Chapter 64: Snagging
He woke at 6:05 with a hard-on and no alarm.
Phone face down on the pillow where it had ended up at half 11. He turned it over and the screen came up on exactly what he’d left it on, her on the edge of the bath with one foot on the rim and the dark line down the middle of the cotton.
He looked at it for a while, on his back, in the dark.
Saturday. Four days.
Then he put it face down, got up, and stood under a shower the size of his old bathroom for four minutes, because eleven years of a boiler that gave you six had put something in him that marble wasn’t going to shift.
Toast, standing up. Tea in the Argos mug, standing up. Out.
Thomas had the door before he was off the scooter. "Wrap up. It’s bitter."
"Is it?"
"My hands have gone and I’ve been here forty minutes."
He rode past the lights on his way south even though it wasn’t his way. Half 6, and Wasim had four at the van, griddle going, the smell of it coming twenty feet up the pavement. A hi-vis lad walking off with a roll in one hand and a cup steaming in the other.
Every morning, that. Rain or not.
He let himself into his own shopfront and put the light on out of habit before he remembered, and stood there in the dark like an idiot.
Clunk went the door behind him.
The floor man had gone at four on Friday and left the sander in the middle of the room with the flex still out, and Danny walked into it shin-first in the dark and went down on one knee swearing, and that was the morning starting.
He got his phone torch on.
The boards were down. That was the thing. That was three grand eight hundred of Sandra’s floor man and they’d come up the colour of honey where he’d sanded them and gone back to grey where he hadn’t, so the room had a line straight down the middle of it, done and not done, like somebody had drawn it.
Danny crouched and put his hand flat on the finished half.
Smooth as anything. Warm-looking, even in torchlight. A hundred years of feet in that wood and it had come up like new.
Then the other half, which was still grey, and rough enough to catch on his palm.
That’s what the whole place is. Half of it good and half of it not, and I keep looking at the good half.
He put the sander against the wall out of the way and got the sealant gun out of his bag, because 22 of Keisha’s 31 things were still on the list.
Number ten was the gap along the skirting behind where the counter went, where she’d got down on her knees on Saturday, stuck a finger in it up to the knuckle, and said mice, and that was all she’d said, and he’d not slept well after it.
He got down and started laying the bead.
Halfway along, the gun coughed and put out a wet gout of it about four times the size it should have been, right across the new board.
"Ah, come on."
He got it up with a rag before it went off, and it left a smear on the honey-coloured wood, and he sat back on his heels looking at it.
Then he did the next foot slower, with the gun at a proper angle instead of the one he’d made up, and it came out like a line off a machine.
He did the next twelve feet like that and didn’t waste a drop.
Nobody had taught him. He’d watched a bloke on his phone for six minutes on Sunday night and got it wrong twice and now he could do it.
That was the bit nobody had told him about this, and it was the bit he’d stopped mentioning to people because it made him sound simple. He liked it. He liked knowing a thing at eleven that he hadn’t known at ten.
Tap tap.
The old boy was at the glass with his hand cupped against it.
Danny got up with his knees going and opened the door.
"We’re not open, mate."
"I know you’re not open, there’s no door on your bog." He was already coming in. "Bill said there was somebody doing it up."
The step got him.
It was a two-inch lip, original, the sort of thing nobody looks at, and he had to get the stick up onto it first and then bring the bad leg after, and it took him about four seconds and a hand on the frame, and Danny got hold of his elbow without thinking about it.
"Ta." The old boy shook him off, but not badly. "That step’ll have to go."
"Will it?"
"It’ll have to go or you’ll have half your customers stood outside it having a think." He got himself upright and looked round the room. "Where’s your chairs?"
"Not got any yet."
"Right." He went and sat on an upturned milk crate by the window, without asking, with the enormous relief of a man who’d been on his feet since the bus. His stick went against the wall and slid down it and Danny picked it up and stood it in the corner.
Then the old boy sat there and looked at the room properly.
Danny watched him do it. Watched his eyes go along the counter and stop, and go to the window, and come back.
"You’ve put your counter in the light."
"That’s right."
"So whoever’s behind it’s looking into the sun all afternoon."
Danny opened his mouth and shut it.
"June that’ll be," the old boy said. "You’ll want something on that glass or she’ll be squinting at everyone who comes in and they’ll think she’s got the hump."
Keisha had said the same thing about the heat. Nobody had said it about the squinting.
