No Flight Home

Nik told her, in front of the whole room, that he was glad it was her, and then he let the silence sit there long enough that the room had to go and be busy with something.

That was half three in the afternoon. Nine years since Ines Halloran had walked out on the three of them rather than go on being the part of their lives that nobody would say out loud, and there he was in front of the crew, putting a true sentence down on the concrete and then declining to pick it back up.

By then she had been on her feet in the building since mid-morning, and she had run every hour of it, which was the only part of any of this she knew how to do.

The rehearsal room in Salford was a converted paint hangar with a roof forty feet up and no heating anybody had ever found, and Ines had been standing in the middle of it for two hours in an oxblood coat she had not taken off, because the first rule of a room like this was that whoever looked cold first had lost.

She had come in with a clipboard, a printed day sheet, and a mouth painted the hard red she put on before every load-in — not for the band, and certainly not for herself at seven in the morning in a Chorlton bathroom with the light still yellow outside, but because a red mouth in a dark room is a thing people can find. You want the crew to be able to locate the person who answers questions. Everything else about her was equipment too. Good boots because concrete is nine hours long. Gold at her ears because it does not have to be looked after. Near-black hair blown out properly, and the reason for that one she had stopped examining somewhere around 2020.

The truck had been in since eight. The floor was a mess of cable and empty flight cases with their lids up like a row of open mouths, and forty feet above her the lighting rig hung half-focused, the trussing ticking as it warmed. Nine years ago she had sold t-shirts off one of those cases for these three men, in a foyer, in the cold, for eighty quid a night. She had thought about that fact precisely once today, at Piccadilly, waiting for a tram, and had put it down again like a hot pan.

"Ines." Dodds, front of house, coming down the room with his hands in his back pockets and the particular slow walk of somebody about to test something. Fifties, Brummie, twenty-six years of other people's tours. "Cue forty-one."

"Cue forty-one's a problem."

"Cue forty-one's what the LD wants."

"Cue forty-one is nine bars of a blackout with a strobe punch at the end of it, and Ovie doesn't play to a click." She did not look up from the clipboard while she said it, which was deliberate; the sentence worked better arriving sideways. "So either the strobe lands on top of him or it lands six frames late every single night for twenty-two nights, and the second one looks like a fault. It looks like our fault. In Berlin it'll look like our fault in front of the label."

Dodds was quiet a moment. Up in the rig somebody's radio crackled and said something about channel four.

"He still won't do a click," he said.

"He has never done a click. It's not a preference, it's the reason the songs breathe. I'm not going to spend the first week of a comeback teaching a thirty-three-year-old drummer to be a machine so a light can be on time." She put a line through cue forty-one on the sheet and turned the clipboard round so he could see the line, which was the entire trick of it. "Give me a chase we can run off the desk manually. Ceri can call it. She'll be watching him anyway."

"Ceri hates being given jobs."

"Ceri hates being given stupid jobs," Ines said. "Ask her."

Dodds looked at her for about a second and a half longer than he needed to, and then something in his shoulders went down an inch, and that was that; that was the whole negotiation, and she had won it, and the pleasure of it went through her like the first mouthful of a drink. She had spent nine years getting good enough at this that the rooms stopped arguing inside an hour. It was the one thing about her life she had never had to explain to anybody.

The drum riser was next. She walked it out heel to toe across the marked-up floor, checked it against the plot, and then stood on the front edge of it with her arms folded, looking down the length of the empty hangar at where eight thousand people would be, and thought: no.

"It's eighteen inches too far upstage," she said, to nobody, and then, louder, to the two lads coiling cable, "Can I have you both a minute?"

They moved it. It took four minutes. Ceri arrived from the monitor world at the tail end of it with a fistful of XLRs and an expression that suggested somebody had already ruined her day, saw where the riser was now, stopped, and said, "Who did that?"

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because he'll be able to hear the room off the back wall from there, and he cannot from where it was, and if he can't hear the room he'll drag the second half and everyone will blame you."

Ceri, who was about twenty-six and had been on two tours of this size and had clearly decided in advance to be unimpressed, said, "Huh," which from Ceri was a standing ovation. Then she said, "Cue forty-one's rubbish, by the way."

"Cue forty-one's dead. You're calling the replacement."

"Am I."

"You're the only person in the building looking at him anyway."

Ceri went off with the XLRs. Ines wrote riser +18" — tell Piet, affects load on the sheet, and her phone went in her coat pocket, and she knew before she looked what it was, because it had been that kind of week.

Your cousin Máire's youngest is being christened the 3rd of May in Westport. Your father asked me was there any chance.

