On Camera

Rhian Teague asked it at seventeen minutes to eight on a sofa the colour of a plaster, and I’d counted the cameras before she did: four on the floor, and a fifth on a rail above us that moved when nobody was looking.

The car had come to the hotel at twenty to six. Fitz had counted us into it, two and a manager, because Fitz counts anyone she’s responsible for onto anything with wheels, and Hal had sat in the front with his coat on and said nothing for the length of the drive except, at a red light on the Embankment, “Don’t touch the fruit. It’s a prop.”

The green room was on the fourth floor of a building made of glass, and it had the fruit, and a monitor showing the programme going out, and a runner with a headset who called us both “guys” and Hal “sir”, and a woman with a brush who put powder on Ezra’s forehead while he sat with his hands on his knees and let her, the way he lets Marek restring the red guitar, as if it were happening to a piece of equipment he was fond of.

“They’ll play the clip,” the runner said. “Then Rhian, then a couple of questions, then the twenty-ninth, then out to the weather. Eight minutes. Nothing to it.”

“Nothing to it,” Ezra said, and the runner smiled, and Ezra didn’t.

Hal stood by the door with a coffee he’d found somewhere that wasn’t the fruit. He’d said in a loading bay in Liverpool that he’d be in the green room with his coat on, and he was, and he’d said he wouldn’t tell us what she’d ask, and he didn’t, and he looked at the two of us on the sofa a yard apart and said the only other thing he said all morning.

“Whatever you do, do the same thing on the way out that you did on the way in. The lift’s got a camera.”

· · ·Scene break

The studio was smaller than it looks and colder, and the sofa was a plaster-coloured L with Rhian Teague at the short end, and the floor manager counted us in with his fingers, five, four, three, and then two and one without sound, which is Fitz’s job, and Fitz was in the corridor letting him do it.

Rhian Teague has been on at half past seven since before I could sing. She has a voice like a warm hand on your arm and she uses it for everything, for floods and for puppies, and she used it on us, and I liked her for the whole of the eight minutes, which is the trouble with her.

“Longfield,” she said, to the camera on the rail. “Seventy-one dates. Six months. The biggest folk tour this country has seen in a decade, and I’m told it doesn’t feel like folk from the twentieth row. And this. Have a look at this.”

The screen behind us was the size of a garage door, and it showed the bridge.

I’d not watched it. I’d read the comments and I’d watched the number, and I’d not once pressed play, and now it was playing behind my head at twenty to eight on a Monday to a country eating toast, and I turned on the sofa and watched myself look at him. Two amber lamps. A black field. A woman singing a line to a man’s face. His face, when she does. I’d never seen his face from the front. I’d only ever seen it from three and a half feet, in the light, and from the front it did the thing I have no word for and I write the words, and twelve thousand people had a name for it, and so did Rhian Teague.

“Well,” she said, when it stopped. “I’ve watched that eleven times and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t. Sylvie. Ezra. Three years you’ve sung that song. What happened in Dublin?”

“The room came in late,” I said. “Half a beat. It’s never happened. Lenny’s still talking about it.”

She laughed. She’s good; she gives you the laugh and then she takes the road you’ve walked her off. “And Lanternfield on the twenty-ninth. A live record. The whole set, in a field, in Herefordshire. That’s the one everybody’s going to buy, isn’t it, for that bridge.”

“It’s the whole set,” Ezra said. “Fourteen songs and that one. People forget the fourteen.”

“I don’t think anybody’s forgetting anything this week.” She turned in her corner of the L. She turned to me. And she did it kindly, which is the only way she does anything, and she did it once. “I’ve got to ask, because everybody watching has asked me, and I’d be a coward not to. Are you two together?”

· · ·Scene break

Two hundred times. On camera, on radio, in French in Berlin. I have a way of not answering that starts with a laugh, and on the harbour at the Ropewalk the laugh hadn’t been there because there’d been no camera, and here there were five, and one of them was moving, and it was there.

I laughed. On cue. It’s a good laugh; Hal could sell it as a course. And I said the second half, which is a sentence I’ve said so many times my mouth does it for me, the way my hands do the first chord.

“It’s a song, Rhian. It’s always been a song.”

I want to be exact about why, because I’ve had time since to be exact, and nobody else is going to put it on the record. I didn’t laugh for the label. I didn’t laugh for the truck, or the sleeve, or Annika’s five million. I laughed so that the question would die as a joke on a sofa, and be over, and he’d never have to be the one who said the true thing at twenty to eight to a country eating toast and was wrong in public. I laughed to cover him. That was the whole of my reason and I had it ready before the car came.

Rhian took the laugh, because she’s good, and she turned the warm hand on him.

“Ezra?”

He didn’t laugh.

I felt him not laugh, the way you feel the man beside you not come in on a chord. He sat with his hands on his knees and the powder on his forehead and he looked at Rhian Teague, not at the camera, not at me, and he said it plain, and slow, and Cornish, and once.

“Ask the songs.”

“I’m asking you.”

And he waited.

He waited on live television. I’ve counted three seconds sixty-four times in the dark, and I counted them on a plaster sofa at seventeen minutes to eight, and they were the same three, and he sat inside them with his face still and gave Rhian Teague the whole length of an answer he wasn’t going to give, and I understood, on the second of the three, that he’d meant it. He’d said on a roof that he was done singing it to a room, and this was a room, and he’d not been asked a thing he could sing, so he’d said the only sentence he had that wasn’t a lie and then he’d stopped, and he was going to let the silence be his, on air, in front of everyone, and let it cost him.

