Chapter 59: Quotes
Danny ate it standing at the island in his coat.
The bun held. That was the first thing.
He’d had a hundred burgers off a hundred counters and every one of them had gone to mush in his hands by the fourth bite, and this one held all the way down and left a ring of grease on the board where it had been sitting.
The meat gave without falling apart. There was bone marrow in it according to the app, which he read afterwards and had no opinion about whatsoever.
The chips were still hot at the bottom of the pot when he got to them, which he had not known was possible.
He ate it in about four minutes.
£35.
And I’d rather be having a bacon roll off that counter at six in the morning with the door going and somebody having a moan about the buses.
Plate in the sink, which he was fairly sure you weren’t supposed to do with a cloche. Notebook out.
Floor man, £3,800. Counter built and shifted to the window, £4,200. Kitchen and extraction and the grease trap and whatever the water board wanted, call it £9,000 and find out on the day.
Electrics, no idea, put £6,000 in and know you’re guessing. Tables and chairs second-hand, £1,500 if he was patient. Signage. Paint. Till, fridge, insurance, licences. Wages. Three months of rent and stock and bills before a single cup came back.
Twice, and both times about £57,000.
On top of the £52,340 the lease had already had.
£113,595.42 in the account.
Leaves £56,000. No wage behind it. Rent going out every quarter whether a soul comes in or not.
Two weeks ago that account had £41 in it.
He sat with it a while. Didn’t feel like much, which was its own odd thing.
Seven the next morning, because he couldn’t sleep and there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
Dark still. The road already going with that pre-seven noise, vans and shutters going up, rattle-rattle-CRASH, a bin lorry two streets over doing its hydraulic scream. Nnnnngh.
Wasim’s van down at the lights with a strip light on inside and four blokes in hi-vis round it, and the griddle going, and the smell of it coming all the way up the pavement.
Danny stood outside his own dead shop in the dark and smelled another man’s bacon.
Two fifty a roll. Four in the queue at ten past seven and it’s not even light yet.
He let himself in. Clunk.
Flicked the switch.
Nothing.
Flicked it again. Up, down, up. Like it might change its mind.
Oh, you’re joking.
Course. Course it is. Eleven months empty.
Who do you even ring for that? Is that the electric company? Which one? How do you find out which one?
The cellar door was warped hard in the frame and took four minutes and gave with a CRACK that went round the whole empty room and made him jump.
Six concrete steps down into a dark his phone torch didn’t do much about, and a smell coming up to meet him. Wet brick and something older underneath.
Half a pallet of something under a sheet in the corner. He did not lift the sheet.
Meter on the wall by the stairs. Old one, dial face, card slot, sticker on the side with a company name he was fairly sure had stopped existing before he left school.
He photographed it and sat down on the bottom step in the cold.
Above him, through the floor, a bus went past and the whole building took it, a low shudder that came up through the concrete into his boots.
£8.4 million of flat across the river and I’m sat in a cellar in my coat because I can’t turn a light on.
The number on the sticker gave him the noise a dead line makes. Nnn-nnn-nnn.
Then 50 minutes on hold with the phone wedged against his shoulder while he swept the front floor with a brush he’d paid four quid for, and the hold music went round nine times, and a woman came on and asked him for the MPAN.
"What’s an MPAN?"
She told him. Patiently, the way you’d tell a child, and not unkindly.
Under THINGS I DON’T KNOW, which was four pages now.
Friday week, earliest.
"Nothing sooner?"
Nothing sooner.
He was still sweeping at half nine when somebody knocked on the glass. Tap tap tap.
A woman, sixties, padded coat, shopping trolley, hands cupped to the window.
He opened up.
"Is it opening again?"
"It is, yeah."
"Oh, thank God." She said it with her whole chest. "It’s been shut a year. What is it, one of them coffee places?"
"It’s a caff."
"A caff." She looked past him into the wreck of it, at the ripped-out counter and the wires hanging out of the wall. "A proper one?"
"Proper one."
"Because we’ve got nowhere." She was still looking past him. "There’s nowhere. The Turkish isn’t open till eleven and you can’t sit in it, and my sister’s got her hip, and we used to come here Thursdays. Sixteen years we came here Thursdays."
Sixteen years.
"What did you have?"
"Tea and a toasted teacake." Straight out, no thinking about it at all. "Every Thursday. And he’d have it on before we were through the door because he saw us coming up the road."
Danny had the notebook out of his coat before she’d finished the sentence.
TOASTED TEACAKES.
"You’re writing it down."
"I am."
"Well." She seemed slightly thrown by that. "When’s it open?"
"Four months. Maybe."
"Four months." She pulled the trolley round. "I’ll tell Pat."
She went off up the road, and Danny stood in his doorway with a broom in his hand and watched her go. About thirty feet along she stopped and said something to another woman coming the other way, and both of them turned round and looked at the shop.
Right.
Word’s out.
The electricians came Wednesday. Three, because Sandra had said get three and don’t tell any of them what the others said.
Mick was in and out in 9 minutes. Big lad, vape, van with no name on it. Didn’t go in the cellar.
Looked at the ceiling about as long as it takes to look at a ceiling, asked what was going in, said "yeah, no bother," quoted £4,500, cash if that suited.
And the whole time Danny was doing the thing the phone had put in him that first night on the floor of the penthouse. Reading the half-second. The face before the words got to it.
Eleven years on doorsteps working out whether the door was about to tip him or accuse him, and now it came whether he asked for it or not.
He hasn’t looked at the wiring once. He’s looked at me four times.
He’s pricing the coat, not the job.
And he’s not bothered about being wrong, because he’s not planning on being reachable in March.
"I’ll let you know."
Errol was there an hour and a half. Older, half-moon glasses on a cord, pencil behind the ear, a proper toolbag instead of a bucket.
Down the cellar with his own torch. Up a ladder twice. Took the face off a socket in the back kitchen, scritch scritch of the screwdriver, and held it out under the light.
"See that? That’s a borrowed neutral, that is."
He said it the way a doctor says a word he’d rather not say.
"Whole lot wants ripping out. Board’s from the seventies. You’ve got a spur off a spur off a spur in that back room, someone’s had a right go at it over the years with whatever was in the van. You’re not running a three-group off that." Click went the torch. "It’ll hold till it doesn’t."
He wrote on the back of a card, resting it on his knee.
"That’s certified. And I’ll do your extraction the same trip, same walls, be daft having me back twice."
£11,400.
He doesn’t want me to say yes.
That’s what that is. He’s written a number he knows is right and he’s already braced for a no, and he’s not going to argue about it, because he’s had this exact conversation forty times and he’s sick of it.
That’s not a man selling. That’s a man telling you.
Third one turned up an hour late, went round in 20 minutes, quoted £6,200.
When Danny said "borrowed neutral" his face did something quick and small.
"Who told you that?"
"Second bloke."
"Yeah, well." A look at the ceiling. "He’s not wrong."
And you knew. And you’d have worked round it and left it in there, and it’d still be in there in five years.