Chapter 1: Sand Eels
The Danish MEP had got to the sand eels, and Fran Mulcahy was a sentence and a half behind him, which was exactly where she liked to be.
"And I would remind the Commission that the sand eel is not a glamorous fish," she said into the microphone, in the voice of a fifty-eight-year-old man from Esbjerg, which was also her own. "Nobody puts it on a menu. Nobody takes its photograph. But the puffin eats it, and the cod eats it, and the mackerel eats it, and if we hoover it out of the North Sea to make pellets for salmon farms then, Chair, in five years we will be sitting in this room having the same conversation about the puffin."
Below the booth window, forty people in lanyards sat round a horseshoe of desks in committee room ASP 1G3, each with a little grey box and a dial to choose a language. Most of them had chosen hers. English was the channel you picked when you didn't trust your own booth, or when you were Maltese, or when you wanted the Danes to think you'd followed them without help.
She had been alone in the booth for twenty-six minutes. This was against the rules, against the union, and against her own personal code, which was stricter than either.
The door behind her opened and let the corridor in.
You didn't turn round, so Fran didn't. A man edged in sideways between the back of her chair and the wall, the way you'd get past knees at the cinema, and sat down in the right-hand chair. He smelled of cold air and bicycle chain. He put on the spare headset, listened for perhaps four seconds, and slid her notepad across the desk towards him.
In tidy block capitals he wrote: SORRY. TRAM. SAND EELS?
She took the pen out of his hand without looking at him and wrote YES under it, still talking. Puffins, quotas, the Dogger Bank. Her hand and her mouth had stopped needing each other's permission years ago.
He took the pen back.
I'M BENOÎT. ON LOAN FROM THE FRENCH BOOTH. LIKE A PANDA.
Down in the room the Danish man said the puffin was a bird of real importance to his constituents, particularly the ones who sold postcards. The Danes laughed first, and then everyone else laughed two seconds later in twenty-three languages. Fran pressed the cough button with her thumb, laughed once into the dead mic, a short ugly bark nobody would ever hear, let go, and said, "particularly the ones who sell postcards," in time for the English channel to laugh with the rest.
That was the sin. Not laughing. Making someone laugh. You could take the good chair, you could leave the pad with no pages, you could eat crisps in the booth, God forgive you, but you did not make the person on the mic laugh.
She wrote: 26 MINUTES.
He wrote: I KNOW. I'M VERY SORRY. THERE WAS A SWAN ON THE LINE AT MONTGOMERY.
She wrote: LIAR.
He considered this, and wrote: HALF.
At the half hour the Chair thanked the Member and gave the floor to the Commission, a woman from DG MARE with a French accent and a binder of tables. French into English: his. Fran lifted her hand off the desk, the old signal, three fingers, two, one, and the Commission woman was halfway into her first sentence when Fran's fist closed. He didn't wait for a full stop. He took the sentence from the middle, as if it had been his all along and he'd only lent it to her for the morning.
She sat back and pushed one side of her headset off her ear, the way you did when you were resting and not really resting.
He was good. She'd known he would be, because nobody got lent to the English booth for being bad; they'd been through all the bad ones already. What she hadn't expected was a voice she'd have to listen to. His English had a Liverpool vowel in it that he'd fought, lost to, and then made friends with. He didn't decorate. He stayed close behind the Commission woman without ever treading on her heels, and when she reached for a figure he already had his mouth ready for its shape.
Fran wrote the figures anyway, because that was the job of whoever was resting. 112 000 t. 2027. 15 %. She wrote them big and drew a box round the fifteen, because the room was full of fishing-county MEPs who'd hear fifty if you so much as breathed on it.
He glanced down and put one finger on the box, which meant thank you, and said "fifteen per cent" without a flicker.
At half eleven the Chair announced a contribution by video link from the Danish Fisheries Agency in Copenhagen, and could the technicians please. A man in a fleece came up on the big screen, too close to his laptop, a whiteboard behind him. Danish. Benoît didn't have Danish; Fran did, from a year in Aarhus she still dreamed about sometimes, mostly the bicycles. She tapped his arm with two fingers and was live before he'd taken his hand off the mic button.
He didn't take his headset off. He turned his chair a few degrees towards her and listened to her output, which he had no reason to do.
The man in the fleece had been talking for four minutes about dredge surveys when his laptop found the room's speakers and the room's speakers found the laptop and the sound folded back on itself into a squeal. It came up through the headset like a drill. Fran had the volume dial spun down before her brain had found a word for it, and she kept talking, "the survey, which we carry out each December," because the English channel didn't care that her ears were ringing.
Beside her, Benoît had ripped his headset off so hard the cable caught the desk lamp. He had his palm pressed flat over his right ear and his eyes shut. For about three seconds he looked like a man who'd been hit by something he had been expecting to be hit by for a long time.
