Chapter 18 Not Taking the Tuesday #2
“No.”
“In twelve years.”
“No.”
“Right.” A long breath down a phone line from a kitchen in Bristol. “Who’ve I got for Tuesday?”
“Ceri Vaughan. Six years, two arena tours, and she diagnoses a room off the concrete instead of a meter. She’s got the contract open in front of her and she’ll ring you at eight, and she’s better in a difficult room than I am.”
“Is she.”
“She is, and I’d rather have said something else.”
And then, with the phone still warm against her ear and three men not pretending to look anywhere else, Shona opened her banking app with her thumb, and moved the float that was meant to be the gap between jobs into the account the card was on — the mobilisation half had gone in August, on a boiler, and a boiler does not give it back — and typed two thousand six hundred pounds, and the reference that was on the invoice from the eleventh of July, and sent it thirty days early because thirty days would have been a way of still nearly going.
A small grey tick came up on the screen.
That was the money and the favour and the phone call, all three, gone in eleven minutes in a lit room with witnesses, and she put the phone face down on the table and discovered that her hands were not entirely steady, and left them where everyone could see them.
Solomon stood up.
Fifteen years in that band and the man does not get up to a room. Yusuf actually turned his head.
“I’ve sat down through all of it,” Solomon said. “Fifteen years, and not once in it.”
He put the towel down on the bench.
“So. I’ve got a question. I’ve asked for more things this week than in the whole of the rest of it and I’ve noticed that too.” He looked at her, pale grey eyes, entirely level. “Am I in it?”
“Yes,” said Shona.
“That’s all,” Solomon said, and sat back down, and looked faintly appalled with himself, and pulled the towel back up round his neck.
Yusuf had not said a word since the kettle. He had his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands and he was watching her the way he watches a room, and then he stopped watching the room.
“When did somebody last cook you a meal,” he said.
It went straight through the middle of her. She had the work answer ready and it was a good one, something about catering and the Ironside and the fact that nobody on a tour has eaten a meal that was not out of a hotel box, and she opened her mouth to spend it.
“March,” she said instead. “My mum. Down in Medway, three weeks, and she fed me twice a day for the whole of it and asked me nothing, because I’ve trained her out of it as well.”
“Right,” Yusuf said.
“That’s it. That’s the answer.”
“I know. I heard it.” He nodded slowly at the table. “Tuesday, then.”
“There’s no Tuesday.”
“There’s a Tuesday,” Yusuf said. “There’s just nothing in it.”
“And in March there’s Deakin’s shoulder,” she said. “There’s a crew list with somebody else’s name at the top of it and me in Peckham with my feet up. That’s the actual shape of this. Six weeks and whatever the diary does, and then it ends, because that is what a run is.”
“That’s the shape of the booking,” Solomon said, to the table, without looking up.
Yusuf reached behind him without looking and switched the kettle off at the wall.
“There’s the six weeks,” he said. “There’s the six weeks and whatever the diary does before he’s back. And then there’s the one where I stop talking about the diary altogether, which is the one I want, and I’m not giving you three to pick from this time.”
“You always give me three.”
“Not on this.” He did not soften it and he did not hand her a way round it. “I want you after March. Not the run wanting it. Me. And the other two, and they can say so themselves, but I’m not sitting here being tactful about it at half one in the morning.”
“You’re not, no,” Solomon said. “After March. That’s me saying so myself.”
And Shona Hasker, who had spent twenty years being the person in the room with no want in her, looked at the varnish and then made herself look up, because the looking up was the part that cost.
“Then you’ve got me after March,” she said. “All three of you.”
Emre did not say anything at all.
He had not said anything since he came in and put his hand flat on the table, and he did not say anything now, and a week ago that would have been four hours of work for her — reading it off the width of his shoulders, checking it against the thing at the services and the thing with the case handle, running it twice like a patch list looking for the item in the wrong place.
Then he moved along the bench, and left the space beside him.
She knew exactly what it meant. That was the whole of it — not that he had softened, not that he had found a sentence, but that the thing she had spent five days translating had stopped needing translating, because he had asked her in a wing in the dark and she had said yes and a question that has been answered does not have to be asked again.
He had been at that table when she said after March, and he had made room on a bench without being asked to, and from that man that was the entire sentence, and she took it as one.
She texted Mags: Yes. Six weeks. Crew list — me.
Mags came back inside forty seconds: It’s half one. And then, before Shona had finished deciding what to do with that: You said one. I’ll have it.
Emre reached across the table and took the phone out of her hand and turned it face down, and then left his hand on it, and then slid it to the far end of the table out of her reach, which took a man of six foot four almost no effort at all.
Then she put her jacket over the back of the bench and sat down next to Emre Bayram in the strip light with her hair coming loose and her face half off and her nails chipped petrol green on the varnish, and Solomon shifted up, and Yusuf finally made something with the kettle, four mugs, nobody asked what, and the driver came through and said they were rolling at three: three addresses and the yard by teatime, and he had a view about the order.
The dock door went down somewhere behind them with a bang like a lighting case.
And Shona Hasker, who had spent twenty years leaving buildings at exactly the hour she had written on a sheet, stayed where she was in a lit lounge with three men and a cold mug and absolutely nowhere to be on the Tuesday, and did not reach for the phone, and did not stand up, and did not go.