My Clocking In System

Chapter 17: The Life

Danny woke in the white bed the size of his old kitchen and, for the first time, did not reach for his phone to check if it had all been a dream.

He knew it was real now.

He lay there a while in the quiet, the city going gold through the glass, and thought about the last bed he’d actually slept in.

The one in the box room at his mum’s, a single, the mattress folded at the edge where he’d lain on it five years too many. This bed was wider than that room had been long.

He’d worked it out the second night with the tape measure on his phone, just to see.

He let himself smile at the ceiling about it. He hadn’t smiled at a ceiling in years.

Then he got up and did something he’d never once done in twenty-eight years.

He used the amenities.

The pool first.

Third floor, that long lit rectangle of still blue water.

Not quite his alone.

An elderly man in a navy cap ploughed slow steady lengths at the far end.

A woman in enormous sunglasses sat fully dressed on a lounger reading the Financial Times and ignoring the water entirely, a uniformed attendant hovering near the towels with the patient stillness of staff everywhere.

Danny swam in a place that smelled of nothing. No armbands, no other children’s plasters, no council-pool shriek off the tiles.

Just the slosh of his own arms and the quiet slap of the old man’s stroke and the city beyond the glass.

He’d learned to swim in water the colour of weak tea at Camberwell Leisure Centre, where the lifeguard had a tattoo of a knife on his forearm and the changing room floor was always wet for reasons you didn’t want to think about.

This was like swimming through air.

This. This is what it’s for.

He thought about the money in his account while he swam. £15,935.42 sitting in HSBC like it had been there all along, like it belonged to him, which it did, which it had taken him three days to start believing.

He grinned underwater.

He was towelling off at the shallow end when the glass door swung open and a girl came in out of the changing rooms, and the whole quiet expensive room seemed to wake up around her.

Copper-red hair piled up and escaping.

A swimming costume in a green so bold it was almost rude in a building that wore nothing but charcoal and cream.

Cut high on the hips and low at the front. Danny’s eye, which had been too tired and too broke for years to bother going anywhere, went before he could stop it.

Long legs. Narrow waist. Tits that the thin fabric was only just managing, round and full, pressing against the green like they were trying to escape. Gold hoops in her ears she hadn’t taken off for the swim.

A scatter of freckles across her nose and one larger one at the corner of her mouth that moved when she talked. She walked like she knew exactly what she looked like and didn’t care if you noticed or not, which made you notice more.

She brought a smell into the chlorine air with her. Something coconut, sun cream maybe, the kind of smell that didn’t belong to a London February but to a different building entirely.

"Oh thank God, a human."

She dropped her towel on a lounger, talking already, to him, to the room, to the city through the glass.

"I’ve been in this building three weeks and it’s like swimming in a morgue. Everyone’s so. composed."

She said the word like it was a disease.

"My brother had this flat for six months before I got the keys. Six months and he never used the pool. I asked him what was the point. He said he hadn’t found the time. Christ, the point is to swim in it."

She was at the water’s edge.

"You’re new, top floor, you must be."

"I..."

"I’d have heard otherwise. Everyone’s been talking about the mystery man in forty for days, it’s all anyone down in the lounge can manage between sips of their horrible green drinks. And here you are. Disappointingly normal-looking. No offence."

A grin, bright, freckled, without malice. "Mara."

"Danny."

"Danny." She tried it out, nodded, and approved. "Good. Plain. I like it. Everyone here’s called Rupert."

He opened his mouth to say something and lost the chance, because she was already crouching at the edge, one toe in.

"God, they keep it freezing. Right. Don’t watch, I scream going in."

She was in before he could answer. Splash. A yelp bounced off all that expensive glass. She came up laughing, hair dark and slicked.

She was the most alive thing in the building.

"You coming back in," she called, treading water, "or are you one of the composed ones after all?"

"I’ve got, "

"You’ve got somewhere to be. Course you have."

"I do, actually."

"Mm. They all say that."

But she said it warm, treading water, copper hair dark and slicked now, the wet costume clinging to every curve.

She pushed herself up onto the pool edge, arms straight, water running off her. Danny watched it stream down between her tits and over her stomach, and he couldn’t help it. His dick stirred in his swim shorts.

She caught him looking.

She didn’t look away.

She was younger than him. Twenty-four, twenty-five maybe, with the easy fearlessness of someone the world hadn’t ground down yet.

"I’m right under you, Danny-from-forty. The floor below. So you’ve no excuse." A flash of that grin, slower this time, like she was filing him away for later. "Nobody escapes me forever, ask anyone. Go on then. Go be mysterious."

She hauled herself out of the water and came toward him along the wet tiled edge, talking the whole way, hands going. She moved the way she talked. All of her at once, nothing held still or held back.

The costume was plastered to her now, almost see-through, and Danny was a man and she was built like something out of a dream and he was only human, so he noticed.

Her nipples were hard from the cold, pressing through the thin green fabric. The curve of her ass as she turned. Everyone in a ten-mile radius would have noticed.

"So you’re the big mystery." She was still coming, gesturing, not watching her feet.

"Honestly, the relief. I thought forty was going to be some sixty-year-old hedge-fund ghoul with a young wife, and instead it’s, well."

A grin. "You. Whatever you are. Which nobody knows, by the way, which is driving everyone absolutely mental, I love it for..."