Then the technician cut the feed. The man in the fleece froze with his mouth open. The Chair apologised in Portuguese. Benoît opened his eyes and picked up the pen.
DANES, he wrote. THEY DO IT ON PURPOSE. VIKINGS.
She didn't laugh. She was live, interpreting the Chair's apology, which went on for some time and included the technicians, the Danish Fisheries Agency, and the whole concept of the internet.
She wrote: REPORT IT. There was a form for it now, after the years everyone had spent shouting into laptops: the time, the meeting, the speaker, the symptoms.
He looked at the two words for a while. Then he drew a small neat line underneath them, as if he were filing them somewhere, and turned the page.
The coffee machine on the third floor took coins, cards, and in Fran's experience about a minute off your life per cup. Benoît fed it a two-euro coin and pressed the button for something called Cappuccino Délice, then stood back as though he expected it to sing.
"You're Fran," he said.
"I know."
"Mulcahy. Frances Mulcahy. I've always wanted to know what you looked like."
She had her own coffee, black, from the machine on the other side of the lifts, which everyone agreed was worse but was never broken. She looked at him properly for the first time. Late thirties. Taller than the booth deserved, with the sort of curly hair that made him look like he'd just come in from somewhere windy even when he hadn't. A navy jumper with the elbows going. A good watch he probably hadn't bought for himself.
"Why would you want to know what I looked like?"
"Because I've had you in my ear for nine years." He heard it, and winced. "Sorry. That sounds like a police matter. I mean relay. Every time a Latvian talks about fertiliser and the French booth has no Latvian, we take English. We take you. You're the best relay in the building, did nobody tell you?"
"No."
"You don't speed up when they speed up. You don't do that thing where the end of the sentence goes up like a question so we'll forgive you." He took his cappuccino out of the machine and looked at it with betrayal. "You breathe in through your nose before a number. So I always know one's coming. And after about four o'clock your th goes soft." He tried it. "Fings."
"I do not say fings."
"Only after four. Stockport?"
She stared at him.
"I don't know where Stockport is," he said, happily. "I know you're not Liverpool, because my mother is Liverpool, and if you were Liverpool you'd have told me by now. So: Manchester-ish. I asked Ger."
There it was. "Ger told you."
"Ger told me you were from the bit of Manchester that isn't Manchester and gets annoyed when you say so."
"It's a separate town. It's got its own viaduct."
"You see? Annoyed."
People didn't listen to interpreters. That was the point of interpreters. You were good when you disappeared, when an MEP from Lisbon could shake hands with an MEP from Vilnius at the end of a meeting and feel that they had understood each other, and you'd been nothing more than a slight delay. The best compliment Fran had ever had was from a German delegate who'd walked past the booth afterwards and said, puzzled, I didn't notice you at all.
She did not know what to do with nine years of someone noticing.
"Nobody listens to relay," she said.
"Everybody listens to relay. They just don't know they're doing it." He drank his cappuccino and made a face. "This is a crime. I'm going to write to someone."
"I've never heard you," she said. "In nine years. Not once."
"No. Nobody takes relay off the French booth if they can help it. We editorialise."
She nearly laughed, and caught it, and he saw her catch it and looked very pleased with himself, which made her not laugh more firmly.
"Why are they lending you to us?"
"Because you're dying out. Since the British went home there are about eleven people left in Brussels with English as an A language and the right passport, and four of them are Ger." He nodded at her lanyard as though it might tell him something. "And you. You're not British any more, they tell me."
"I'm Irish."
"Since?"
"2019. By post." She heard how that sounded and didn't care. "My nan was from Ennis. You fill in a form and send them her birth certificate and about three hundred euros and then one Tuesday you're Irish."
"And how is it?"
"Same as before, but people buy me drinks in March."
"My mother's still English," he said. "Forty years in Belgium. She says Belgium can have her when it learns to make a cup of tea."
Ger Fitzpatrick came out of the lift then, sixty-one and the size of a wardrobe, with a roll of Polo mints in one hand and his reading glasses pushed up into his hair. Ger had been in the English booth since before there were screens in the meeting rooms, and he ate Polos all day long because they were the only sweet in the world you could eat on a live mic without anyone downstairs hearing you.
"There he is. The panda." He clapped Benoît on the shoulder hard enough to spill the cappuccino, which was no loss. "Is she minding you, chief?"
"She's very strict."
"She is. She's the only one of us who can count." Ger offered the Polos round. Fran took one. Benoît took two and put one behind his right ear, for reasons that weren't explained. "Did she box your fifteens for you?"
"She did."
"Good woman. Fifteen and fifty," Ger said to Benoît, darkly, tapping the side of his nose. "Ruined more careers in this building than drink."
After lunch Benoît took an orange out of his rucksack and began to peel it under the desk, slowly, in one long spiral.
"You can't eat in here," Fran said. They were off; the meeting had broken into an argument in the corridor about the agenda, and both their mics were dark.
