My Clocking In System

What else has it done that it hasn’t told me about?

He sat with that one for a bit.

A bus went past. Somebody’s dog had a go at him from the end of a lead and got hauled off.

He decided a pavement in Clapham was not the place to start pulling on that particular thread. And he was aware, deciding it, that he’d been finding reasons not to pull on it for about a fortnight.

A blank you can call private. Naomi had found a blank and it had bothered her, but a blank can be shrugged off.

A full checkable history that turns out to be invented isn’t a private man at all. It’s a manufactured one.

And manufactured things come apart in the hands of anybody patient enough to pull.

And she’s patient. Sixteen years behind that desk patient.

"Yeah," he said. "Thanks."

It didn’t feel like thanks. The phone didn’t answer.

He sat there a moment longer than he needed to with his thumb over a screen full of somebody else’s memories of him, then forwarded the lot to Priya before he could think about it any harder, and rode south.

Gethin drove a Passat with a child’s booster seat in the back and an air freshener shaped like a football.

He spent the whole drive to the corner unit explaining, unprompted, why the Elephant and Castle regeneration was a disgrace.

Twice his phone went and he answered it with "Gethin," in a completely different and much smoother voice, and said "yeah, no, absolutely, mate" eleven times to somebody called Baz.

"Sorry about that." Back to the normal voice. "Baz. Nightmare. Lovely bloke."

The key fought him at the door.

"Swollen. They all do it, this row, it’s the damp coming up off the, " He put his shoulder into it. "There we go."

The door went scrape, and a small avalanche of junk mail slid across the floor.

Inside was cold. The specific cold of a room nobody has heated since November.

Bare boards grey with dust. A counter with the top ripped clean off, leaving the carcass and four bolt holes where a machine had stood. Wires hanging out of the wall behind it.

Through a hatch, a back kitchen with a stainless sink and a fridge door left open on an empty white cave.

And under the dust and the cold plaster, faint but absolutely there, coffee. Years of it, soaked into the walls the way it gets into everything and never comes out.

Danny walked into the middle of the floor and stood still.

Through the front window the road went past in the afternoon light.

A 63 pulled up, knelt down with a hiss, and let an old man off with a shopping trolley. Two kids in blazers went by eating chips out of paper at three in the afternoon, which meant they’d bunked the last lesson, which was precisely what he’d have been doing at that age.

A woman waited at the crossing with a pram and pressed the button four times, because everybody presses the button four times.

Sun came through the dirty glass and laid a long yellow shape across the boards.

Right where the tables would go.

Sunny side. People are lizards.

He crouched and put his hand flat on the floor.

Under the dust the boards were proper wood. Old, scarred, black at the edges where a century of feet had gone in and out. Somebody had painted them once and given up halfway.

He rubbed his thumb across the grain and it came up warm-coloured under the grey.

He was thinking about his mum.

Not a picture of her. The actual her. Sleeves pushed up behind that counter, talking to you while doing four other things at once, telling somebody called Ron that his tea was coming and he’d wait like everybody else.

The rota off the fridge for good. Nobody’s half five start. Nobody’s four hundred bins.

Something went tight in his chest and he stood up and coughed and looked at the ceiling until it passed.

"It adds up, mind." Gethin was in the doorway checking his phone, entirely oblivious. "People think it’s the rent. It’s never the rent."

"No?"

"It’s the machine, the kitchen, the electrics, which are older than you and possibly me. Extraction. Grease trap. You’ll want the floor doing." He looked up. "You’ll spend most of what you’ve got. Everyone does. Then they come back and say Gethin, why did nobody tell me, and I say mate, I told you. I told you in the car."

"Right."

Danny got his phone out while Gethin was still talking and opened the banking app, which he had opened, by his own count, forty or fifty times in a fortnight, and which still did the same thing to him every time.

£165,935.42

He looked at it for a second.

Four hundred and ten pounds. That was the record. The most he’d ever had at one time in twenty-eight years, on a Friday in March two years ago, for about nine hours, until the rent went out.

He’d stood in a Tesco in February and put a sandwich back on the shelf because the card had gone through for the meal deal and he wasn’t confident it would go through twice.

And now there was a number on a screen with a comma in it.

Premium. Sixty grand, near enough, if he did it properly. Machine, kitchen, electrics, floor, the three months of not-earning while it was shut. Call it a hundred by the time it opened, if he wasn’t stupid.

Which left about sixty-five in the account and no wage coming in behind it.

That’s the whole of it. That’s every penny I’ve got in the world, and the flat isn’t money and the doors aren’t a job.

