Free Starburst by Robin Pilcher Page A

oger let out a long groan and pressed the “pause” button on the remote with force. He leaned back in his chair and slapped both hands to his forehead. “Dammit, we should have started on this before now. I just don’t see how on earth we’re going to make it work.”
    Phil Kenyon drummed his pencil on the desk as he studied the two pages of roughly drawn diagrams, his supreme confidence at their being able to programme the piece beginning to wane. “I reckon we’re all right for the first fifty-nine seconds. The timings seem to be spot-on.”
    “Yes, but that section has the whole orchestra involved. Now we dive into these three quiet passages, followed by two crescendos before we get the volume back again. If we just sequence in a load of flares and fountains, the audience will either end up bored rigid or fall fast asleep by the time we reach that point in the music.”
    Phil stuck the pencil behind his ear and pushed himself out of his seat. “We’d better have more coffee,” he said, clamping together the two empty mugs on the desk with his fingers, “otherwise we’ll be in danger of doing the same.”
    Roger glanced at his watch. It was only ten past five in the afternoon, but having only managed four hours’ fitful sleep in the past thirty-six hours, all he really felt like doing was crawling into bed and flaking out for an eternity. He pressed the “start” button on the remote and once again listened through the muted string section of the Tchaikovsky piece.
    “Okay,” he said, as Phil placed a cup of black coffee on the desk in front of him. “Let’s work first on the crescendos. We don’t want them to overrun, so we’ll use some of those short-timed items we’re getting from Hengyang and then when the volume hits in again, we’ll catch it with a battery of four-inch flash mines. How does that sound?”
    Phil took the remote from Roger and scrolled back through the music. As he listened again to the piece, he thumped his fist on the desk, out of time with the music but knowing intuitively each moment of firing. He pressed the remote at the end of the section.
    “Yeah, I reckon that would work. We’ll have to back-time the mines by at least two bars, otherwise we’ll lose synchronization when the whole orchestra comes in again.”
    “Shall we risk it?” Roger asked, feeling too tired to make a decision on it for himself.
    “I don’t see why not,” Phil replied, reaching over to the CD machine and switching it off, “but my suggestion is that we don’t make a decision right now and go sleep on it.”
    Roger rubbed both hands at the side of his bearded face. “That’s about the best idea you’ve come up with all day.”

EIGHT
     
    R ene Brownlow stood watching long after the van had pulled out of sight, its one-time presence in the cul-de-sac still marked by the lingering smell of exhaust fumes. Well, that’s it, then, she thought to herself, ye’ve gone and done it, ’aven’t ye? In the last fifteen minutes, ye’ve made a decision that’s going to change the course of yer life. All right, let’s be practical about it, everything could go belly-up and ye might well end up back here in ’Artlepool with yer tail between yer legs. But so bloody what! An opportunity ’as opened up to get away from this dreary little ’ouse in Clavering, to break into a new world outside of this cold, windy town teetering on the edge of Britain. Not that ’Artlepool is a bad place to live, but thirty-five years is a long time to be stuck here without ’ardly ever going away. A West Docker, through and through, that’s what y’are.
    She turned and walked slowly back to the house, and as she reached the gate she stopped and looked back to the end of the street, her face thoughtful as something clicked in her mind. “You’ll show ’em, lass,” that’s what Terry had said. And he’d said it once before, hadn’t he? Rene kicked the gate shut with her foot and then walked along the narrow