My Clocking In System

Mara came down for a coffee she didn’t want, which was a thing she’d been doing.

Half 9 on a Wednesday, and the lobby had its morning lot in.

Two women in gym kit by the water wall with green drinks. "...no, but she’d already told him, that’s the whole point, she’d already told him."

A man in a navy overcoat by the lifts, quiet and furious into his phone.

Priyanka on the desk with a delivery driver and a clipboard. "These are lilies. I ordered the white ones. No, look, I’ll show you the order."

Mara took the seat at the far end by the window, put a flat white on the sill, and didn’t drink it.

Chime.

The bronze doors opened. Not the bank of six. The other one, set apart, no call button on it.

A woman came out.

Sixties, maybe more. Small. A coat that had been good about 15 years ago. She held her handbag in both hands in front of her, the way you hold something when you’re not sure of the floor, and she got six steps into the lobby and stopped.

Mara watched her look at the lounge and decide the lounge was not for her.

Watched her clock the two women with the green drinks, and change her grip on the bag.

Then she came over and sat down two seats along the same window, right on the edge of the cushion, knees together, bag on her lap.

"Is it all right to sit here, love?"

"It’s all right to sit anywhere. That’s what they’re for."

"Only I don’t want to be in the way." She looked at the doors. Then the ceiling. Then back. "I’ve never been anywhere like this in my life."

"Nor had I when I moved in. I still get lost on the way to the bins."

"You live here?" She turned properly, and her face did something Mara hadn’t expected, which was plain warmth. "Ooh. Well, you’re very glamorous for half 9 in the morning."

Mara laughed before she could arrange it.

"That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in a fortnight."

"It’s true, though." She looked her over the way an aunt would, no malice anywhere in it. "That coat’s lovely. My sister had one that colour."

"Thank you."

"Is it warm, mind? That’s what I’d want to know. It’s bitter out and they’ve not been out with the salt."

"It’s not even slightly warm," Mara said. "It’s useless. I bought it because it’s the colour it is."

"Course you did." She patted her own knee, pleased with the answer. "That’s how I ended up with a coat with no pockets. What’s a coat with no pockets, he says. Where’s your hands meant to go."

"Who says?"

"My son."

Chime.

Danny came out with his phone in one hand, looking for somebody before he was properly through the doors.

He found her.

Then he found who she was sitting next to, and something went across his face at speed and got put away.

"Mum."

"There he is." She started getting up, one hand on the chair arm, a small noise coming out of her doing it. "I’ve been talking to this young lady. She’s freezing in a lovely coat."

"Mara," Danny said.

"Danny," Mara said.

His mum looked between the pair of them.

"Oh. You know each other."

"She’s on 39."

"Well, that’s nice. Neighbours."

"Something like that," Mara said.

Danny had a hand hovering at his mum’s back. Not touching. Just there.

"Come on. Cab’s waiting."

"He fusses," his mum said to Mara, and then over her shoulder, going: "Lovely to meet you, darling. Get yourself a proper coat."

Thomas had the door and said something Mara didn’t catch and it made her laugh.

Out on the pavement Danny’s arm went round his mother properly, and the two of them went off up the road, and Mara watched them all the way to the corner.

She sat back down.

That’s his mum.

He’s had his mum up there.

The coffee had gone cold. She put it back on the sill.

And the thing she kept snagging on wasn’t the flat, or the lift, or the arm round the shoulders. It was that somewhere in the middle of all that he’d laughed at whatever his mother said.

She had never heard that laugh.

Not at the pool. Not on the gym floor. Not once in 12 days of arranging to be within 3 feet of the man.

Everybody gets that. Naomi gets a meeting on the top floor. Priyanka gets a smile every single morning. His mum gets his arm round her in the street.

And I get a bloke who’s extremely polite to me at a swimming pool.

She left the coffee where it was.

In the cab going south, Danny had his mother’s hand on his arm and didn’t take in a word for the first mile.

Mara Doyle. In my lobby. Talking to my mum.

