My Clocking In System

At 5:25 a man came and stood next to Danny at the pillar.

Seventies. Half a glass of something. A cardigan under the jacket, which nobody else in the room had.

"Whose are you?"

"Sorry?"

"Whose guest." He was watching the screen. "You’re somebody’s."

"I’m on my own."

"Ah." He drank a bit. "Well, that’s the best way. I came in with my father in 1971 and I’ve not enjoyed a Saturday since."

Danny laughed.

"What do you do?" the man said.

"I’m opening a café."

"A café." He turned round and looked at him properly for the first time. "Where?"

"Bermondsey."

"Bermondsey." He said it like a word off a map. "My wife’s sister lived in Bermondsey. Frightful lift."

And Danny went for the half second before the next thing, the way he went for it with everybody.

The face before the words got to it. 11 years of that, on doorsteps, in the rain, working out off a man’s eyebrows whether the door was about to shut on him.

He got nothing.

Not a blank. Not a man hiding something. There was simply nothing coming off him at all in Danny’s direction, the way there is nothing coming off a chair.

"Are you all right?" the man said.

"Yeah. Sorry."

"Mm." He looked back at the screen. "They’ll lose this."

Then he wandered off towards the fire and did not speak to him again, and Danny stood at the pillar with a drink he had not touched and his heart going for no reason he could have written down.

At 20 to 6 the door went and somebody came in late and the room did something small.

Not a fuss. A settling. Two conversations adjusted themselves.

"Afternoon, Mr Doyle."

Danny turned his head.

Sixties. Heavy through the shoulders. Coat still on, being taken off him by the porter, and he said something to the porter that made the porter laugh properly rather than politely.

Doyle.

Something went across the back of Danny’s mind and did not arrive.

Where do I know that from?

It’s a name. It’s an ordinary name. There’s a Doyle on every road in London.

Then the barman said "Sir?" at him because he’d been stood at the pillar for 90 minutes with one drink, and Danny said no thanks, and by the time he looked back the man was in the far room with his back to the door.

At 6 on the nose the phone buzzed in his pocket.

[ Clocked off. 18:00. ]

[ Shift complete. 1 hour 58. ]

He got out into the hall to read the rest of it and had to stand against the wall by the coats to do it, because they came one after another and he could not keep up.

[ Grade 2 wages: 140,000. Paid. ]

[ First shift at grade. Additional: ]

[ Kit is retained. ]

[ Ashcombe’s has been added to your record. ]

Danny read that last line about 6 times.

Retained.

He did not know what that was. He had not asked what any of it cost and had spent 3 hours being careful not to look it up.

And what’s the other one? Added to my record. What record?

He typed with his thumb against the wall.

what does added to my record mean

[ It means you are known here now. ]

known by who

[ By the house. ]

He stood in the hall of a building he had walked into 2 hours ago off a text message, and then he did something he had not planned.

He put his coat over his arm and went back out through the front door, down the 3 steps, and stood on the pavement for a count of 10 with the bay trees either side of him.

Then he went back up the steps.

The porter opened it before he got there.

"Forget something, Mr Flynn?"

Danny stopped dead in the doorway.

Nobody in this building has asked me my name.

I’ve not said it once. Not at the door, not at the bar, not to the old boy, not to the lad. I have not said my name out loud in that room all afternoon.

"No," he said. "Sorry. Thought I had."

"Not to worry, sir." The porter had the door wide. "Goodnight."

"Night."

He went down the steps a second time and got 40 feet up Ryder Court before he looked at the phone again, and there was one more sat there waiting, sent while he was stood in that doorway.

[ You were the only person in that room who was working. ]

Danny stopped under a lamp with 2 bay trees behind him.

what does that mean

[ It means what it says, host. ]

He got in at 25 past 6 and took it all off.

Jacket over the back of a stool. Shoes with the wooden things pushed back inside them, because it turned out that was what they were for. Shirt off, and the collar had rubbed a line under his jaw that he could see in the mirror.

The watch he held for a bit before he put it back in its box.

Retained.

Mine, that. All of it’s mine and I’ve not paid for a button of it and I’ve not asked what it’s worth, and I’m not going to, because the second I know what it’s worth I’ll have to think about who bought it.

He shut the hinge on it. Snap.

Then the clothes he’d bought on Thursday in a shop on Rye Lane with a queue and a sale rail.

A dark jumper, £22. A pair of jeans that were not work jeans, £28.

He’d stood in front of a mirror in a changing room with a curtain that didn’t meet in the middle and looked at £57 of clothes and thought about the coat Jodie had already gone quiet about once, and about the watch she’d noticed, and had bought the cheapest thing in the shop that still looked like he’d made an effort.

He put them on.

Then he stood in front of the glass again, in a jumper off Rye Lane, 40 floors up, with £316,412.87 in an account and a suit on a stool behind him that had been cut for a shoulder nobody had ever measured.

Right.

That’s better.

That’s a bloke who takes a girl to the pictures.

Two floors down and one along, Mara Doyle had done nothing all day and was extremely aware of it.

The green coat was over the back of a chair where she’d dropped it on Friday night. Camilla’s sofa had her jumper on one arm and a plate on the other. She had swum at 8 instead of 9, on purpose, which she had told herself was because the pool was emptier.

4 days.

You said you’d last 4 days and you’ve lasted 4 days, and nobody’s given you a medal.

She’d said it all out loud in that lobby with Priyanka 20 feet away building a wall of parcels. Don’t say it out loud. I’m not sitting in that window again. I’m in the pool Monday.

And he’d stood there in a wet coat with a crash helmet under his arm and said the thing about her being the only person who’d been straight with him all week, and she had been turning that over for 26 hours like a stone in a pocket.

And then he swallowed a name.

"I know some, "

And then nothing. And then a woman his mum used through the council years ago.

She got the phone and opened the notes and went down past the shopping list and the flight details and DAD BIRTHDAY IDEAS.

THE FORTY PROBLEM

The grey dash in the directory. The company that went round in a circle and came back to itself. And the third line, which she had copied off Companies House 11 days ago with her thumbnail against the screen:

correspondence address: 2a Clapham Rd SW9, above the dry cleaner’sP. ANAND

She looked at it.

She had looked at it perhaps 40 times and it had never once been anything except an address and 2 initials and a surname.

P. Anand. One room over a dry cleaner’s.

Small. Nobody’s got a practice like that unless they’ve walked away from a big one.

Somebody who’d pick the phone up.

She thought about Tom, and the flat being in the company, and 8 months of a man in Marylebone at £600 an hour not answering an email, and she thought: I could just ring her. Monday. She’s 15 minutes away and she does exactly this.

She put a full stop after the name and turned the phone face down and went to run a bath.

Danny came out of the Sterling at 6:40 in a £22 jumper.

Thomas had the door and had his helmet out of the cupboard behind the desk before Danny had asked for it.

"Evening, Mr Flynn. You’re out twice today."

"I am."

"Nice one, was it?"

Danny stopped with the helmet in his hands.

"Do you know," he said, "I’ve got no idea."

He got on the scooter and went south over the river with the wind coming up his sleeves, and 4 miles the other way a woman was in a bath with her phone face down on a sofa in the next room, and 3 miles south of that a woman with dark blonde hair had been doing her hair for 2 hours and was going to be late.

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