ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
Personal Journal: Captain John Price
Date: [Redacted] β Day Two
Location: Joint Task Force Facility, UK
I don't know why I'm writing this down.
Nothing happened. Operationally speaking, nothing happened at all β routine morning, 0500 start, heading to the east corridor to check the amended patrol schedule before my run. Standard. Unremarkable. The kind of morning that doesn't make it into journals because there's nothing to put in them.
Except I'm sitting at my desk at 0523 and I'm writing it down anyway.
Day two of the attachment.
I'll say this for her: she's quiet. Moves through the base without taking up more space than she needs to, which is not what I expected from the file and not what the men expected either β I can tell from the way they keep waiting for a performance that isn't coming. They don't know what to do with a woman who arrived with a holdall and a provisional clearance and simply got on with things.
But that's not what I'm writing about.
East corridor. 0510. The base at that hour has its own silence β not empty, because there are always people awake, always something running somewhere, but the administrative quiet of a building that hasn't fully started yet. The heating system. The distant sound of whoever's on the early kit check. My own boots on the floor.
The women's facilities are at the far end of the east corridor. I've walked it a thousand times.
I was maybe ten metres from the briefing room door when I heard it.
Coming through the wall. Muffled by the distance and the plumbing and whatever soundproofing this building has, which has never been tested for this specific purpose β which is to say that I could hear it clearly enough to know it was singing and clearly enough to know it was her and not clearly enough to make out more than fragments of the words.
I know the song. Not well β it's not the kind of music that makes it into my regular rotation β but I know it the way you know songs that have been in the world long enough to reach everywhere. Something about love. About wanting it. About the particular vulnerability of someone who isn't sure they deserve the thing they're asking for.
She was singing it to the shower wall at 0510 in the morning.
Not performing. That's the thing I keep coming back to, sitting here trying to make sense of it. I've read enough of her file by now to understand that performance is the mechanism β that the voice is a tool she has spent years sharpening, that she deploys it with the same precision she deploys everything else. I expected, if I ever heard her sing informally, to hear the professional underneath the casual. The training showing through.
What I heard was someone singing because they needed to. Not for a room. Not for a target. Not for any audience at all. The kind of singing people do when they're alone and something in them has to come out somewhere and music is the only container large enough for it.
The voice was the same voice.
That was what stopped me.
In the day and a half since her arrival I have been watching for the seam. There is always a seam. Twenty years of reading people and there is always a point at which the performance and the person come apart.
Which is itself unusual. Which I had been noting and filing.
Through a wall at 0510 in the morning, without meaning to, she answered the question I hadn't asked out loud.
β The warmth is real. The feeling in the voice is real. The thing she deploys so precisely in professional contexts β it's not a construction.
She isn't performing even when she sounds like that. That's just what she sounds like when she's alone with no reason to be anything for anyone.
I stood in the east corridor for longer than I should have.
I'm not going to write down how long.
Not controlled the way a professional controls a technically demanding passage. The way you reach for a high note when there's no one watching, when you don't care if you get it wrong, when you're singing it because the song requires it and you're alone and so you just β
She got there. Every one. With something in the voice that wasn't precision β it was more ungainly than precision, more committed than technique, the sound of a person who is entirely inside the music rather than outside it managing it.
I've heard better singers in controlled environments.
I have never heard anything that sounded more like the truth.
I kept walking when I realised I'd stopped. Amended patrol schedule. Checked it. Filed the notes. Went for my run. Standard route. 0530 to 0600. Came back. Showered. Coffee. At my desk by 0615.
Normal morning. Operationally speaking.
Something about love, the song said.
She was asking the wall for it.
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
π [masterlist] | next βΊ
