The Loved One

Episode 4: The Right One by Lynda Radley

• Created by Danny Krass. Series concept by Oliver Emanuel. • Season 1 • Episode 4

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"I wish you were here Billie. You'd love this. It's a big party on the HMS Weirdville..."

An exhausted Pink returns to Luca's Cafe where a stranger's recording of the ocean promises a sound she's been longing to hear.

Performed by Kaylah Copeland, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Catriona Faint and Chloe-Ann Tylor

 Written by Oliver Emanuel
 Directed by Lu Kemp
 Sound Design & Music by Danny Krass
 Series concept by Oliver Emanuel
 Produced by Tron Theatre and supported by Creative Scotland
 
 #TheLovedOne

Speaker 1:

Hello, welcome to the Loved One. This is a piece of immersive audio drama designed for listening on headphones. If you want to have a wee, lie down in a dark room, stick on a cheeky eye mask and go ahead. But wherever you're listening, please enjoy the Loved One.

Speaker 2:

My flatmates say it's creepy Hearing me pad about during the night Opening drawers running the water. That's why.

Speaker 1:

I'm here.

Speaker 2:

No one cares who I am or what I'm doing Away from distractions. I listen for you what I'm doing Away from distractions.

Speaker 1:

I listen for you. This is the Loved One. Episode 4 the Right One, by Linda Radley.

Speaker 2:

Once there was a lot of all-night cafes. This is the only one left With the bacon. Air meets the Glasgow night. Condensation runs down the window panes, red leather seats, yellow formica tables, spit and sawdust, but warm and cheap. They have vegan sausages now. Luca gets them in just for me. Got a small frying pan, wrote Martha on the handle in Sharpie. He doesn't mind if I nurse the same cup of coffee for hours. He's friendly. But he doesn't ask personal questions. All I have to do is catch his eye, send a silent signal and he brings me toast and jam.

Speaker 2:

At half past three I observe a pattern. Between 1 and 3am it's clubbers and gig goers. Thursdays to Sundays, a clutch of off-duty drag queens take up a booth removing fake eyelashes as they wait for their builder's tea and dippy eggs. Between three and five it thins out. A woman who sits by the window tries to console someone unseen under her breath. Three cab drivers with matching bellies eat together in resentful silence. A man dressed only in black comes at 4.15, reads the Glasgow Times and leaves the Grim Reaper, the Sandman I'll never know. At 5.30 it gets busier. Truck drivers, office cleaners, shift workers. I cycle home.

Speaker 2:

But now the ecosystem is disturbed by an American, a private investigator from LA, called Pink, a walking cliché. Even with my headphones on, I hear her Wobbling her table, scraping her chair. Her daughter is missing, last seen here, and there's a transactional taste to the way she approaches people Desperate, persistent. The Grim Reaper was very put out by her questions, left half his bacon butty behind. She makes it harder to send a signal, makes it harder to close my ears to the human world and tune into you, makes me wonder what it would be like to be able to open huge jaws and swallow all those who encroach on my territory. Look, lady, I just Pink. Pink. That's the only socket I'm on a deadline.

Speaker 3:

So am I A big one? Talk please, I'm asking. Nicely, talk for a bit and you have your seat back. Ok, kat, it's.

Speaker 2:

Martha, maybe you should go home Get some sleep.

Speaker 3:

I would that I could Now sit down. Martha, I won't bite. I've told you I didn't see her. Look at the photo. I've told you I didn't see her.

Speaker 2:

Look at the photo. I've looked. Look again. I come here to work.

Speaker 3:

I don't notice people, you notice everything.

Speaker 2:

How I wear my headphones.

Speaker 3:

Sometimes I close my eyes too. You don't make it obvious how much you see, how much you hear. You're better than some professionals. I know, Was she a?

Speaker 2:

quiet person, unlike you. That could be why Is?

Speaker 3:

she? What Is Billy? A quiet person, billy, that's her name, and no, not quiet. Maybe here, I guess, but can't be sure, sorry really Talk, but I don't know.

Speaker 2:

Sure, sorry, really Talk, but I don't know anything.

Speaker 3:

Those podcasts you listen to Any good, I need something for when I can't sleep Podcasts. I never hear a tsk-tsk-tsk in your headphones, so it's gotta be podcasts, right.

Speaker 2:

Here Put these on Whales A pod, so I suppose it's a podcast.

Speaker 3:

Oh, it's just when I thought shit couldn't get any weirder.

