My Clocking In System

Chapter 30: Where is he?

This morning it was across a kitchen table.

She filled the kettle. Click of the switch. Pulled two mugs from the cupboard. Dropped bread in the toaster. Thunk. Moved through the cramped space with the practised ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was.

I tried to land on the last time I’d sat in a kitchen at half seven with a woman moving round it like the morning belonged to both of us. Couldn’t get there. It had been that long.

She put a mug in front of me without asking. White. Chipped. A small painted J on the side I clocked and decided not to mention. Then her own. Taller. Plain. She tapped the spoon on her saucer. Once. Same as the café. She did not look up to see me notice. She did not need to.

She came round behind me to get to the fridge and ran her hand flat across my shoulders as she went. Not a stroke. Not a pat.

Just an absent-minded thing, the way you’d touch a bit of furniture you were used to leaning past. I caught her wrist on her way back, ducked, kissed the inside of it without looking up from my mug, and let it go again. She didn’t react. She just kept moving. Carried the milk to the table. Set it down.

"Upstairs was having one of their nights last night," she said, sitting. "Did you hear them?"

"Around three. Bit of shouting."

"That’s the wife. He never says anything back. She does the whole performance on her own. I keep wondering if there’s actually a husband up there or if she’s been doing it solo all this time for the acoustics."

"Reckon there’s a husband. There’s two pairs of feet over the ceiling on a Sunday morning."

"You’ve been here five minutes, Danny Flynn. You don’t know my ceiling."

"I’m a fast learner."

The half-smile. Sideways. Into her mug.

She reached across the table without asking and took the burnt corner off my toast. Ate it. Didn’t comment.

There was a clock on the front of the cooker.

The time on it meant something I didn’t want it to mean.

I’d said the pool. Same time. The girl with the green costume would be doing her lengths on the third floor about now, looking up at a door I’d said I’d come through. Mara.

I looked at the number long enough to know I was choosing. Then I looked at Jodie. And I let the number go.

Across the river, in a building that cost more for a month than Jodie’s whole flat cost in a year, Mara Doyle stood at the edge of the third-floor pool in a swimming costume the colour of a traffic light, and got quietly, steadily annoyed.

09:14.

He’d said the pool. He’d not said it, actually. She’d said it, and he’d stood there dripping and gone the colour of a postbox and let her say it, which was the same as agreeing, in Mara’s experience.

Pool. Tomorrow. Same time. And here she was. Same time. Same green costume, worn on purpose, because the look on his face yesterday when he’d caught her coming up out of the water had been worth wearing it twice.

The costume was cut high at the hip and low at the front and it did nothing at all to hide what she had, which was a lot. The full, heavy tits that had been turning heads since she was sixteen and getting in her own way ever since. The narrow waist.

The long, strong body she’d built doing her lengths every morning of her life, swimmer’s shoulders, hard stomach, an athlete’s legs. Her dark hair was loose today and still half wet, the way she knew it sat best on her. She had dressed, top to bottom, for an audience of exactly one.

And the one hadn’t turned up.

The pool was empty.

Mr Pemberton ploughed his slow lengths at the far end in his navy cap, faithful as a clock. The woman in the enormous sunglasses sat on her lounger ignoring the water. The towel attendant folded towels that did not need folding.

No Danny-from-forty.

Mara put one toe in. Took it out. Did not get in. Getting in meant committing to the idea that she was here to swim, and she was not here to swim, and she had just enough self-awareness to know the difference and be irritated by it.

"Has the gentleman from the top floor been down this morning?" she asked the attendant, as lightly as she could manage. Which was not very lightly.

"I’ve not seen him, miss."

"Right." She picked at the strap of her costume. "Fine."

She got in after all, because standing at the edge of an empty pool in a costume chosen for an audience that hadn’t turned up was somehow worse than swimming.

She went in with a splash and did a hard fast twenty lengths with her face in the water, telling herself it was for the exercise. Mr Pemberton nodded at her gravely on the turn. She nodded gravely back. They had an understanding, her and Mr Pemberton.

By the time she hauled herself out she’d worked it down to a cool civility in her own head. So he hadn’t come.

So what. She’d met the man once. She’d nearly cracked her skull open and he’d caught her, and there’d been a moment, fine, she wasn’t going to pretend there hadn’t been one when his whole body had told her exactly what he thought of hers.

But a moment was a moment. She’d had a hundred moments. She did not stand around pools waiting on men. That was for the Penelopes of this building, the ones on their third marriage circling the new arrivals.

She wrapped herself in the big cream linen shirt and stopped at the desk on her way to the lift. Just passing. Just casual.

"Morning. Is forty in? I’ve a..." she gestured vaguely, "a thing of his. From the pool yesterday."

She did not have a thing of his.

Priyanka at the desk gave the smooth smile they all had down here, the smile trained into the staff for women like Mara. "Mr Flynn went out yesterday afternoon, miss. I don’t believe he’s been back. The night porter would have logged him."

"Oh." Mara kept her face doing nothing. "He didn’t come back last night."

"Not that we have, miss. Shall I leave him a message?"

"No." Too fast. She softened it. "No, it’s nothing. I’ll catch him."

She rode the slow lift up to her own floor, wet hair dripping a dark patch onto the cream linen, her jaw set in a way her mother would have told her caused lines.

She could still feel where his cock had pressed against her yesterday.

That moment in the water when he’d caught her, one arm hard across her back, her own feet gone out from under her on the tile, and she’d felt the full thick length of him against her thigh through his swim shorts.

Hard. Unmistakable. Neither of them saying a single word about it while it lasted longer than it had any business lasting.

She’d thought about it all night.