The Quiet Floor

Hal put his phone face down on the breakfast table in Belfast on Thursday morning, and I’d read the screen before it landed, because it was lit and I read everything: six missed calls, one name.

“She rang four times last night and twice this morning,” he said. “I answered the sixth, because a man has to eat.”

We’d come into Belfast at three on Wednesday morning, eight and a driver, and Fitz had walked us through a lobby with the lights half off and up to the sixth floor, which had a sign in the lift that called it the quiet floor. No hen parties, no stag parties, no room service after eleven, for guests who need to sleep. Fitz had booked the whole band onto it, which tells you what Fitz thinks of Lenny, and Lenny had read the sign twice and said, “That’s a bit much,” to nobody, and gone to bed in a coat.

Wednesday I’d slept until two, and then I’d lain in six-twenty with the curtains shut and watched a number go up. The clip had been two million at bus call in Dublin. By the time I turned the phone off on Wednesday night it was five, and the comments had stopped being ten spellings of one thing and started being a hundred spellings of the same thing with adjectives. Ezra had spent the day in a music shop buying strings he didn’t need. Dot had walked the river with a map. I know because I’d counted them back in through the lobby from the window of the bar where I was drinking tea.

Hal had his coat on. It was August and the breakfast room had the heating up, and Hal had his coat on and his hands round a cup, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me in a corridor in Manchester, like a man holding evidence he’d rather not have picked up.

“I’m not asking,” he said. “I want that understood before I say what she said. I’ve watched it. I’m fifty-eight and I’ve eyes, and I’ve had them on you two since the folk clubs. I’m not asking.”

“I know.”

“She said, and I’m giving you it as she gave it me, because I’m not going to make it prettier: whatever that was on Tuesday, keep it. And don’t confirm.”

“Confirm what?”

“She didn’t say. That’s her whole trick, Sylvie, she never says the noun.” He drank his coffee. “She said the truck’s booked, the sleeve’s designed, and she’d like the twenty-ninth to look like Tuesday. She said the number’s five million and it’s not been released and nobody’s lifted a finger. She said, and this is the bit I’d like you to hear, ‘It’s true now. That’s the product. It was always going to be worth more true.’”

I counted the tables in the breakfast room. Nine. Two occupied. A woman with a laptop who hadn’t looked up. A man in a suit reading a paper he wasn’t reading.

“What did you tell her?”

“Forty-four seconds,” said Hal. “She’s changed the note.”

He got up. He put the phone in his coat and picked up the cup to take with him, because Hal doesn’t leave a coffee, and he stopped at the end of the table.

“She’s not wrong about the money. She wasn’t in Manchester either. I said that then and I’m saying it now so you’ll know I’ve not changed.” He looked past me, at the door, where Ezra had come in with a coffee of his own and no strings. “I’ll be at the desk. I’m at the desk every night. That’s where you’ll find me.”

· · ·Scene break

Ezra sat down in Hal’s chair while it was still warm and put the coffee on the table and didn’t drink it. He’d heard the end of it from the door. He hears everything from a door; it’s where he lives.

“Keep it and don’t confirm,” he said.

“That’s the message.”

“And the product’s true now.” He turned the cup a quarter turn on the cloth. “So let them.”

“Let them what?”

“Sell it. It’s true. It’d be the first true thing they’ve ever sold of ours. Let them put it in a truck and on a sleeve and see what a true thing does. I’ve watched them sell the other kind for three years. I’d like to see the comparison.”

“It wouldn’t be the first.”

He looked up. “What does that mean?”

“It means it wouldn’t be the first.”

“Sylvie.”

“Not here.”

“Then where? You keep saying not. Not a word, not yet, not here. I’ve stopped counting the nots. I’m not being unkind.” He wasn’t. He never is. “I’m asking where.”

I had the sentence. I’d had it since Manchester, and it had a date on it, and it wasn’t a breakfast-room sentence with a woman on a laptop at the next table. My sentences had gone short and I let them stay short.

“Not here,” I said again, which is a thing I’d said, and I got up and left him with two coffees he hadn’t ordered, and the woman with the laptop looked up as I went, which is the first time she’d looked up at anything.