"Who’s she, then," the old boy said. "Wife?"
"My mum."
That got a proper look. "Your mum’s running it?"
"She is."
"Hm." He shifted on the crate. "My wife used to come here Thursdays. Her and her sister. That corner."
He pointed with two fingers at the bare bit of floor by the window, and Danny turned and looked at it, and there was nothing there, just boards and dust and a socket with no faceplate on it.
"Tea and a toasted teacake," the old boy said. "Every Thursday for I don’t know how long."
Danny stood very still.
"Is your wife’s sister still, "
"Pat. Yeah. She’s got the hip." He was getting himself up off the crate, one hand on the sill. "She still says about it. Where do we go now, Norman. Every time I see her. Where do we go now."
He got to the door, and the step got him again on the way out, the other direction, worse.
Danny came round and held the door wide and didn’t offer the elbow this time.
"Six o’clock, you said."
"Six."
"Right." Norman got himself down onto the pavement. "I’m up at five anyway, at my age."
He went off up the road, and Danny stood in his own doorway watching him go, and looked down at the two-inch step, and then back into the room at the milk crate by the window where a man had just had to sit down.
He got the notebook out and wrote STEP and underlined it hard enough to go through the page.
Then he stood there a bit longer.
Because it wasn’t the step. Or it wasn’t only the step. It was that Norman had come in and in about ninety seconds had needed something to hold, something to sit on, and somewhere for a stick to go, and the room had not had one of the three.
And Danny had picked the stick up off the floor himself, and it hadn’t once occurred to him before that minute that a room needs somewhere for a stick to go.
He looked at the counter. At the window. At the bare walls with the horrible colour still on three of them.
Keisha knew where the milk fridge went. His mum knew what people wanted. Sandra knew the trade.
Nobody knew what the room was supposed to do.
He wrote it underneath.
someone who does rooms. not a shopfitter, they’ll sell me their standard.
Interior designer? Is that what that is? Is that a thing you get for a caff or is that for people in magazines
£48k. and you get one go at opening. open looking like a building site and that’s what you are forever
ask Sandra who did hers. ask Priya, she knows everybody.
He was still writing when Errol rang.
"That board." No hello. "I’ve had it off the wall and I don’t like what’s behind it."
Danny put the pen down. "Go on."
"Main tail off the cutout’s been got at. Years back, before you." Something being shifted at his end, metal on metal. "Seal’s been off that shouldn’t have and put back wrong."
"So fix it."
"Can’t. It’s supplier’s side. I touch that, I lose my ticket."
"Right." Danny looked at the grey box on the wall, which he had walked past about forty times and never once looked at. "So who does?"
"Them. And they’ve got their own clock."
"How long’s their clock?"
"Week." Errol left a gap in it. "Or six."
Danny sat down on the milk crate, which was still warm.
"I’m ringing it in this morning," Errol said, "and I’m putting it in writing what’s wrong, because if it’s not in writing they lose it and then it’s your word against a call centre." A pause. "I had you down for a fortnight, mate. I’m not happy either."
He rang off.
Danny sat on a milk crate in the middle of his own café with a floor that was half honey and half grey and a room with nowhere to put a stick.
Four months. He’d got that off Priya saying by spring, and rounded it, and said it to his mum, and said it enough times that it had turned into something he thought he knew.
Six weeks on a board he wasn’t allowed to touch. Then something else. There’s always something else, that’s the whole lesson so far.
And the rent going out the whole time.
He got up off the crate and went and finished the skirting, because the board belonged to the supplier and the wait belonged to them, and 22 things on that list were his.
He was on the last four feet when the phone went on the counter.
Buzz.
Keisha. A photo of a machine on a pallet in somebody’s unit, red, big, the paint gone dull on one corner.
this one. reconditioned La Marzocco, bloke in peckham, he’s a mate, he’ll do it properly. £4,600. gone by thursday. yes or no
£4,600 on a machine he couldn’t plug in, for a shop that couldn’t open, in a week where a grey box might cost him six.
Every single one of them had said the same thing about the machine. Sandra twice.
yes, he typed. tell him yes
Three dots.
good. right answer
Then, a second later:
you’re less useless than you look
He laughed on his own in an empty room, and was still looking at it when the screen changed over.
Mum. 4 missed calls.
Ringer had been off since the sealant.
She never rang twice. She left it a day and started with I didn’t want to bother you.
He was up and going for his keys when the fifth one came through.