My Clocking In System

Chapter 16: The Sterling

"I’ve got a chef?"

"You’ve got a chef."

"I had a kettle and two rings this morning," Danny said, before he could stop himself, and then caught it, the slip, the crack in the story, and watched her clock it.

She was good. She filed it, said nothing, but he saw her see it, and he thought, not for the first time, that Naomi Adeyemi missed absolutely nothing and was far too clever to be fooled for long.

The burger, when it came, was the best thing he had ever eaten.

Which was, he was aware, the third time he’d thought that in twenty-four hours, the meal-deal sandwich, the egg and cress on the floor, now this, and the realisation that hit him with the first bite was not about the burger.

It was that he’d been so hungry for so long, for so many years, that he’d forgotten food could be a pleasure and not just a problem to solve. He ate every chip. He was not ashamed of it.

Then Naomi showed him the rest, and the rest was absurd.

The pool, on the third floor, a long lit rectangle of still blue water behind glass with the city beyond it. It wasn’t empty. Three women were in the water, and two more were lounging on the deck chairs. And they were all wearing bikinis that seemed designed more for showing off than swimming.

Danny stopped. One of the women climbed out of the pool, water streaming down her tanned skin, the tiny thong of her bikini doing absolutely nothing to hide the perfect, round curve of her ass. She shook out her wet hair, arched her back slightly, and walked toward the showers, her hips swaying with every step.

Danny’s breath caught. He looked away, but the other women on the loungers were just as bad—long legs, flat stomachs, and asses that belonged in a magazine.

His jeans were suddenly far too tight. The erection he’d been fighting since the lounge came back with a vengeance, hard and aching against his zipper. He had to cross his arms in front of his waist and hunch his shoulders slightly just to hide it.

I have to do something about this, he thought, his brain short-circuiting. I am going to embarrass myself.

But not today. Today he was just trying to get the hang of this wealth thing that was coming out of nowhere. The asses in the pool would have to wait.

Naomi didn’t seem to notice his crisis, or if she did, she was too professional to show it. She led him past the spa, where a woman in a tight white uniform offered him a treatment he did not understand the name of, and he said maybe another time, his voice a little hoarse.

The gym, all black machines and mirrors, where a girl in skin-tight yoga pants was doing squats, her ass in the air.

The screening room on two, a dozen huge reclining seats facing a cinema screen, where Naomi told him he could watch anything he liked, just call down, they’d set it up, and Danny thought of the cracked tablet he’d watched things on in bed and said nothing at all.

"And this is the residents’ terrace," Naomi said, opening a glass door onto a roof garden strung with low lights, planters and heaters and seating, the river black and gold below. "Popular in summer. Quieter this time of year."

There were a few people out there despite the cold, wrapped up, drinking.

The fortyish woman from the lounge was among them, and she lifted her glass to Danny across the terrace with a smile that was an invitation and a question at once. He nodded back, polite, and did not go over, and felt Naomi notice that too.

"Penelope," she said, low, as they stepped back inside.

"Third marriage. Currently between the third and the fourth, if you take my meaning. She collects interesting new arrivals." A beat, perfectly dry. "You’re this week’s interesting new arrival."

"Lucky me."

"You can handle Penelope, Mr Flynn. I have every confidence."

And there it was again, that flicker of real humour under the polish, the sense of a person in there who found the rich she served quite as ridiculous as Danny did, and was far too professional to ever say so, and had perhaps, just slightly, decided that Danny was someone she could almost say it to.

They ended up back in the lobby, near the desk, where Thomas straightened the instant he saw them and Priyanka smiled.

And through the glass front, parked in the resident bay where a Bentley and something low and Italian sat gleaming, was Danny’s pale green Vespa, looking like exactly what it was, a scooter, among cars worth more than houses.

A couple coming in stopped to look at it. Danny heard the man say, fond, half-laughing, "Now that I respect. Bloke buys the penthouse and rides a Vespa. No flash. Knows what matters."

And the woman said something back about how refreshing it was, how grounded, how you could always tell real money because it had nothing to prove.

Danny stood there and absorbed this, the latest and most ridiculous Chapter of the joke. They thought the scooter was humility.

They thought it was a statement, the quiet confidence of a man so rich he didn’t need a car to prove it.

They had constructed, out of a scooter he’d chosen because it was cheap and invisible and he couldn’t have charged a Tesla, an entire flattering story about his character. Down-to-earth. Grounded. Real money.

The truth was he’d picked the Vespa because he was broke and it was free and a courier could disappear on one. The truth was it was the opposite of a statement, it was camouflage.

But you could not tell people the truth, and the lie they’d invented for themselves was so much kinder to him than any truth had ever been, that he just let them have it, and kept his face still, and let himself be, for the first time in his life, comprehensively misunderstood in his favour.

"Something funny?" Naomi asked, watching him.

"No," Danny said, and then, because she’d been straight with him and he liked her, gave her a sliver of the real thing.

"Just, a week ago, nobody on this earth wanted anything to do with me. Now I can’t ride a cheap scooter without people deciding I’m a philosopher." He shook his head. "It’s a strange old world, Naomi."

She looked at him for a moment, and the read she did then was different from the one she’d done at the door this morning, slower, more curious, a woman recalibrating an assumption.

"Yes," she said. "It is." And then, professional again, smooth: "Anything you need, Mr Flynn, any hour, the desk knows how to reach me. Welcome to the Sterling. I think you’re going to be interesting to have around."

She left him at the lift. He rode up alone to the silent penthouse and the cardboard box and the whole city laid out below his windows, full of burger and surrounded by a life he’d been handed and could not yet feel was his.

He set the photo of his mum on the kitchen island, where he’d see it in the morning. It looked very small there, one warm human thing in three hundred square metres of beautiful cold.

He looked at it a while, and thought about the letter that would be landing on her mat any day now, and what her face would do, and wished he could be there to see it and knew he couldn’t, not yet.

Then he showered, in water that stayed hot as long as he wanted it, which was its own quiet miracle, and got into the white bed the size of his old kitchen, and lay there in the dark with the city glowing through the glass, too much space around him, the silence pressing in.

He should have dropped straight off. He’d barely slept in years and now he had the best bed in London. But sleep didn’t come, not for a while, because the wary part of him, the Pembury part, was lying awake too, turning the day over. The staff who couldn’t do enough.

The strangers who’d built him a character out of a scooter. Naomi, who hadn’t been fooled. The whole gleaming building that had opened itself to him on the strength of a word on a screen.

It had all gone so easily. That was the thing he couldn’t put down. Every door, all day, swung open the second he pushed. And in his experience, the only things that came that easy were the things that cost the most later, when the bill came, the way bills always came.

What do you want from me, he thought, at the dark, at the phone face-down on the nightstand with its gold line and its patient voice. Nobody gives a man the sky for nothing.

The phone did not answer. It just sat there, glowing faintly, the way it always did, like it had all the time in the world and knew that he did not.

Somewhere out past the glass a quarter of London was asleep and the other quarter was awake, and one of them, in a white stone house behind a door that had once locked Danny Flynn out in the rain, had no idea that tomorrow a courier was coming back.

Danny closed his eyes.

And eventually, fed and clean and forty floors above the only world he’d ever known, he slept.