Chapter 3: Stenography
"I'll take him," Fran said, before the man from Uppsala had finished unmuting.
Benoît was on the mic, halfway through a Spanish MEP's question about microplastics. He glanced at her. She already had her headset straight and her hand by the button, and when the Spaniard stopped and the Chair said we now go to Professor Lindqvist, who joins us remotely, she took it off him so smoothly that the English channel didn't so much as hiccup.
Professor Lindqvist spoke English, as it turned out, so there was nothing to interpret, and the English booth went quiet and sat listening to a Swede explain tyre dust to a room of people who had stopped listening. That wasn't the point. The point was that if Professor Lindqvist's laptop howled, it would howl into her ears and not his, because Benoît had his headset off and round his neck and was doing a sudoku in the margin of the agenda.
She'd done it all week. It was easy to do. The booth roster said who was on, but it didn't say who was on for what, and within the half hour you could swap however you liked as long as the person in the chair didn't mind. She took the video links. She took the hybrid speakers, the ones in airports, the ones in cars, the one MEP who always connected from what sounded like a car wash. She told Benoît she liked them, which was true in the sense that she liked anything she was good at.
She wrote his numbers in capitals two fingers high. She wrote the names as well now, the ones with lots of consonants, and the place names, and anything that ended in -teen or -ty. She'd started writing them before he was live, a column down the left side of the pad like a shopping list he'd be needing. When she spoke to him off-mic she leaned in and spoke into his left ear, which was the side she was sitting on anyway, so it was barely leaning at all.
And when Ger did the roster for December, which Liliana Darmanin, the head of unit, then went through line by line from her office upstairs the way she went through everything, he'd said, "D'you want the panda again for Strasbourg, or will I give him to Siobhán?" and she'd said, "Leave him with me, he's still learning the English booth," and Ger had looked at her over his glasses for slightly longer than was necessary.
Professor Lindqvist finished. His laptop did not howl. The Chair thanked him, and Benoît put his sudoku down, and Fran gave him back the mic, and the pad, which was ready.
He looked at the column of numbers on the left. Then he looked at her, and for a second she thought he was going to say something, and her whole body went still, the way it had when she was small and a teacher looked at her dad's handwriting on a note.
He said, "You've spelled Szczecin wrong."
"I have not."
"You've got one z too many. It's a common mistake. Very common. Among amateurs." He took her pen and crossed out a z that was correct and put it back again, and she hit his hand, and the Chair gave the floor to a Polish MEP, and he was live.
At the break Ger stopped her by the lifts.
"You're very cosy in there," he said, unwrapping a new roll of Polos with the concentration of a bomb disposal man.
"It's a small booth."
"It is. It is that." He put a mint in his mouth. "Thirty years I've been in that booth, chief, and nobody ever wrote my numbers out like a ransom note."
"You can count."
"I can," Ger agreed, and wandered off towards the gents, crunching, which you could only do off-mic, and which he did with real satisfaction.
She knew what she was doing. That was the trouble with it. She'd known since the river, since the Chelsea boots, since she'd walked back to the hotel on his left side and lain awake in her room with the radiator ticking and thought: right. It wasn't even a decision. It was like when you've been driving for twenty years and your foot finds the brake before you've seen the cat. She'd been someone's ears since she was seven. Her body knew how to do it without her.
The thing she didn't know was why he hadn't said anything. And the thing she knew even less, the thing she didn't let herself turn over, was why she hadn't either.
The audiogram looked like a ski jump.
Benoît had it flat on the kitchen table under the window, smoothed out, the letter beside it. He knew exactly what it said. He'd read it in March, standing up, with his coat still on. He was reading it again now because it was Saturday morning and the street below was full of Saturday and he'd woken up thinking about Fran's handwriting.
Two lines across a grid. The left ear, a neat row of little crosses along the top, more or less where they'd been when he'd done the test for his first contract, at twenty-nine. The right ear, a row of circles that began fine at the low end, the bass end, the end of drums and lorries, and then, from about two thousand hertz, simply let go and slid down the page like a man falling off a roof. The high end. Consonants. S, f, th. The difference between fifteen and fifty, if you wanted to be precise about it, which the people at Saint-Pierre had been, in a paragraph near the bottom.
Hearing aid trial recommended (right). Avoid noise exposure. In view of the patient's profession, we recommend a review of occupational suitability with the employer's medical service.
Occupational suitability. He'd laughed at it in March, in his coat. It had sounded like something you'd say about a horse.
