Chapter 17 She Walks Out
The last song of the set finished at four minutes past ten, and thirteen thousand people in a round room made the noise that tells you the building has decided it was worth the money.
Shona had five minutes.
She had spent the whole of the last song working out whether she was going to do it, and then found, in the way of these things, that she had already spent the whole of the last song getting ready to.
Because here is what a monitor engineer does in the change.
She recalls the encore scene — done, at the last chorus, the scene lit up green on the screen under her left hand.
She checks the six wedge sends and the three in-ear packs, and all nine are where she put them at line check and have not moved, because nothing on this desk moves without her.
She checks that Solomon’s click, which he does not use and has never used, is still safely off. She sets her own talkback.
And then, normally, she sits there for the whole show with her hands in her lap and lets the room shout.
Shona keyed the talkback and latched it open.
Not to one. Not to the wedges either, with a boarded stage and Amrit’s crew working on it — to the three ear mixes and nothing else, all three at once, pre-fade, at the level she used for line check, which is the level of somebody standing a foot away from you saying your name.
Then she took the handheld off the top of the rack — the spare, the one she had walked the empty room with that morning, still patched into her own talkback input from doing it, fifty feet of black cable coiled on the hook beside it — and stood up with it.
She knew what she was about to put in their ears.
Three minutes of wing, crowd bleed through six feet of drape, her own footsteps, the handling noise of the microphone in her hand, pre-fade, into three mixes, two minutes before they walked back on.
There was no version of it that was not a fault.
She had costed it standing up and decided to pay it, which is not the same as not knowing the price.
Amrit’s system tech looked at the desk, and then at her, and did not say anything, because he was good.
Eleven paces from her desk to the drape.
She had counted them at eleven that morning and they were still eleven, and on the eleventh one she could still see the nine meters of her own outputs down the side of the screen, bouncing green in the dark, which mattered more to her in that moment than anything else in the building.
Nothing on that desk needed a human being for the next five minutes.
She had made sure of it before she stood up, the way you make sure of a thing before you do something stupid, which is the difference between doing something stupid and being stupid.
Twenty years of never once being the woman having a feeling in a wing.
She walked out into the wing.
Stage left at the Blackwall is a deep run of black drape with a metre and a half of gap behind it, lit by two strips of blue tape on the floor and a single work light gelled down to nothing, and in the dark of a changeover it is the loudest quiet place in England.
On the other side of six feet of fabric, thirteen thousand people were stamping the rake.
It came up through the boards into her boots at about seventy cycles, which is what a crowd is, and under it somewhere a bottle rolled.
They were already coming off. Solomon first, because Solomon comes off first, towel round his neck, shirt gone transparent across the shoulders, walking at the speed he walks at.
Yusuf two steps behind him with his hand up to his ear and the mesh shirt open to the waist, black and wet and stuck to him.
And Emre last, bass still on him, because he will not take it off in a changeover on the grounds that putting it back on wastes four seconds.
All three of them had her open in their ears.
She stood in front of Emre Bayram with a talkback mic in her hand and stopped him, and he stopped, six foot four in the half-dark with his hair down out of its tie and stuck to his neck and his in-ears in, which meant he had no idea yet that he was about to be heard by two other people, and she did not tell him, because telling him was the one thing that would have let him do something about it.
“I’m going to say something,” she said, “and it’s going to take three minutes, and then you’re going to go and play.”
Emre did not say anything. He looked at her.
“Last night I said a sentence in a dressing room to three of you,” Shona said, “and it was true and I meant every word, and it was also a coward’s sentence, because it let me say it to a room instead of to you. So this one’s yours. Yours specifically. Nobody else’s name is in it.”
She had her hand on the mic and her thumb was not on the key, because the key was latched, and she was aware of that in the way you are aware of a live cable at your feet.
“I want your hands,” she said.
He went very slightly still, which on Emre is a large movement.
“Not as a nice way of saying something else. Your hands. The one that went over mine on the case handle last night and waited — waited, didn’t pull, waited — until I let go of the thing I was holding.
The way you put your palm flat on the grille of your own wedge at the Ironside to feel whether I’d got it right, instead of asking me.
The way you had my flight case waiting at the bottom of the ramp this morning, squared to the room, and let me take it up myself.
I’ve been reading you off your hands since Wednesday and I’d like to keep doing it for six weeks, and I’m telling you that because I want you to know that I’m not putting up with them. I’m asking for them.”
Four feet away in the dark, Yusuf Warsame had stopped walking.
She saw it happen out of the side of her eye and did not turn her head.
He had stopped the way a man stops when a voice arrives in his ears from somewhere the voice is not supposed to be, one hand still up to the pack on his belt, and then he did not touch the pack, and he did not take the ear out, and that was a decision he made in about a fifth of a second and she would think about it later for a long time.
“I want how still you are,” she said.
Emre’s jaw moved.
“You stand further away from people than you want to. You said that at a service station on the M6 and then you bought four coffees so nobody could answer you, and I’m not going to answer it now, because it isn’t a thing that needs answering and I’ve nothing to add to it and you didn’t ask.
I’m just telling you what I want. I want the distance you stand at.
