Dead Air

The People Still Awake Eileen had been trying to apologise to the woman next door for six years, although she still wasn't entirely sure which of them ought to apologise first. The disagreement had begun with a fence, become considerably worse over a tin of exterior paint, and settled into the peculiar arrangement whereby they brought one another's bins in from the pavement but no longer spoke. "You're both doing rather well for people who aren't speaking," Jo Merritt said. "I know married couples who do less for each other." Eileen laughed, which was encouraging. A chair creaked at her end of the connection and something clinked against a saucer. "I haven't told you the worst of it. Brenda's husband had an ambulance yesterday. He's home again, apparently, but I only know because I saw their daughter taking bags in. I didn't go across." "You wanted to go over?" Jo asked. Eileen sounded astonished. "Obviously I wanted to. Why else would I be ringing you? If she tells me to clear off, though, that's another six years gone." Jo moved the telephone fader down a fraction as Eileen's kettle began hissing in the background. People on The Small Hours rarely put the rest of their lives aside to call her. They carried on folding washing, making tea, waiting for a driver to arrive or keeping half an ear on somebody asleep upstairs. Eileen had already made herself two cups during the conversation and was explaining, with some indignation, that she certainly didn't want a third. "Do you know how Brenda's husband is?" Jo asked when the kettle quietened. "That's what I don't know. And she'll say I'm interfering." "She might. You've known her rather longer than I have." On the next screen, the music counter was running towards a scheduled item. Jo had a minute before she needed to free the line. "Perhaps knock and ask after him. You don't have to solve the fence while you're there. You could take something with you. Biscuits usually help." "She's diabetic," Eileen said promptly, as if Jo had proposed poisoning the woman. "Right. No biscuits, then. You'll think of something better." Jo heard a small chuckle and waited while Eileen considered what might actually be welcome. She eventually suggested tomatoes from her own garden, then remembered Brenda's greenhouse and dismissed the idea herself. By the time they said goodbye, Eileen had agreed to consider knocking in the morning. Jo suspected she would find several domestic jobs to do first, but she wished her luck, introduced the next record and lowered her microphone. The studio returned to its usual combination of music and machine noise. There was a low murmur from the ventilation behind the acoustic panels, the soft click of relays as the playout system advanced, and now and then the rattle of Jo's chair whenever she leaned too far back. Beyond the internal window the production area was dark. No producer occupied the pair of desks out there; their screens had been switched off after the evening shift. A green status lamp on the far wall blinked patiently above the corridor door. Jo checked the next names in the caller queue and took a mouthful of tea. It had gone tepid, which was how it spent most of her working life. On a shelf behind her stood three mugs she didn't remember acquiring, an emergency torch and a plastic dinosaur with half its lower jaw missing. The dinosaur had survived two station moves and several management restructures. There were people on the payroll with shorter service. The Small Hours ran from eleven until five, mixing music with calls from anyone who had a reason to be awake. It had begun seven years earlier as an economical way to fill the overnight schedule and had gradually acquired an audience nobody at Aldermere Radio was very good at describing. The daytime station sold itself to commuters and local businesses. Jo's listeners were people on hospital breaks, factory staff, drivers heading home on empty roads and those who lay awake because the house had become too quiet. Some had an urgent question; others wanted company until the next song. She preferred the calls that wandered. A retired bus conductor once spent eleven minutes explaining how to keep a wooden gate from swelling in November rain, and by the end three listeners had phoned to disagree about the hinges. Jo had gone home knowing more about exterior joinery than she'd ever intended. Not much of it would have survived scrutiny from a carpenter, but the old man had enjoyed himself. Tonight's next caller was Darren, coming off a shift at a distribution depot on the southern edge of Aldermere. He had mentioned the same takeaway on the ring road to Jo often enough that she asked about it before he could tell her why he was ringing. The chips were apparently much improved; the coffee remained disgraceful. Darren accepted her suggestion that the owners were responding selectively to his feedback, then explained that he had encountered temporary barriers near Eastgate on his journey home. "They've left half of it looking like a building site," he said. "There were temporary lights yesterday. Tonight there's a load of barriers and no workmen. I got through fine, before you ask. Just wondered when they're going to sort it out." Jo checked the local traffic page. "The notice here says the work's due to continue until Friday, but it