He put the phone away.

Two years ago he’d have called a man mad for spending a hundred grand on a room with no counter in it.

Two years ago he’d also have called a man mad for having it.

"You’ve barely asked me a thing, though."

The phone went away, and something in him sharpened.

"That’s the bit I keep noticing. Most people I can’t get off the drains. Drains, damp, is there a basement, what’s the neighbour like. You’ve walked in, looked at the floor, and you’re about to tell me you’ll take it."

"I’ll take it."

"There it is." Gethin laughed, and it wasn’t entirely a laugh. He looked at Danny a second longer than was comfortable. "Can I say something."

"Go on."

"Every buyer I get has either not got the money or not got the nerve. You’ve clearly got both, which normally means Daddy."

Lightly. Not asking lightly at all.

"And you don’t strike me as Daddy."

Danny kept his face doing nothing, which was the one thing a hundred doorsteps in the rain had taught him properly.

"No," he said. "Not Daddy."

"No," Gethin agreed, and let it go, and got his folder out.

Three people in one day had looked at Danny Flynn and quietly filed something.

Priya. Gethin. Naomi, by post, from four miles north.

He was going to have to get better at this.

The phone went again at half four, and it was Jodie, and the whole afternoon changed temperature.

BREAK. finally. four minutes. what are you doing.

standing in an empty shop, he wrote.

thrilling. what shop.

just a shop. something for work.

"work". you’re so mysterious it’s actually irritating. one day I’m going to follow you.

Then, before he could answer:

anyway. not why I’m texting. I’ve been thinking about sunday all day and it has got completely out of hand and I need you to know it’s YOUR fault.

what did I do.

you know exactly what you did. you did it twice.

He was still working out a reply to that when the next one came through.

The next one wasn’t words.

She’d taken it in the staff toilets, going by the tiles behind her. Phone up in the mirror, one hand holding it, the other pulling her work shirt open.

Undone four buttons past anything the dress code would have permitted. Her tits full and pale and freckled at the tops, one nipple just clear of the fabric and stiff, the shirt shoved aside rather than taken off, which was somehow worse.

The pencil still through her hair from the shift.

And her face in the top corner of the frame doing the half-smile. Dry as sandpaper. Entirely aware of what she was doing to him with it.

don’t get excited that’s all you’re getting until six, she wrote underneath.

And then:

ALSO Nadia nearly walked in and I have never moved so fast in my life. I nearly died for this photo. you’re welcome.

Danny stood in a derelict café in his six-hundred-quid armour and made a sound that wasn’t a word.

Gethin looked over. "All right?"

"Yep."

"You’ve gone a colour."

"It’s cold in here."

"It’s not that cold," Gethin said, and went back to his folder.

jodie, Danny typed. I’m with someone.

OH GOD. why didn’t you say. is he looking. tell me he’s not looking.

he’s not looking.

right well. serves you right for being mysterious.

Thirty seconds. Then:

ok that one was a bit much on reflection. sorry. delete it.

no.

DANNY.

absolutely not. it’s mine now.

A longer gap. Long enough that he put the phone away and got it out again twice.

...fine. ok. that’s actually quite nice. don’t tell anyone I said that.

And then, at ten past five, the last one.

six o’clock. I mean it. I’ve been thinking about it since about half ten this morning and I am not in a patient mood. bring yourself. leave the mystery outside. x

Danny sat on the Vespa on a south London side street at twenty past five with the engine off and the phone in his hand, and got a clear look at the whole shape of his life.

Upstairs on the third floor that morning there had been a woman he barely knew, and a thing he still had no name for, which had left him confused and obscurely ashamed and unable to explain himself to anybody. Including himself.

And here in his hand was a woman who’d known him since he was seventeen. Who had risked her job in a staff toilet to make him laugh and make him hard at the same time. Who had signed off with leave the mystery outside.

One of those he couldn’t get to the bottom of.

The other one he wanted so badly he could feel it in his hands.

He put the phone in his jacket. The engine caught first time.

He was two streets from her flat with the light going orange over the rooftops when it buzzed again in his pocket at a red light.

Not Jodie.

He knew before he looked, because Jodie’s buzz was two short and this was one long, and he’d only had this phone three weeks and already his hands knew the difference.

A number with no name on it.

Mr Flynn. Naomi Adeyemi, Sterling Riverwalk. Apologies for contacting you outside the building.

Two things, when you have a moment. Nothing urgent.

Then, eleven seconds later, while the light was still red and Danny sat with his boot down on the tarmac and the engine idling underneath him:

Actually, one of them may be.