My Clocking In System

He woke up to a cupboard door.

Not the kettle, not a voice. A cupboard door going tap somewhere off past the double doors, and then another one, and then a drawer coming out and going back in.

Danny lay there in the left third of the bed with his eyes open.

Somebody’s in the flat.

That’s Mum. That’s my mum in the kitchen.

He’d woken up in that room 15 mornings and every one of them had been the same nothing. Ventilation over the ceiling. The fridge compressor coming on and running. The building leaning very slightly in the wind off the river.

Now there was a woman out there opening cupboards at 5 past 6 and he could hear every one of them.

He put a jumper on and went out.

She’d been up since 4:10, because she’d been up since 4:10 for 20 years and a flat with a staircase in it wasn’t going to shift that. Fleece on. Hair up. Tea already made and half drunk, in the Argos mug, stood at the island rather than sat at it.

"You’re up."

"You’ve been through every cupboard in this kitchen."

"I have." She said it with no apology in it at all. "There’s 9 of them and there’s nothing in 6."

He opened the fridge.

Fish fingers. A block of cheddar. Milk, proper milk, not the oat stuff that had come with the flat.

Four yoghurts. A bag of potatoes on the bottom shelf where potatoes should never go and he knew that and said nothing. Butter in a dish she’d brought from Battersea, actually brought, in her handbag, in a Tupperware.

"Mum."

"Well, there was no butter." She came and looked over his arm at it. "There was something in a gold packet that cost £6 and I put it back. £6, Danny. For butter."

"I’ll eat it."

"You won’t, you’ll have beans."

The bag from the shop was folded flat on the side with the receipt on top of it, and the receipt had biro on the back where she’d written him a note at half 12 the night before, and neither of them looked at it.

He got the toaster on.

She rinsed her mug, dried it, and put it back on the hook she’d found for it, and then she stood there with the cloth in her hand.

"I heard the lift."

Danny kept his eyes on the toaster.

"Yeah."

"Half 12."

"About that."

"Mm."

She hung the cloth over the tap and squared it up and went off to have her shower, and did not say one more word about it.

Her shoes were by the lift. Both pairs, toes to the wall, lined up the way you line them up in a hall.

There was no hall. There was £8,400,000 of double-height living room and a lift that opened into it, and his mother had found the 2 feet of wall by the doors and put her shoes there, because you don’t wear your outdoor shoes through a house.

He stood looking at them with his tea going cold.

Then he got his coat, because Errol was ringing it in at 8, and the floor man was supposed to be back, and there was a 2 inch step on a pavement in Bermondsey that had put an 80 year old man’s whole weight onto a door frame.

Ding.

The lift dropped 40 floors and he spent all of them working out what he was going to say.

Say something normal. Morning. That’s normal.

Morning’s what you say to somebody you didn’t. Morning’s what Pemberton says.

So what, then?

You’ve had 6 hours to think of a sentence and you haven’t got one.

The doors opened on the lobby and the warm air and the lilies and the noise of that stone room doing its late-arriving thing with every sound in it.

Priyanka had the delivery man again. Same clipboard, different argument.

"These are the white ones."

"They’re not white, they’re cream."

"They’re white."

"Look at them next to the desk. Look at them next to the desk and tell me that’s white."

The 2 gym kit women were by the water wall with their green drinks, and one of them was doing an impression of somebody with her chin pulled in and the other one had her hand over her mouth.

And Mara was in the window seat at the far end.

Danny got about 6 steps and stopped being able to do anything else.

She was not in gym kit. She was not damp, she was not scraped back, she had not come down off a treadmill and she had not been anywhere near that pool. She had come down those 39 floors dressed, at 20 to 9 in the morning, and she had done it on purpose, and there was no version of that room where you did not look at her.

The camel coat was open. Under it a cream jumper, fine stuff, thin enough that it went where she went, and a skirt to just above the knee, and boots up over the calf with a heel on them.

Her hair was down and dried properly and it was the copper it went when the chlorine hadn’t been at it for a day. Gold hoops. The freckle at the corner of her mouth that he had spent 12 days not looking at and had spent most of Tuesday night with his mouth on.

