My Clocking In System

Chapter 31: who are you?

She’d thought about it all night.

Thought about it this morning in the dark with her own hand between her legs and the pillow bitten quiet so the neighbours wouldn’t hear, finishing on the memory of a man she’d met once.

Thought about it, choosing the green costume again, the one that showed everything, sliding it up over the wet she was already in.

She was wet now, even after the swim. Standing in a slow lift in a building full of strangers, a slick streak of herself smeared on the inside of her thigh under the costume, every bit of it for a man who hadn’t come down.

Didn’t come back last night.

Well.

So the mystery man from forty had somewhere to be after all. Somewhere that kept him out all night.

Mara leaned against the lift mirror and looked at herself, the freckles, the green still showing at the collar of the shirt, and felt something she did not have a flattering name for and refused, on principle, to call jealousy.

She’d known him the length of one wet handshake and a near-concussion. She had no claim on where Danny Flynn spent his nights.

Obviously.

She let herself into her flat. The phone was already going in her bag, the particular ringtone she kept for the one caller she couldn’t ignore and couldn’t bear, and she dug it out and her whole posture changed. The easy pool slouch going out of her. The spine coming up.

MOTHER.

"Yes," she said, in the lower flatter posher voice. The one with nothing of the pool in it.

"Yes, I’m up. I’m dressed." She wasn’t. "No, I haven’t forgotten lunch." She had. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Friday. Twelve thirty. Daddy’s club. I know, Mother. I know what I can and can’t wear to Daddy’s club, I’ve been going to Daddy’s club since I was six."

She walked to the window. The river below. The grey towers of the wrong bank she never really looked at.

"Yes. I’ll be charming. I’m always charming."

She hung up. Put the phone face down on the side. Hard.

Then she picked it up again and, because she was twenty-four and human and irritated and a little bit hungover off a man she’d met once, opened the building’s resident directory, the one that listed everyone, and scrolled to the top.

To Flat 40. And found, where every other entry had a name, a little grey dash.

No name. Company-held. Nothing.

"Who are you...?" Mara said to the dash, out loud, in her empty flat.

The dash, like everything else about the man, declined to answer.

"Toast’s burning," Jodie said. Not moving. A beat. "Go on. You’re decorative. Might as well make you useful."

I got up. The toaster popped just as I reached it. Burnt one side. Fine the other. I scraped the worst off with the back of a knife. Dropped it on a plate. Brought it over.

"My hero," she said. Dry.

We ate. Drank the coffee. It was terrible. Instant. The kind you bought when you paid your own bills and didn’t see the point of the twenty-quid bag from the place on the corner.

I watched her over the rim of the mug. The bruise on her neck where I’d put my mouth last night.

A small dark thing I caught myself stupidly proud of, and wanted to put my thumb to, and didn’t. The pencil through the wet knot. The dressing gown a bit too big, sleeves rolled up.

The green lace I knew was on underneath it now, the secret of it sitting warm in my chest. The half-made Carter dress on the machine in the next room through the open door. Her whole secret life around me in a kitchen.

"Don’t look at that," she said. Catching me looking past her at the dress.

"At what..."

"You know at what."

"I was looking at you."

"Smooth."

"Wasn’t smooth. Was true."

She held my eye over her mug. The half-smile. Then she dropped her eyes.

"You’re not allowed to see it in daylight, Danny Flynn. It’s not done." She set the mug down. Tapped the spoon. "If you tell anyone about it, I will kill you."

"I’m not going to tell anyone."

"Steve does not get to know."

"Steve absolutely does not get to know."

"Or my mum. Or anyone."

"Or anyone."

She watched me a second longer. Then she nodded. Once. The label stayed in the room between us. A thing she’d let me see and trusted me to keep.

Through the thin walls the city was waking up. A bus grinding its gears on the main road. The far-off rattle of a train. A door slammed in the flat above. Someone’s music starting two walls away. The day was out there, waiting.

My phone buzzed again on the bedside table down the corridor. Then again. Then it stopped.

This time I went and got it.

I don’t know why. Maybe because she’d shown me a secret, and I wanted to look the other one in the face. I turned it over. The dark square. The single line of gold sliding down, writing itself slow, letter by letter, the way a man writes who has never once been kept waiting.

[ Good morning, host. You did not sign in. ]

[ The Concierge noticed. The Concierge notices everything. ]

[ Flat forty has no name on it. People have begun to ask why. ]

[ At the Sterling, that is gossip. ]

[ Where you are going next, it is a question. ]

I read it twice.

I thought of the grey dash where my name should be in the building directory. The lounge full of people who knew of me and knew nothing. Mara at the pool, asking the desk. Naomi Adeyemi reading my face that first morning and filing what I let slip.

A name with no face behind it was a question. And questions got answered, whether you wanted them to or not.

"Danny." Jodie’s voice from the table. Quiet now. Not joking. "Your face just did a thing."

I turned the phone face down on the side.

"Nothing that can’t wait."

She didn’t ask again. She stirred her terrible coffee and kept her eyes on the dress through the open door and let me keep it. The same way I was keeping hers. She wasn’t stupid. She’d heard the buzzing, in the shower and now. She knew exactly what she was doing, not asking.

I crossed back. Sat down. Took her hand across the small wobbly table.

Across the river, a woman in a charcoal suit was pulling up a company registration that led nowhere and frowning at it over her own coffee.

In a kitchen in Battersea, a letter from a debt company sat unopened on a table, waiting for a tired woman to come home from cleaning other people’s offices and read, in a single line, that the stone she’d carried for eleven years was simply gone.

The world had started, this morning, to ask after Danny Flynn.

And the world, once it starts asking, does not stop until it has a name, a face, and a use for both.

But that was for later. All of it was for later.

I turned my hand over under hers. Laced our fingers. The phone lay face down on the side, gold line dark, patient as ever.

For one more hour, I chose to stay exactly where I was.

The world could have its answer tomorrow.