My Clocking In System

Chapter 35: What Is This

He read it anyway. All the way down. So she could watch him read it.

The company’s logo at the top. The reference number. The account in his father’s name and hers. The joint one. Opened the year before everything came apart.

The figure. £40,912.16.

The line under it.

Balance outstanding: £0.00.

No further payment is required.

"It says what you thought it says," Danny said.

"It can’t."

"It does."

"Danny." Her hands were flat on the table either side of her mug. Cleaner’s hands. The knuckles gone thick. The nails cut down to nothing because you can’t wear nails on that job. A shine across the backs of them from twenty years of somebody else’s disinfectant.

"I’ve paid that every month for eleven years. Every month. I paid it the month you moved out. I paid it the Christmas the boiler went. There is one hundred and forty quid coming out of my account on the eighth of every month for that and it has never once, not once, gone down in any way that made a blind bit of difference."

"I know."

"So you tell me how a thing like that just stops."

There it was.

He had thought about this. Lain awake on eight hundred quid’s worth of mattress and thought about this. Every version he’d built had sounded, in his own head, exactly like what it was.

He looked at his mother across a table he’d done his homework on.

"Because I paid it," he said.

She didn’t move.

"Danny."

"I paid it. Last week. All of it."

"Danny."

"It’s done, Mum. It’s gone. That’s what the letter’s telling you."

She was shaking her head. Small and fast. Not disagreeing exactly. More like she was trying to get something to sit level.

"You haven’t got forty thousand pounds."

"I have."

"You haven’t got four hundred. Love. You had to ask me for petrol money in February." Her voice was climbing.

"You wouldn’t come at Christmas because of the train. You’ve got a coat on you I’ve never seen and a scooter that’s new and you’re sat in my kitchen telling me you’ve got forty thousand pounds, so no, no, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to do better than that, because I have spent eleven years being told things by men who were about to make my life worse."

That last bit came out of her before she could stop it. She heard it land. Her mouth went tight.

"I’m not him," Danny said quietly.

"I know you’re not."

"I’m not him, Mum."

"I know." She put a hand up to her forehead. "I know that. I do know that. Danny, I’m not, " she stopped. Started again.

"I’m frightened. That’s all this is. I’ve had that letter since one o’clock and I’ve been sat here going, right, so what does this cost, because that’s how it’s always gone. So just tell me. Whatever it is. Just tell me what it costs and let me get on with it."

Danny wrapped both hands round the robin mug.

Tell her.

The thought arrived fully formed and horrible in its simplicity. Tell her about the app. Tell her about the doors.

About the man in the dressing gown.

The sign-in and the fifty thousand and the hundred and fifty thousand and the flat with two floors and a lift that only goes to you. Put the phone on this table. On this exact table. Let her see the number. Watch her face.

She’d believe him.

That was the terrible part.

She’d sat in this kitchen and believed a hundred worse things.

And then she would be a woman who knew, and knowing would be a thing she’d have to carry, and his mother had carried enough.

So he did the thing he’d been doing for a week. And he did it to her. And he felt it go in.

"Crypto," he said.

She blinked. "What?"

"Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, that sort of thing." He heard his own voice go slightly wrong. Too even. Too rehearsed for something he was supposedly explaining off the cuff. He pushed on through it.

"I put a bit in, years ago. When I was doing the kitchen job. It was nothing, it was, I don’t know, a couple of hundred quid I shouldn’t have had. Forgot about it, basically. And then it came good."

He’d heard it in a lounge full of people who’d never met him. Tech, must be. Sold something. Crypto, maybe. He’d stood there and let them build a man out of nothing and hand him to himself. And now here he was handing the same man to his mother.

"Came good," she repeated.

"Yeah."

"How good?"

"Good enough that the debt’s gone and I’m all right." He made himself hold her eye.

"It’s clean, Mum. It’s mine. Nobody’s coming to the door. There’s no man behind it. It’s just a stupid amount of luck happening to somebody who’d run out of it."

The kettle ticked as it cooled. Somewhere downstairs a door went, bang, and voices went along the walkway.

His mother looked at him for a long time.

And Danny watched her decide.

That was the thing he would think about later, lying awake. He watched her weigh it. Watched her find the seams in it. Because she wasn’t stupid. She had never once been stupid. He watched her get to the edge of asking the next question.

And then he watched her put it down.

She chose to believe him. Chose it. The way you choose to put a heavy bag down at the top of the stairs. Because the alternative was a version of her son she couldn’t survive. And she had been surviving things for a very long time and she was tired.

"Right," she said.

"Right?"

"Right." She picked up her tea. Her hand wasn’t steady. "Well. Good. That’s, " she laughed, once, and it came out wet. "That’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard in my life."

"I know."

"Bitcoin."

"Sort of."

"Your father put four hundred pounds on a horse called Lucky Sovereign at Kempton in 2009," she said. "And you’ve gone and done it with a computer."

And then she was crying. Properly. Both hands over her face. The way she never did in front of him.

Danny was round the table and on his knees on the shiny bit of carpet with his arms round his mother’s shoulders and her fleece against his cheek. She was saying something into her hands he had to lean in for.

"Eleven years," she was saying. "Eleven years, Danny."

He held on and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything.

When she’d stopped she was furious about it. Obviously. She got up and did things at the sink with her back to him for a bit. Blew her nose on kitchen roll. Told him the flowers were lovely and that he shouldn’t have and that they’d want cutting.

Danny sat back down. Looked at the fridge.

Same fridge. Magnets. A photo of him at eleven again, the same one, a spare copy gone yellow. A dentist’s appointment card from March.

And the rota.

Blu-tacked at eye height. Printed off at the office and gone soft at the corners. Her name at the top. Her weeks laid out in a grid. Shifts written in blocks the way they’d been written for as long as he could remember.

MON 05:30 Tower Court / 17:00 Rye Ln

TUE 05:30 Tower Court / 17:00 Rye Ln

Five-thirty in the morning. Then again at five in the evening. Two buildings. Two sets of stairs. Four hundred bins. Five days a week and a Saturday every other. A bus at ten to five in the dark to get to the first one.

Fifty-two years old.

Danny looked at that rota and felt something go through him that was not warmth and was not gratitude. Closer to rage. It had nowhere to go, because the person it was aimed at was a whole world.

Four days ago he’d sat on a floor with a phone hot against his ear and told himself the money was the fix. Sat here now, looking at MON 05:30 Tower Court, he saw for the first time that the money was the small easy part.

"Mum."

"Mm." She was doing the flowers.

"How long have you been on that rota?"

"Which rota?"

"That one." He nodded at the fridge. "Tower Court."

"Oh." She didn’t turn round. "Nine years at Tower Court. Rye Lane’s newer. Six?" She thought about it. "Six."

"And you get up at what."

"Ten past four."

"Ten past four."

"You know all this," she said, mildly, snipping. "You used to hear me go."

He had.

That was the thing.

He’d heard her go a thousand times. From fourteen years old onward. The tap running. The front door. The walkway.

He’d lain in bed in the dark and listened to his mother leave the flat in the middle of the night to go and clean the offices of people who would never once, in their entire lives, think about her.

Danny stood up.

"You’re done," he said.

She turned round with the scissors in her hand.

"You what?"

"You’re done. You’re not doing it any more. I’m retiring you."