My Clocking In System

Errol was on the pavement at 6:50 with a flask, which meant he’d been there since about 20 to.

"You said 7."

"I know what I said." He had his collar up and his glasses on the cord under it.

"I’ve been ringing that lot 30 years, son. If they turn up at 11 and there’s nobody here with a ticket, they get back in the van, and then it’s not 6 weeks, it’s whatever they decide it is."

"They’re coming at half 11."

"Yeah, well." Errol unscrewed the flask. "I’ll believe it when there’s a van."

Danny let them both into the dark and Errol went straight down the cellar with his own torch and stayed there 20 minutes.

Up the road, Wasim’s strip light was on and there were 6 in the queue at 10 to 7 and the smell of it came all the way up the pavement in the cold, bacon and onions and the sharp bit of the griddle.

Danny stood in his own doorway on his own scaffold board and watched a man he’d bought 3 teas off on Thursday sell 6 rolls in about 4 minutes.

Half 11.

If they don’t come, that’s 6 weeks. And 6 weeks is February, and February’s the floor man gone to another job and Terry’s counter sat in a unit in Deptford and Keisha ringing somebody else back.

Don’t do that. Don’t sit here doing February at 7 in the morning.

He went in and swept a floor he’d already swept.

The van came at 11:20.

Three of them.

The older one got out and looked at the front of the building without saying anything at all, and the second one went straight round the back of the van and had the doors open before the first one had finished looking, and the third one was about 19 and came round the side eating a sausage roll.

"You Flynn?"

"Yeah."

"Kev." That was the entire introduction. He turned round. "Sully. Cellar."

"Where’s the cellar?" said Sully.

"Back kitchen, door on the left, it sticks," Danny said. "You’ve got to lift it."

"Course it does."

The young one stopped in the doorway and looked at the room.

"What’s this going to be?"

"Caff."

"Nice." He had the last of the sausage roll in his cheek. "My nan had a caff. Not round here, up Dagenham. She had it 20 years and then the council done the road up and killed it."

"Brad," said Kev, from the back kitchen.

"Yeah, coming."

Errol came up out of the cellar and got in front of Kev before he’d got a foot on the top step.

"Right. Before you go down there. That tail’s been got at and it’s been got at properly, and I’ve had the board off and I’ve photographed the lot, and I want you to look at it before anybody touches anything, because I’m not having it come back on my certificate."

Kev looked at him for a second.

"You Errol?"

"I am."

"You wrote the report."

"I did."

"Yeah." Kev went past him. "It’s a good report."

Errol stood at the top of the cellar steps looking mildly thrown, and Danny watched him take about 10 seconds to work out what to do with a compliment.

It was not 90 minutes. It was 2 hours and 40, and most of it was noise.

Bang went the cellar door for the ninth time. The whistle of Sully doing 4 notes of something over and over with no intention of getting to a fifth. A drill going somewhere under the floor and coming up through the boards into Danny’s feet. Kev saying numbers up the stairs and Sully saying different numbers back.

"That’s not what he’s written."

"It’s what’s there, Kev."

"He’s written 25."

"Then he measured it before somebody had a go at it, didn’t he, because it’s not 25, come and look."

Brad spent 40 minutes sat on the bottom step doing nothing at all except handing things up, which appeared to be the entire job.

"You opening at 6?"

"Six."

"That’s mental."

"Builders start at 7."

"Yeah, no, I know, I’m one of them." He turned a screwdriver over in his hands. "We go to a van. There’s a bloke does a van at the lights up there."

"Wasim."

"You know him?"

"I know him."

"He’s all right, him. He does a thing with the egg." Brad thought about it. "You doing eggs?"

"Probably."

"You want to do the thing with the egg."

"What’s the thing with the egg?"

"He breaks it on the griddle and then he does something with the, " Brad made a gesture with the screwdriver that explained nothing whatsoever. "I don’t know. It’s better than a normal egg."

"BRAD."

"Yeah."

They cut the supply off at 1:15 and then there was 40 minutes where nothing happened at all and nobody would say why, and Errol stood at the top of the cellar steps the entire time with his arms folded like a man watching somebody else’s children near a road.

At 5 past 2, Sully came up.

"That’s you."

Danny looked at him.

"That’s me what?"

"That’s you. You’re on." He was wiping his hands on a rag and already looking at his phone. "Kev wants a signature and then we’re gone, we’ve got a job in Rotherhithe wants closing off."

"That’s it?"

"That’s it, mate. It’s 90 minutes’ work, that. It’s been 90 minutes’ work since March."

