer’s shoulder on the other and a six-foot-four bass player asleep across the bottom corner of it with one hand round her ankle, was an hour, and she lay there in the middle of all of it, doing absolutely nothing, which was itself a thing she had not done in years.
Somebody’s phone made a noise.
“That’s mine,” Emre said, into the pillow.
“It’s four in the morning.”
“It’s the alarm for the alarm.”
Shona lifted her head. “The what?”
“He sets one at four to tell him the six is going to happen,” Solomon said. “He’s done it every day for as long as I’ve known him. You’ll get used to it.”
“He’s going to the gym at six.”
“He’s going to the gym at six.”
“There is no gym,” she said. “I’ve seen the leaflet. There’s a room with a cross-trainer in it and a poster about hydration.”
“Yeah,” said Emre, and went back to sleep.
She got about another hour of it. She knew it was an hour because she was counting, the way she counted a changeover, and because somewhere out past two in the morning she had stopped being a person having a night and started being a person storing one.
Then Yusuf’s breathing went long and deep, and Solomon’s did, later, and the room had three men asleep in it and one woman on a fault line with her eyes open, and she lay there for a while longer pretending that was not what was happening.
It took four minutes to get out. She did it the way she pulls a mic stand out of a stacked line — no sudden weight change anywhere, everything supported before it is moved — and got Emre’s hand off her ankle and onto the duvet without waking him, and got her feet onto the carpet, and stood in the dark next to a plate with three cold chips on it and found her jacket on the floor by the radiator, and her phone, and the key card.
At the door she stopped and looked back at them.
That was the mistake. She knew it while she was doing it.
Three men in a bad hotel bed with the window open and a lamp still on the floor where she had put it with her elbow, and Yusuf with the dead arm flung up over his head like a man surrendering to something, and Solomon on his back with his hands folded on his chest like a lid on a box, and Emre diagonal across the whole bottom half of it because he does not fit anywhere and has stopped expecting to.
She went out into the corridor and let the door go shut on its closer, slowly, with her hand on it.
The corridor was the temperature of a fridge and lit like an interview.
Carpet with a pattern designed to hide sick.
A vending machine at the lift lobby doing its hum, and the fire door at the end of it, and past the fire door a concrete stairwell with a window in it and a view of a multi-storey car park and, beyond that, a strip of sky going the colour that means Saturday.
Saturday. She had been thinking of it as Friday for five hours. It had been Saturday since midnight, and Saturday was a show day, and show day meant the Ironside at nine with nine thousand sold, and in twenty years she had never once been unclear about what day it was in a building.
She sat down on the second step with her jacket round her shoulders and the phone in both hands and did not open it for a while.
Then she opened it.
It was not hard to find. Nothing she has is hard to find.
There is a folder for the year and a folder inside it for each contract and inside that a scan, an invoice and a thread, because the thing nobody tells you about freelance is that the work is the easy half.
HALFMAST — 4 shows — Aug had eleven items in it. The one under it had forty.
She opened the PDF. Signed in July at a kitchen table in Peckham with the window open, countersigned four days later from a laptop in Bristol, five weeks of arenas and theatres, first load-in oh eight hundred Tuesday, gate four, bring your own talkback mic because they have lost theirs again.
She scrolled to clause four.
Where the Engineer withdraws within fourteen (14) days of the first scheduled load-in, the mobilisation payment shall be repayable in full within thirty (30) days of notice.
Two thousand six hundred pounds. Invoiced on the eleventh of July.
Paid on the nineteenth, which was fast, which was her, which was the woman in Bristol who pays a freelancer inside eight days because she remembers being one.
Spent in August against a boiler and the standing charge on a flat she is in for about nine nights a quarter.
Five thousand two hundred for five weeks of arenas and theatres, which is under what the work is worth and both of them had known it in July. She had taken it anyway, in a kitchen, with the window open, because the woman asking had asked her in person, and because a boiler is a boiler.
