A Breath

Mara's workroom was at the back of the house. From the hall, Liv could see a garden where chair legs stood in a thick layer of leaves. A wet ball hung on a string just beyond the cover of the awning. Someone had tried to keep it dry and been distracted halfway through.

Mara closed the workroom door before drawing back her chair. She had set out two mugs and her own headphones. The second chair had been borrowed from a child; a glossy dinosaur decorated its back.

‘It sinks a bit,’ she said. ‘Don't jump.’

Liv sat and immediately dropped several inches. Now the keyboard was too high for her hands. Mara laughed, got up and exchanged the chair for a taller one from the kitchen. Liv waited in the doorway. It was a relief that someone could laugh aloud at a sound she herself had made.

They had until three. Mara didn't wield the time like a threat. She simply pushed aside her own diary, checked where Liv wanted to plug in the drive and asked where they should begin.

‘Five,’ Liv said. ‘Joop. That's furthest along.’

‘In what way?’

‘You can hear him clearly. I've marked what we want to use. Less needed taking out than I thought.’

Mara waited for the folders to appear. ‘What do you want me to listen to?’

Liv realised she had answered another question again. She took her notebook from her bag and opened it at her pilot choices. Willem Kooij: one morning when a boat ran aground. Joop van Dijk: the other account, in which boats had kept coming in for years. For the third interview there was no developed extract, just a longer question about changes in access. On Tuesday that could offer a comparison without becoming a third portrait.

She wanted to know whether the voices drowned one another out in what she had written around them. Not literally, she added, then wished she hadn't.

‘Shall we listen first?’ Mara asked.

She rested her fingers beside the space bar. Liv nodded.

A brief scraping sound came from the speakers, then a man saying they had misunderstood. Joop sounded hoarse, the hard beginning of his words striking the microphone. The interviewer asked how many more years the boats had continued coming in. Joop didn't answer straight away. He began talking about a skipper, changed his first wording and said he didn't mean the largest ships.

Mara stopped it.

‘Which version is this?’

‘The listening copy.’

‘Have you cut something out here?’

‘No.’

‘Play me the source.’

Liv opened the transfer she was working from. Its filename was longer than the listening copy's, with a reference to the physical tape and side. The tape itself was still with the collection. Here they had the digital transfer, both channels as supplied, including an edge of the sound that occasionally dropped away. Liv found the same point and started a few seconds earlier.

First came a high, sustained hiss. Then small clicks she had removed from the listening copy because they hurt her ears. Joop spoke the same words. The way he breathed between them was different.

Liv looked at the screen. The man took an audible breath just before saying the boats had still been coming in. There was something of a suppressed laugh in it. Or not a laugh: the beginning of an answer he wasn't ready to give. It didn't become a word. He held it briefly, began again and delivered his firm statement.

In her version that small beginning was almost gone.

She played the two sections one after the other. Mara watched the empty space above the speaker, not the moving lines. Liv could tell from the tension around her mouth that she was following the sequence. On the second version she moved her hand a few centimetres, then let it rest.

‘He sounds as though he's speaking straight through,’ she said.

Liv placed the cursor before the sentence. ‘Same words.’

‘I can hear that.’

‘I haven't cut a sentence there.’

‘I can hear that too.’

Mara turned towards her. Liv felt herself defending something, badly, that nobody had accused her of. She laid her palm on her thigh.

‘I wanted to reduce that constant hiss.’

‘You have.’

‘But the lead-in's gone with it.’

Mara nodded. ‘To my ears. I can't say why he takes a breath like that. But I want to hear it.’

She reached for the space bar, waited for Liv and played the source alone again. Hiss filled the small room. Joop moved something on the table, asked whether the interviewer had ever stood on the old quay and offered him a biscuit. Mara smiled at how quickly his irritation became hospitality.

‘He does his own editing, that man.’

Liv gave a short laugh. She knew that biscuit; it had been in the file for days. Only now did she hear the offer interrupting the question. There was no neat transition. Joop had probably held out his hand, the interviewer had done something, and for a few seconds both their mouths had had something to do besides talking.

‘We need that bit,’ said Liv.

‘That's for you and Anouk. But don't make him an answering machine that's finally giving up its information.’

Liv drew the notebook towards her. She didn't write down what Mara had said. She added the reference for the longer passage and a question mark beside its length. It might be too long for a short listening session. They needed to know before cutting it to fit.

They returned to her edit. Liv showed where she had reduced the noise, letting Mara hear the difference rather than expecting the lines to prove what she had meant. She had used the first setting across a longer section. It made the background more even, the voice closer. That soft beginning of a breath almost merged with the sound she wanted to lose.

She reduced the processing. The room grew audibly larger. Something scraped further away, perhaps a chair, and the breath came back. So did the hiss. Liv drew her head back a little.

‘That horrible high edge is back now.’

‘Yes.’

They listened again, more quietly. Less clean didn't suddenly mean less intelligible. But at the hard part there was a sharp click that kept making Liv flinch. She had treated that separately. She showed Mara where, played it with and without the change and heard that Joop's first consonant was now softer than the next.

‘I've gone too far there.’

Mara didn't point out a button. She didn't know Liv's whole process, and the work was already on a copy. Liv went back to the earlier point, spent more time on the brief section, then listened to it in context again. The click was quieter, not gone. The voice had a rough edge again that belonged to the same man.

