My Clocking In System

Chapter 32: The Long Way Back

By nine that morning, three women in three different postcodes had Danny Flynn on their minds.

Two of them were dangerous.

He was eating breakfast with the third.

The caff was two corners from her flat, on Battersea Park Road, close enough that she’d walked it with her hand shoved in his coat pocket the whole way. The egg roll did change his life. Near enough.

They ate them on the low wall outside, the door going ding behind every workman pushing in. Grease soaking through the paper. Traffic going by. The hiss and spit of the fryer through the propped-open door, somebody’s radio going behind the counter, a bus grinding its gears at the lights.

Jodie put hers away in about four bites and stole the last third of his without asking.

Danny let her.

A week ago he’d been counting out a meal deal to the penny. Now the richest thing he owned was watching a woman in his stolen jumper eat his breakfast in the cold.

"You’re staring," she said. Mouth full.

"I’m not."

"You are. It’s weird. Stop it or commit to it, one or the other."

He committed to it.

"Oi!" She went pink and shoved the last of the roll at him to shut him up. "Piss off."

The half-smile ruined the telling-off before it landed.

The jumper came down past her hips and swallowed her hands to the knuckles. And underneath it, and nobody in the whole of Battersea knew this except the two of them, was the green lace he’d picked out of her drawer an hour ago. Same green as the Carter dress he wasn’t allowed to see in daylight.

Two secrets she was wearing at once. Both hers. Both his to keep.

She caught him thinking it.

He watched her catch it.

She looked away first. That never happened.

"Don’t," she said, to the traffic.

"I didn’t say anything."

"You didn’t have to. Your whole face said it." She pulled the sleeves down further over her hands. Pinker. "Behave, Danny Flynn."

Then she looked at her phone and swore.

"Shit. Shift. I’m on at ten." She was up, brushing crumbs off his jumper, which was now apparently her jumper. "I have to go home and change into clothes that aren’t yours, which is a tragedy, because this is the most comfortable I’ve been in years and I hate that it’s yours."

She stopped.

Looked at him.

And the bold went out of her for a second, the way it kept doing when she wasn’t guarding it.

"You’re really not going to disappear."

"No."

"Say it properly."

"I’m not going to disappear, Jodie. I’ll text you tonight. I’ll be a nuisance. You’ll get sick of me."

"Doubt it," she said. Then, like it cost her: "The second one. Not the first. I’ll get sick of you eventually. Everyone does." A beat. "Just. Not yet."

Then she got hold of the front of his coat with both buried hands and pulled him in and kissed him.

Not quick. Not the peck you give at a bus stop.

She kissed him like she was making a point about something. Her mouth warm and tasting of egg and brown sauce and that terrible instant coffee. One hand coming up out of the sleeve to find the cold side of his jaw.

Her whole body leaning into him, the soft full weight of her tits pressing against his chest through two layers of wool, and his hands knew exactly what was under that jumper now, which made the wool worse than nothing.

He got a hand into her hair.

Then he slid the other one down her back, over the jumper, and filled it with her ass. Squeezed. One last time. Because he was allowed now, and because eleven years of not being allowed hadn’t burned off him yet.

"Mmh." Into his mouth. She came up on her toes and arched into him for it.

Beep. A van went past. Somebody shouted something out the window.

Neither of them heard it. Neither of them moved.

When she finally broke off it was with a soft wet sound, and she stayed close. Forehead nearly on his. Breathing on his mouth.

"That hand," she said. Unsteady. Making no move to get it off her. "is very confident for a public pavement."

"It’s my jumper. I’m checking it’s being looked after."

"It’s my jumper now, Danny Flynn. And apparently so’s the hand." The half-smile starting at one corner. "Right. That’s your lot."

"Jodie."

"Don’t." She was already backing off up the pavement, pointing at him, pink to the ears. "Don’t say anything nice at me. I’ll be late and it’ll be your fault and I’ll have to explain it to Steve."

And she walked off up the road in his jumper. Didn’t look back.

Danny sat on the wall and watched her go and felt like the luckiest liar in London.

Because that was the thing sitting under all of it.

The lie.

She knew he was hiding something. She’d felt the shape of it and chosen, on purpose, not to pull the thread. But she thought the something was small. A windfall. A bit of luck a courier wasn’t ready to explain.

She didn’t know it was forty floors. She didn’t know the coffee she’d apologised for that morning was better to him than anything a chef in a white coat had ever carried up under silver. She didn’t know the something had a gold line and a price list for doors.

And every good thing between them was built on the exact size of what she didn’t know.

He sat there in the cold and let himself feel exactly how much that was going to cost him one day.

Then he put it away, the way he was learning to put things away, and got on the Vespa.

He took the long way back to the river.

He told himself it was the morning. The light. No reason to rush.

The truth was he didn’t want to cross the bridge.

On the south side he was just Danny. The second he crossed the water he was the mystery man in forty. The nameless dash. The question the whole building was asking.

He wasn’t ready to be him again yet.

So he rode the back way. Past the estate. Past the chicken shop with the shutters rattling up. Past Pembury House, where his own broken lift was probably still broken, and let himself be nobody for another twenty minutes.

Then he ran out of south London.

And the bridge was there.

And he crossed it.

The Sterling took him back the way it took everyone back. Smoothly. Like he’d never left. The engine ticking as it cooled. Thomas had the door open before he’d got the Vespa on its stand.

"Mr Flynn. Good to have you back, sir." A fractional pause. The discretion of a man paid to notice everything and mention none of it. "You were missed."

"Was I... ?"

"The building runs on very little to talk about, sir." The ghost of something dry under the deference. "An empty penthouse is a great deal to talk about. An occupied one that empties for a night is more."

So they’d clocked it.

Of course they had. One night away and the whole tower had turned it over.

Danny filed it, the way he was learning to file things, and thanked him, and went in.

Naomi was at the desk.

Not near it. At it. Behind it, almost, leaning over Priyanka’s shoulder at the screen.

She straightened when the doors hissed, and turned, and put on the smile.

But Danny had a half-second before the smile.

And the half-second was where The Knock lived now.

She’d been looking at something she shouldn’t have needed to look at. Something about me. And she’s pleased to see me the way you’re pleased to see the thing you’ve been chasing walk in and save you the trouble.