Chapter Twenty-Four
Diwa’s study occupied the entire basement of the Notting Hill townhouse, and it was, without exaggeration, the most extraordinary space Lysander had ever been in.
He’d been spending a lot of time with Diwa.
It had crept up on them both, the consequence of orbiting the same bedridden planet.
Colin’s room was the centre of the house, and when his father drifted off or needed quiet, the two of them had to go somewhere, and they kept ending up together.
Making tea. Walking to Tesco for the particular brand of ginger biscuits Colin had decided he couldn’t live without.
Standing in the garden shooting the shit.
They talked easily. Diwa had a dry humour that surfaced when Lysander least expected it and most needed it. And he loved Colin with an attention so total that Lysander’s concerns about his father having an alpha for the first time quieted.
His daddy was loved by a man who repositioned his pillows without being asked and tracked the swelling in his hands.
Colin’s headache had started before breakfast and climbed steadily through the morning until his face had gone the colour of old paper and his sentences were arriving with gaps between the words.
“Both of you, out.” Colin’s eyes were closed, one arm draped across his face to block the light that Diwa had already dimmed to almost nothing. “I love you both dearly, but I need you to leave.”
Diwa didn’t move from the edge of the bed. His hand was on Colin’s stomach, spread wide over the bump the way it always was. “I can stay quiet.”
“You can’t, because you breathe, and breathing is a sound.” Colin’s fingers curled into the duvet. “Diwa. Please take my son downstairs and show him whatever it is you do in that basement all day. Let me sleep until the paracetamol kicks in or I die. I don’t care which, as long as the pain stops.”
Diwa leaned down and pressed his mouth to Colin’s temple. Then he straightened, adjusted the duvet over Colin’s shoulders, and crossed to where Lysander was hovering in the doorway.
“He gets like this,” Diwa said, once they were on the landing with the door pulled shut behind them. His jaw had tightened. “The headaches come and go. Sometimes they pass in an hour. Sometimes he’s out for the rest of the day.”
“Is the doctor —”
“The doctor knows. They’re monitoring it.” Diwa’s hand found the banister, and he stood there for a moment, looking at the closed door. Then he exhaled, pushed off the railing, and turned for the stairs. “Come on. I’ll show you where I hide when your father’s being difficult.”
The basement stairs were narrow, the thick carpeting swallowing the sound of their footsteps. Diwa hit a switch at the bottom, and the room came alive.
An arcade cabinet stood pride of place against the far wall, its screen glowing blue-white in the dimness. “Is that Street Fighter?”
“Street Fighter II Turbo. Original cabinet.” Diwa crossed to it and tapped the side of it with two fingers.
“Ryland found it at an auction. He and I restored the board ourselves over a weekend. Replaced the CRT, rewired the coin mechanism.” He paused.
“Then we played it for nine hours and Ryland beat me two hundred and fourteen times out of two hundred and twenty, and I haven’t touched it since. ”
Beyond the arcade cabinet, the basement opened up into a space that bore very little resemblance to a study.
It looked more like a mission control centre.
Three monitors sat on a wide desk in a curved arrangement, their stands adjusted to different heights, flanked by a mechanical keyboard and a mouse that looked like it had been designed for someone piloting a spacecraft.
Cable management ran beneath the desk in neat channels, and a small forest of hard drives sat on a shelf to the right, their indicator lights blinking in staggered rhythms.
A recording setup filled the entire back wall.
Two studio microphones hung from adjustable boom arms, positioned on either side of a desk that was separate from the main workstation.
Acoustic panels lined the wall behind them in a pattern of charcoal and slate grey.
The camera, a proper broadcast-grade unit, not a webcam, sat on a tripod between the microphones, its lens angled at a chair upholstered in dark leather.
“This is for your calls?” Lysander asked.
“Investor calls. Board meetings. The occasional TV interview.” Diwa dropped into the main desk chair and spun it to face Lysander, one ankle hooked over his knee.
“When you’re doing a pitch to sovereign wealth funds, they notice if you’re sitting in front of a bookshelf with a ring light.
It needs to look like you take them seriously enough to have a proper setup.
” He shrugged. “So I have a proper setup.”
Lysander ran his fingers along the boom arm of the nearest microphone. The metal was cool and precisely balanced, pivoting smoothly at the joint. The pop filter attached to it was professional grade.
“It does the job.” Diwa pulled a can of iced coffee, the imported Japanese kind, from a mini fridge sat next to the desk, and cracked it open. “You want one?”
Lysander took the offered can and settled into the leather chair beside the recording setup, crossing his good ankle over the splinted one.
The acoustics down here were different from the rest of the house.
Tighter. The ambient noise of the street above had vanished entirely, and when Diwa’s can hissed open, the sound was crisp and close, as though it had happened inside Lysander’s own head.
He took a sip of the iced coffee and turned the can in his hands, running his thumb along the condensation.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said.
“One of the things I love about Hamish is talking to him. Our conversations. He’s the best interviewer I’ve ever watched.
I know I’m biased, but I think he’s right up there with Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson.
Hamish isn’t trying to catch you out. He’s not building towards a gotcha.
He just sits there in his stupid glasses and he asks you a question, and somehow you end up telling him secrets that you’ve never told anyone else. ”
Diwa smiled. “I can’t wait to meet him.”
“I’ve watched him do it with Cassian,” Lysander continued.
“With me, honestly. He’s got this way of making you feel like whatever you’re about to say is the most interesting thought anyone’s expressed to him all day, and it’s not a trick: he actually believes it. Every time. That’s what makes it work.”
He picked up the coffee again, took a long sip, and put it back down.