· · ·Scene break

Belfast is eleven thousand, night sixty-three, and at soundcheck Jonesy asked for the bridge, both mics, and Ezra said, “Save it, Jonesy,” for the second show running, and Jonesy didn’t look at Bel this time, because he’d stopped being surprised.

Fitz came to the foot of the stage steps with her clipboard while Marek was changing a string, and read us the plan for the night in the voice she uses for cables.

“Bus call is six. In the morning. The boat’s at half seven and it’s eight hours and the bus goes on it and you go on the bus and I count you twice, once on and once off, because the sea’s had one before.” She looked at Lenny. “There is no bar. There’s a bar, I’m told it’s very nice, and there is no bar. If anyone is in it at six I’ll count them in it and leave them in it and Liverpool will have a drum machine.”

“That’s a day off wasted,” Lenny said.

“It’s a day off on a boat. Read a book.” She looked down her list. “Quiet floor. Room service stops at eleven. I’ve checked.”

Dot, on the stage behind her, drew the bow once across the fiddle, open string, and put it down again, and looked at me over the bridge of it. Not the level look. Something shorter. I’ve since decided it was Dot deciding not to say anything for a sixth day, and finding it harder than the fifth.

· · ·Scene break

The show was the show, and I’m not going to describe it, except to say that at the bridge I looked at him, in the light, for the third time, and the room already knew I would.

That’s the difference between Dublin and Belfast. In Dublin twelve thousand people saw a thing they hadn’t expected and came in half a beat late. In Belfast eleven thousand had watched the clip on the bus in, and they’d come to see it, and when I looked at him and sang the first line to his face the last line came back on the beat, on the nose, and it came back kind. That’s the only word I’ve got for it. They sang but I’d never say it in the light the way you sing at a couple at a wedding, with their hands on each other’s shoulders and their phones up, and it was the thing I’d been afraid of since a bus outside Newcastle, and it was worse than I’d counted on because it was so kind.

Then the last chorus and the last chord and the dark.

I took the step. I’d taken it twice before and both times he’d been at the end of it, and I took it in Belfast with my hand already out for the strap, and there was nothing there. The mark was empty. In the three seconds I could hear the room and the truss ticking as it cooled and I could hear him walking, three feet away and then five, toward the gap in the blacks, at the same pace as Femi.

Fitz’s torch came on at three and found me on my own on the taped mark with my hand out, and she moved it off me at once, which was a kindness, and said, “Stage left, all of you, mind the cable,” on time.

· · ·Scene break

The Belfast corridor is grey and sixty-two steps, and he waited for me at the door of the living room and let the others go in first, and said it there, in the light, with his hand on the frame, because that’s where he says things.

“I’m not doing the dark any more.”

“You didn’t take the step.”

“No.” He laughed at himself, through the nose, first, and it was short. “I’ve had three years of three seconds, Sylv. I’m not saying that to be hard. I’m saying I’ve counted them too, in my way, and I’ve spent them, and there aren’t any more. I’ll do the light. Or I’ll do a door with a number on it. Those are the two I’ve got left, and I’d like you to know which two, so it’s not a guess.” A beat. “That’s the plain thing. There’s not a joke tonight. I looked for one.”

Then he waited, in the corridor, with the crew going past behind him, and I stood there with the sentence in my mouth and the wrong room round it, and he saw that, because he sees everything, and he took his hand off the frame and went in ahead of me, and let me go first anyway, which is his worst quality, and I’d not change it.

The living room had the hummus, twelve beers, Hal’s whisky, and a printed card from the venue about the quiet floor that Fitz had brought from the hotel and propped against the whisky as a joke, which is the only joke Fitz has made in twenty years. Lenny had a beer, because there was no bar, and then a second, because there was no bar. Femi had his one and his phone and a photograph of a six-year-old asleep. Dot had the fiddle across her knees and didn’t play it. Ezra had a beer he didn’t open.