Nearly fifteen minutes to decide about a few seconds. Liv saw the minutes going and felt the old urge to call a whole passage finished once its most irritating noise was gone. She stopped starting again.

‘That's what I'd like to put to them.’

Mara nodded. ‘Me too. But it's a longer extract now.’

‘Yes.’

They noted its duration, then listened to Willem from the original question. The problem here wasn't the sound. Context made his one bad morning smaller than Liv had first wanted to hear it. She had needed it to be bigger, to set the voices against one another. She crossed out the line above her selection: the harbour that closed.

‘Was that your title?’ Mara asked.

‘For now.’

‘Sounds as if they both end up with the same answer.’

‘They don't.’

‘No.’

Liv wrote access. Not elegant, but enough to show Anouk what she meant. Joop spoke about ships; Willem about a morning and a grounded boat. They could let visitors hear how differently memory drew the limits of the same place. That was something already. She didn't need to turn it into a disappearance first.

They were still on the third interview when Mara checked the time. This needed a smaller correction. There was a question Liv didn't want to conflate with the first two. Instead of making another voice settle their disagreement, she used a short passage to raise something different. Mara thought the listeners needed a more specific question than what do you think?

Liv tried a sentence aloud and heard it steering the answer. She began again. What have you heard that the speaker knows for certain, and where do you hear him revise what he has just said? Still long, but at least a question.

Mara pushed her own note across. She had another difficulty with the third extract: unless you knew the first name, the question wasn't clear. Liv had heard the name because she knew where it came. They played the section without the text.

They heard different words.

For a few seconds the hiss felt less like something Liv had to repair than a narrow space in which someone else would always arrive somewhere different. She looked at Mara, turning her pen between two fingers.

‘Leave it as inaudible?’

‘You can say it's uncertain in the notes. I wouldn't read it out as a fact.’

Liv went back to her sheet. She removed the name from the question she had written for the listeners. The passage still meant something. It was about access, not a particular person whose name she needed to drop to sound knowledgeable.

Her phone lit up. Els asked when she was coming. No follow-up demanding where she had got to, no unfinished sentence. Liv checked the clock and wrote that she was running later than expected. She wanted to settle the three points with Anouk first.

Els replied that Roos would be there until early evening. They didn't have to do everything today.

‘Anything else you want me to hear?’ Mara asked.

Liv looked at the drive. Her first impulse was no. The strange voice was at home in another folder, not on this work drive. She could play it on her phone. She could play it tomorrow. She could wait for Mara to ask.

‘No.’

Mara turned her chair back. ‘You'd better ring Anouk, then. I need to go soon.’

Liv closed the files on screen and waited for the copying to finish before unplugging the drive. Mara wasn't watching her hands. She pulled her own bag closer and checked her work appointments. One of the times was wrong. She used a word Liv didn't often hear from her, then rang to sort it out.

Meanwhile Liv fetched the borrowed chair and carried the taller one back to the kitchen. It took two trips; in the hall they briefly got in each other's way. Mara held the front door while telling the person on the phone she couldn't be there any earlier than she had just said.

Outside Liv rang Anouk. She didn't go straight to the car, but stopped at the garden gate, a wet leaf stuck to the sole of her shoe.

First she explained what could be ready. Three selected passages for Tuesday, longer than the neat little examples she had first intended. More audible hiss with Joop, because her earlier treatment had removed some of his hesitation. The words were unchanged; the impression wasn't. They needed to keep the longer version until they had heard it together.

Anouk asked whether visitors needed to hear what had gone wrong with the restoration too.

‘Not as a demonstration of my mistake,’ Liv said. ‘But I don't want to send you only the smoother version, then tell you what the man definitely meant.’

‘You don't need to. We want to listen to these people.’

Liv rubbed her sole over the ground. The leaf wouldn't come off.

Anouk asked how she envisaged the listening afternoon. Liv described a short introduction, an extract with its preceding question, then a pause before setting the other man against him. Time to write something before they spoke. Some people coming knew the place, Anouk said, while others had no connection to it. She didn't want the first group filling every silence before the others could speak.

‘Everyone writes one thing first, then,’ Liv said.

‘Then we compare.’

‘Yes.’

Anouk asked about the three corrected interviews. Not tomorrow's short extracts, but the usable listening copies they had discussed. Liv could send them on Thursday morning, she said, with brief notes for each tape. Two, five and nine. Checking the other nine would have to continue. She didn't offer a date that didn't yet fit the work hours in her diary.

Anouk checked her own schedule. Thursday worked for the three. The full set was still a separate delivery. She wanted the first page to say what was included and what wasn't, so nobody later mistook a folder of three files for twelve.

‘I'll do that.’

‘And come a little earlier tomorrow. We'll test them on the speakers.’

Liv asked how early. They agreed half past two, to start at three. It needn't become an evening event. Anouk had a room that would be used for something else afterwards.

After the call Liv stayed by the car. It felt as if she had spent an afternoon on seven seconds. She knew she hadn't. They had made three real choices, agreed what would come on Thursday and found a question she could ask tomorrow without giving the listeners the answer. Mara hadn't absolved her. She had helped her work.

Liv pulled the leaf off her sole and dropped it among the wet leaves beneath the hedge. She sent Anouk the confirmation. She told Els she was on her way, took the drive from the bottom of her bag and put it in the compartment where she couldn't confuse it with another.

As she fastened her seat belt, the seat beside her was empty. She didn't look again. She started the car and drove to the guesthouse, where the ordinary things still needed carrying downstairs.