“I’m not Hamish. I don’t have that talent right now, but I think I can learn it.
” He unfolded his arms and looked at the microphone beside him.
“People talk to me, Diwa, about the weirdest shit. They always have. It’s my OnlyFans history, partly.
Once the world’s already seen your arse, nobody feels like they need to hold back around you.
But…I also know what it’s like to have your worst moments be public, and when people clock that about me, they start talking because everyone wants to be listened to. ”
He traced the edge of the pop filter with one finger.
“I want to do a podcast.” The words landed in that dead-air room with more certainty than they’d had inside his head, when he’d been typing out his ideas on the notes app on his mobile.
“I want to talk to people with important stories they haven’t told yet, or ones that got told wrong.
I’ve got my own story, obviously. That’s the starting point.
But I don’t want it to just be me talking about myself for an hour every week.
I want to be the person who sits across from someone and makes them feel safe enough to say whatever they need to so that they can move on. ”
“What would you call it?” Diwa asked.
Lysander hadn’t expected the question, which was stupid, because Diwa was a man of action who regularly skipped past “that’s a great idea” and went straight to operational specifics.
“I don’t know yet,” Lysander admitted.
Diwa nodded. “I can help you with the production side. When you’re ready.” He gestured at the setup behind Lysander with his chin. “You’re sitting in a broadcast studio, Sander. It’s already here.”
He smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
Diwa was already pulling up a complicated-looking dashboard on the main monitor, his chair rolling across the floor.
“When you’re ready to build your own rig, Ryland and I can spec it out.
He’s got opinions on microphone preamps, and I know a guy in Shenzhen who does custom audio interfaces, proper broadcast-grade, not the consumer stuff.
We’d want to think about room treatment first, though, because your acoustics will make or break the whole thing, and most people skip that step and then wonder why their recordings sound like they’re presenting from inside a wheelie bin.
” His fingers moved across the keyboard, tabs multiplying.
“Ryland will want to build you a soundboard.”
Lysander watched the tabs proliferate. These alphas would want to run cable. They’d want to talk about bitrates, and about microphones at a level of granularity that would make his soul want to leave his body.
“Lovely,” Lysander said. “Can’t wait.”
Diwa glanced over his shoulder, caught the look on Lysander’s face, and grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ve learned my lesson about overdoing it.” He turned back to the monitor, closing the tabs one by one. “I nearly lost your father over a baby monitor.”
Lysander’s eyebrows climbed. “A baby monitor.”
“Colin mentioned that the monitor we’d bought for the nursery had a grainy picture.
That’s all he said. ‘The picture’s a bit grainy, Diwa.
’” He closed another tab. “So I sourced a thermal imaging camera from a defence contractor, hired two engineers to design a custom monitoring system with real-time respiratory tracking, and I personally developed a machine learning model that could differentiate between seven distinct types of infant cries.” He paused.
“Colin came home from his antenatal appointment to find a man on a ladder drilling through the nursery ceiling to mount a sensor array, and he packed a bag and went back to Barking for eleven days.”
“Eleven days.”
Diwa’s mouth pressed together. “Ryland thought the system was brilliant, for what it’s worth. He wanted to add a spectrographic analysis layer for the crying classification. Stephen had to physically take his laptop away…so I lent him one of my spares.”
Lysander glanced at the browser tabs still open on Diwa’s screen. So that’s what all the shit in the nursery was…
“I’m starting to see a pattern here,” Lysander said.
Diwa grinned. “Ryland and I set it up in his nursery over a weekend. We’ll do it for you, too, when the time comes.”
? ? ?
Lysander rang Hamish from the garden, sitting on the low brick wall that separated Diwa’s patio from the strip of lawn where Colin’s hydrangeas were putting on a show.
“I’m thinking about starting a podcast,” he said, skipping past hello entirely. “Have conversations with people about strange or amazing stuff that happened to them on the internet.”
Hamish was quiet. In the background, Lysander could hear the kettle clicking off and the familiar creak of a floorboard that meant Hamish was standing at the kitchen counter.
“I think that’s a brilliant idea, Sander.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’d be good at it.” The fridge opened and closed. “Get your ideas down. Structure, format, the kind of stories you want to tell. When you’ve got it all down on paper, I’ll put you in touch with Meredith Walton. She produces Detour — you’ve listened to it.”
Detour, in Lysander’s opinion, was one of the best interview podcasts going. He devoured each episode, and it was always at or near the top of the download charts for long-form investigative podcasts.
“I’d love that,” Lysander said. “Seriously, Hamish. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. She’s terrifying in person. Anyway…you’ll see.” A mug clinked against the counter. “How’s your ankle?”
“Better. Diwa’s got a setup down here that would make you weep. He’s got a broadcast-grade camera, acoustic panels, the lot. He offered to help me build a rig.”
“Of course he did,” Hamish said. “Right, I’m going to hand you over, because someone’s been loitering in the doorway for the last forty-five seconds doing a very poor impression of patience.”
There was a scuffle, and then Cassian’s voice arrived at full volume, mid-thought.
“—Also my therapist says I’m making excellent progress with cognitive restructuring which is when you learn to notice the thoughts that aren’t yours, and I told her about the Ninth Principle and she said it was a textbook example of thought-terminating cliché which sounds very rude but apparently it’s a real academic term—”
He drew breath. Lysander stretched his legs out on the wall and let the evening settle around him.
“—and the inquiry people rang again but Hamish was there and he talked to them first and then he sat with me while I talked to them and I only cried once which is an improvement on last time when I cried four times and had to eat an entire packet of Tim Tams before I could speak again—”
Lysander closed his eyes, tipped his head back, and let Cassian talk.