My Clocking In System

At 10:04 the phone went.

"It’s in." Errol. No hello, same as always. "Rang it through at 8 on the dot, got a reference, and I’ve emailed it as well so it’s in two places."

"And?"

"And they’ve give me a window." A pause with a lot in it. "6 weeks."

Danny stopped with the brush in his hand.

"6 weeks."

"That’s what they’ve said."

"It’s 90 minutes’ work, you told me that yourself."

"It is. It’s 90 minutes." Something metal shifted at Errol’s end. "It’s 90 minutes and it’s 6 weeks, and both of them are true, and I know how that sounds coming out of my mouth."

"Can I pay for it?"

"Pay who?"

"Them. Pay them to come sooner. There must be a, " He put the brush against the wall. "Everything’s got a fast one. There’s always a number you can pay."

"Not this, son." Errol had dropped his voice, the way he had over the socket in the back kitchen. "It’s not a shop. There’s no premium service on a cutout. They’ve got a queue, and you’re in it, and the bloke on the phone can’t see the queue. He can only see the box on his screen with your reference in it."

"So who can see it?"

"Somebody can. I’ve never met them."

Danny stood in his own dead room with the phone against his ear and 40 dead flies on the windowsill all facing the same way.

"Errol."

"Go on."

"Where do they come out of? The crews. Where’s the yard?"

A gap.

"What are you thinking?"

"Where’s the yard, Errol."

He rang the number off the paperwork first, because he wasn’t an idiot, and got 4 minutes of a woman’s recorded voice offering him 6 options, and pressed 2, and got 3 more options, and pressed 1, and got told his call was important and that current wait times were in excess of 45 minutes.

He put it on speaker on the windowsill and swept the back kitchen and let it run.

Somewhere around the fifth time the hold music went round he stopped sweeping and stood in the middle of a dead room with a brush in his hand, thinking about a cream jumper.

She sat there an hour.

And she got up and told me why, straight out, in front of Priyanka and a bloke arguing about lilies. Nobody does that. Nobody in that entire building says the actual thing out loud.

And you had a bloke coming at 8.

At 38 minutes it cut out on its own.

He looked at the phone for a while.

£8,400,000.

£113,000 in an account. A flat with a lift in it that only comes for me.

And a reference number, and a recorded woman, and a queue I can’t see.

Right.

He put the brush against the wall properly this time and got his helmet.

It was 40 minutes east on the A2 with the wind coming across the Blackwall approach, and the yard was out past Charlton, down a road with nothing on it but other yards, behind 8 feet of green mesh fence with vans nose-in along the back and 3 drums of cable on their sides in the mud.

Barrier across the entrance. Intercom on a post at car-window height, so he had to get off the scooter and crouch to it.

Brrp.

"Yeah?"

"I’ve come about a job on Verney Road."

"You booked in?"

"No."

"Then I can’t let you in, mate."

"I’m not asking to come in. I’m asking who I talk to."

A pause with a fan noise behind it.

"Reception’s through the pedestrian gate. You can’t leave that on the entrance."

He put the scooter round the side against the fence where a man in a hi-vis was eating crisps in a parked van with the engine running, and the man watched him do it and didn’t say anything and went back to his phone.

Reception was one room with a counter, 3 chairs, a water cooler with no bottle on it, and a radiator you could feel from the door.

One woman behind the counter. 40s, headset round her neck, a cardigan over the back of her chair and a second cardigan on. A sandwich in the plastic at her elbow with 1 triangle gone out of it, and the bread had gone the colour bread goes when it’s been open since 9.

She had somebody on the headset when he came in and lifted a finger at him without looking up.

"...no, the reference is what tells us where it is in the system, so if you’ve got the reference I can... yeah. Yeah. I understand that. I do understand that." She had the flat patience of somebody 200 calls into the same sentence. "It’s 6 weeks from the date of report."

He sat down on one of the three chairs.

