Chapter 18 Not Taking the Tuesday
A load-out is the only part of a tour that is honest about what it is.
By twenty to midnight the Blackwall had stopped being a room and gone back to being a warehouse with a curved ceiling.
The drape came in first, the way it always does, and thirteen thousand seats appeared all at once with the litter still in them, and the quarter-power house light came up flat and colourless over the lot of it, and the noise of the building changed from a crowd to wheels.
Cable ramps. Castors. Somebody’s radio. The particular bang of a lid going down on a lighting case, which is the sound of a show being over, and which Shona Hasker had been hearing four or five nights a week since she was eighteen and had never once got tired of.
Down the ramp and into the dock, where the river cold came in off the peninsula and sat about a foot deep over the concrete.
Her own world struck small. That is the good and the bad of monitors: twelve wedges, three ear rigs, one desk, two racks and a loom, and forty minutes if the stage crew are decent, and this stage crew were more than decent.
She coiled her own looms because she has never in twenty years let anybody else coil them, over and under, elbow to hand, and the black rubber came up off the deck still warm from a show.
At two minutes past twelve on the Monday morning the last of Halfmast’s steel went up the truck ramp and Amrit’s number two pulled the strap down over it and hit the ratchet twice.
Her flight case was not on it.
She noticed that the way she notices a wedge going three-quarters of a decibel out — not as a thought, as a wrongness — and turned round, and it was on the bus, of course it was on the bus, standing upright and squared to the wall at the bottom of the corridor by the bunk that had been Deakin’s, with the handle facing out into the gangway where a person would reach for it.
She stood in the dock and looked at the open bus door for the count of five, and then went back up the ramp, because she had one thing left to do and it was not going to do itself.
The monitor rack case takes a stick in the lid, in a foam cut-out, next to the spare talkback capsule. That is where Deakin kept his and that is where Shona had found it in Glasgow, tape label on upside down, eleven years of a man’s work on four gigabytes of plastic.
She had spent an hour of the afternoon on it while the room was still being built, and forty minutes on the bus before doors, and a last ten with her boots on a road case at half eleven while the drape came in.
It was all there. His scene list, rebuilt, every one of the nineteen scenes recalled and re-saved off the honest mix and named the way he named things, not the way she names things.
His file structure, which she had privately thought was mad at first and had come round to by the end of the week.
And then the part that took the hour: a note per scene.
Not a handover. Not a list of what she had changed, which would have been a way of telling a man with a bad shoulder what he had got wrong for three years.
Just what the rooms had done. Ironside — low mid bloom off the roof, gone by doors, don’t chase it.
Yusuf wedge +4 from your file; my call, and he’s asked for another half since.
Emre takes his own wedge up two now, leave the pot where he can reach it.
Solomon runs no click and never has, scene 9 has it muted not off, muted is wrong, take it off.
And at the bottom, dated, because everything she does is dated:
Blackwall, Sun 23:50. It’s a good file. It was always a good file. — S.H.
She put the stick back in the foam. Then she turned the tape label the right way up, pressed it down flat with her thumb, and shut the lid on it, and she was aware of being slightly ridiculous about a strip of gaffer and did it anyway.
Because he was coming back. March, Mags reckoned, and Mags is right about things. And a desk you leave without an engineer on it is not a desk you left, it is a desk you abandoned, and Shona had a whole career built out of never once doing that.
She was about to find out what that cost when the desk in question was somebody else’s.
Mags caught her at the bottom of the ramp with a radio in one hand and a folded day sheet in the other and a face that had been awake for nineteen hours.
“I need it tonight, and I meant tonight, not in a lovely way. The promoter’s advance is on me for a crew list for Hull by nine and I’m not putting a name on a list I haven’t got.”
“One o’clock,” Shona said.
“Shona.”
“One o’clock, and I want to say it on the bus first, with the three of them in the room, because if I say it to you in a dock it’s a booking and if I say it in there it’s the other thing.
” She heard how that sounded and let it stand, which was new.
“Give me until one and you’ll have a name for your list, and it’ll be the right one. ”
Mags let that sit for exactly as long as she could afford to.
“One o’clock,” she said, and unfolded the day sheet and started walking before she had finished reading it.
