Source A: What the cylinder kept

Most objects arrive at the sound archive looking less important than their paperwork suggests. We receive cardboard boxes of cassettes, reels wrapped in newspaper and envelopes containing nothing but a date. The box delivered from the old theatre was smaller than a loaf of bread. Its string had loosened, and one corner had gone soft with rain.

Inside, beneath a layer of grey tissue, lay a dark cylinder in a velvet-lined tin. A label had been pressed into the lid:

MARA VENN — DRESSING ROOM TEST — PRIVATE

The first two words meant nothing to me. The last one should have made me pause. Instead, I treated it as an instruction left by an over-cautious clerk. Archives are crowded with commands from people who cannot explain what they intended: KEEP FLAT, NOT WANTED, DO NOT ERASE. Time turns warnings into puzzles, and puzzles are difficult for an archivist to resist.

I carried the cylinder to the small studio where damaged recordings are examined. Under the lamp, its surface showed a pale scratch running almost from end to end. I photographed it, measured it and removed the loose dust with a brush soft enough to bend beneath its own weight. Each task had a box on the conservation form. Each box received a neat black tick. The procedure made the object seem obedient.

It was too fragile to place on an ordinary machine, so a scanner mapped the surface without touching it. On the monitor, a thin line began to crawl across the screen. At first it resembled a row of broken fence posts. The computer translated those marks into sound while I waited with my headphones beside me, trying not to imagine too much.

There was a rush of static. A knock. Then a woman drew breath.

Her first words were lost beneath a storm of scratches, but the next sentence arrived intact. The voice was bright, impatient and much closer than it had any right to be. Mara repeated a line from a play, stopped halfway through and complained that the room was cold. Someone beyond the recording laughed. She laughed back.

I forgot the conservation form. I forgot the rain tapping against the high windows. A name that had meant nothing five minutes earlier now belonged to a person who cleared her throat, missed her cue and began again. When she sang three uncertain notes to test the machine, I caught myself holding my breath, as though any movement in the studio might frighten her away.

The rehearsal ended with the scrape of a chair. I reached towards the keyboard to stop the file, but the cylinder continued turning in its digital copy. Mara spoke again, more quietly.

“Nell, I do not think it is listening now.”

There was a pause, followed by words that were not meant for an audience. She spoke about leaving the theatre, about money hidden in a coat and about a letter she could not bring herself to send. Her confidence had vanished. Several times she started a sentence and abandoned it. Finally, she said, “If this machine has kept any of that, promise me it stays between us.”

The recording ended in the middle of Nell's reply.

By the following morning, the archive could have produced a clean public copy. The theatre exhibition needed a centrepiece, and a voice recovered after more than a century would attract visitors in a way that costumes behind glass could not. My catalogue entry was already open. The empty box marked ACCESS waited for one word: public or restricted.

I removed the headphones. Without Mara's voice, the studio seemed larger and less certain. On the screen, the file waited exactly where I had left it. So did the question.