My Clocking In System

Chapter 11: The Condo I

Light!

That was the first thing, before the size of it, before anything.

The whole place was made of light, because the whole place was made of glass. Floor to ceiling, every wall, on every side, and beyond the glass the entire city of London lay out under the hard bright morning like something laid at his feet on purpose.

The river, a wide band of moving silver. The bridges strung across it. St Paul’s, small and pale and far. The towers of the City flashing back the sun.

And there, south, across the water, a grey huddle of brick he knew the shape of the way you know your own hand, because he had woken up in it that morning, on a free mattress, under a broken radiator, with an eviction letter face-down on the counter.

The estate. His whole life. From up here, it was a thumbprint on the glass. He lifted his hand and covered it, the place where he was born and raised and overlooked and ground down for twenty-eight years, blotted out behind one palm.

He took his hand away. Made himself walk out. Behind him the lift sealed shut without a sound.

And then he just looked, and made himself see all of it, because some part of him needed to count it, the way you count money you don’t believe is yours.

The floor ran in wide planks of pale oak, warm underfoot, and he thought of the lino in his own room, cracked at the seams, lifting at the corner by the door where the damp got under it.

The ceilings went up and up, double height, and his own ceiling was close enough that he’d painted over the same damp patch three times standing flat on the floor.

A kitchen ran along the far wall, an island of pale veined stone, brushed-steel everything, a tap that arched like something in a showroom, a wine fridge with nothing in it yet, a hob that had never had a pan set on it, and Danny thought of his own kitchen, which was two rings and a kettle and a single shelf, and the empty milk bottle in a fridge that held nothing else.

Above the island hung three glass pendant lights, and he thought, helplessly, of the bare bulb with no shade, because a shade had been four pounds and four pounds had been four pounds.

He walked further in.

Two long sofas, the colour of wet sand, faced each other across a low table of dark stone, deep enough to lie down on, more seating than he had owned cushions in his life, turned not toward a television but toward the window, because here the window was the television and the television was the whole of London.

A real fireplace was set into a wall of pale marble, a fire forty floors up where no fire could possibly be needed, and that, he understood, was the whole point of it: it was there because someone could afford to want a thing for no reason. On the walls, actual paintings, the kind with texture in the paint, lit from above by their own small brass lamps.

A dining table of dark wood stretched long enough to seat ten people he had never met and could not yet imagine knowing. And everywhere, on the shelves, in the corners, objects, a sculpture, a bowl, a tall vase, things whose only job was to be expensive and stand there being it.

Through a wide arch, the bedroom.

A bed the size of his entire kitchen, made up in white so clean it looked unused, a headboard of soft grey fabric, two lamps, a wall of wardrobe behind sliding doors of frosted glass, and beyond the bed more window, more city, so that a man could lie there and watch the river move.

Danny thought of the free mattress three blocks’ worth of someone else’s life had handed down to him, pressed flat to the frame, the blanket he folded every morning.

Off the bedroom, a bathroom of marble and glass, a walk-in shower with a head the size of a dinner plate, a deep stone bath set against, of course, a window, and warm air breathing up out of the floor itself, and he thought of lukewarm water out of a boiler that never got past lukewarm, of getting dressed fast in a cold room with his breath showing.

Every inch of it chosen, placed, finished. Furnished down to the last spoon by someone with taste he did not have yet and money he was only beginning to understand he had.

Move-in ready. As if it had been waiting years for a man who, until last night, could not have paid the service charge on it for a single month.

Every inch of it was his?!

The glass pulled him the way the shop window used to, except he wasn’t on the pavement now in the rain doing sums he couldn’t afford. He was inside the window.

He crossed the wood and put his hand flat to the cold pane and looked down the whole drop of the city, the river, the bridge he’d crossed an hour ago a thin grey line below, and his own reflection hung faint over all of it, a tall man in a good grey coat standing at the top of a tower of glass, and for a second he genuinely did not recognise him.

His whole life, this London had happened to other people, behind glass exactly like this, and Danny had been the one outside it in the wet, holding their parcels, pressing their dead buzzers, sent round their backs.

He was on the inside now!

And there was no one up here. No one to ask his business. No one to send him round the back.

No one at all, just Danny and the city and the enormous ringing quiet, and into that quiet his stomach growled, absurd, loud as a shout, and it broke him open and he laughed, alone, forty floors up, a sound that came out half a laugh and half something he hadn’t let himself do in years.

The phone lit in his hand.

[ Sign-in complete. ]

[ Apartment 14, The Sterling. The penthouse. The top two floors, thirty-nine and forty, knocked into one. ]

[ Four bedrooms. Five baths. Two terraces. Three hundred square metres of the best address south of the river. ]

[ Market value: £8,400,000. Bought outright. Furnished. Held behind a company that leads nowhere and a name no one can trace to a courier. ]

[ It is yours, Danny. No mortgage. No landlord. No rent. ]