Speaker 2:

I listen to an area of the North Atlantic Ocean, Part of a team that counts marine animals using passive acoustic monitoring. We set hydrophones to record and count animals by listening to their voices. Counting that's what you've been doing here every night. The counting is done by computers. The recordings we make generate spectrograms colourful images of the frequencies that make up a sound. Are you following?

Speaker 3:

The animal sounds get made into pictures, correct.

Speaker 2:

And different animals generate different pictures. A whale sound looks different to a porpoise sound. A humpback whale produces a different spectrogram to that of a sperm whale.

Speaker 3:

Why the headphones If it's all done by picture?

Speaker 2:

Sometimes I listen to the unrecognised sounds. A while back I heard a whale. That isn't part of our study. We don't have a lot of recordings, so the computer didn't recognise them. A mother and a baby may have travelled outside of their usual habitat. Climate change.

Speaker 3:

You're looking, I mean listening.

Speaker 2:

Listening for one mother and one baby 30 out of a total of 300 of these whales died in 2020.

Speaker 3:

Every mother and especially every baby counts, so hearing them is a big deal. Right, it would have been, except there was a hitch.

Speaker 2:

A technical problem with the storage of the recordings. Now I need to listen to the entire database to find what I heard, what I think I heard.

Speaker 3:

Technical problem. My ass, you lost them somehow. That's why you're doing this here in the middle of the night. Well, if that's everything, you don't have to explain it to me. Kid, I get it. I always wanted to see a whale up close, don't? Why not?

Speaker 2:

This whale that I'm trying to find is called a right whale because it floats instead of sinks when you harpoon it Right whale to catch.

Speaker 3:

People should stay away from whales, so you've never seen one in real life.

Speaker 2:

My parents took me to SeaWorld in Orlando when I was ten. Saw an orca up close. It was one of the happiest days of my life. My parents took me to SeaWorld in Orlando when I was 10. Saw an orca up close. It was one of the happiest days of my life. We flew thousands of miles to see wild animals perform tricks in captivity.

Speaker 3:

Oh, come on, kid, your parents just wanted to make you happy.

Speaker 2:

So they sacrificed my future security for a fleeting thrill.

Speaker 3:

Jesus, your generation is such a bunch of Debbie Downers. If we're doomed, then we may as well enjoy ourselves. Right, that's the thinking that got us here. I've heard it before. Billy says my generation are the worst. I like the sound of her. No, listen to the kid. No, you could do things for these animals if you find them in all that sound.

Speaker 2:

Right, we can track them, keep them safe, implement the laws that stop humans from hurting them. That's something.

Speaker 3:

I'll let you get on with it.

Speaker 2:

Um, do you, Do you have a recording Billy? Sure, Give me a sec. Do you have a recording Billy?

Speaker 3:

Sure, give me a sec. Hi, I know you can track this, so I'll keep it short. I'm alive, I'm, I'm okay. Sometimes, just sometimes, I miss you a very little bit. She spoke to me.

Speaker 2:

I had to plug her phone in for a minute. How did she look? I don't know. She was in my face, like you, but I didn't. I didn't really look at her. I didn't want to, but she seemed chatty and I. I went to the bathroom to give her some privacy. When I came back, she was gone.

Speaker 3:

That's it. When was this Three weeks? Ago, the drag queens from the She-Dick were in, so Somewhere between Thursday and Sunday around 2am. Thank you, martha. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

One of the first deep-sea recordings was made in the late 1980s. You can clearly hear a woo-woo whistle sound and another sound like tracks An eerie underwater ghost train, and that's what everybody thought. The sound was actually made by an iceberg scraping along the sea floor, which, given that the ice was already melting by then, means that it is the sound of a ghost stream, or may as well be. I hear it all the time in my sleep. I tell people that my job is about counting animal calls. What I hear are the silences. What I map is loss, decline, crisis.

Speaker 2:

So when I heard you you and your baby communicating, I started shouting. I turned you up full blast. I got up on my desk and danced to you. It felt like you sent out a signal and you chose me to hear it because you knew that I needed something, some glimmer of hope. I drank like Captain Ahab. I cheersed you, but when I woke you were gone, wiped the hard drive, soaked in natural botanical gin with a hint of sea salt. In all my celebrating, I forgot to be a scientist. I neglected to make note of the file number.

Speaker 3:

Martha wake up.

Speaker 2:

Martha, wake up, martha, wake up. At the front of Lucas Cafe there are two large windows. They look out on the black and blue Glasgow night. Sometimes I see you through the windows floating by in the deep dark, mother and baby. I hear your calls Colossal, beautiful, frightening, gentle, powerful, strange Tonight. I know you are not here for me. You're indifferent, just as you should be. I climb onto the yellow table to be closer to your sound. What's up?

