My Clocking In System

Chapter 15: The Amenities

The thing nobody told you about owning the sky was how quiet it was up there.

Danny stood in the middle of the penthouse as the evening came down gold and pink over the river, a cardboard box at his feet holding the sum total of the old life he’d decided to keep, a photo, a medal, a dead watch, a few letters, and felt, for the first time all day, the strangeness of the silence.

Mrs Antwi’s telly turned up loud because she was going deaf.

The baby two doors down screaming at three in the morning.

The lads outside the chicken shop playing grime off a phone speaker.

Adaeze’s heels clicking on the landing when she did her rounds.

And the couple next door... every night, like clockwork, the moment Danny got home. The headboard knocking against the thin wall, the woman moaning, the man grunting, going at it like they were glued together.

He’d stopped hearing it months ago. Stopped registering it. He’d gone numb to all of it, the sex, the noise, the life happening around him while his own had gone quiet and cold. Here, there was nothing.

Just the hum of a building too expensive to make a sound, and his own breathing, and forty floors of air between him and another human being.

Thomas had carried the box up himself.

Insisted on it, actually, would not hear of Mr Flynn lifting a finger, had ridden up in the private lift holding a battered cardboard box like it was the crown jewels, set it down with enormous care, and asked, with total sincerity, whether Mr Flynn would like it unpacked.

Danny had said no, thanks, he’d manage, and Thomas had looked almost disappointed to be denied the honour.

That was the thing. The whole staff of the Sterling had decided, somewhere between this morning and this evening, that he was somebody, and now they could not do enough.

He looked at the box. He looked at the four bedrooms he did not need and the kitchen that had never cooked anything and the dining table for ten people he did not know.

It was, he thought, the most beautiful place he had ever stood in, and it was also, right this second, the loneliest, and both of those were true at once and he didn’t quite know what to do with the pair of them.

His stomach answered for him. It growled, long and aggrieved, and he realised he had not eaten since the egg and cress sandwich on this exact floor that morning, a lifetime and forty grand ago.

Right.

He owned penthouse in a building full of food and staff and amenities he was paying a service charge on whether he used them or not.

It was time, he decided, to stop standing in his enormous empty home like a burglar who’d got lucky, and go and actually have some of this life he’d been handed.

How hard could it be.

The private lift sighed open the second he touched his fob, like it had been waiting for him, and carried him down, and somewhere around the tenth floor, Danny caught his own reflection in the bronze and had a small crisis.

He’d changed back into normal clothes at Pembury, jeans, a plain jumper, trainers, comfortable, him. And he was about to walk into a building full of people in cashmere who thought he was a mystery millionaire. He almost went back up to put the grey coat on.

Then he stopped himself, because that was the old Danny, the one who dressed to be allowed in. He owned the place. He could wear what he liked. Let them wonder.

The doors opened on the lounge, and they wondered.

It was a beautiful room, all low velvet chairs and a real fire and a wall of bottles behind a marble bar, and maybe a dozen residents scattered through it in the soft lamplight. And the women.

Danny had lived his whole life in London, but he’d never seen a concentration of women like this in one room. They weren’t just beautiful; they were expensive. The kind of sexy that took time and serious money to maintain.

A blonde by the bar in a backless silk dress that clung to every curve of her ass. A brunette lounging on a velvet sofa, legs crossed, wearing heels high enough to be dangerous and a skirt short enough to be illegal.

His arrival turned heads quietly, all at once, and then politely away. He felt every one of them clock him. The young man from forty.

The one nobody knew. The penthouse that had stood empty for years, suddenly occupied by a bloke in his late twenties with no visible company, no visible job, no visible anything, who had appeared out of nowhere and bought the most expensive flat in the building outright.

He could hear, almost, the story assembling itself around him as he crossed the room. Tech, must be. Sold something. Crypto, maybe. Or family money playing at being self-made.

A woman by the fire, fortyish, beautiful in the maintained way money kept you beautiful, watched him over her wine with frank, amused interest. Her dress dipped low in the front, and she shifted just enough to make sure he noticed. He noticed.

His body noticed, too.

After the encounter with Adaeze on the stairs, his dick was already on a hair-trigger, and walking into a room full of gorgeous, perfumed women looking at him like he was a prize was not helping. He shifted his stance, adjusting himself subtly inside his jeans.

"Mr Flynn."

Naomi materialised at his elbow the way she seemed able to materialise anywhere in her own building.

She was still in the charcoal suit, but she’d unbuttoned the jacket, and the white silk blouse underneath clung to her in a way that was entirely professional and completely distracting.

She was stunning. High cheekbones, dark skin, and a body that the tailored suit was working very hard to contain. When she shifted her weight, the fabric pulled tight across her hips, and Danny had to force his eyes to stay on her face.

"I thought I might find you down here. Settling in?"

"Trying to," Danny said. "It’s quiet up there."

"It is." Something passed over her face, quick, professional sympathy with a real thing under it.

"It’s the one thing the brochure never mentions about the top floor. You can have everything in the world up there except a neighbour. Most people find it takes some getting used to." A small smile.

"Can I get you a drink? On the house, your first night. Then I’ll show you what you’re paying for."

"Actually," Danny said, and his stomach chose that exact moment to growl again, loud enough that she heard it, and he had the grace to be embarrassed,

"I’ve not eaten. All day. Is the. Does the food thing work, or is that just a brochure thing too?"

Naomi’s mouth twitched. It was the first genuinely human thing he’d seen her do, a real laugh held just behind her teeth. "The food thing works, Mr Flynn. The food thing very much works. Come with me."

What followed was, Danny would think later, one of the strangest and funniest evenings of his life.

Because Naomi gave him the tour.

The full tour.

And she did it the way you’d show a child round a sweet shop, except the child was a grown man who three days ago had been deciding between the eggs and the milk, and the sweet shop was a building where everything was free at the point of use because you’d already paid more than most people earned in a year just to live there.

The private dining room first, where a chef Danny had not asked for and did not know he had appeared from a kitchen and asked, with a small bow, what Mr Flynn might like, anything at all, the kitchen was his.

Danny, who had been rehearsing how to order in a restaurant his whole adult life and had never once felt he’d got it right, stood there paralysed by a man offering to cook him literally anything, and heard himself say, "Could I just, could I have a burger? And chips?"

The chef did not so much as blink. "Of course, sir. How would you like it cooked?"

"However’s. however’s good. Thank you. Really. Thank you."

Naomi watched this with an expression she was working hard to keep neutral and failing, and when the chef had gone she said, dry, "You can ask for the burger, you know. You’re allowed. It’s your chef."

"I’ve got a chef?"