The Regulars

Bill Ondaatje-Hall rings at twenty to three, give or take four minutes, every night he works, which is Tuesday to Saturday, which is Rowan's exact week, which is not a coincidence and which he has never admitted.

He is the night baker at Fern Row, which is a bakery of the kind that has three staff and supplies eleven shops, and he has been doing nights there for twenty-six years, and he is sixty-three, and he has a voice that the entire audience of Small Hours would recognise in a supermarket.

The call is always the same length, which is between three and five minutes, and it is always at the same point in his own night, which is the gap after the first bake goes in and before the second is shaped. Rowan worked that out in her second month and has built the show around it ever since without ever saying so: at half past two she goes into a record long enough to take the call.

What they talk about is nothing. That is the entire point of it and Rowan has had to defend it twice to people at the station who wanted the overnight to be more focused. Bill talks about the football, the weather from a doorway on Fern Row, a documentary he watched on Sunday, the fact that flour is going up again, a bird that has got into the yard, his knee.

He has been on air at twenty to three for something like six hundred nights and he has never once said anything about his own life that could be called personal, and Rowan knows, from other callers rather than from him, that his wife died in 2019, that he has a daughter in Dundee he sees three times a year, and that in the winter after the funeral the bakery kept him on nights when the owner had been intending to move him to days, deliberately, because the owner's view was that a man who cannot sleep should be paid for it.

The audience adores him. There is no other word. He gets more mentions in the station's email than the whole of the daytime schedule combined, and the one occasion Prit floated putting him on a proper weekly slot with his name on it, Bill said no in about a second and a half, and when pressed said, "It is not a slot, it is a phone call," and would not discuss it further.

He calls Rowan "kid", which she is not, being thirty-four. She calls him Bill. He signs off the same way every night — "Right, that is the second lot, God bless" — and the number of people in Bickerstaff who have heard those seven words more times than they have heard their own children speak is not small.

The taxi is Serafina Duque, who has driven a private hire car in this town for nine years and who rings from a rank or a lay-by and never while moving, which she announces every single time in a tone that dares Rowan to suggest otherwise.

Her contribution to Small Hours is weather and roads, delivered like a shipping forecast, and it began as a joke in her third or fourth call and is now a fixture that people plan around: "Prendergast wet, ring road wet, the ridge is fog from the reservoir up, do not take the top road, there is ice on the bridge at the paper mill and there has been since one." She is never wrong. Twice in three years the council gritting supervisor has rung the station the next day to ask where she gets it.

The infirmary is Ward Nine, which is long-stay respiratory, and the caller is whoever is on the desk, which over three years has been eleven different people, and they all ring for the same reason and it is not for themselves. They ring to ask for a record for a patient, by first name, and Rowan plays it, and does not editorialise, and has been asked exactly once whether it is not unbearably sad and said that she had never found it so and had never seen any reason to.

The mill is Denny, who sits alone in a security office at the paper mill from ten until six with a wall of nine monitors and a kettle, and who rings once a fortnight at about half past three and talks for a long time and is, by some distance, the loneliest person who calls the show and the least likely to say so.

He has views. He gives them at length. He is wrong about a great many things and right, spectacularly, about a few, and he once described the resurfacing of the eastbound carriageway with such precision and such feeling that a woman from the roads authority emailed the station to say she had pulled over to listen.

Rowan lets him run. It costs her a record and sometimes two and she has never once cut him off, and the only thing she has ever done to manage it is to move him, gently, over about six months, from twenty past three to half past, so that he lands after the point where the calls get longer anyway.

She has never told him she did that, and she has never told anybody else either, except Prit, who said it was the single most professional thing he had seen anybody at Bickerstaff do in eleven years and then made her tea in a mug that says Bickerstaff Carpets on it, because the station's mugs all come from downstairs.

Since the second November of her run there has been a caller who rings, on average, four times a month, always between three and half past, and who does not speak.

The first time it happened Rowan assumed a pocket dial and hung up after fifteen seconds. The second time, a week later, from the same withheld number, she said hello twice and then, on an instinct she has never fully explained, said, "That is all right, you do not have to. I am here until four," and stayed on the line for two minutes and forty seconds, which is the length of the record she had running, and then said, "I have to go and do this, but the line stays open," and put the phone down as gently as it is possible to put a phone down.

They rang back nine minutes later.

What Rowan has, three years on, is this: it is one person, it is the same withheld number, they breathe, occasionally there is a sound behind them that is a television or a fan, once there was a dog, once there was somebody else in the house calling a name that Rowan did not catch and has thought about roughly weekly ever since. They have never spoken. They have rung a hundred and thirty-odd times.

She has never mentioned them on air and never will. She has typed them into the queue as 3am for three years and every guest presenter who has ever covered the slot has been briefed on it in person, in the studio, standing up, in a way that has made two of them visibly nervous: if a withheld number comes in after three and does not speak, you do not hang up, you say something ordinary, and you leave the line open until they go.

The card in the drawer has four numbers on it and Rowan has thought about all four of them in connection with this caller and has used none of them, because there is nothing to give them and nobody to give it to, and because on the one occasion she said, very carefully, that there were people who could be rung and would she like the numbers, the caller hung up and did not ring again for six weeks.

She has not made that mistake twice. What she does now is talk about nothing in particular for as long as they stay, in the same voice she uses for Bill and the weather and the football, and it has taken her three years to be certain that this is the correct thing and about four months to stop needing to be certain in order to do it.

Rowan came to Bickerstaff Community Radio in the March of a year she does not talk about much, having done nine years in local commercial radio in two much bigger towns and having stopped rather abruptly.

The version she gives, when asked at things, is that she got tired of the format. This is true and is about a third of it. The rest is that the last station she worked for was bought, and the new owners networked the overnight and then the evening and then the mid-morning out of a building four hundred miles away, and Rowan spent her final eighteen months there presenting a three-hour show that went to seven towns simultaneously and in which she was contractually forbidden to mention the weather, because the weather is different in seven towns.

She has described this to exactly one person, at four in the morning, in the station kitchen, and what she said was that she had stood in a studio saying good morning, you to four hundred thousand people and had understood with total clarity that she did not know where a single one of them was standing.

Prit hired her over a coffee in eleven minutes. He has said since that he had a two-page person specification in his bag and never took it out. What he did ask her was why the overnight, when a woman with nine years of commercial experience could have had the drivetime and a proper fee.

And Rowan said that in nine years of daytime radio she had taken about eleven calls that mattered, and that all eleven of them had come in after eleven at night on nights she had been covering somebody else's shift, and that she had come to the conclusion, which she was aware sounded ridiculous, that the useful part of radio happens when the person listening has run out of other things.

She is paid for two nights a week and does five. The station cannot afford more and she has known that since the eleventh minute of the interview. She does three shifts a week at a garden centre on the ring road, on the tills, from ten until four in the afternoon, which is a thing she mentions on air perhaps twice a year and which about half the audience does not know.

The other half do, and the consequence is that Rowan Kestle cannot buy a bag of compost, a cup of tea, or a loaf of bread on Fern Row for the price on the ticket, and has given up trying, and now simply says thank you and takes it, which took her about a year to learn and which she says is the single hardest skill she has acquired in this town.