He got the notebook out, because he was a man who wrote things down now, and turned past the menu page and the snagging list to the back where he kept the running total.
£176,412.87.
He’d written it Thursday night after the machine went out.
He looked at it a long time and then wrote +140,000 underneath and did not add it up, because adding it up would have made it a real number and he was not ready for that at 20 past 11 on a Saturday.
Priyanka rang up at half 12.
"Mr Flynn, sorry to bother you. There’s some parcels come for you and I’ve put them in your lift, only there’s 4 of them and I didn’t want them sat down here."
"Cheers, Priyanka."
"They’re from a place on Savile Row." She said it the way you’d read out a foreign word you’d practised. "Is that right?"
"Should be."
"Lovely. Well, they’re in your lift."
Four boxes, and none of them shouted about anything. Grey card, a small mark stamped in the corner, tissue paper inside folded like somebody had been taught to fold it.
A suit. Charcoal, no pattern in it you could see from more than 3 feet.
A shirt, white, in its own bag.
Shoes with the soles unmarked and a wooden thing inside each one to keep the shape.
Socks. A belt. And a watch that did not look like anything, on a leather strap, in a box with a hinge.
Danny stood in the middle of it with the tissue paper round his feet.
Then he put it on, in a flat with nobody in it, and it took him 11 minutes because he had never in his life done a proper collar and had to look up what to do with the cuffs.
And it fitted.
Not near enough. Not close. It went on him like it had been waiting for him, across the back and down the arm and everywhere else, and the trousers broke on the shoe exactly where trousers are supposed to break on a shoe, and he had no idea how he knew that except that he had spent 11 years looking at other men’s clothes from a doorstep.
He went and stood at the glass and looked at himself in it with London going on behind.
That’s not me.
That is a man off a lift in a building like this one. That’s a bloke who gets a table.
He turned sideways and did up the button and looked again.
And then he saw it.
The right shoulder sat differently. Not wrong. Cut differently, with a bit more room in it than the left, and it lay flat on him where a jacket off a rail had never once lain flat on him.
11 years of a bag on that side. Sainsbury’s carriers first, then the square one, 6 days a week, up on the right shoulder because that was the side he’d always carried on since he was 17.
He had never told anybody that. He had never mentioned it to a living soul, because it was not a thing you mention. He had never been measured for anything in his life.
Danny stood in front of 40 floors of glass with his hand on his own right shoulder and felt the whole flat go quiet around him.
He got the phone.
who else works here
The answer came fast, which it did not always.
[ There are others, host. ]
[ You will not meet them. ]
He read it 4 times.
what happens if i stop
Nothing for 9 seconds. He watched the screen with his thumb hovering.
[ That is not a question the Concierge is able to answer. ]
able or allowed
[ Your shift begins at 16:00. ]
Ryder Court was a dead-end off a street off St James’s, 40 feet of black railings and 2 bay trees in pots and a door with no name on it anywhere.
He’d got a cab. He’d stood on his own pavement at 3:20 in a charcoal suit with a crash helmet in his hand and understood inside about 4 seconds that the helmet was not going to work, and had gone back up and left it on the marble and got a cab like a man who gets cabs.
There was a porter inside the glass. Sixties, black waistcoat, the whole thing.
Danny went up the 3 steps and the door opened before he’d got to it.
"Afternoon, sir."
"Afternoon."
And that was it.
No question. No book on a stand, no name asked for, no list. The man held the door and stood back and Danny walked past him into a hall with a stone floor and a staircase going up and a smell of woodsmoke and old carpet and lilies.
The phone went once in his inside pocket, one short buzz, and he got it out in the doorway of the first room and looked at it.
[ Clocked on. 16:02. ]
Right.
So that’s what it looks like.
The room had about 40 people in it and a rugby international on 2 screens with the sound down and the radio commentary going instead, half a second out from the picture, so that the room made its noise before the telly did.
Danny got a drink because everybody had a drink and stood near a pillar and waited to be told what he was there for.
Nobody told him anything.
At 20 past he moved to the far end, in case it was a spot he was meant to be stood in rather than a building. At half past he went and stood by the window. At 4:40 he went up the stairs and put his head round a room with a billiard table in it and 3 men round it, and one of them looked up and Danny said sorry and came back down.
There’s no job.
Where’s the job? There’s always a thing. A door, a room, a sign-in, and the phone tells you what it wants.
And it’s told me a postcode and a grade.
He got the phone out at the bottom of the stairs and typed what am i supposed to be doing and watched the screen for 30 seconds and got nothing back at all, which it had never once done.
By 5 he had stopped looking.
And once he’d stopped looking he started reading the room, because it was the only thing he had ever been able to do, and because it was a very good room for it.
The barman had been pouring in that building for 30 years and had 4 regulars he served without asking and one he asked every time out of some grudge nobody had explained to him.
There was a lad of about 22 being walked round by his father and introduced to men who shook his hand and forgot him inside a minute, and the lad knew it, and his father did not.
Two women by the fire, and one of them did a very fast unkind impression of somebody who had just gone out of the room, and the other one laughed and then looked at the door.
England scored and the room made a noise and then the radio caught up and it made it again, smaller.
The lad got left by the fireplace at about 5 past.
His father had gone off sideways into a conversation with two other men and had not looked back for him, and the lad stood there with a glass in front of his chest like a shield and did the thing Danny had watched a hundred people do in a hundred doorways. He checked a phone that had nothing on it. Put it away. Got it out again.
22. Maybe 23.
And he’s been in this building his whole life and he’s still stood on his own by a fire.
Danny went over.
"All right."
The lad’s head came up fast.
"Hello."
"Who are you with?"
"My father. He’s, " He looked over at the group and back. "He’s just over there."
"Right." Danny nodded at the screen. "Are they going to lose this?"
"God, yes." It came out of him like a cork going. "They’ve been terrible since the summer. We’ve got no 10 and they keep picking a 10 who isn’t a 10, and everyone can see it except the bloke who picks him."
"Who’d you pick?"
And the lad told him. For 6 minutes, without stopping, with his hands going, and Danny understood roughly a third of it and asked a question every so often to keep it running.
Somewhere in the middle of it the lad put his glass down on the mantelpiece, which he had not done once in an hour.
"Sorry," he said eventually. "I’ve gone on."
"You’ve not."
"I have. I do." He picked the glass back up. "What do you do?"
"I’m opening a café."
"A café." He said it like Danny had said something in another language, and then, hopefully: "Whereabouts?"
"Bermondsey."
"That’s south, isn’t it."
"That’s very south."
"Right." The lad thought about it. "Well, good luck. Genuinely."
His father collected him 4 minutes later without apologising for the hour, and took him off towards the billiard room by the elbow, and the lad looked back once.
Somebody needs to put a chair by that fire that a person can sit in on their own without looking like a spare part.
And a bloke behind a counter who says all right.
That’s the whole job, that is. That’s all I’m actually buying.
He got the notebook out in a members’ club in St James’s and wrote A CHAIR NOBODY HAS TO ASK ABOUT and put it away again.
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