He knew what Fran was doing. He wasn't stupid, he was deaf, or partly, on one side, from two thousand hertz up. He'd known since Strasbourg, since she'd come round behind him on the Quai and asked him about his laces, though it had taken him until he was in bed that night to understand what she'd been asking. He'd lain there with the rain-on-a-tent playing and felt sick, then relieved, then sick about the relief.
She'd never said a word. She just did it. She took the video links. She wrote him a shopping list of every number in the meeting, the names, the places, all in those furious capitals. She leaned in on his left. And she did it so well and so quietly that some days he forgot, for whole hours, that it was being done, and worked the way he'd worked before, easy and quick and a little bit showing off, the way he'd always liked to work. And then he'd look down at the pad and see the column, two fingers high, and remember.
It was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in years, and he couldn't stand it, and he couldn't stand the thought of her stopping.
He folded the audiogram back into the letter and the letter back into the envelope and put it behind the toaster. Then he took out his phone, because he'd decided something in the shower, and typed: Are you doing anything tomorrow? I want to show you the ugliest place in Europe.
The reply came while he was still looking at the screen.
Is it Charleroi
How did you guess
You've mentioned it once or twice
Once or twice an hour, he typed, and then, Train at 10.12 from Midi. Bring boots with laces.
There was a long pause, long enough for him to wonder if that had been a mistake.
Mine have laces, she wrote. Some of us are grown-ups.
Charleroi had a metro that went round the middle of town in a loop, like a dog after its own tail, and Benoît took her round it twice before she'd agreed it was a real thing and not something he'd made up to see what she'd believe.
"The best part's out there," he said, pointing out of the window into a tunnel. "There's a whole line to Châtelet they built in the eighties. Stations, escalators, platforms, signs. Then the money ran out and they shut the doors and left it for forty years. People used to break in and take photos. There were trees growing on the platforms."
"Used to?"
"They're finally opening it. Forty years." He looked genuinely mournful. "I'm almost sad. It was our best thing."
"We've got a pyramid," Fran said.
He turned and stared at her.
"In Stockport. By the motorway. Blue glass. A big blue glass pyramid, for a bank. There were meant to be more of them, a whole valley of them, like Egypt, and they built one and the money ran out." She looked out of the window. "So it's just there. On its own. By the M60."
"That is magnificent."
"It's not magnificent. It's just a pyramid by a motorway."
"Mulcahy," he said. "That's the definition of magnificent."
They got off the metro and walked out through streets of shut-up shops and fantastic old art deco fronts with the letters gone, past a canal the colour of tea, past a man selling one lettuce off a crate, to the edge of town, where a black hill rose out of the houses with birch trees growing up its sides in a thin yellow fur. A terril, he said. A slag heap. The whole region was dotted with them, the spoil from a hundred years of pits, and now people walked their dogs up them and got married on top of one of them, once, he'd read.
The path went up in zigzags through the birches. The ground underfoot was loose and dark and crunched like cinders, because it was cinders. Halfway up Fran stopped and looked back at the town spread out below: brick roofs, a church, the glass tower of something, and beyond them the huge dead shapes of the old steelworks, rust-brown towers and pipes, standing about in the grey like cattle in a field.
"It's not that ugly," she said.
"Don't you dare."
"It's ugly," she said. "But it's not trying to be anything else. I like that in a place."
"Is Stockport trying to be something else?"
"Stockport's trying to be Manchester and pretending it isn't." She started climbing again. "We've got a viaduct. It's the biggest brick structure in Western Europe or something. Lowry painted it. People always say Lowry painted it as if that's the end of the argument."
"Isn't it?"
"He painted it covered in smoke with tiny people running about underneath looking miserable. That's not a compliment, that's a witness statement."
He laughed so hard he had to stop, holding on to a birch.
At the top it was flat and bald and the wind came across it from three directions at once. There was a bench someone had dragged up, and an old cable drum, and a view all the way round to a line of hills going blue in the distance. Benoît pointed west, along a road that ran away between fields.
"Binche," he said. "Twenty minutes. My mother's frying something right now. I can feel it."
"Do you go back much?"
He didn't answer, and she wasn't sure whether it was the wind. She said it again, on his left, closer.
"Not as much as I should," he said, and didn't say anything else, which was so unlike him that she looked at him properly.
He was looking at her too. The wind was flattening his hair on one side and lifting it on the other and his face had gone, for once, completely unguarded, as if he'd put something down for a minute and forgotten to pick it up. She was very aware of the distance between them, which was about a foot. She was aware that he had moved, or she had, and it was less than a foot.
