Chapter 80: Thursdays III
Danny stood the stick in the corner where he’d started keeping it.
Pat came up the road at 25 to 4 with the trolley and Danny watched her the whole length of the window, and the trolley wheels went up and over the board without her looking down or breaking step, and she was 3 feet inside before she stopped and saw who was on the milk crate.
"Oh. Norman."
"Patricia."
"You never said."
"I never say."
"No." She stood there with both hands on the trolley handle. "No, you don’t, do you."
Danny brought the chair over. He’d bought one chair off a bloke on the market on Tuesday for £8, bentwood, cracked seat, because a room needs somewhere to sit.
"Sit down, Pat."
"Oh, I’m all right stood."
"You’re not all right stood."
"No," she agreed, and sat down, and got the leg out straight in front of her, and made a noise she hadn’t planned on making. "Oh, that’s better. That’s much better. Don’t ask me about it."
"I wasn’t going to."
"Everyone asks. And then I tell them, and then we’re there 20 minutes and everybody’s miserable." She got her coat open. "Anyway. You’ve had them tiles off."
"Yesterday."
"Good. They were horrible, them tiles. They were horrible when Ted had them and they were horrible when the man before Ted had them, and there was a man before Ted, you know, everyone forgets that. Little Scotch fella. Now what was he called."
She looked at the ceiling. "Anyway. It’ll have been the 60s. Before my time here, that, I only come down in ’71 when I married John, and John’s mother was on this road, she was in the flats over the top of where the bookies is now, and she used to, "
"Patricia."
"What?"
"He doesn’t want the whole family."
"He might want the whole family." She looked at Danny. "Do you want the whole family?"
"I’ve got nowhere to be," Danny said.
Norman made a noise.
"There’s no power," he said. "He’s offered me a cup of tea and there’s no power."
"Manners," said Pat.
Danny stood up. "Give me 5 minutes."
"Where are you going?"
"To get you a cup of tea."
Wasim’s van was at the lights with the strip light on and nobody in the queue at 20 to 4, and Wasim was leant on the inside of the counter with his phone in both hands and his elbows down.
He looked up before Danny had got to the hatch.
"You’re the caff."
"How do you know that?"
"Mate, everybody knows that." He put the phone face down. "Ray’s told the entire road. Bloke’s bought the corner, been in there 3 weeks with a broom, hasn’t got a chair." He picked up a folded cloth and did the griddle with it, scrape, though there was nothing on the griddle at all. "So what do you want? Because if you’re after a bacon roll I’m going to enjoy this."
"Three teas."
"Three teas."
"Yeah."
"You’ve got a caff and you’ve come to me for 3 teas."
"I’ve got no electric."
"Ahh." He turned round for the cups. "Yeah. That’ll be that run. That whole run’s been trouble since they did the road, the barbers had 4 days off in February. Milk?"
"All three."
"Sugar?"
"Don’t know."
"You don’t know." Wasim shook his head and got 3 sachets and dropped them in the tray anyway. "Who are they?"
"Two old people who used to come here on a Thursday."
He made the teas the way a man makes 300 of something, no wasted movement in it anywhere, and he had the lids pressed on before Danny had his money out.
"Three pound."
Danny gave him a fiver. "Keep it."
"I’m not keeping it, what am I, a charity?" He put 2 pound coins on the counter. "Take your change."
Danny took his change.
"What time are you opening?" Wasim said.
"Six."
His hand stopped on the lid of the tin.
He did the whole sum right there, 6 o’clock against his own 4 o’clock and 200 yards of pavement between the two of them, and Danny stood and watched him do it and watched him decide to say none of it.
"Six."
"Yeah."
"And what have you got at 6?"
"Bacon roll, tea in a mug, toasted teacake." Danny got the cups into the tray. "And proper coffee."
"I don’t do coffee."
"I know. That’s why I’m doing it."
Wasim looked at him for a good long moment, and then he laughed, once, and picked his phone back up.
"Four months, they’re saying."
"Something like that."
"Mm. Go on. Your tea’s going cold and you’ve got two old people."