The switch was by the door where it had been for 100 years, brass, painted over twice, with a chip out of the bottom corner.

Danny had flicked it 40 times in 3 weeks. He’d flicked it on the first morning out of habit and stood in the dark like an idiot, and he’d flicked it since out of something closer to superstition.

He put his thumb on it and pushed it down.

Ka-tunk.

The strip light in the middle of the ceiling ticked twice, went blue-white, dropped out, came back, and then held.

And the room appeared.

Not the room he’d been carrying round in his head for 3 weeks. The actual one, at 2 o’clock on a Friday afternoon in November, under a 40 year old fluorescent tube with a dead moth in it.

The yellow tiles behind where the fryer had gone, and they were worse in the light, they were the colour of a bad tooth. The grey half of the floor and the honey half and the line straight down the middle where the floor man had stopped. Six wires out of the wall at chest height, cut square, none of them labelled. The plumber’s merchant calendar still open on August of the year before last. A dozen dead flies along the back windowsill, all facing the same way, and now he could see every one of them and the dust on them.

And a great long crack in the ceiling plaster running from the light fitting to the corner that he had never once seen.

Danny stood in the middle of it.

"Oh, that’s horrendous," he said.

Sully looked up from his phone. "What is?"

"All of it."

"Yeah," Sully agreed, and went back to his phone.

Brad came up out of the cellar with a coil of something over his shoulder and stopped.

"Oh. Oh, that’s grim, mate."

"I know."

"No, but like, properly, "

"BRAD."

"I’m just saying it’s grim."

Danny started laughing and couldn’t stop for a bit, stood in the middle of his own lit-up wreck, and Errol came out of the back kitchen and looked at him with real concern.

"You all right?"

"I’ve never seen it," Danny said. "Three weeks. I’ve been in here 3 weeks in the dark with a phone torch and I’ve never once seen the whole room at the same time."

Errol looked round it properly.

"Ceiling’s cracked."

"I know. I can see it. That’s what I’m saying."

"Mm." Errol went and stood under it and looked up with his glasses pushed onto his forehead. "That’s not structural, that’s a bit of lath let go. Somebody’ll tell you it’s £4,000 and it’s not."

He came back down the room and started putting his flask in his bag, and took a long time doing it.

"Errol."

"Mm."

"You were here at 20 to 7."

"I was here at half 6." He did the zip up. "I’ve had that supplier tell me 6 weeks 40-odd times in my life and I’ve never once had one of them turn up on a Friday, and I wanted to see it."

"And?"

"And I’ve seen it." He got his bag on his shoulder. "I’ll be back Wednesday to do your extraction and I’ll want that ceiling sorted before I’m running anything through it, so don’t let anybody talk you into painting first."

He got as far as the door.

"Whoever that Geoff is," he said, without turning round, "I’d hang on to him."

Danny rang the floor man at 2:06 and had him on the phone inside 3 rings, which never happened.

"There’s power. I’ve got light and I’ve got sockets and you can run your compressor."

"Right."

"So when can you come?"

"Monday."

"It’s 2 o’clock on a Friday."

"I’m in Catford till gone 5 and I’ve got a hall, stairs and landing in Sydenham tomorrow." A van door went at his end. "Monday, first thing. I’ll be there for 8."

"I’ll pay you double for today."

There was a pause that went on slightly too long.

"Mate," the floor man said, "I’ve got a bloke in Catford whose floor’s in bits with his furniture in the garden. What do you want me to do, leave it in the garden?"

Danny stood in the middle of his lit room.

"No."

"Monday. Eight o’clock. And I’ll do the whole of that grey half and I’ll go back over the join so you can’t see where I stopped, and you’ll not know it was ever two halves."

Terry came at half 3 with the corner return in bits in the back of a Transit, swore at Danny for 40 seconds about the change, and then stopped in the doorway with a unit under each arm and looked at the floor.

"You’ve not had your floor done."

"He’s coming Monday."

"Then I’ll come Tuesday."

"Terry, "

"I’m not fixing carcasses down onto a floor a man’s about to take a sander to." He put the units down. "He’ll get up to my kickboard and he’ll stop, and you’ll have a line under that counter for the rest of your life."

"Nobody’s going to see under the counter."

"You’ll see it." Terry had his hands on his hips. "Every day. For 20 years."

"Keisha’s coming Monday and I want her stood behind it."

"Who’s Keisha?"

"She’s the person who’s going to be stood behind it."

Terry looked at the counter run, and then at the grey half of the floor, and then at Danny.

"It’s your money," he said.

And he fixed it down.