doesn't tell me what they've been doing tonight. If they've left something across the carriageway, you'll need to report it to highways." "It's passable. Looks daft, that's all." He had already reached his turning and asked Jo to give him a moment while he negotiated it. She heard the indicator ticking, then the familiar hollow sound of a car entering a residential street. "Anyway, I'm home now. Got to be back in at five tomorrow." "Have a shower before you fall asleep," Jo advised. Darren claimed she'd never know the smell of a warehouse after a full night of forklifts. He promised to ring again if the barriers caused a real problem, and Jo left the roadworks notice open after he disconnected. One caller's description of untidy roadworks was hardly grounds for a traffic warning. Her phone-in queue had a woman with a dispute about radiators and a man who insisted his council had removed a pedestrian crossing. Jo dealt with the radiators by confessing she knew less about central heating than the woman probably did. The crossing, she discovered after a patient description of the layout, had been moved forty yards down the street. The caller was unconvinced this was an improvement, and Jo let him have that. She could establish where the crossing was without settling whether anyone had wanted it there. At twenty-eight minutes past midnight she checked the clock, stretched her legs beneath the desk and took another sip of unappealing tea. The station's computers had behaved themselves all evening. The call software displayed four waiting listeners, two of whom she'd already screened. A local news summary was due near the top of the hour, supplied remotely, so she had time for one more conversation before another record. A man called Peter had been waiting with a story about a cat that had followed him into a twenty-four-hour supermarket. Jo was just about to bring him on when a different caller's note flashed across the queue: POWER OFF AT DEPOT. She took the depot caller privately, expecting somebody annoyed about a delivery. "Aldermere Radio. You're speaking to Jo." "Mick here, love. Calder Road. You've heard about the lights?" He explained that the whole industrial estate had lost power, recovered for a few seconds and gone dark again. The loading bays were now running on the generator, but the main offices had nothing. Jo could hear machinery and people calling to one another behind him. Jo checked that everyone at the depot was safe. Mick said the supervisor was already speaking to the electricity network. They wanted to find out how far the fault extended. "You're the first person who's told me about it," Jo said. "If you hear anything definite, let us know. And don't stand where that forklift behind you can't see you." "He's looking straight at me. He's got headlights." "Well, I'll worry about you anyway." Mick laughed and rang off, leaving Jo to check the network's status page. It showed yesterday's maintenance notice and no live faults. Another line lit up before she could take the next caller. A woman in Northfields said her television had gone off during the weather forecast and every streetlamp she could see had failed. The woman confirmed she was safely indoors. Jo warned her against investigating electrical equipment outside. It was a second, geographically distinct report, but still no confirmation of the cause. The next caller was several miles from Northfields. His supermarket had lost lighting and the tills, and staff were moving customers outside. A fourth caller said the signals were dark at the ring-road junction. The problem was evidently larger than Mick's depot, although Jo still had no confirmed explanation. She switched between the traffic page and the electricity network, waiting for one of them to update. Jo used a short instrumental passage to assemble what she could responsibly say. When she opened the microphone again, she kept the announcement limited to locations and observations. "We're receiving reports of electricity interruptions around Aldermere, including Northfields, the Calder Road industrial estate and parts of the south ring road. We haven't got a confirmed cause or restoration estimate yet. If you're driving through a junction where the traffic lights are out, reduce your speed and take particular care. We'll pass on official information as soon as we have it." The callers kept coming. Jo screened two more, wrote their locations in a column headed REPORTED and marked a separate space for CONFIRMED. The neat headings made the paper look more organised than the information. One listener described an entire row of houses in darkness. Another said the far side of his street was still lit. She knew enough about power distribution not to find that surprising, though she couldn't explain it to him in any useful detail. She was reading a caller's note about a stopped tram when the overhead fluorescent panels gave a small flutter. She looked up from her notes. She waited for the lighting to settle. It brightened briefly, then disappeared. The console lights went out beneath her hands, the music in her headphones stopped and the room shrank to the green rectangle of an emergency sign above the door. Jo kept her fingers resting on the dead microphone fader until the standby lighting came on and the distant generator began turning over.