Danny carried 3 teas from another man’s van up the road, past his own dead front, over his own scaffold board.
Norman had shifted the milk crate round so it faced the chair instead of the window.
The 3 of them sat in a room with no floor, no counter, no power and no fittings, on a chair and a crate and an upturned bucket, and drank tea out of cardboard cups.
"He used to have it on," Pat said. "Ted. You’d come up the road and he’d see you through that glass and he’d have the pot going before you’d got the door open. Every Thursday. And he’d never say anything about it, he wasn’t a talker, Ted, he’d just put it down in front of you and go off and do something else."
"He talked to me," Norman said.
"He talked to you about the horses."
"Well. That’s talking."
"That’s not talking, Norman, that’s two men saying numbers." She turned to Danny. "There was never a sign, you know. Not in all them years. He never had one put up."
"So what did people call it?"
"Well, you’d just say the corner." She said it like he’d asked her what colour the sky was. "Are you coming up the corner. I’ll see you up the corner. Nobody said the caff. Did they, Norman."
"Nobody said the caff."
"Because there was the caff by the station as well, you see, so if you said the caff nobody knew which one you meant, so it was always the corner." She had both hands round the cup. "And then Ted went and it shut and that was that."
Danny turned his cup round on his knee and did not write anything down and did not say anything at all.
Outside, a lorry went past close enough to move the air in the doorway. Somebody’s radio out of a van window, gone in 3 seconds. The 63 coming in at the stop up the road with a hiss and a bloke running the last 10 yards for it.
"Joan liked that table," Pat said.
Norman’s cup stopped halfway up.
"Which one?"
"The one in the window. Not the little one by the counter, the window one." She was looking at a patch of bare floorboard where nothing was. "She used to say you got everybody twice out of that table. Once coming up the road and once going back down it. She was very keen on that. She’d have it or she’d sulk."
"She never told me that."
"No, well, she wouldn’t, would she."
"Why wouldn’t she?"
"Because you’d have said it was daft, Norman."
"I would not have said it was daft."
"You’d have said it was daft in about 4 seconds and then you’d have said it again in the car."
Norman put his cup down on the floor by his foot and left it there.
"Yeah," he said. "I would."
Pat went at 20 past 4 because she didn’t like the road once it was dark, and Norman went about 4 minutes after her, and Danny stood in the doorway and watched the pair of them go off up the pavement 6 feet apart, not talking, at exactly the same speed.
Then he came back in and stood in the middle of it.
Three empty cups on the floor. One chair, one crate, one bucket.
He picked the cups up and put them in the bag with the rasp, and got the notebook out, and turned to the page that had MENU at the top and 6 lines under it, and looked at it for a while.
Then he wrote underneath:
a table in the window. not the best one. THE window one. you get everybody twice
He rang his mother from the lift at 6 like he’d said he would, and she went on for 20 minutes about Eileen and the girl from Wolverhampton, and whether he’d read the bit of paper she’d stuck to the tile, and how Denise had put too much pepper in the shepherd’s pie again and you couldn’t say anything.
He was 10 minutes into the fish fingers when the phone went on the marble.
Not a call. A photo.
A coat on a rail in a shop, taken badly, on an angle, with half of somebody’s arm in the corner of the frame. Dark green wool. Big collar.
And under it:
Well?
Danny stood in his own kitchen with a fish finger in his hand and read those 4 letters about 3 times.
She hasn’t mentioned Tuesday.
She hasn’t mentioned the lobby, or the jumper, or one single thing.
She’s sent me a coat.
He looked at the photo again.
Dark green. The exact green as the dress. The same green as the costume, the first morning, the one that had made him look before he could stop himself.
She’s picked that colour on purpose and she’s sent it to me with one word on it, and she knows I’ll know, and she’s waiting to see whether I say so.
His thumb went over the screen.
Then it buzzed in his hand and it wasn’t her.
The Sterling Riverwalk, Residents’ Portal N. Adeyemi: Re: Section 4. Following up. Shall we say tomorrow?