“Dot. Femi. Sylvie. Lenny, that’s two, that’s fine. Marek, Bel, Jonesy. Keith’s on.” Fitz lowered the clipboard she doesn’t need. “That’s seven and a driver.”
Nobody moved. It was one in the morning in the loading bay behind the Leeds arena, and the drizzle was the same drizzle Newcastle keeps on a timer, and the bus was running with the door open and the step lit, and we were standing on the tarmac in the order she’d counted us, because that’s how you stand at a bus call when you’ve done seventy of them.
“That’s one short,” said Lenny.
“It’s the number I was given.”
“By who?”
Fitz looked at him the way she looks at a cable somebody’s left across a doorway. “Get on the bus, Len.”
We got on the bus. I got on last, because I’d been waiting for a name that didn’t come, and I stood…
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