Chapter 44: Choosing
Danny woke early in the biggest bed he had ever slept in and lay in the left third of it, because twenty-eight years of single beds pushed against walls don’t leave you just because someone hands you a bed the size of a room.
The light came in through a wall of glass that ran floor to ceiling.
The river was down there. Half of London beyond it. He watched the city turn from grey to gold and thought, the way he thought most mornings, that he really ought to get to know his own house.
So he got up, and moved through it.
The bathroom off the main bedroom stopped him the way it stopped him every morning.
Marble floor to ceiling. Heated, so the stone was warm under his bare feet in February. A bath sunk into the floor you could lie flat in. A shower behind glass with a head the size of a dinner plate.
He thought about the bathroom at Pembury. The black mould in the ceiling corner he’d painted over three times. The shower that ran cold on a bad day. The way you dressed fast in winter with your breath showing.
He’d had a whole childhood of cold bathrooms.
This one warmed the floor for him while he slept.
He went down the stairs.
His own stairs, inside his own home, pale floating wood with no risers. He still came down them with a hand on the rail. Every set of stairs he’d ever known was communal and concrete and smelled of other people, and stairs that were his, carpeted in nothing but quiet, was a thing his body hadn’t caught up with.
The lower floor opened out into more room than one man could use.
The kitchen. The marble island the size of a small boat. The swan-neck tap. The wine fridge with nothing in it because he didn’t drink wine. The induction hob he was frightened of and had never set a pan on.
And on the vast counter, plugged in by the socket, small and white and cheap and the only thing in the whole kitchen he’d chosen himself, the kettle.
Bought from an Argos on the second day because the coffee machine built into the wall had a screen and menus and frightened the life out of him. It sat on ten grand of marble like a mouse in a cathedral, and it was the truest thing in the room.
The kettle clicked and rumbled up to the boil.
He made his tea and carried it through the flat. Past the two sofas facing each other across a rug that cost more than his mum earned in a season. Past glass pendants hanging over nothing. Past the wall of glass with the whole city laid out below it.
And he let himself feel the thing he made himself feel now instead of shoving it down: it was the most beautiful room he had ever stood in, and there was nobody in it, and there never had been.
There were three spare bedrooms besides his.
Three.
He opened the first one because he hadn’t been in it since the day he arrived. The handle turned with that soft expensive click that good doors have, and the air inside was completely still.
Nobody had breathed in here. That was the thing.
The bed was made with the corners done properly. Hospital corners, the way his mum did them, except a stranger had done these for money and then gone home.
Two pillows. A folded throw at the end in a grey somebody had been paid to choose. A lamp on each side, which meant the room had been designed for two people. A bedside table each, which meant somebody had imagined a couple putting their books down.
Danny stood in the doorway with his tea going cold in his hand.
He thought about the box room at his mum’s. Single bed against the wall under the window, so close to the radiator that in winter one side of him cooked and the other froze.
A poster he’d had since he was thirteen and stopped liking at fifteen and never took down, because taking it down would have left a mark. He’d done his GCSE revision on that bed with the door shut and the telly going through the wall.
A boy out of that box room would have cried at this room. Actual tears. He’d have walked in and put his hands on the duvet and not believed it.
And here were three of them, and Danny couldn’t think of one single person he could put in any of them.
Not his mum, who thought he was still at Pembury. Not Jodie, who thought the same. There was a whole list of people he loved, and the list was two names long, and both of them would have to be lied to before they got as far as the lift.
He shut the door.
The click was very quiet in all that space.
He took his tea out onto the terrace.
From forty floors up you could see everything. His own side of the river, the low grey sprawl of it, the estates and the chimneys.
If he leaned and looked south he could nearly pick out the streets he knew. Pembury somewhere down there. His mum’s block. The café that would be his. All of it small and far and on the other side of the water.
And here he was above all of it, with a tea going cold in a cup that cost more than he used to spend on a week’s food, on a terrace off a flat with four bedrooms and two of everything and nobody in any of it.
It was the most valuable thing he would ever own and it felt like a hotel he’d checked into by mistake and was waiting to be asked to leave. A picture of a life, the way the eight million was a picture of money. Perfect and complete and belonging to nobody.
And the knackered café on the sunny side of a south-London road, worth a thousandth of what he was standing on, already felt more like his than this ever had. Because he’d chosen it, and his mum would stand in it, and people would come in out of the cold and be somewhere.
That was the difference. He tipped the cold tea over the balustrade and the wind snatched it away with a hiss.
This place had everything a life needed except the life. You couldn’t fill forty floors of air with a life you had to keep secret.
You could only fill a small warm room.
The phone lit on the glass table behind him.
[ Good morning, Sir. ]
[ It is Friday. ]
[ The door is open from noon. The guest list is short. ]
[ Say the word and the Concierge will put your name on it. ]
He stood there with the empty cup in his hand and looked at it a long moment.
Noon. A room he’d once have been sent round the back of. Bring the coat, bring the face, leave the name at the door.
And at eleven he had a woman in reading glasses above a dry cleaner’s in Clapham who wanted to know where his money came from.
And at some point today a man called Gethin with the keys to a corner unit on the sunny side. And at six a woman in Battersea who’d rung him on her break to tell him she’d been thinking about him all day.
"Not today," Danny said.
The gold line sat there a second.
[ Noted. ]
[ The door does not mind waiting. It has waited for better men than you. ]
"Cheers."
[ It will be there when the café is bought. ]
[ The Concierge only observes that you have started choosing. ]
[ That is new. ]
Danny put the cup down and went to get changed, because he had a whole day down there in the grey where the people were, and the first of it, before the coat and the solicitor and the café, was thirty-seven floors below him.
Danny had started using the gym, which was its own small miracle.
He’d spent twenty-eight years getting his exercise the way poor men get it, by carrying things up stairs for other people, and had never once in his life chosen to lift a weight for no reason.