Oliver's day

THEREFORE from Day 28's cut thumb, on Monday — the last Monday of September — Ollie took the Northern line to Broadcasting House in the jacket from the Edinburgh final, the Moleskine in his inside pocket with the plaster-wrapped thumb holding it shut, and in the green room he drank water and did not open the notebook. Helen said his name into the microphone at four and he walked into the studio and the red light came on; he opened with the Edinburgh bit — his mum, the M60, the cassette of Simply Red — and by the third minute the room had the held-breath silence he had been engineering all month, and at the button he pivoted without break into the panic attack set, and the room did the wave laugh. He walked into the corridor and a man he had never met — a friend of Pryce's, he later learned — shook his hand and said Pryce sends his best, mate, and the humiliation landed like a stone in his stomach. He took the lift down, stood on the pavement, and his phone buzzed — Yara, a single line: I heard you did it; he put the phone in his pocket and decided, on the Northern line home, that Pryce had a man in the room and that the month was now a count of who had been listening.