A wet black Labrador the size of a small pony came over the top of the path at a gallop, dropped a stick on Benoît's foot and barked at him once, with tremendous seriousness, from about knee height.
They both leapt back.
"Bijou!" shouted a woman's voice, from somewhere below. "Bijou, viens ici!"
Bijou did not come. Bijou looked at the stick, and at Benoît, and at the stick, with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.
"You'd better throw it," Fran said.
"It's very rude not to," Benoît agreed, and picked it up and threw it, and Bijou went off like a cannonball down the slope, and the moment went with her, crashing through the birches.
He didn't try to bring it back. She noticed that. He made a joke about Bijou, a long one involving the dog's social ambitions, and she laughed, and they sat on the bench in the wind and ate the sandwiches she'd brought from the Delhaize by the station, and she thought: he chose that. The dog didn't. He chose the joke.
It was cold on the bench. The wind was loud enough that she had to lean in to be heard, and so did he, and after a while she noticed that he'd stopped pretending. He just watched her mouth when she talked. Openly. Like a man reading a menu.
"You can stop writing like an optician, you know," he said.
She went still.
"In the booth." He wasn't looking at her now; he was looking at the steelworks. "Those numbers. You hold them up like an eye chart. Ger thinks you're in love with me."
"Ger thinks everybody's in love with somebody. It's the Polos."
"Mulcahy."
She waited. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, and she'd once interpreted a fourteen-hour budget negotiation with food poisoning.
"March last year," he said. "A hybrid meeting. Transport committee. A man in Athens on his phone in his car with the speaker on, and someone in the room left their mic open next to him on the screen, and it went round and round. Like the Danes, but longer. I was live. I didn't take the headset off quick enough. I was trying to get to the end of his sentence." He laughed, not really. "I always want to get to the end of the sentence."
"Did you report it?"
"I filled in the form. I wrote ringing, temporary. It was temporary for about a week. Then it wasn't." He rubbed his right ear with the heel of his hand, the way she'd seen him do in the booth a dozen times and thought was a habit. "It's there all the time now. A sort of whine. And the top end's gone on that side. Not all. Enough. If you're on my right and the room's loud I get about half."
"And you've not told them."
"I went to Saint-Pierre. They did the tests. They sent me a letter that says I should have a hearing aid and a review of occupational suitability." He said it in a pompous voice, a doctor's voice, and she didn't smile. "You know what that is? That's a man from the medical service and a man from personnel and a form with a box on it. And at the end they put me somewhere quiet. Written translation. The minutes of the Committee on Petitions. For ever."
"You don't know that."
"I know that." He turned to look at her at last. "I'm good at it, Fran. In the booth. I'm really good."
"I know you are."
"I'm better than I am at anything else. I'm better at it than I am at being a person."
She didn't say anything to that, because it was true about her too, and she'd never heard anybody say it out loud.
"After Christmas," he said. "Let me have December. Strasbourg, the last session, the Sakharov Prize, all of it. Then I'll go back to Saint-Pierre and get the thing and go and see Darmanin and do it all properly. January. I promise."
She knew what she ought to say. She could hear herself saying it, in her best voice, the clear one, the one she used for the Commission: You need to tell them now. You're one bad number away from a story in the paper. She'd have said it for anybody else. She'd have said it for a Portuguese MEP in the first person without blinking.
What she said was, "It's sorted."
He put his head down on her shoulder for a second, just a second, the way you'd lean on a wall. Then he sat up and said, "Bijou's back," and she was, with the stick, dripping, enormously pleased with both of them.
He fell asleep on the train back somewhere after Luttre. One minute he was explaining the rules of Belgian card games and the next his head had gone down on her shoulder, the left side of his face against her coat, his bad ear up to the carriage.
A lad across the aisle was playing music out loud on his phone, something thin and tinny with a man shouting over it. Usually it would have driven Fran up the wall. Usually she'd have stared at him until he turned it off. She looked at Benoît's face instead, gone soft and young in sleep, and didn't do anything about it, because he couldn't hear it, and for once neither of them had to manage anything at all.
Outside it had gone dark. The window gave her back her own face, and the top of his head, and the lights of somewhere going past.
She lifted her free hand, the right one, and told him something in the first language she'd ever had, the one there was no booth for in the whole building. She did it small, against the dark glass, where nobody on the train could read it but her.