She read the clause again, straight through, at the same speed, the way she reads a patch list twice. It said the same thing the second time. Clauses do.
She put the phone face down on her knee.
Here was the thing. She had run those numbers four times since Thursday — in a bunk outside Carlisle, in a production office, in a dressing room with her back to a mirror, and on the end of a hotel bed at ten past eight last night, before Emre got funny about a turndown service — and she had run them each time with the particular warm competence of a woman solving a problem, and she had noticed on about the third pass that the numbers were never in the wrong place.
The numbers were fine. The numbers had been fine since July.
Two thousand six hundred pounds is two and a half weeks of somebody else’s arena at what this business pays, and she has worked harder ones for less, and if it were only money she would have paid it the first night and not mentioned it to anybody.
So she did the other sum. The one she does not do.
She thought about the Tuesday itself. Eight in the morning, a gate, a room she has never been in, a desk somebody else has left a show file on, and eleven hours of concrete, and at the end of it a bus with a bunk in it and a new touring party learning by the second night that the monitor engineer hears what you need before you say it and never once needs a thing herself.
Five weeks. Then the next one, and the one after that, and she has the next one and the one after that, because she is never not dated.
And it went through her, sitting on a concrete step in a stairwell with the hour going from black to grey outside it, the whole thing at once, the way the hole in that band had gone through her inside an hour in Glasgow: it is the same instrument.
That was the sentence. It arrived complete and she could not put it back.
Every wedge on that stage had been turned down against every other one, and the three of them had called it manners for fifteen years, and what it actually was was a way of not being audible enough to be asked anything.
And she had a contract for the Tuesday and a contract after that and a contract after that, signed and dated and countersigned, and she had called it professionalism for twenty, and it was the same move exactly.
Turn yourself down. Book the exit before you walk in.
Give the room everything it needs for four days, and be four hundred miles away and unreachable before anybody in it gets far enough to ask you a single question about yourself.
She had walked into that building on Wednesday and diagnosed three men in under an hour off a bar and a half of a song.
Nobody had ever once mixed her.
The stairwell hummed. A lorry went round the ring road and its brakes did something at the roundabout, and the sky over the car park went another degree of grey, and Shona Hasker sat on the second step with her hair still down from the night before and her face still yesterday’s and the phone face down on her knee, and looked at the fire door, and did not move.
Because here was the actual arithmetic, and she had never had to do it before, not once, not in twenty years, and she did not have a shorthand for it.
What does it cost to not have a way out of a room.
Two thousand six hundred pounds, repayable within thirty days.
A woman in Bristol with one day to replace her and her name on it, who had put a twenty-six-year-old on her first arena on the strength of a hunch and a handshake, having to hear the word no from her.
A phone call, at some point, to another twenty-six-year-old, this one in Cardiff, who would say yes in four seconds and then say something flat and terrible about it afterwards without even turning round.
And on the other side of the sum, the bit that has no units: six weeks of a run that is not hers, and a Tuesday with nothing in it, and three men who would then be entitled — actually entitled, no exit booked, no date on it — to ask her things.
She sat with it. She did not open the email. She did not type a word. She did not ring anybody at that hour of the morning, because she is not a lunatic and because the version of her that does a thing like that at that hour is a version that has decided, and she had not decided.
She looked at the clause for a long time with the screen dark and the phone still face down, because she had it by heart by then.
Then, somewhere down the corridor behind the fire door, a phone alarm went off, muffled, and it was six, and the sky over the car park had gone from one grey to a better one while she sat there, and she heard through two doors a very tall man get up off a bed without complaining about it, and she found that she was crying slightly, in a stairwell, with no warning whatsoever and for no reason she could have written on an invoice.
She wiped it off with the heel of her hand, carefully, the way you do when your liner has survived a fourteen-hour day and there is still a show in front of you.
Then she got up, and put her phone in her jacket pocket without closing the folder, and went back in.