Chapter 16 Load-In Around a Silence
The Blackwall sits on the Greenwich Peninsula with the river behind it and a loading dock that takes four trucks abreast, and at eleven o’clock on the Sunday morning it was full of daylight, which is the wrong thing to find in an arena and the reason everybody who works in one hates a London dock.
Thirteen thousand. Four thousand more than Birmingham, two more than Glasgow. A bowl with a proper roof on it and a flown PA that needed three motors a side, and a stage-left wing deep enough that Shona had to walk eleven paces from her desk to see the drape, which she counted, because she counts.
Her flight case was waiting for her at the bottom of the ramp when she came down off the bus at twenty past ten, stood upright on its wheels with the handle squared to the room, in the place a monitor engineer’s case goes, which is not where the runners put cases and is not where they had put anybody else’s.
She stood and looked at it for slightly longer than it deserved.
Then she put her hand on the handle and took it up the ramp herself, and that was the whole of what she got.
Load-in at eleven. Twenty-two crew, a house head of production called Amrit who had her patch list open before she asked for it and who was, on the evidence of nine minutes, the best house PM of the four, and a stage that came up in sections with the seriousness of something being built rather than something being unpacked.
Shona pinned her hair up at the ramp and did not take her jacket off, and went to work.
The desk was up and lit before she was, with DEAKIN on the meter bridge in marker where it had been all week.
She loaded the show file off the stick at ten to twelve — HONEST, as Sat, saved again on Saturday night and renamed for it — and the scene list came up in the daylight looking exactly like what it was, which was three men at their real size, and she left it alone.
It took her forty minutes to walk the room with a wedge and a talkback mic and find out what thirteen thousand empty seats were going to do to her, which was: take the bottom out of everything, be a full third of a second slower to come back at her than the Ironside, and put a bloom on the low mids from the roof that was going to disappear the moment there were bodies in it.
She wrote it down. She wrote down the time she wrote it down.
Emre was on the stage from half eleven.
He did not have to be. Bass players do not do their own load-in at this tier; there is a backline tech for it and the tech here was competent and had been on the run since Newcastle.
Emre was there anyway, in a black t-shirt with his hair tied back, lifting the end of things that did not need his end lifting, and when his cabs came up off the truck he took the covers off himself and stacked them flat and squared the corners.
He did not look at her.
That is a harder thing to do than it sounds, in a room with one monitor desk in it and a stage-left wing you have to cross to get anywhere.
He crossed it eight times before one o’clock.
Twice he passed within a yard of her. Once he stepped over the loom at her feet and put a hand down on the cable bridge to do it and she watched his fingers spread on the steel and close again, and then he was gone past.
Twenty years of reading what people do instead of what they say, and she had spent five days building a case that this man could be read off his hands, and now his hands were doing the only thing she had never had to interpret before, which was working.
Carrying. Stacking. Coiling a cable she had already coiled.
She could not tell whether it meant I am here or I am giving you the room or I have not got a sentence and I would rather lift something. It probably meant all three, and the three of them do not point the same way, and she had thirteen thousand people arriving in seven hours.
At one she went and had a coffee she did not want, standing up, out of a paper cup in the dock with the river light coming in flat off the water, and put her phone on the crate next to her, face up, and did not open the folder with the countersigned PDF in it.
Two thousand six hundred pounds, because she is inside the fourteen days and has been since before Mags ever rang her.
Two days to the load-in. Gate four, oh eight hundred Tuesday, and a woman in a production office somewhere who had given her a first arena in 2014 and would have one working Monday to find a monitor engineer in.
She turned the phone over.
Line check at three.
She had them one at a time the way she always does, and she had the room the way she wanted it, and at twenty past three Yusuf Warsame came up to the front edge of the stage and stood over her desk with his hands in his pockets and said her name.
“There’s the vocal and there’s the guitar,” she said, without looking up, already reaching for his sends, because she has never once needed telling. “Or the wedge and the ears. Say which.”
“No,” Yusuf said.
She did look up then.
He was clean-shaven to the jaw and five hours out from a show, in an ordinary grey shirt, and there was nothing whatever generous happening on his face. No options in his hands. No early car and no late one.
“I want my voice up half a dB in my own wedge,” he said. “Not the ears. The wedge. Just mine, just me, and I don’t want it for the room and I don’t want it because it’s better. I’d like it because I’d like it.”
Shona put her pencil down.
Half a decibel. Half a decibel is nothing.
