My Clocking In System

Chapter 10: Naomi

"Mr Flynn. Naomi Adeyemi, I manage the building."

A firm, dry handshake, and as she gave it her eyes went over him, quick and thorough, the coat, the boots, the way he stood, and Danny felt himself being read by someone good at it, the same read he’d been doing to people from doorsteps his whole life, only smoother.

A woman taking his measure and deciding, for now, to be charmed.

She’s better at this than the porters, he thought, and held his own face still, because if she was reading him then the worst thing he could do was let her see the broke courier underneath flinch at his own name in her mouth.

Don’t oversell it. Don’t undersell it. Just be a man who owns the top floor and is mildly bored of being welcomed.

It was acting, and he was not an actor, and his pulse knew it even if his face didn’t.

"Naomi." He gave it back easy, first name for first name, the way the men in the good lobbies did to staff, and watched something flicker in her eyes, recalibrating. "Thanks for coming down. You didn’t have to."

"For the penthouse, I did." A small dry smile.

"We’d begun to think forty would stand empty forever. Walk with me, I’ll take you up, and you can tell me to stop talking whenever you like."

"Go on then," Danny said. "Talk me into it. Though I think I’m already sold."

That earned a proper look, amused, a fraction warmer, and he filed it away the way he filed everything: she liked a bit of back. Most of the men she walked up here probably treated her like furniture.

He was not going to, partly because he did not have it in him, and partly because the part of him still doing sums had already worked out that the woman who ran the building was worth more to know than anyone living in it.

She led him across the lobby, and Danny made himself look at it the way he’d never been allowed to before, slowly, like he had a right to.

It was busy in the muted way money was busy.

By the water wall, two women in gym kit that cost more than his old monthly rent stood with green drinks, mid-conversation, one in box-fresh white trainers that had plainly never seen a pavement.

"...and I told him absolutely not, the terrace is off-limits, I don’t care whose CEO he is." The other laughed, a sound like ice settling in a glass.

A man in a navy overcoat and no tie, the studied carelessness of someone who never had to prove anything, murmured into his phone in a language Danny didn’t place, then switched to English without missing a beat, "...we hold until Thursday, tell him that."

An older woman swept through in a camel coat with a small grey dog under her arm, a young man two steps behind carrying nothing but her attention, and she did not glance at the lobby, only clicked her fingers at the desk and watched it move, because that was what you did when you had been rich long enough to forget it was rare.

A boy of maybe nineteen, in a hoodie Danny clocked with the part of his brain that priced everything as the kind that cost four hundred quid precisely to look like it cost twenty, drifted past with a phone to his ear.

"Dad, I don’t want the Belgravia one, I want Mayfair, the accountant can do one." Nobody hurried. Nobody carried anything heavy.

Nobody, he realised, looked tired, the bone-deep tiredness he saw on every face on his own side of the river, the tiredness of people the week was using up.

Up here the week worked for them.

And not one of them looked at him twice. That was the thing that kept landing. Not the up-and-down, not the verdict. He passed through them and they let him, because the coat said he was one of them.

"The lounge is through there," she was saying, with an easy gesture at a set of double doors, fire and low chairs and more glass beyond them.

"Coffee, papers, a bar from six. Pool and spa on three, the gym beside it, both staffed, both yours at any hour. There’s a screening room on two you can book, a private dining room if you’re entertaining. Housekeeping as often as you’d like it, just say the word at the desk. Deliveries, dry cleaning, a car if you need one, that all comes through us."

She said it lightly, a woman who had given this speech a hundred times, and Danny nodded along like a man who had heard it a hundred times too, while inside his head a small hysterical voice was going pool, staffed, at any hour, because just yesterday his idea of luxury had been hot water that stayed hot for the length of a shower, and a fortnight back he had stood in this very building pressing a dead buzzer in the rain trying to deliver a parcel to people who had all of this and could not be bothered to come down for it.

"And anything not on that list," she finished, "you ask me, and it goes on the list. That’s rather the point of the place."

"I’ll try not to be a nuisance," Danny said.

"Most of them don’t try at all."

She said it dry, almost under her breath, and he caught the crack of a real person under the polish, someone who dealt with the worst of the rich all day and had opinions about them she was far too professional to share.

He liked her better for it.

He said nothing, but he let her see he’d heard it, a flicker, and she clocked that too, and something settled between them that was not quite friendship but was at least two people recognising each other was awake.

They reached a single lift set apart from the rest, its doors brushed bronze. She laid a fob to a panel and the doors parted. Inside, no buttons, just a panel and a soft light.

"Your private car," she said, stepping in with him. "It serves the penthouse and nothing else. No one reaches forty without your say, not even me, after today." A small smile. "Your home should feel like your home."

The doors closed them in together, and for a second Danny stood in a bronze box the size of his old bathroom with a woman who ran an eight-figure building, and the sheer madness of it nearly made him laugh out loud.

Three days ago, he’d been bracing for the street. Now, a woman like this was handing him keys to a sky he’d only ever looked up at.

"Can I ask you something," he said, before he could stop himself.

"You can ask."

"You’re young for this. Running all this." He nodded at the building around them. "How long did that take you?"

She looked at him, and the professional mask slipped a half-inch, surprised, maybe, that he’d asked about her at all. "Sixteen years. Started on a desk like that one, eighteen years old, telling people the lift was on the left." A beat.

"Why?"

"No reason." But there was a reason, and it sat warm and strange in his chest. Sixteen years she’d been climbing this.

He’d spent his own on doorsteps, in the rain, going nowhere, and got handed the top of this building by a thing on his phone in a single night. She’d earned every floor. He’d earned none of them. "Just. fair play, that’s all. It’s a long way up."

Something in her face changed, just slightly, the look of someone unexpectedly seen.

"Yes," she said. "It is." And she did not say anything else, but the rest of the ride was easier, two people who had both come a long way up by very different roads.

The lift rose, smooth and silent. Danny watched the floor count climb on the small display and felt his pulse go up with it, the number rolling through floors of people who would each have called themselves rich, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and still climbing, until it stopped at the only number with nothing above it but sky.

Forty.

"I’ll leave you to it," she said, not stepping out as the doors opened. She stayed in the lift, a small courtesy that told Danny she had understood something about this morning he had not said aloud.

"The desk knows your name now, Mr Flynn. So does everyone who matters. Welcome home."

The doors closed on him, and Danny was alone, and the penthouse opened out in front of him.

No hallway. No corridor, no neighbour’s door, no number on a wall. The whole crown of the Sterling was simply there, around him, his, and Danny stood with one hand flat against the lift door to stop it closing and could not move his feet.