Small Hours

Prit asked her in the kitchen at four in the morning on a Tuesday in September, which is where and when everything at Bickerstaff Community Radio is decided, with the kettle going and both of them holding mugs from downstairs.

Ashleigh is leaving. She has got a job at a proper station in a proper city and everybody is delighted for her and Prit means it more than anybody. The breakfast show is six until nine, Tuesday to Saturday, and it is the only presenting job at Bickerstaff that pays a full wage, and it has been offered to Rowan Kestle.

"You would not have to do the garden centre," Prit said. "That is the actual sentence. I have rehearsed nine ways of saying this and that is the one that matters, so I am saying it first. Three shifts a week on a till, gone."

Rowan looked into a mug that said Bickerstaff Carpets and did not say anything for a while.

"Can I do both?" "No." "I did not think so." She had known it before she asked and had asked anyway, which is a thing she does, and which Prit has watched her do in that kitchen perhaps nine times in three years and has never once made her feel foolish about. "You did eight hours in a storm and it took you nine days to be a person again," Prit said. "You are not doing one to four and six to nine. I will not have it and neither will the insurance."

What he did not say, and what Rowan has said since she is grateful for every time she thinks about it, is anything at all about the money, or about her being thirty-four, or about how many years a person can reasonably spend walking home at four in the morning from a job that pays for two nights out of five. He said none of it. He said, "Think about it. There is no date on it. Ashleigh goes in November and I will hold it open until the last minute I can."

Then he rinsed his mug, because he always rinses his mug, and said the only other thing he said about it that night, from the doorway, with his back half turned: "For what it is worth, I do not know who else does one to four. I have three names and none of them are right and I have been sat with that list for a fortnight and it is not getting better."

She has had six weeks and has not answered, and the show has gone on every night of it, and the only person who knows is Prit, and — she is fairly sure — Serafina, who knows everything and has said nothing, which from Serafina is a kind of extraordinary tenderness.

The arguments for are not small and she has made herself list them properly rather than dismissing them, because she knows what she is like. A full wage. Daylight. Sleeping at night, which she has not done for three years and which two doctors have now mentioned. A breakfast show at a community station is a genuinely good job and the person who does it is the voice of the town in the hours when the town is actually awake, and there are nineteen thousand people in Bickerstaff and rather more of them are up at seven than at three.

And the arguments against are one argument, and it is not the one people assume. It is not that she loves the night. She does not, particularly; it is cold in that room by three and the walk home in February is not romantic and she has been ill more often in three years than in the nine before them.

It is that the people who ring Small Hours do not ring anything else. Not the station, not the daytime shows, not a helpline, not one another, and in several cases not anybody at all between one email a fortnight from a daughter in Dundee and a phone call to a woman in a room above a carpet showroom.

Bill rings at twenty to three because at twenty to three, for twenty-six years, the first bake went in, and the man who worked out that the call had to fit that gap is not coming to the breakfast show; he does not get up for the breakfast show, he lies awake for it. Denny is in a security office at the paper mill from ten until six. Serafina does not drive at seven in the morning. Ward Nine has day staff at seven and the day staff have a television on.

And there is a withheld number that has rung a hundred and forty-odd times in three years, that has said four words to her, once, in a storm, that she believes is somebody in this town in their seventies with a window that does not shut properly, and that she has no name for, no number for, no way of reaching, and no way of handing on to anybody else. If she takes the breakfast show, that phone rings at twenty past three into a studio with a computer in it, and nobody picks it up, and there is no version of that which Rowan Kestle can currently look at for more than about four seconds.

She has said none of this to Prit. What she has said to Prit, twice, is "I am thinking about it," and Prit has said "Right" both times, and put the kettle on both times, and she is aware that she is going to have to do considerably better than that before November.

It is the last Tuesday in October and she is in at half past twelve, and Dennis has left the chair squared and the headphones coiled and a note on the pad, which is the forty-fourth, and which says that the second microphone has developed a hum and that he has logged it and does not trust the log.

The blind is down over the window as it has been down for three years. The kettle that is not supposed to be in there is on. The laminated card with four numbers on it is inside the drawer, and next to it now is Prit's typed sheet with the pharmacy and the taxi rank and the ridge road on it, which has been used twice since the storm and both times for something minor.

At two minutes to one she puts the headphones on. At one minute to she brings the fader up on the bed, the low sustained thing off a library disc that she found in her fourth week and that now means half past midnight to a number of people she will never meet, in a town seven miles across, and on a stretch of coast forty miles away that has produced exactly three callers in seven years.

She has thought, once or twice in the last six weeks, about what happens to that piece of music if she takes the breakfast show. Nothing happens to it. It goes back to being nineteen seconds on a library disc, and the town does not notice, and in about four months nobody in Bickerstaff can tell you what it sounded like, and this is not an argument for anything and she is aware of that, and she thinks about it anyway at half past twelve on a Tuesday with her coat still on.

At one exactly the red light goes on above the door.

"It is one o'clock. This is Small Hours on Bickerstaff Community Radio, 106.1. I am Rowan and I will be here until four. The lines are open, they are open the whole time, and if you are up, you are not the only one."

Then the first record, which is always something without words, because at one in the morning a voice arriving on top of a voice is an intrusion, and people are not listening to a radio show yet.

The room is the same room. Nine feet by eleven, a desk with a fader panel that was secondhand in 2009, one microphone that works and one that now hums, a kettle, a blind that has never been up, and a red light above a door that nobody outside can see. In November there will be a decision in it and there is not one in it tonight.

She watches the queue monitor while it runs. Bill will be at twenty to three. Serafina will be at some point after two with the roads, and it is the last Tuesday in October so there will be fog on the ridge and she will say so. Denny is due, it has been a fortnight. Ward Nine, probably, because it is a Tuesday and Tuesdays are Bernadette and Bernadette always rings.

At nine minutes past one the queue lights up with a number she does not recognise.

This is not unusual in itself; there are new callers most weeks, and the majority of them ring once, say a nice thing about the record, and are never heard from again, and Rowan is fond of them in a way she finds difficult to explain and has come to think of as the correct relationship to have with most people.

She takes it herself, because it is a Tuesday and there is nobody on the desk in the outer room, in the two minutes and forty seconds of a record.

"Small Hours, this is Rowan."

There is the particular quality of pause that means somebody has got through to a person and had not entirely expected to, and that Rowan can now identify inside about half a second, and that has never once in three years turned out to be nothing. Then a voice — young, she would say twenty at the outside, and local, and doing that thing of speaking slightly too fast at the front of a sentence to get it out before the nerve goes:

"Hiya. Sorry. I have never rung a radio before. I do not want to be on it or anything, I just — my nan listens to you. She listened to you all through the storm, in the dark, on her own, she is on Culvert Lane. She died on Sunday. And I have got the house and I have got her radio and I put it on at one o'clock because I did not know what else to do with myself, and you said that thing you say, and I just wanted to —"

The record has forty-one seconds left on it. Rowan Kestle pulls the pad towards her, and writes nothing on it, and says, "Take your time. I have got a minute and I can make it longer. Go on."