Ines put the phone back in her pocket. The 3rd of May was somewhere between Berlin and Prague, and her mother knew it, because Ines had emailed her the routing in February for exactly this reason, and the knowing was the point of the message rather than an obstacle to it. Three miles from where she was standing was the street she had grown up on, a terrace off Barlow Moor Road with a green door and her mother in it, and inside a fortnight Ines would be in Antwerp. This was not a coincidence anybody in her family had ever failed to notice out loud.

The phone went again.

She'd love to see you is all.

She was still holding it when the door at the far end of the hangar opened and let in a rectangle of grey Salford afternoon and Ovie Ekaru walked through it.

She had known he would come in first. She had known it the way you know the weight of a door you have opened ten thousand times. He came the length of the room without hurrying, coat open, a bag over one shoulder, and the light from the half-focused rig went across him and made him briefly enormous — deep brown skin gone warm under it, the close fade with the hard part cut into it exactly where it had always been, the beard down to a line, broad through the shoulder and narrow under it in the way that takes six mornings a week, and entirely unsurprised by what a room does when he walks into it — and he stopped in front of her at a perfectly ordinary distance and said:

"Ines."

That was all. He did not say look at you or it's been a while or any of the nine or ten sentences she had spent the drive over here disposing of in advance. He said her name in the voice she remembered, deep and unhurried, and then he stopped talking and stood there, entirely comfortable, and waited.

Nine years of being the most competent person in every room she walked into, and she still had no idea what to do with a man who did not need one.

"Ovie," she said. "Your riser's moved."

"I felt that when I came in." He looked at it. "It's better."

"You haven't sat on it."

"I don't need to sit on it." He put his bag down on the front edge of it. His hand rested there flat for a second, the way you touch a car you have owned a long time. "Thank you."

And then he went to look at his kit, and that was the whole reunion; it had taken four seconds and she was going to be picking bits of it out of herself for a week.

Tam came in seven minutes later, at speed, talking before the door had shut.

"Is that the actual riser or a rehearsal riser? Are we getting the real one in Manchester or is the real one in a shed somewhere? Did anybody tell you the storage unit invoice is in my name still, because that's a whole thing, and —" He arrived, sandy hair pushed back, guitar case in one hand, and stopped dead in front of her with all four questions still going. "You look terrifying."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't — " He laughed at himself, went slightly pink up the freckles the way he had at twenty-three and evidently still did at thirty-two, and looked at the floor. Half a beat. Then, quieter and quite differently: "You look really well, Ines. I'm glad it's you. That's what I meant."

"Storage unit's in the production budget now," she said. "Send me the invoice. Stop paying it out of your own account, it's been eight years."

"Nine," Tam said, from inside the guitar case, and did not look up.

Nik was last, and Nik came in on the phone.

He was through the door with it against his ear and one arm out of his jacket, and the first thing he did when he saw her was stop walking entirely — thick through the chest and shoulders, black hair short, the beard closer than it used to be, a man who very obviously spent time on how he looked and had never once pretended otherwise — and hold up a finger, and mouth one minute, and then lower the phone anyway and say, out loud, across twenty feet of concrete, "I'm glad it's you. I asked for you. I want you to know I asked."

And then he stood in it.

That was the thing about Nik. He put the sentence on the table and then he did not fill the silence afterwards, not because he was working her — he was not capable of working anybody, it was practically a medical condition — but because he had said the true thing and did not have a second one ready. Ovie, over at the kit, tightened a wing nut. Ceri, thirty feet away, was suddenly extremely interested in a cable.

"Noted," Ines said.

Nik nodded, once, took the whole nod seriously, and went off into the wings with the phone.

They broke at four for twenty minutes and the room did what rooms do — kettle, crisps, three separate conversations about ferries. From the wings, unlowered and entirely unbothered, came Nik's voice in Punjabi, warm and rising, the same two or three words in English falling into it: Tuesday. No — Tuesday. Wolverhampton. His sister, then. His sister who had rung the hangar phone once in 2014 to tell him their dad had been let out of hospital, and Ines had been the one holding the receiver. The band had been six weeks old.

Nobody mentioned 2017.

That was the thing she kept coming back to, standing at the production table with cooling coffee and a day sheet, ticking off a bus call. Not one of the three of them had gone near it. Not a joke, not a look, not a so, then. Nine years, a wet car park in Sheffield at four in the morning, and the three of them had walked into this building and greeted her three entirely different ways and every single one of those ways had left it alone.

Which was either kindness, or an agreement they had made in advance.

She got her phone out to check the bus call against Piet's driving hours, and her thumb went where it had been going all day, and she did not stop it: airline app, bookings, the one live reference. MON 18 MAY. LIS–MAN. 07:20. Booked on the second of March, the week she signed with Slate, before she had even met Hana Trescott face to face.

Second time today.

She closed the app, put the phone face down on the table beside the day sheet, picked up the radio, and said, "Right. Can we go again from the top of four, please, and this time nobody touch the strobe."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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