The front lounge of a nightliner at ten past midnight with the strip light on is the least romantic place in Europe.
A table with a ring on the varnish from every mug that has ever been put down on it, a bench either side, a fridge with the day sheets under a magnet, diesel and disinfectant and the ghost of somebody’s chips from Birmingham, and a strip of gaffer along the bottom rail where some previous band taped something that is not there any more.
Yusuf had the kettle on and was not making anything with it.
Solomon was already sitting down, because Solomon is always already sitting down, with a towel over his shoulder and his shirt changed and the wet one presumably in a bag somewhere.
Emre came in last and stood at the end of the table with his hair still down and one hand flat on the varnish.
“Sit down,” Shona said. “All of you. And leave the light on. I’m not doing this one in the dark, I’ve done one in the dark tonight already.”
Emre sat down.
She stayed standing, because standing is what she does, and put her phone face up on the table in front of her, which is not.
“I’m not loading in on Tuesday,” she said.
The fridge ticked.
“I want the six weeks. Hull, Dublin, the rest of it, and the days off in the middle where there’s no truck and nothing to carry and nothing I’m useful for.
And I want the three of you with it, all three, exactly the way I said it in a breezeblock room in Birmingham, and I’ve had twenty-four hours to go off the idea and I have not gone off it. ”
Yusuf had both hands on top of his head.
“And I’ll tell you the last bit now, so nobody finds it out in six weeks off a day sheet.
” She looked at the three of them in order, which took her longer than it should have.
“I’m going to be difficult. I’ve been easy for twenty years and it’s a con, and I’m going to stop, and what that’s going to look like is a woman who wants things out loud at inconvenient hours and can’t do it gracefully yet.
I’ll be bad at it. I’d like you to not fix it. ”
“No,” Solomon said.
“No?”
“No, we won’t fix it,” he said, “that’s what you asked for.”
It was twenty past twelve when he said it.
She had told Mags one o’clock, and one o’clock was a thing she had chosen herself, so the four of them sat in a lit lounge with the fridge ticking and let the rest of it go past, and nobody got up, and it was the longest hour of the run.
At one she found she wanted another quarter of an hour and took it, and did not pretend to herself that she had not.
Then she picked the phone up, and did the expensive half where they could see it, because a thing you do in a corridor is a thing you are still hiding.
Ceri Vaughan answered on the fourth ring at fourteen minutes past one in the morning, awake, obviously awake, because monitor engineers who have just come off a run do not sleep for about a week.
“It’s one in the morning.”
“It’s Shona.”
“I know it’s Shona, that’s why I answered it.” A pause with a kettle in it somewhere in Cardiff. “You’re on the Halfmast thing. I gave Mags your name.”
“You did. I’ve got a different one for you.
Five weeks, arenas and theatres, first load-in oh eight hundred Tuesday, gate four.
Signed contract, decent paper, mobilisation half on invoice inside eight days because the tour manager pays freelancers like a human being.
Bring your own talkback mic, they’ve lost theirs again. ”
Silence on the line.
“You came off your own run on the Saturday,” Shona said. “Mags says you’ve nothing until November.”
“I’ve nothing until November.”
“Then I’m handing you a desk, not a favour, and if it’s a stupid job I’ll say so now: it isn’t. It’s a good one. Eleven trucks’ worth of nothing going wrong.”
“Why aren’t you doing it.”
Four people in a lit bus lounge and a twenty-six-year-old in Cardiff, and Shona Hasker, who deflects a personal question by answering a work question standing near it, and had done it professionally for two decades, and could have done it right then in her sleep.
“Because I want to stay on this one,” she said.
The pause was about two seconds long.
“Huh,” said Ceri Vaughan.
Solomon, who had never met the woman and could not hear her, looked up.
“Send me the PDF,” Ceri said. “I’ll read it twice and ring her at eight. And Shona — I’ll not say anything about it. Ever. That’s me not saying it now.”
The line went.
The second call was worse, and she made it anyway, at twenty-two minutes past one, to a woman in Bristol who answered like somebody who has been woken and is already dressed.
Shona did not make it a story. She said the date, the clause, the number, and the word no, in that order, in the register she uses for a call time, and then she stopped talking and let the other end of it be quiet, which was the only part that cost her anything.
“You’ve never done this,” the woman said.