She did another 2 minutes of it, and then a minute where she said nothing at all and let the other end run, and then she said "I’ll make a note," and pressed something on the headset and pulled it off her ears and pushed both hands up into her hair.

Then she saw him properly.

"Sorry. Are you all right there?"

"Verney Road," Danny said. "Cutout on the supplier’s side. Reported at 8 this morning, I’ve got the reference."

"6 weeks."

"I know it’s 6 weeks."

"Well then." She said it the way you’d say it to a man asking about the weather, and reached for the sandwich.

"Can I ask you something that isn’t about my job?"

She stopped with her hand on the plastic.

"Go on."

"That form you fill in when somebody rings." He nodded at her screen. "Where does it go?"

She looked at him.

"What do you mean where does it go?"

"I mean I rang the 0800 and I sat on it for 38 minutes and it cut out, and I don’t actually know what happens next. Does a person read it? Does it go in a pile? Is there a pile?" He had his elbows on his knees. "Because everyone keeps telling me 6 weeks like it’s weather, and I’ve been going mad about it all morning, and I’d honestly just like to know what it is I’m waiting for."

She sat back in the chair.

"Nobody’s ever asked me that."

"No?"

"They ask me to make it quicker. All day. Every day." She looked at the sandwich and then pushed it away from her along the counter. "It goes on the schedule. It’s not a pile, it’s a wall planner, because Geoff won’t have it on the computer. So I put it in the system and then I print it and then Geoff puts it on the wall."

"Geoff."

"Geoff does the crews." She pulled the headset back round her neck. "And before you ask, no, you can’t talk to Geoff, he’s got a portakabin out the back and he doesn’t do the public."

"Right."

"He does not do the public, love. I’m telling you now so you don’t waste your morning."

Danny stood up.

"What’s he like?"

She laughed, once, through her nose.

"He’s Geoff."

The portakabin was out the back past the drums, up 3 metal steps with a bit of carpet gaffered to the top one. Door propped open in all that cold, because there was a heater going inside it you could feel from the bottom step.

Geoff was 60-odd with reading glasses down his nose and a mug with a badge on it, and behind him the whole end wall of that portakabin was a planner. 6 foot of it. Weeks across the top, crews down the side, the whole thing covered in magnetic strips in 4 colours with jobs written on in marker.

He looked up.

"You lost?"

"Verney Road."

"You’re the public."

"I am."

"I don’t do the public." He was already back on his paperwork. "Reception’s round the front."

"I’ve been round the front. She said you’d say that."

"Then she’s saved us both a conversation."

Danny didn’t go. He stood in the doorway with the heat coming out past him into the yard, and he looked at the wall, because he’d been looking at it since he got to the top step.

The strips were tight all the way across next week and the week after. Packed in, no gaps anywhere.

Except Friday.

Friday had 3 yellow strips at the top and then a run of empty planner all the way down to the bottom of the crews. And next to the third one there was a smear of dry-wipe where something had been rubbed out and never written back in.

He’s got a hole on Friday.

And he’s not filling it with a phone call, he’s filling it with something that’s already near the van.

"You’ve had a job go over," Danny said.

Geoff’s pen stopped.

"What?"

"Friday. You’ve had something slip." He nodded at the board. "Deptford, is it? That one that’s been rubbed out."

Geoff turned round in the chair and looked at his own wall, and then looked at Danny, and his whole face changed shape.

"Who are you?"

"Danny Flynn. I’ve got a cutout on Verney Road that your bloke says is 90 minutes." He stayed exactly where he was in the doorway. "And you’ve got a crew stood about on Friday that you’re going to have to pay whether they turn a spanner or not."

"You don’t know that."

"No," Danny agreed. "I know what a wall looks like when a job’s come off it."

Geoff put the pen down.

Behind Danny in the yard somebody dropped the tailgate of a van, BANG, and swore at somebody else, and a radio came on and got turned down again.

"Verney Road’s Bermondsey."

"It is."

"That’s not where that crew’s working Friday."

"How far off is it?"

Geoff looked at the wall for a good long while.

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