My Clocking In System

Chapter 1: That Just How It is

VOLUME 1

"He dropped it. I watched him drop it."

The man in the doorway had a dressing gown, bare ankles, and a voice pitched to carry down the whole marble lobby. Danny stood on the step with the parcel in his hands, the same parcel, undropped, and felt the night tilt the way it always tilted, toward him, never away.

"Sir, it’s sealed. Nothing’s broken. You can hear it if you..."

"Don’t shake it." The man recoiled like Danny had offered him something off the pavement.

"Don’t you dare shake it. That’s a sixteen-hundred-pound decanter. You people throw these on the doorstep and ride off, I’ve seen you do it... I’ve got it on the camera."

He did not have it on the camera.

There was no camera pointed at the step, and even if there had been, it would have shown a courier holding a parcel in the sleet, waiting, which was all Danny had done.

But a camera was a good word to say loudly in a lobby, because it sounded like proof, and people who never got accused of anything believed proof was a thing you simply announced.

The concierge had come out from behind his desk now, drawn by the noise, and that was the moment it stopped being a complaint and started being a problem.

Because the concierge looked at the man in the dressing gown, who lived there, who tipped at Christmas, and then he looked at Danny, who was wet and from somewhere else, and Danny watched him decide. Under a minute. It always took less than a minute.

"Is there an issue, Mr Halloran?"

"The issue is your delivery person damaging my property and lying about it." Halloran folded his arms.

"I want it noted. I want his company informed. I’m not paying for a smashed decanter because some boy on a moped can’t be bothered to..."

"It isn’t smashed," Danny said.

He said it quietly.

He had learned a long time ago that the quiet way was the only way that worked, that the second you raised your voice, you became the thing they already wanted you to be.

So he said it quietly, and he held the parcel out, flat on both palms, and he looked the concierge in the eye rather than the man in the dressing gown, because the concierge was the one still deciding.

"Open it," Danny said. "Right now. If it’s broken, I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket and you’ll never see me again. If it’s not, this gentleman signs for it and we all go to bed."

For a second, it hung there. The concierge wanted to. Danny could see it. A reasonable man, off the clock in his own head, who knew a sealed box when he saw one.

But Halloran was a resident, and Danny was not, and that was the whole of it.

"I think," the concierge said carefully, not unkindly, which was somehow worse, "it’s best if you take it back to the depot. Let them sort it with Mr Halloran directly. We can’t have a scene."

We can’t have a scene.

As if Danny were the scene. As if the man in the dressing gown shouting about cameras that did not exist were a calm spring morning, and the courier standing silent in the rain were the disturbance.

Something moved in Danny’s chest, the old thing, the hot thing, the one that wanted to put the box down on the marble and ask Halloran to his face why a man with a sixteen-hundred-pound decanter was up at half eleven in a dressing gown looking for someone smaller than him to be right about.

He could feel the words. He had a good few of them, ready and sharp.

He thought about arguing. He always thought about arguing. He never did.

Arguing was a thing people with options did. You argued when losing the argument did not cost you the week.

Danny had thirty-seven pounds in his account and an eviction letter on his counter, and the depot docked you for complaints whether the complaint was true or not, and Halloran knew none of that and would not have cared, and so the words stayed where they were, behind his teeth, where they always stayed.

He gave the concierge a look instead.

Not a glare.

Just a flat, level look, the kind that said you know, and I know you know, and he watched it land, watched the man glance away, because the one small power Danny had left was making a comfortable man uncomfortable for exactly one second before the door closed.

"Sign says no signature, no payment," Danny said. "I’ll mark it refused."

"That’s fine," the concierge said, to the floor.

"Good," said Halloran, to no one, already turning, victory bored into a yawn. "Honestly. The standard of people they send."

The door shut. The lock turned. Through the frosted glass Danny watched the warm blur of them move off into the marble, the resident and the man paid to take his side, and then the lobby was just light he stood outside of, the way he stood outside of most things.

He put the parcel back in the bag.

Refused.

A black mark on the app, a hit to his rating, a one-star that would say the courier was rude, because that was the version that got written down.

He had done everything right, held the box flat, offered to open it, offered to pay, kept his voice level, and they would dock him anyway. They always found a way. That was not bitterness. Bitterness was for people who still expected better. This was just arithmetic.

Three streets to the moped, head down, sleet coming sideways off the river and finding the gap between his collar and his neck. He had learned the face young, the one you made when someone with a lanyard decided your worth in under a minute.

He made it now, at no one, at the rain.

Two years of couriering, a kitchen before that, a call centre before that that let him go in a fortnight for not being the right energy for the brand.

A whole life of standing in lobbies he would never live in, holding things he would never own, for people who looked through him on the way to the door.

The moped waited where he had chained it. A Honda PCX, white once, more rust than paint now. A parking ticket was already stuck to the seat, going soft in the wet. He peeled it off. Sixty pounds.

He laughed once, with nothing behind it, and pushed it into his pocket with the others, because what else did you do with a sixty-pound fine when you had thirty-seven pounds. You laughed, or you lay down in the road.

The engine caught on the third try.

One drop left and the tank near empty. He pulled into the petrol station, told himself ten pounds would do it, and went in to pay.

The card reader thought about it. Thought about it some more.

"Declined," the kid behind the counter said, already reaching to cancel it.

Danny’s face went hot, the same hot as the lobby, the one he was not allowed to do anything with. A man waited behind him. A woman behind the man. He could feel them not looking, which was its own kind of looking. "Try it again."

"Declined. Sorry."