She had her legs crossed at the knee and her hands in her lap, and the jumper did what it was always going to do on a woman built the way she was built, and she had chosen it knowing that, and she was sat in a public lobby with the whole of it on display and her chin up.

Right.

She’s come down for this.

She’s been sat there since half 8 in a jumper like that and she’s not touched that coffee, and she has never once in her life had to sit anywhere and wait for anybody.

She looked up, and she’d known he was coming, he could see that. Nobody in that building could miss the private lift going.

"Morning."

"Morning," Danny said.

She uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way, and something went across her face in the middle of it and got put away fast.

She’s sore.

He got it in the half second, the way he got everything, and it went through him like a hand on the back of his neck.

She’s been sat there an hour and she’s sore and she’s not moving off that seat until I’ve walked past her.

He came the rest of the way over.

Coconut. Off her hair, off her neck, the same as it had been on a pillow on 39 at 10 o’clock the night before, and 8 hours later it was still doing exactly the same thing to him.

Thomas had the door open for somebody behind him and the cold came across the floor and up Danny’s legs and did nothing whatsoever to help.

"I’m getting a coat," Mara said.

"Are you."

"Your mother’s orders." She turned the cup on the sill a quarter turn and left it where it was. "Apparently mine’s useless."

"It is useless."

"So I keep being told." She looked up at him from the seat, which meant looking up the whole length of him, and she took her time about it and made no attempt to hide that she was taking her time. "I was cold this morning, actually. Properly cold. I had a bath at 7 to sort it out."

Danny’s jaw did something.

"Did you."

"Mm."

"And did it?"

"It helped." The freckle moved. "It didn’t fix it."

The delivery man said cream again, loudly, and Priyanka said something back with a lot of consonants in it, and one of the gym kit women laughed at the far end of the room at something that had nothing to do with anybody.

Mara held his eye through all of it and did not blink first.

Say her name.

That’s all it needs. Say her name and she’ll know you’re not going to be strange with her.

Say her name and tell her you’ve thought about last night about 200 times since half 5, and that you can smell her hair from here, and that if this was any room in the world except this one you’d have her back in that lift.

"I’ve got a bloke coming at 8," Danny said.

Something went across her mouth and was gone before it finished.

"Course you have."

"Mara."

"No, off you go." She picked the phone up off the sill and turned it over and looked at a screen with nothing on it. "You’ll be late."

She uncrossed her legs again, carefully, and put both boots flat on the floor and stood up, and the coat came off the back of the chair with her, and Danny got the whole of her at once, the whole silhouette, top to bottom, 3 feet away in a room full of people.

She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder.

"Danny."

"Yeah."

"I’m not going to be difficult about it," she said. "I just wanted you to have to walk past me."

Then she went off towards the lifts with her heels going on the terrazzo, and every single man in that lobby who had a reason to look up looked up, and Danny stood on the wet mat by the door with his ears going red in the warm.

Thomas said "Morning, Mr Flynn" in a voice pitched to move a man along.

He was on the scooter with the helmet half on before he let himself have it.

That was wrong.

What bit?

All of it. She sat in that lobby for an hour, sore, in that jumper, and you gave her a bloke coming at 8.

He got as far as the bridge before he worked out that he had no idea which sentence would have been the right one.

And then he stopped thinking about the sentence altogether, because the wind came off the water and went up his sleeves and his body went somewhere else entirely without asking him.

Her on top of him with her hair down and her hands over his on her tits, pressing them in harder. The face she made the second time, when she stopped moving and had to put both hands on his face. The noise, which she had made no attempt to keep in, in a corner flat with nobody either side.

Stop it.

You are doing 30 on a bridge.

She was sat in that lobby not able to cross her legs properly because of you, and she came down anyway, and she did her hair.

He was still at it at the lights on Tooley Street with his visor fogged, and he cracked it, and the cold came straight in at his eyes and sorted him out.

4 miles south of her, the shop was cold enough to see his breath in.

He got the sander shifted off the middle of the floor and the flex wound up, and swept the honey half, and then swept the grey half, which came up filthy the way it had every single time.