Sounds Like Radio Episode 14
Rav, on the phone to the next caller, gave Danny a thumbs-up, and Gerry pressed a button to divert the line into the show’s mix.
“Hi, Ms . . . er . . . King. What’s your question?”
“You can call me Bronwen,” a soft voice said.
It was a nervous voice, and Danny looked quickly at Daisy. They preferred bold, articulate callers with something to say, people who made “good radio”.
They would probably keep this one short.
“OK then, Bronwen. Fire ahead,” Danny said.
“I was wondering about natural remedies.”
“For what condition?”
“Well, for low mood, if that’s taken seriously.”
“All mental health is serious, Bronwen.”
Gerry had thought the voice sounded familiar, and then she got it. It was Bronwen from Finance!
They had worked together for a few years.
Bronwen’s tone was a little bit wheedling, although neither Daisy nor Rav seemed to notice.
Gerry saw Rav’s monitor with Daisy’s added text on it: continue with this caller – nice to have something on alternatives.
“There’s so much online,” Bronwen said, “you can’t see the wood for the trees.
“If I could find a way to make a . . . database, sort of, of things that work and things that are crackpot –”
“Wouldn’t that be cool?” Danny said. As he chatted to Bronwen she seemed to loosen up.
Gerry was thinking back to drab offices. She remembered Bronwen as the needy type.
There had been too many of those, a queue of them in Gerry’s head.
Hadn’t it been Bronwen who had frequently been off work?
Gerry recalled covering for her, or at least adding some of Bronwen’s work to her pile of “to dos”.
From Bronwen’s call to Danny’s final sign-off, the phone-in flew by.
Daisy debriefed with Rav and Danny around the microphones afterwards but said nothing about the technical side of things.
Cesca had told Gerry that this would be a good sign.
“A good engineer isn’t noticed until she messes up,” she had said.
When she could edge the team out of the studio section she put away the microphones and collected Danny’s soda cans.
It was quiet now, with that peculiar, thick, inky silence of a recording studio, padded from the outside world. A studio with no outside drilling!
Gerry smiled, remembering her first day and Cesca trying to hunt down the drilling, and finding the builder.
It was great that Cesca might have something going with Bill. He seemed nice. Cesca deserved something good.
She looked through the glass at Rav, Daisy and Danny laughing in the control room.
Winding a final cable, she thought again of Bronwen.
It felt strange to have handled the woman’s voice, to have channelled it on to the airwaves without so much as a “hi” between the two of them.
Maybe she ought to have spoken to her briefly when the call was over?
But she shook her head.
Why Bronwen King, of all people? They hadn’t even been friends.