I had water. It was Thursday. The next show was Saturday, and I’d like it understood that the water wasn’t for my voice. It was for me. I’d been clear since Glasgow with the kettle on, and I’d kept it clear through a roof in Dublin and a loading bay in the rain, and I wasn’t going to have the first true thing I ever said on its own be a thing I could put down to a beer.

· · ·Scene break

Fitz counted us into the lift in the hotel lobby at ten past midnight, which she does not normally do, and did tonight, because the boat was at half seven and she’d decided the count started early.

“Femi. Dot. Lenny, that’s two cans, that’s fine, take them up.” The doors. “Sylvie.”

“Six-twenty.”

“That’s yours.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me for as long as it takes to check a number against a list. She didn’t check the list.

“And Ezra.”

“Six-twenty,” I said.

Fitz wrote nothing down. She never writes anything down; the clipboard is for holding. “Bus call’s six,” she said. “I’ll knock on one door.”

· · ·Scene break

The lift said sixth floor, quiet floor in a voice that had been recorded by a woman who’d meant it. Dot got out first and went left without a word and I heard her door, and then Lenny’s, and then Femi’s at the far end saying goodnight to a photograph, and then it was the corridor, carpeted, a lamp on a table halfway down with nobody at it, and the two of us walking on it at the pace you walk on a quiet floor.

Six-seventeen was his. Six-twenty was mine, across and one down, which is Fitz’s arithmetic in every hotel in the country and I have never asked whether it’s counting or kindness.

He stopped at six-seventeen with the key card out. I walked past him to six-twenty and opened it, and didn’t go in, and turned round with my back to the room and the door open behind me and the lamp on the table between us.

“Ezra.”

“Here.”

“Come here.”

He came. Not fast. He came down the corridor the way he’d come down it in Glasgow, and he stopped in the door frame with his hand on it, where he lives, and this time I hadn’t gone to fill a kettle. I was standing in front of him with nothing to do with my hands, and I let them have nothing.

“I want you to stay,” I said.

He didn’t move. He’d asked, in a corridor in Glasgow, to hear it on its own some time, and I could see him hearing it on its own, and I could see him not letting that be the whole of it, because it wasn’t, and because he’d said in Glasgow he wasn’t going to guess with me.

“Say the rest,” he said. “All of it. I’ll wait.”

“I want you to come in and shut the door. I want you to stay the night, in here, with me. I don’t mean tea.” My sentences had gone short. I let them go and I kept going, because the short ones were the true ones and I’d been leaving them out for seven years. “I’ve had water since Glasgow. I’m clear. It’s Thursday and there’s no show and no bar and I’m not on a bus. I can say stop at any point and I will if I need to, and you can say it, and I’ll hear it. I want you. I’m saying it on its own. It’s not the second one as well. There’s no second one tonight.”

I stopped, because that was the end of it, not because I’d run out.

He looked at me for the length of a whole answer. It’s the only measurement he uses and I’ve never been able to hurry it, and I didn’t try, and I stood in my own doorway on the quiet floor of a hotel in Belfast and let a man take as long as he liked, and the lamp on the table burned, and somewhere below us a lift went down without anyone in it.

“You’re sure,” he said. Not a question; a thing he was putting in front of me to look at.

“Yes.”

“And if I say stop, that’s true too.”

“Yes.”

“Then here’s mine, so we’ve both said one.” His hand came off the frame. “I want to stay. I’ve wanted to since a kitchen in Leeds with your guitar in my hands, and I’m not staying because you asked, and I’m not staying because I want to. I’m staying because it’s both, and you’ve made it both, out loud, in a corridor, and I’ve waited seven years to hear how that sounds.” He laughed at himself, once, through the nose. “It sounds fine. That’s the joke. It’s not much of one.”

“Come in,” I said.

He came in. I closed the door behind him, with my hand flat on it, the way I’d closed it on him in Glasgow, and it was the same door and the same hand and he was on my side of it.

I’d told Fitz in advance. It was the first thing in seven years I’d told anyone in advance, and she’d written nothing down, and the boat was at half past seven, and for the first time since I was twenty-four I hadn’t counted past a door.