"I'm not eating. I'm peeling." He held out a segment. "Here."
"No, ta."
He kept holding it out. "Where I'm from, if someone gives you an orange you don't refuse it. It's very rude."
"Where are you from?"
"Binche."
"Never heard of it."
"It's near Charleroi."
"Never heard of that either."
"Lucky you." He was still holding out the segment. "At carnival, the men dress up as Gilles, with straw stuffed in their costumes and bells on their belts, and they throw oranges into the crowd. Hard. At your head, sometimes. And you're not allowed to throw them back. You keep it. It's a gift. Even if it breaks your window. Even if it breaks your nose."
"That's barbaric."
"It's UNESCO."
She took the segment, because it was clear he would hold it there all afternoon, and ate it, and it was a very good orange, which annoyed her.
He'd taken the right-hand chair again when they came back from lunch, she noticed. The right-hand chair had a wobble in its back and was closer to the door that let the corridor in. Everyone in the English booth fought for the left one, which had the good back and a clear view of the Chair. He'd walked straight past it.
The tram home to Saint-Gilles was full of schoolkids and a man with a cello. Fran stood, holding the strap, and listened to nobody in particular, which was her favourite thing to do at the end of a day of listening to everybody. Her flat was above a launderette on the Chaussée de Waterloo, and in winter it was the warmest flat in Brussels, because of the dryers.
She put her bag down, took her coat off, and found a long spiral of orange peel in the pocket. She had no memory of putting it there. You couldn't leave peel in the booth bin; by morning the whole floor would know. She must have scooped it up without thinking. She stood looking at it in her hand.
Her laptop chimed. Sunday and Wednesday, half seven, for as long as there'd been video calls good enough to sign on. Before that it had been the textphone, the big beige box on the hall table in Edgeley that clacked out his words on a strip of paper, and before that it had been her.
She propped the laptop against the fruit bowl and her dad's face filled it, too close, the way he always held the iPad, as if she might have got worse at seeing since Sunday.
What's that? He pointed at the peel, which she was still holding.
Orange.
You don't eat oranges.
I do now. She put it down on the table. How was the hospital?
His hands went up, and she knew from the speed of them that this would take a while. Brendan Mulcahy had worked thirty-one years as a print finisher at a works in Reddish where the machines had been so loud that the hearing men had worn ear defenders and used signs anyway, and he had hands like a man who'd folded a few million leaflets, broad and quick and precise. He did not do anything slowly that he could do angrily.
The letter, he signed. The letter from the eye clinic. Did she know what it said at the bottom? If you are unable to attend, please telephone. He spelled it out, P-H-O-N-E, two-handed, jabbing each letter. Telephone. They've got it on my notes, Deaf, in a box, in red, and they want me to telephone them.
I'll ring them in the morning.
You will not.
It's no bother, Dad—
I emailed them. Three times. I'm going down there on Thursday and I'll stand at the desk until somebody learns to write. He sat back, pleased with the plan. Ann from the club's coming. She's got a big coat. She can stand for hours in that coat.
Fran laughed, out loud, in her empty flat. He couldn't hear it, but he saw it, and he looked satisfied, the way he had when she was small and he'd done his whole repertoire of ducks.
County lost, he told her.
I saw.
Disgrace. Then he narrowed his eyes at the screen. What's the matter with you?
Nothing.
You've got a face on.
I've got the only face I've got.
You've got a face like when you were nine and you'd put the cat in the airing cupboard. He leaned in. Who is it?
Nobody. A new colleague. Belgian. She thought about it. He talks too much.
Her dad considered this for a long moment, then signed, slowly, so she'd be sure to get it, So do you, and put his tongue out at her.
The flat in Ixelles was above a shop that sold wax-print fabric from Kinshasa, folded in bright bolts in the window under a sign that said Maman Wax, and on a weekday evening the street outside was all music and arguments in Lingala, which Benoît didn't speak and liked anyway.
He couldn't hear much of it from the kitchen. Not with the right ear.
He sat at the table with the window open and a beer he wasn't really drinking and listened to the other thing instead, the thing that was always there now: a thin high note in his right ear, like a kettle someone had put on in a flat upstairs in March of last year and never come back for. After the Danes it was louder. It would be louder for a day or two, and then it would settle back to what it had been, and he would tell himself, again, that what it had been was fine.
He put the phone on the table and opened the app, and the app made the sound of rain on a tent, which was the only thing that worked. He turned it up.
Fings, he thought, and smiled. She'd been so offended.
The letter was behind the toaster. It had been behind the toaster since March, a long white envelope from the ENT department at Saint-Pierre with his name in the little window, and it had been opened once, read once, and put back exactly where it had been, as if that were a place where things got better on their own. Sometimes he took it out and turned it over. He took it out now. The rain on the tent kept on.
Then he put it back behind the toaster, and turned the rain up.