The Old Television Studio, Chapter Two

Cresting the rise of the railway bridge at the top end of the freeway, she stopped by her bike and took in the view. Her face, flushed from the uphill effort, was alight in the wind and sun.

Beneath a blue sky warm with fine afternoon clouds, Nottingham’s domed Town Hall sat like a jewel amidst the cityscape. Closer at hand to Jenny’s left, the Queen’s Medical Centre sprawled beside the bumpy beginnings of campus grass, where one of the first tower-blocks stood sentinel. Everywhere between were known streets, familiar byways. Here was Jenny’s Nottingham, and she felt as if she held the key tucked away in her bosom.

This was why she’d come, as so many others had. It was better than where she’d been before. Friends were here, and a cause to believe in.

Jenny’s rucksack buzzed.

She reached inside it for her phone, thoughts still fond with Robin. That was the only reason she was taken unawares.

Because it wasn’t Robin.

Her throat seemed to rise up into her mouth.

It was a pity – it was really a pity – that some people had to do and say things like that. Jenny felt as if all her happiness was ruined now, the lovely vista suddenly overspread as by a black wing shadowing the summer. That, or it might have been the dark folds of some vast tattered cloak. One text-message, but somehow underwritten on that vile snatch of script was the downfall of Nottingham’s proud spires. It was what laughter and sanctuary and faith could not withstand. And after doom had visited the last corner where she and Robin might have smiled, all that would be left was what was represented by the texts, and their doer, and the act of sending them.

Jenny had wondered before whether all this could be the work of a mere boy. She did recall a friend advising her, not so long ago, to be careful of jumping to that conclusion. The messages in fact were often more like the sort of thing a man would say. A horrible man.

People who tell you nobody looks good in cycling clothes can’t have any idea what I’m –

Thinking about. Doing. Jenny threw the phone back into her bag in disgust.

If it was the boy next door, then why had he waited so long to text her about the glimpse she’d given him this morning? That strengthened the argument it wasn’t.

But in that case, it would have to be someone who’d seen her since.

All at once Jenny glanced around her, frightened. With pensive palms she tried to smooth down the light fabric of the seat of her shorts.

To be honest though, they weren’t much more than little knickers.

Without any elastic in the legs. That was why she’d chosen them.

But it was one thing to joke about waging war on your overdemonstrative neighbour, and quite another to be out here atop an overpass on your own, wearing no panties, when somebody far worse might be following you. Or watching you right now.

Jenny drew a deep, deep breath.

He was not going to spoil this.

Whether boy next door or grown man of provenance indeterminate, she was not going to pedal home pell-mell and hide because of him.

Not on a beautiful day in Nottingham.

She straddled her bicycle again and moved off, standing in the stirrups to build onward thrust, that the slippy shorts poked back whence she came. It was Jenny’s sincere hope any unwanted spectators would interpret from the gesture what she thought of them.

By the time the sun was low, Jenny had come upon a track fringed by dry tangles of the last summer herb. The noise from the highway alongside was no more than a mutter.

It was peaceful here. Jenny was walking with her bicycle again. This felt like one of the older places, dipped in mystique which had lingered since the creation of Nottingham. What rose from the tarmac and the rustling verge mingled pleasingly with the girl who was likewise giving back heat to the waning day.

Yet the quiet and the solitude were a little spooky too, after the latest text-message and the route onto which it had steered Jenny’s ruminations.

Here was a forgotten building of some kind, its chain-link fence much overgrown with weed, but the gate unbarred. Jenny crossed through to the forecourt, rested her bike against the smooth outer wall of red brick, and hung up her cycle-helmet and bag.

It was a Nottingham Cable Network television studio, long disused.

As the shadows steadily lengthened, so Jenny’s prior anxiety began to grow again. She glanced back at the out-of-the-way sideroad, mindful once again of the thinness of her shorts.

Tentatively she touched the door to the studio’s reception-area, and tried. It wasn’t locked. Jenny went in.

The old time was safe. Her generation had been very young when The Four Heroes brought about Nottingham, and filming still went on in this place. Jenny was glad to find herself suddenly somewhere you’d struggle to even picture a mobile phone. There was surprisingly little corrosion or corruption, none at all really, and Jenny felt that if she were to switch on the dusty monitor above the security-desk, it would be showing a teatime television programme which hadn’t been on since her childhood.

The corridors leading out of reception were glass-walled, but the sun was well beneath the surrounding sheds by now. Jenny trod deeper into the dim.

“Hello?” she called out timidly. “Is anybody there?”

She couldn’t think why anybody would be, or what she’d say to them if they were. Someone had been scaring her with text-messages, and please could she…what? Sit in the office a bit? Then she really would have felt like a silly primary-school girl.

The problem was, witticisms still weren’t making Jenny any more comfortable.

She’d had to bite back on tears when she’d thought of that TV show, and the days a bath before bed was the only time you went without knickers.

How did life lead you from there to here, creeping into the guts of an abandoned building, half-undressed and afraid with night coming on?

The carpeted walkway ended in double-doors so massive and imposing they could only give onto the shooting-stage. Across the handles fell the last shaft of day, rich in golden motes.

Jenny knew by now she wasn’t only here in search of help or refuge.

So she obeyed the calling that sounded out over her awe, and pushed the ancient archway wide.

TO BE CONTINUED