Rhian filled it on three. She’s good; that’s the trouble. “Well, there you are, you heard it here, ask the songs, and I think we all will, on the twenty-ninth, Longfield at Lanternfield, and the live album in the spring. Thank you both.” And the man at the long end of the L said something about the weather in the west, and the light on the camera on the rail went off, and the floor manager put his hand up flat, and we were done.

· · ·Scene break

The lift had a camera. We did the same thing on the way out that we’d done on the way in, which was stand a yard apart and look at the doors, and it was the longest four floors I’ve ever counted.

Hal was in the green room with his coat on and his phone in his hand, lit, and he turned it to me without a word, because Hal doesn’t read out other people’s sentences.

Perfect.

One word, from Annika, at 7:46. I’d been perfect. It’s the word she’d used about the pages, five years ago, in a studio, with a notebook in her hands: these are perfect.

I gave him the phone back. Fitz was in the corridor counting the runner, for practice. Ezra had gone to the window, which looked over a river the colour of the fruit bowl, and he stood with his back to the room, and Hal looked at his back and then at me, and took his coffee and went out to stand with Fitz, because that’s what a man does who doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want the answer to.

“You laughed,” Ezra said, to the window.

“It’s what it’s for.”

“I know what it’s for.” He turned round. He wasn’t angry. I’d have known what to do with angry. “I’ve heard it two hundred times. I’ve heard it from the next chair. I’ve never once sat next to it and been the thing it was covering.”

“That’s why I did it.”

“I know why you did it.” He said it slowly, the way he tells Jonesy where the fizz is. “You did it so I’d not have to. So the question would be a joke and I’d not be stood in it. I heard that. I heard it while you were doing it. And here’s the thing, Sylv, and I’ll say it once and then I’ll go and find the car. I read my name off a poster once. A listing. Three names, in a chip shop. That’s how I found out I’d been left. I’d not have said there was a worse way to find out where you stood than that.” He laughed at himself, through the nose, and it wasn’t much. “There’s not a worse way. It’s the same way. It’s a room deciding for you and being kind about it. I asked you on a roof to look wherever you liked, and you did, and I thought that was the end of the covering. It’s not a complaint. It’s a fact. I’d like you to have it.”

“Ezra.”

“I’ll wait in the car.”

He went. He touched the door frame on the way through, because he touches door frames, and Fitz counted him past her in the corridor, and I stood in a glass room on the fourth floor with the prop fruit and my perfect laugh, and the runner came in and said, “That was great, guys,” and I believed him, which was the worst of it.

· · ·Scene break

By noon there was a clip of the clip.

Three words, on a plaster sofa, and a man not laughing, and three seconds of a presenter’s face waiting, and then the weather. Ask the songs. By the time Fitz had counted us to the London hotel it was a caption under a hundred thousand posts that had nothing to do with us. By the time she’d counted us to the arena on Tuesday it was on a hand-painted sign held up by a girl in the fourth row, in capitals, with a question mark she’d thought better of and painted over.

London is twelve thousand, night sixty-five, and I looked at him at the bridge, because I’d said I would and I say the sentences I say, and he sang the second line to me, and it was the same three and a half feet and the same two lamps, and the last line came back on the beat, and under it, from the fourth row, in the gap where the room breathes before the chorus, one voice, high and clear and eighteen years old, shouted, “Ask the songs!” and a thousand people laughed, kindly, and it was a joke now. Both halves of it. His and mine.

In the dark he stayed on his mark and so did I. Fitz’s torch found us four feet apart. “Cable,” she said, and there was nothing in it, and I’d have given the whole clip for the second late.

· · ·Scene break

The living room in London had a rail of clothes nobody had brought and a mirror with all its bulbs working, which I counted twice because I didn’t believe it, and when I came in from the corridor with the plywood-top still on my back the three of them were on the sofa with one phone between them.

Lenny in the middle, holding it. Femi at one end, with his one beer, not drinking it. Dot at the other, with the fiddle across her knees and her bow on the floor.

They’d been watching the sofa. I knew from the sound. Rhian Teague’s warm hand was coming out of Lenny’s phone at a volume he’d turned down when the door went, and it said are you two and stopped, because Lenny had stopped it, with his thumb, on my face, mid-laugh.

Nobody said anything.

Lenny opened his mouth. He’s twenty-seven and he’s lived since the first leg in a state of just having finished a show, and he had a whole sentence ready and I could see the shape of it, and it wasn’t going to be a kind one, and Dot put her hand flat on the fiddle strings without looking at him.

“Cardiff,” she said.

Lenny closed his mouth.

“We watched it,” said Femi, who says things once, and picked up his beer, and looked at the label on it as if it might have his daughter’s name on.

Ezra came in last with the red guitar, and put it on its stand, and looked at the room, at the three of them on the sofa and the phone stopped on my face and the rail of nobody’s clothes, and then at me, and said nothing, and sat down with a beer he didn’t open.

I counted the bulbs again. Fourteen. All of them working. And for the first time since a Bradford arts centre nine years ago, in a room with LIVING ROOM on the door, nobody said good room, and the bus was at one, and Cardiff was two days off, and Dot’s bow was on the floor where she’d put it, and she hadn’t picked it up.