Half a decibel is under the resolution of what most people in this industry can hear, and the honest truth is that there are house engineers with twenty years on them who could not pass a blind test on it, and this man — who had spent three years singing four decibels under where he should be because he could not work out how to want anything — had crossed a stage in daylight to ask a woman he had slept next to for a number so small it barely qualified as a change.
She had to hold the edge of the desk for a second.
“Yeah,” she said. “Course.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yusuf.” She found his input on the left-hand bank and put her finger on the fader and moved it the width of a fingernail, which is what half a dB looks like, and the number went up on the screen and stayed there. “It’s done. It was done while you were being embarrassed about it.”
He did not move off the edge of the stage, which for him was an effort.
“That’s the first thing I’ve asked anybody for in about nine years,” he said.
“I know.”
“Is it a horrible way to feel.”
“Yes,” said Shona, who had done it in a breezeblock room in Birmingham seventeen hours earlier and had been awake for most of the seventeen. “Get used to it. It’s going to happen to you all week.”
Yusuf laughed — one, short, surprised out of him — and went back to his microphone, and she sat with her finger still on a fader that had already stopped moving and thought, with some annoyance, that of all the things on this run that might have taken her out, the one that did it was half of one decibel.
She caught Solomon at half four, in the gap where the drum tech tunes and the drummer has nothing to do but wait for his own kit.
He was sitting on a road case at the back of the stage with a towel already round his neck at four in the afternoon, which is not a thing anybody else does, and he was watching the far end of the room where Emre had the covers off the spare rig and was doing something to a plug that did not need doing.
“Solomon.”
“Mm.”
“What’s he doing.”
Solomon did not say anything for a moment. Then he pulled the towel off his neck and folded it in half over his knee, and she understood that she was going to get more sentences out of him than she had got in five days, and braced for it.
“I’ve known that man fifteen years,” he said.
“I can tell you what he did in Cork in 2019 and what he did the night Yusuf’s father died and what he did on the Tuesday we found out the second record hadn’t sold, and I could tell you what all three of those mean, and I’d be right.
That’s the thing you want me to do now. I’m not going to do it. ”
“Solomon—”
“I’ve gone off being the man who knows,” he said, unhurried. “You know why. You were in the room when I said it.”
The drum tech hit the floor tom twice and stopped.
“I’d be doing it at you as much as about him,” Solomon said. “Here’s what he means, here’s what he’s like, here’s the shape of him — and I’d hand it over like I’d earned the right to. And then it’d be my reading sitting in the middle of the two of you for the rest of it.”
“That is not—”
“It is,” he said, and it was not unkind, it was simply more exact than what she had been going to say, which was the thing he does.
“There is one person in this building who can read that man’s hands properly and it isn’t me.
I’ve had fifteen years at it. You had four days and you’re already better than I am, and that’s not a compliment, it’s just true, and it’s a bit of a blow to me if I’m honest.”
He put the towel back round his neck.
“He’ll have moved his rig twice by six,” he said. “You’ll know what that is. I don’t.”
And then he got up and went to his kit, and his own line check started, and he played sixteen bars of nothing at all and said, to the house engineer, “kick’s lost some skirt,” which was correct, and did not speak to her again for two hours.
Mags found her at ten to five in the production office, in the doorway of it, with the day sheet in her hand and the radio for once not at her ear.
“Shona.”
“Mm.”
“Six weeks,” Mags said. “Hull on Tuesday week, then Dublin, then the rest of it, and before you say it — I rang Ceri Vaughan from the loading bay this morning and she’s got a thing of her own in November she’ll not move for me or anybody, so she can give me the autumn and then she’s gone, and I’m not handing this band a third engineer in the middle of it.
The agency have sent me two CVs I wouldn’t let carry a mic stand.
And Deakin’s shoulder’s a March job at best, so it won’t only be the six weeks I end up asking you for, it’ll be whatever the diary does before he’s back, and I’d rather you knew that tonight than found it out in Dublin.
It’s yours if you want it and I need to know tonight, because if it’s a no I’ve got to ring people from a car park at midnight and I would genuinely rather not. ”
Twenty years, and Shona had never once let a question like that stand in the air. There was always a next one. The next one was the answer, and the answer was in her hand before the question had finished, and it had the date on it and everything.
“Tonight,” she said.
Mags looked at her for a second.
“Right,” she said, and put the radio back up, and went.
Shona stood in the corridor under the seated tier of the biggest room of the run with two and a half hours until doors, and behind her, out on the stage, somebody moved a bass rig for the second time that afternoon.