The Handover

When Liv went to the heritage centre for the full handover, the speaker was on the cabinet where it belonged. It had a new label. She read it on her way in and pointed.

‘That helps.’

Anouk looked up from her computer. ‘Until someone sticks that name somewhere else.’

Mara sat by the window, a notebook on her lap. She'd come early because the next bus always made her just too late. Her bag occupied a chair, with a scarf slipping off it. Liv caught the scarf, folded it and put it back.

She'd grown used to seeing Mara on a screen. In person her hair was shorter than it looked on video, and her glasses had scratches on the frames. Liv wanted to say how good it was to see her like this, but Mara raised a hand.

‘Before we start: you've left a comment for me in number eleven.’

‘Where?’

‘In your notes. Not the public version.’

‘Oh.’

‘You can delete it. You've done what it says.’

She pushed the sheet towards Liv. In the margin was a sentence Liv could almost hear herself saying: Mara, I don't know whether to put this breath back in. She had put it back. She removed the comment and checked the sentence after it.

Then they began the handover. Not listening to all twelve interviews from start to finish again, but opening the whole collection, looking through the accompanying texts and checking that the listening versions matched the documentation. These edits hadn't replaced the original digital transfers. The physical cassettes stayed with the collection, bearing their own labels and faults.

Anouk had written down questions. Specific ones. Which version should she give a visitor? Could she play individual excerpts without playing a whole recording? What should she do if someone recognised a name they hadn't been certain enough to put in the text?

Liv answered the first two. At the third, she pushed her chair back.

‘Keep what that person tells you as an additional note. Don't treat it as something we can suddenly hear on the recording.’

Anouk looked at Mara.

‘That's where I'd start too,’ Mara said. ‘People might genuinely know something. But it's new information.’

Anouk made a note. She didn't need to check Liv's face at every answer to see whether she felt under attack. It had been different on the morning they brought in the first three interviews. Liv had seen the questions as so many small fences between her and the end of the job. Now there were people wanting to use the collection.

They listened to a passage from Willem Kooij together. In the small room his voice was still a little too large for the speakers. He described a decision that had seemed obvious to his crew at the time and needed explaining afterwards. Before he named someone, there was a silence. Liv knew that silence. She hadn't shortened it out of a fear that people might think the recording had stopped.

Anouk leant back. ‘He sounds as if he's got time now.’

‘He had,’ Mara said. ‘At that moment.’

Liv smiled. It was a compliment she didn't immediately need to qualify with everything that hadn't worked. The sound was usable, not polished smooth. There was still movement behind the voice, the edge of a room, an occasional knock she couldn't lift cleanly out from beneath a word.

For Joop van Dijk they found a different passage from last time. Joop laughed at something the interviewer thought he'd understood too quickly. The interviewer began to protest, then had to laugh himself. Anouk bent towards the computer to note the time.

‘I want to play people this.’

‘Why this bit?’ Liv asked.

‘Because they're always quoted so seriously here. As if they'd spent every voyage thinking about how it would become history.’

Mara chuckled. ‘Sounds exhausting.’

They let the excerpt finish. Liv remembered her first evening in seven, sitting at the table with her headphones askew and notes on her knees. She really had done this work there. The guesthouse couldn't reach back and take every part of those days away from her.

Anouk closed the folder and said this was what they needed. She wanted to read the overview again later without them there; if anything about using the collection was unclear, she'd ask. The work on all twelve interviews was delivered.

Liv didn't pick up her bag straight away. She looked at the desktop, the ordinary folder names, today's date. It wasn't the great rush of relief she'd imagined on bad nights. More like a surface she could finally put her hand on.

They settled the last practical details. There was still an invoice to deal with. Mara's work would come out of Liv's own fee, not a budget that had suddenly grown. Anouk knew how much extra time it had taken. She didn't need to apologise for terms they'd already agreed.

Outside, Mara stopped by the door to fasten her coat.

‘Coffee?’ she asked.

Liv checked the time.

‘You don't have to,’ Mara said. ‘My bus isn't for another forty minutes.’

They found a café with a free table beside the door. Every time someone came in, the thin draught curtain stirred. Mara picked up the menu and put it down again.

‘Even one coffee's complicated enough here.’

