What Was at Home

Her house smelt of heating. Liv dropped the key in the dish beside the door, hung up her coat, then went back to move it away from the wall. One sleeve was wet. The cloth beneath the coat hooks lay exactly as she had left it.

She went through to the kitchen. Nothing here needed finishing tonight before she could sit down. She put water on, took bread from the tin and forgot to look for anything to put on it. Her phone was on the table already. Els had said she was going to bed. Liv didn't need anyone else to confirm it.

Still, she opened her messages with Roos. The last was about a time for moving things. No further check arranged. She could ask something that sounded merely friendly: how's your evening? Roos might say fine, send a photograph of the television, say Els was asleep already. Liv wouldn't know what she had gained, only that she had asked again.

She put the phone down. The water had been boiling too long. She made tea and went to her workroom.

Anouk's afternoon email had arrived. Not lavish praise, but confirmation that she would gather the comments, and Liv could send her brief explanation of the versions tomorrow. Photographs of the completed sheets were attached. Anouk had made sure no hands or coffee cups obscured the writing.

Liv opened Noor's sheet. Beside the second extract: starts twice, is there something he doesn't say? She remembered Noor's face, how she had stayed by her chair after asking her question. Sound quality wasn't a smooth surface. Someone wanted to know where to keep her attention.

Liv wrote a short paragraph. The old recordings hadn't been made in silence; where background noise obscured conversation, she tried to improve intelligibility. She couldn't restore what had never been recorded or make an uncertain word certain. That was why Joop's audible lead-in remained, after becoming too faint in the earlier listening copy. She reread it and deleted the sentence about how difficult it had been.

She sent it to Anouk. Finishing the biggest task didn't leave the evening empty. Three listening copies for Thursday remained, the rest of the set, a bill that wouldn't pay itself because she now thought the extracts sounded more honest.

She took out her timesheet. The work was for an agreed fee; all the hours spent on badly chosen extracts and reworking them wouldn't become another invoice. Some were part of the job, some she had let mount up herself. She could no longer separate them precisely. The afternoon with Mara was listed separately, with the help they had agreed. Mara shouldn't pay for Liv's uncertainty by having her hours go unrecorded.

Liv added the date and closed the sheet before calculating it for a fourth time.

The empty screw box stood on the little shelf in the hall. She went to it, checked whether there was a note and put it where she couldn't fetch her key without seeing it. The roofer had said whenever she got the chance. No need for another appointment tomorrow morning. An old stain crossed the ceiling above the coats. The roof had been repaired; the work outside wouldn't take that mark away.

The little light on her speaker still glowed in the workroom. She hadn't shut down the computer, only closed the work windows. The strange file wasn't open. She knew exactly where it was.

She sat without reaching for the headphones.

That first evening at home she had heard her voice, then the silence and the zip. Eleven seconds from the sentence, not eleven seconds with literally nothing recorded. Rain and room noise. She had stared at the long empty stretch as though the file were pointing out a path to search.

Now she opened the copy. She had kept the original separately; the working filename was simply to avoid confusing them. This version was unchanged too. She didn't need another comparison to know it was the same half-minute.

Liv pressed play.

Her voice came through the speaker, just above the table. Lower than she heard herself speaking, with that little catch before the last word. Her tongue rested against her lower teeth. The sentence had passed through her mind so often she could have said it without listening.

She closed her mouth.

Rain. A faint hum. Not the big fridge downstairs, she thought; she couldn't name it from here. The recorder had been by the grille, the laptop elsewhere in the room. She knew how many appliances a seemingly empty silence might contain. She knew, yet held her hand still above the key that would stop playback.

A soft pull along metal or plastic teeth. A zip, she had called it. She could picture the movement, a hand along a bag, the moment the slider caught. Her travelling bag stood at home on the shelf, empty and closed. She hadn't checked yesterday to see whether it was open. Now the urge was so strong she turned towards the door.

The file ended. No words after it, no new breath where yesterday there hadn't been one. Just the recording's end and the ordinary sound of her room.

She stayed seated. When playback stopped she felt as though someone hadn't finished speaking. Not an actual word cut short. Nothing she could put on paper with a dash after it. Still her body waited for a sound other than the appliances around her.

She didn't press play again.

She wanted to ring Mara. Not because Mara could establish what this was. She wanted another human voice now the file had stopped. That was what she should say. No question about a breath on tape five as a way into something else entirely.

Mara answered after a few seconds.

‘Went well this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I've seen Anouk's feedback.’

‘She emailed you?’

‘Copied you in. Just her quick feedback. You don't have to read it now.’

Liv hadn't opened several messages. Nothing that needed putting right tonight. She said people had listened very differently. Mara asked about Joop. She laughed at the biscuit story and wanted to know what the man with the cycling map had written.

