My Clocking In System

The key turned with a clunk that he was not going to get tired of any time soon.

He stood there a second with his hand still on it, in the dark of four o’clock with the light going, and looked in through his own glass at his own room.

Counter carcass.

Somebody had taken an angle grinder to the top and lifted it off whole, and there were four bolt holes in the base where a machine had stood, filled up with grey fluff. Six wires coming out of the wall behind it at chest height, cut off square, none of them labelled.

The menu board still screwed up over where the machine had been. Black plastic, push-in white letters, most of them still in.

TEA 90p

COFFEE £1.20

BACON ROLL £2.40

FULL ENGLISH £4.95

A plumber’s merchant calendar on the wall next to it, open on August of the year before last. A photo of somebody’s dog blu-tacked to the frame of the hatch.

Yellow tiles behind where the fryer had gone, and they’d be coming off. Dead flies along the back windowsill in a neat line where the sun had got them, a dozen of them, all facing the same way.

Four months.

Four months and there’s a woman stood behind that counter with the kettle on.

"You the new one?"

Danny turned round.

The bloke from the shop next door, out on the pavement having a cigarette. Fifties, shaved head, fleece with SOUTHWARK TYRES across the chest, phone in his other hand.

"Yeah."

"Right." He looked at the blank front, the dead signage, the crash helmet under Danny’s arm. "What you doing with it?"

"Café."

"Café." He said it the way you’d say dentist. "Another one."

"There’s another one?"

"There’s three." He pointed with the cigarette, up the road.

"Costa in the garage. Turkish place does a coffee, sort of. And there’s a bloke with a van at the lights does the builders, four till nine, best bacon roll on this road and he’s never paid a penny of rent in his life." A drag. Hsss. "You’ll want to know about him."

"I do want to know about him."

"Mm." Something shifted. "Wasim. He’s all right, Wasim. Don’t go to war with him, he’s got half of Bermondsey in that van by half six."

"What’s he charge?"

"Two fifty a roll, quid a tea, and he don’t do coffee." The cigarette went into the gutter. Fzz. "Which is your gap, innit."

"That’s my gap."

"Eleven months that place has been shut, mind." He turned to go back in. "Everyone reckons it’s cursed. Fella before you had a stroke in the back kitchen."

"Christ."

"Yeah." Bang went the door of the tyre place, then it opened again six inches. "I’m Ray."

"Danny."

"Get your barrels changed, Danny, they’re shot."

Bang.

Danny stood on the pavement in the cold and wrote WASIM. £2.50 roll / £1 tea / NO COFFEE and underneath it ask Ray about the bloke who had the stroke, and then he got on the scooter and went to his mum’s for his tea, and did not tell her one single thing about electrics or grease traps because she’d only worry about money that wasn’t hers to worry about.

Then he rode north.

The Old Kent Road was solid so he came off and cut through, and London did the thing it does at that hour where it stops being somewhere people work and starts being somewhere people are.

Fryer smell going up out of a chicken shop, thick enough to taste through the helmet.

A queue outside a bakery that had no business having a queue.

Two blokes wrestling a sofa out of a van with a third one directing badly while a woman on a first-floor balcony shouted instructions nobody wanted and everybody got. "LEFT. Your OTHER left, Marcus."

A bus pulling out in front of him with the top deck lit blue with phone screens.

Kids outside a Nisa with their bags on the floor, doing nothing at all, at volume.

Round the back of Elephant it opened up. Cranes and glass going up out of the low grey stuff with the red lights blinking on top. Then the river, and the wind off it going straight through the jacket the way it always did, and the smell of the water, which was not a nice smell and which he’d come to like anyway.

The Sterling took him back the way it always did. Thomas at the door with his gloved hand on it. Good evening, sir. The bronze. The lift with the one button.

Ding.

40 floors of nothing at all.

He stood in it with his helmet still in his hand and listened.

Nothing. No pipes. No neighbours. No telly through a wall, no door going, no lift machinery, no traffic. He could hear his own ears.

Every night. Every single night, this.

The helmet went on the marble island where it looked exactly as stupid as it had every other night, and he went and stood at the glass.

Blackfriars strung out orange over the black gap of the water. The Shard with its top gone into cloud so it carried on forever. Two planes stacked up over the east with their lights going, waiting their turn. Traffic on the bridges in two colours.

And four miles south, somewhere past all of it in the dark, a shopfront with a board on the wall saying TEA 90p and a dead man’s calendar open on August.

His stomach went. Rrr.

Beans again?

Four nights running. The grated cheese had gone hard at one corner and he’d been cutting it off.

He looked at the fridge, which was the size of a wardrobe and had a screen on it. The oven he’d never turned on. The hob he was frightened of. The coffee machine in the wall that could do nine things.

And the white plastic kettle off Argos, and the two-slice toaster, which were the only two objects in that whole kitchen he’d bought with his own hands.

He got the phone out and opened the residents’ app and went to the tab he’d scrolled past every day for a fortnight.

IN-RESIDENCE DINING 07:00 to 23:00. Charged to your account.

Stone bass, brown shrimp, sea vegetable. £34. Herdwick lamb, £41. A burger, which he genuinely did not believe, at £26. A tasting of hen’s egg for £19 that he read three times and could not picture.

£26 for a burger.

That’s eleven drops. That’s eleven drops in the rain, that is.

Two weeks ago there was £41 in that account and rent due and you stood in a Tesco having a row with yourself about a meal deal.

So press it.

He pressed it. Then added chips because they were £9 and it seemed mad not to, and the second it went through he thought £35, Danny, you absolute clown, and did not cancel it.

Order received. Approximately 25 minutes.

It came in 22.

Knock knock knock. Three soft ones.

A lad in a black apron with a tray and a metal cloche, breathing slightly hard.

"Mr Flynn."

Down on the island, and the lid came off with a chink, and the steam came up off it and hit the cold air and went sideways across the marble, and the smell arrived about a second later. Beef fat. Butter. Onions that had been in a pan a long time. Vinegar somewhere under it.

Burger on a wooden board, the bun with sesame on top and a smear of grease already going into the wood underneath.

Chips stacked upright in a little copper pot, thick-cut, skin still on, salt visible on them. Something orange in a jar the size of an egg cup. A folded linen napkin with the cutlery rolled up inside.

He’s about nineteen.

Twelve-hour done and two more on. Polite because he has to be. And he’s clocked the crash helmet on the counter and he can’t work out what I am, and it’s nagging him.

"Cheers, mate. What’s your name?"

The lad blinked. "Tomas."

"You come all the way up for one burger?"

"Is my job, yes." A small shrug. "Is fine. Forty is quiet." A beat, and then, with the faintest edge on it: "Nobody orders from forty."

"No?"

"Not once. Since I start." He picked his tray up. "Enjoy, sir."

Ding. The lift took him down and the flat went silent again.