Liv ordered one too. When the woman behind the counter asked if they wanted anything with it, Mara said no and Liv said yes. There was apple pie. It arrived on a plate too small for the whipped cream.

‘Now I do want a bite,’ Mara said.

Liv moved the plate to the middle. ‘You shouldn't have been so principled.’

They ate with two forks. Mara talked about her other work, a job that would go ahead if someone else delivered a recording on time. Liv asked a question and got a long answer that led nowhere near the guesthouse. For the first time in days she was curious without fearing what might come after the next sentence.

Later Mara asked about Els. About Els, not the house.

‘She's walking better. Not as well as she'd like. Once she starts doing something, she keeps going too long.’

‘And you?’

‘I'm not there when she does it.’

Mara looked at her.

Liv picked up her cup. ‘I went on Monday. Took the shopping. She had coffee ready and a list of things I didn't need to do.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘I was offended at first.’

‘That sounds like you too.’

They laughed. Then Liv told her how ordinary sounds still sometimes made her decide too quickly where someone was. She'd hear a drawer in her own kitchen and expect a hand above the worktop, though she was home alone. Not a voice, nothing impossible; just the speed with which her mind completed a movement.

Mara listened, her fork resting on the plate.

‘What do you do then?’

‘Usually look. Sometimes I don't. If I know there's no one there, I needn't get up every time.’

Mara nodded. She didn't give the reaction a name.

‘I'm afraid I won't ever just enjoy it again,’ Liv said. ‘Listening. That everything will turn into work, or something to watch out for.’

‘It didn't just now.’

‘What?’

‘When that man at the counter forgot what he wanted. You were laughing.’

Liv looked at the counter. The man had gone. She remembered his first hesitant word and the woman offering him a choice between coffee and something he apparently knew perfectly well at any other time. She'd been listening without it needing to matter.

Mara checked her phone. Time to go. Liv got up with her and walked to the bus stop. They agreed to meet the following week without a work file between them. Mara suggested a day; Liv said yes and put it straight into her diary.

Els rang as Liv reached the car. She answered while she was still standing outside.

‘Bram's finished the door,’ Els said.

‘Does it work properly again?’

‘I can open it with one finger. Almost suspicious.’

‘Don't keep doing it with one finger just to try it.’

‘I said almost.’

Liv laughed. Els asked whether she was on her way. Liv said where she was. They hadn't arranged a time for her to come, and she wasn't going to make the whole detour automatically.

‘I'll just tell you what it looks like, then,’ Els said.

Liv sat in the driver's seat with the door open. The wind turned a scrap of paper past her shoe.

The wall in seven had been made good. There was a lighter patch because Els hadn't had the whole room painted. In eight the wooden case was gone, the wall closed up and the floor clear. The chairs she didn't want had been taken away; the others were no longer piled together. She'd put the linen cupboard against that wall, making it a room she could fetch things from without squeezing past a stack.

‘I thought you'd want to change everything,’ Liv said.

‘I can't afford that. And I want to keep that bed.’

‘It's a good bed.’

‘You hardly slept in it.’

Liv looked at the pale sky over the car park. ‘For a while on the first night.’

Els was quiet. Then she said, ‘I've got people coming again next week.’

‘You're reopening.’

‘Not all at once. But yes.’

Liv could hear how much she'd wanted to tell her to ring if anything happened. She could almost say it already: the generous promise left at the end of each day, an appointment with no time attached.

‘Do you want me to bring anything when I come?’ she asked.

‘No. Just yourself. And don't come for dinner if you haven't time to stay.’

‘I've got something in the diary.’

‘Come another day, then.’

They chose an afternoon. Els didn't need to give her a list. Liv didn't need to ask who else would be there first.

At home the roofing bill was still on her desk. She filed it with the papers that went with it. Then she entered her final hours and sent off what still needed sending. The costs hadn't shrunk. Mara would be paid; there was less left than she'd hoped. Enough remained that she needn't pretend this had been voluntary work.

The folder of original guesthouse recordings was on the drive. She checked her usual work backup without playing the files. Not opening a file for a few weeks hadn't changed it. She knew that without having to listen.

She shut down the computer. An envelope lay on the kitchen worktop: a new job she hadn't accepted yet. She picked it up, read the first page and wrote her questions on a separate sheet. Then she put everything back. She could ring tomorrow.