Liv told her. As she spoke, her own voice became simply the sound she made with her mouth again. It was dreadful to have to be pleased about that.

Mara asked whether something else was troubling her.

‘I played that recording again.’

No immediate answer. Mara told someone she would be there shortly. Then Liv heard a door close, not a phone being moved somewhere secret.

‘What do you want me to do?’

Liv looked at the motionless window on screen. ‘Nothing. I didn't want to sit here alone after it finished.’

‘I understand.’

‘You don't have to hear it.’

‘I didn't want to.’

Sharper than Liv expected. She looked away from the screen.

Mara sighed. ‘Sorry. But I thought we'd talked about that. I can listen and say what I hear. I have. I can't come every time it feels wrong again afterwards.’

‘I'm not asking you to.’

‘It's why you've rung.’

Liv held the phone away from her ear. The timer showed only a few minutes. That said nothing about how it felt at the other end. She had called Mara about work, the pilot, an extract she couldn't get right. Today Mara herself had asked how she was. This wasn't a score either of them could win by adding it up.

‘I wanted to hear your voice,’ Liv said. ‘That was all.’

Mara was quiet for a moment. ‘All right. You can say that. But I'm going back downstairs soon.’

Liv said she understood.

‘And tomorrow?’ Mara asked. ‘Will you have time for my question?’

It was in a message Liv had seen but not answered. A check on a short transition in Mara's own work; she hadn't wanted to steer Liv's response in advance. Liv had promised to look at her diary. She had stayed caught in her own windows.

She opened the message now and read it. A small file, the source included, a clear question. She didn't have to listen with Mara waiting for an answer. She asked how much time she needed and when it was due back.

‘Tomorrow morning's fine,’ Mara said. ‘If you can. Otherwise I'll ask someone else.’

‘I've got nine till ten.’

‘Plenty. But not with one ear in another house.’

Liv thought of Els at Roos's table or in bed already. She had no right to hold their evening closer than Mara's question in front of her.

‘I'll do it tomorrow morning. And tell you if I can't.’

Mara asked whether she was going to bed. Not straight away. Something to eat, computer off. Then yes. They said goodbye without attaching another question. Liv set down the phone. It could be quiet without anyone having disappeared.

In the kitchen she perched on the edge of a chair and ate the bread from earlier. Her tea was cold. She drank water, then cleared up. She didn't look towards the hall door when the wood creaked. A few times she wanted to. Noticing the impulse hadn't taken it away.

Before bed she saw that Roos had sent a photograph. Not Els in a chair, not proof she was asleep. A baking tin with a crack in one corner, and a question: would Els ever use the large one in her kitchen again, or could Roos borrow it? They had accidentally left Liv in the conversation where they had arranged the food.

Liv wrote that she had little to contribute, except that everything from Roos's oven seemed to end up at her house now. Roos sent a laughing face. Els said the big tin could go tomorrow.

That was all.

On Wednesday Liv woke before the alarm. She had slept, not all night without waking, but without constantly checking the time. At the table she opened Mara's file first. Not tape five. Not her own recording. She listened to what she had actually been asked, noted a join too close to a breath and put a question beside it, rather than instructions for how to do it.

She listened to the longer source, then the edit. The breath belonged to the following sentence, not the one before. A small shift could stop the speaker sounding unfairly hurried in the listening copy. Liv wrote her suggestion, sent it back and ejected the drive before finding a new problem nobody had asked her to look for.

Mara said later that it helped. She had been concentrating on the wrong boundary. That single message warmed Liv far more than confirmation that a file had arrived. She hadn't only taken.

Around midday Els rang. Bram was coming that afternoon to discuss the next work. The cupboard could come away from the wall; he needed to know what he was removing, not merely demonstrate the lever again. Roos would be there until she had to leave. Someone needed to explain exactly what would happen to the rooms afterwards.

‘You don't have to decide,’ Els said. ‘But I don't want to pay, then have you saying we should listen first.’

Liv looked at the file she had just sent Mara. The last connection to her own strange recording didn't run through a wall. She had opened it herself.

‘I won't say that.’

‘Good.’

‘I can be there this afternoon. For that appointment. Then I'll come back.’

Els said that was fine. Liv didn't ask to speak to Roos. She took the roofer's box from the shelf and wrote a note. He could collect it when he was nearby; she would leave it somewhere dry by the front door at the time they agreed. She didn't have to stay in.

Before leaving she looked once more at the desk. Nothing playing. The speakers hadn't been turned round; the plugs were in their usual places. She didn't have to make sound impossible in her house before she could go out.

She put on her coat, took her keys and left the phone in her bag as she pulled the door closed behind her.