Chapter 8: Play
I should say what a recorder like that does when you press the triangle, because it matters.
It does not play the sound it is making.
It stops making sound and plays the file back from the beginning.
The beginning was 6:15 that evening, in the nursery on the second floor, when I switched it on the way I had switched it on every evening since March.
So what came out of that little speaker was not the foyer.
It was me.
My own voice, tinny and small and very close to the microphone.
Recorded in a room forty-one metres and one floor away from where we were standing.
“Fourteenth of September, six fifteen p.m. Ethan Blackwood, fourteen months.”
There is a hiss on those files. The speaker was about the size of a coin and it made everything sound like a bad telephone.
“Room’s twenty-one degrees. He’s had a hundred and eighty millilitres at five forty and about half a banana.”
I had never once heard myself do it.
You do a thing every night for six months and you do not know what you sound like doing it.
I sounded like a person reading a shopping list in an empty church.
“Chest clear. Nothing on the out-breath. Resting rate thirty-one over a minute, counted twice.”
“No episode last night. Twelve September, no episode. Eleven September, no episode.”
Then the log part stops and the tape just runs, because I never turned it off in the evenings.
That is the part I would have paid money to stop.
For about four minutes what came out of that speaker was a woman alone in a room with a baby.
Me telling him the water was warm. Me counting his toes in a stupid voice.
A tap running. A drawer going in.
Me singing.
I sing badly.
I sang to him constantly and it had never mattered, because there was nobody in the room who could hear it.
There were seven people in the foyer by then, standing on marble, listening to me sing “You Are My Sunshine” flat.
Underneath all of it there was a soft mechanical hum from the corner of the nursery. The humidifier. It ran on the timer from six.
It is on every one of those files, six months of them, and I had stopped hearing it in about the second week.
Victor did not move while it played.
He had one hand flat on the console table and the recorder in the other.
He looked at the floor about a metre in front of his shoes.
Marco looked at the front door.
The two men looked at nothing, which is what they were paid for.
And Serena stood up with about nine place cards in her hand and said, “Are we really going to stand here and listen to this?”
That is the closest she ever came, in front of witnesses, to saying something she had not chosen first.
Nobody answered her.
On the recording, Ethan laughed. He had a specific laugh, low, more like a cough than a laugh, and he did it when you blew on his neck.
I heard myself blow on his neck. I heard him do it.
I was sitting on the floor of that foyer holding the actual boy, and he was crying, and on the tape he was laughing, four hundred and twenty seconds ago.
That is the only moment of the entire night when I nearly stopped being able to do my job.
I put my mouth against the top of his head and I did the thing I always did, which is nothing, just be a wall, and it passed.
Victor said, without looking up, “How do I move it forward.”
Marco said, “Hold the right arrow, sir.”
He held it.
The sound went into that fast chittering noise.
Then he let go, and it dropped back into real time.
We got Teodora saying goodnight up the back stairs. We got two minutes of nothing at all.
Two minutes of a house with nobody talking in it is a long time to stand and listen to.
We got me on the landing saying, “All right, we’ll go and look for him, we’ll go and look.”
We got twenty-two stairs, which on that recording is a rhythmic bump, because the recorder was in a pocket against my hip.
Then a room with a hard floor. Everything went bright and echoing, the way a marble room sounds when it comes through a microphone.
“Good evening, Lily.”
Serena Montigue’s voice came out of a speaker the size of a coin and filled the foyer of the Blackwood house.
It was extraordinary how loud it was not, and how completely it stopped everything.
Marco’s hand went halfway to his radio and came back down.
I looked up.
For the first time in that entire evening, I lifted my head and I looked at her face.