Speaker 3:

Calm down.

Speaker 2:

But no, it's not your call. I hear it is the eerie underwater train sound. I try to take off my headphones but they're glued to my ears and I look up and there are harpoons in the water nets falling from above. I call to you, try to warn you. I need to do something to let you go free. Put your head down, you're gonna hurt yourself. Go far, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I hit the window over and over until finally the glass shatters and water spills into the cafe. But it's too late, can't get to you, my signal doesn't reach you, you and I and your baby.

Speaker 3:

We float up towards the light to where the people with knives are waiting. It's all right, take my hand, Be careful. You broke glass there. You caught yourself. Luca, can we get some toast here please?

Speaker 2:

Where did I get here Give?

Speaker 3:

me your hand. No, no, no, give it to me. You've been here all night. You were asleep on your feet. If anyone was going to go postal here, I thought it might have been me. If you plan to break windows, you're going to need to work on your swing and, you know, be conscious.

Speaker 2:

What did I say it?

Speaker 3:

was loud but hard to pick out. You know Sleep talk. Thanks, luca. Well, that's a first. Never seen Luca rattled. I should go. Luca will be angry if you don't eat this.

Speaker 2:

I'm shouting in front of everyone.

Speaker 3:

And boy is word going to travel fast. Oh God, hey, don't you know you are one of the most talked about subjects in this place. The theories the regulars have are wild. The McClinchy brothers who Cab drivers, big bellies, convinced you're some sort of computer whiz, probably working for the Chinese. They don't talk, not even to each other. A crooked accountant ran off with their money. They blamed each other. I tracked the guy down. They talk fine. Now Peggy, you know, sits by the window, talks to her dead sister. She thinks you're a money launderer and her sister I thought you said her sister was dead, she is Anyway. Sister thinks you're a time traveler. Figures she's a real fan Desus. Mr Nam thinks you're sitting there writing some great opus using music software. Mr Nam Dresses in black. The Grim Reaper. Mr Nam works for the council. Lex Bach you run him off. I haven't seen him for weeks. His wife was in the hospice. He still comes in, but in the mornings.

Speaker 2:

Now you got your head messed up, didn't you? I have to stop.

Speaker 3:

I've got a fitness for work review Might be for the best kid. You don't want to hurt yourself. What about you? Do as I say, because half the time I don't know, what I'm doing. Go get your stuff.

Speaker 2:

So I do. But when we go back to the table, peggy, who sits in the window usually, is using my headphones Listening. She asks me to explain it to her, wants to understand what she is hearing. So I do, fascinated, she wonders if I would let her listen to the sea again sometime. When I tell her there's a particular sound that I'm searching for, she asks if she can help, says she and her sister worry a lot about what is happening to the planet and would like to be able to do something for a change. And I say yeah, actually, peggy, please, that would be a huge help.

Speaker 3:

All right, all right, everyone. Please take a pair of headphones and earbuds from the box. This is Martha, and see ya, yes, she is, she will explain what you need to do.

Speaker 2:

Um hi, okay. So the animals that we're looking for are called right whales, and I'm going to give you this, which is an example of what they sound like. If you think you hear anything even remotely like that, then just call me over and I'll check. You're listening to files 2054 to 2080. Um, thank you. It turns out all these loners are great at listening. Luca puts it on the cafe's social media. It's one crappy Facebook page, but people come. He thanks me for the uptick in business. Everyone keeps showing up for you. I wish you were here, billy, with tattoos, scars, voices in their heads and nowhere else to go.

Speaker 3:

It's a big party on the HMS Bredfield. Whenever any of them stop listening, I get them talking.

Speaker 2:

Give out your picture, press for anything they might know we gather together in this small space, tracking you, working through the night. Looking around, it strikes me that we're a bit like a crew of a reverse whaling ship, one that wants you to swim, not float.

Speaker 3:

Any minute now.

Speaker 2:

Any minute, I'll hear your call all.

Speaker 1:

You've been listening to the Loved One, episode 4, by Linda Radley, featuring Sharon Duncan-Brewster, chloe-ann Tyler and Kyla Copeland, directed by Lou Kemp. Sound design and music by Danny Crass, made in partnership with Tron Theatre Glasgow, supported by Creative Scotland. Next time on Episode 5 of the Loved One, a wild Saturday night, ancient saints with wounds of their own to salve might just offer up a vital clue.