He’d come out of that lift with about one second to get his face right and he was fairly sure he hadn’t managed it.

What did she hear? Mum’d tell a stranger her life story in 4 minutes. She told a woman at a bus stop about Dad once. Stood there at the 63 and gave her the lot.

And under that, the thing that had been sat on his chest since the gym.

12 days he’d stayed off that pool. Up at 6, out south, back at 9, using the gym at hours nobody sane used it. Telling himself it was the café.

It’s not only the café though, is it.

The Old Kent Road went past the window.

You’re dodging a 24-year-old because you can’t be trusted in a room with her, and you’ve been calling it being busy for a fortnight.

He’d got the gym floor down to about 20 times a day. It had been 30.

Her forearms. Her face turned sideways on them.

The exact moment she’d stopped pretending it was a stretch and rolled her hips back into him, slow, deliberate, once, and then again, and then not once but properly, working herself along the length of him through two bits of fabric while he knelt there with his hands where she’d put them.

Don’t stop me.

I know. I’m not moving.

The noise she’d made at the end of it. Her sat back on her heels afterwards with her hair down and her face gone red to the hairline, breathing hard, looking at the state of him and not saying one word about it.

And then nothing. He’d said nothing. Twelve days of nothing.

Coward.

Say it properly. There’s a woman in Battersea who rang you off a bath last night and told you she’d had you filed under things that didn’t happen for 11 years. And there’s a girl on 39 who came apart on a rubber floor with your hands on her and you’ve not said one syllable since.

And you’re not staying away because you’re a good man. You’re staying away because you don’t trust yourself. They’re different things.

"...so Denise says she’ll do us a shepherd’s pie Thursday," his mum said. "Are you even listening?"

"Sorry. Say it again."

Mara was in her own lift before she’d decided anything and had decided everything by the time it opened on 39.

Done waiting. Done being dignified about it inside her own head. Done swimming lengths for an empty gallery. Done buying coffees she never drank.

He isn’t coming down. So go up.

And don’t go up in gym kit. Don’t go up damp with your hair ruined, apologising for existing. You’ve handed him the soft version 12 days running and he’s put it down every single time.

She got the shower on and stood under it with her hands flat on the tiles.

She’d been carrying that gym floor round for 12 days the way you carry a stone in a coat pocket. It had a whole life of its own now. It had grown.

In the version she had by Thursday he hadn’t held still. In the version she had by the weekend she hadn’t been wearing anything, and he’d got a hand round the front of her and pulled her back onto him and she’d have let him do absolutely anything he liked on that floor with the treadmill going.

She’d worked herself through that one three times and it hadn’t touched the sides, because the actual memory was better than the invention, and the actual memory was a man who could have had her and didn’t, and she could not get past it.

Almost a week.

Seven days and not a word. Not a look in a lobby.

She got out and did her hair properly for the first time in a fortnight.

The dress was at the back of the wardrobe in a garment bag, because it wasn’t a dress you kept where you’d see it every morning.

Zzzip.

Milan. Bought for a party she’d pulled out of. Never worn.

Dark green, near enough black in low light. The same green as the costume that had made him look before he could stop himself that first morning at the pool, and she knew exactly what she was doing with that.

She put it on and turned to the long mirror.

Silk on the bias, so it moved when she moved and went still when she stopped. The neckline came down between her breasts nearly to the sternum and was held up by nothing you could see.

That was the whole trick of it. She had a lot to hold and the dress made an argument out of holding it, and side-on it did what she’d paid Milan prices for it to do.

Open at the back to the base of her spine. And below that it went over her arse and stopped pretending to be subtle about it.

She turned round and looked over her shoulder at the back of herself and thought, without any modesty about it at all, that if he could look away from this he could look away from anything.

Hair down. Copper, loose, the way it never was at the pool because the chlorine wrecked it. Gold hoops. A red on her mouth that went with nothing else in the outfit and answered everything.

Heels that took her out of the category of woman he could look past.

If he can look away from this, it’s somebody else. And then I’ll know, and I can stop.