I want you on the edge of a room not saying anything with your arms folded, exactly as you are, because when I look up from a desk and find you there it is the single most settling thing that happens to me in a working day, and I’ve been doing working days since I was eighteen. ”
The crowd went up a notch behind the drape. Somebody at the front was doing a chant that had not caught.
“I want the not-asking too, and this is the last bit and then I’m done.
I don’t want you fixed. I have spent five days with three men who each think there’s a version of themselves I’d prefer, and there isn’t, and if anybody’s getting fixed on this run it’s me.
But I’d like you to know that I can hear you.
You do it with your hands and I do it with a pair of ears, and those are both real languages, and you’ve been talking at me all day and I have heard every word of it and I still want it said. ”
She stopped.
And then she did the hard part, which was not any of the sentences.
She stood in the silence after them and did not fill it, and did not soften it, and did not hand him a way out of it, and did not say anyway, or no rush, or you don’t have to, which were all three of them sitting there in her mouth fully formed and useful and ready to go.
Three minutes and four seconds gone. Behind the drape, thirteen thousand people.
Emre reached up and took the left in-ear out.
He did it slowly, and he let it hang on its cable against his collarbone, and that meant he was now hearing exactly half of her, half of the room, half of everything, with a show to play in under two minutes — and it is the single most expensive thing a musician can do to himself in a changeover, and he did it so that he could hear her with an actual ear.
Then he put his hand on her wrist.
Not the mic hand. The other one, the one hanging at her side, and he did not grip it.
His palm came round the inside of her wrist where the skin is thin, and his thumb settled once against her pulse and stayed there, and he bent down — all of that height folding to get to her, because she is five foot two and he has never once made her reach for anything — and put his mouth next to her ear.
“Tomorrow,” Emre said.
His voice in the dark, and also, a quarter of a second later, his voice in the ears of two other men, because her talkback was latched and a talkback does not care whose mouth is near it.
“Tomorrow there’s no truck,” he said. “Nothing on it. Nothing to lift, nothing to carry, nothing to set up, no room to build. Nothing I can do for you.”
His thumb moved on her wrist, once.
“Come and sit next to me anyway.” A breath. “That’s me asking. I’m asking.”
Shona Hasker, who had spent twenty years being the person in the room with no need in her, stood in a wing in the dark and found that she could not immediately operate her own throat.
“Yes,” she said.
“All right.”
“Emre—”
“Yes,” said Solomon Rakoff, from four feet behind her, in the flat unhurried volume he says everything in, “and he can hear you, we all can, and that’s Amrit flashing the wing light, so.”
Emre put the ear back in.
He straightened up, six foot four of him, and his hand left her wrist last, the thumb going off her pulse a half-beat after the rest of it, and he walked past her onto a dark stage at thirteen thousand capacity with his bass on and got to his mark at four minutes eleven by her count.
Yusuf was already moving. He went past her fast, and he did not stop and did not say a word, but he put the flat of his hand very briefly on her shoulder blade as he went, which from Yusuf Warsame is a whole paragraph, and then he was out in it with his guitar coming up over his head.
Solomon went last.
He paused beside her for exactly as long as it takes to sling a towel onto a snare stand, looked at the drape and not at her, and said, “You’ll want to be at your desk.”
“I know.”
“Eleven paces.”
“I know.”
“Shona,” Solomon said. “Best mix that’s ever been in my ears. I’ve not said it and I’m saying it.”
And he went out and sat down.
She made it in nine.
She was back in the seat with the handheld on the rack and her fingers on the send bank at five minutes and four seconds, which is four seconds late by her own watch and was the only four seconds of the entire run she had ever given away.
She had killed the talkback with her thumb on the second pace of the way back, without looking, the way you try a door on your way out of a building, because six seconds of an open mic in three mixes is a technical fault and she does not commit technical faults.
The little red square was already out. The room went dark.
One man. One guitar. One microphone.
He sang four words.
She had heard those four words come out of that mouth on four nights now, and in Glasgow they had gone into a man’s own wedge with nothing taken off them and knocked him clean off a stage.
Tonight his own voice came back at him out of a black box on a boarded floor in front of thirteen thousand people, at its real size, four and a half decibels louder than three years of his life, and Yusuf Warsame stood inside the sound of himself and did not stop and did not put a hand up and did not lay anything down.
He sang the verse. He sang the half.
And on the last beat of it, from the riser, from a man who in five days had told her things he had not told anyone in fifteen years, Solomon counted them in — four sticks, clean, dead on, entirely unbothered, the count of a man who had just heard everything that had been said in his own ears in the dark and had decided that the professional thing and the right thing were on this occasion the same thing.
The band came in underneath.
Bass at the bottom of it, exactly where she had put him, audible now, a whole man on the frequency nobody had been willing to stand on.
Kick and snare dry and slightly behind. And a voice on top of all of it, not under anything, with the throat wide open and the mesh shirt stuck to him and his eyes shut.
Everything audible. Nothing hidden.
Shona sat behind a monitor desk with her hands flat on the surface, palms down, both of them, and mixed the last two songs of the run for three men she had told the truth to, and she did not turn a single thing down.