My Clocking In System

Chapter 36: Shift Change

There was a silence in that kitchen you could have stood a spoon in.

Then his mother laughed at him.

"Oh, are you?"

"Yes."

"Retiring me."

"Yes."

"Danny." She put the scissors down on the drainer with a clink. When she turned round properly her face had changed. It wasn’t soft at all. "I have worked since I was sixteen years of age."

"I know."

"Sixteen. The shop, then the school kitchen, then the agency, then this. I have never signed on. Not once, not when your father went, not when you were small." Her chin was up. "And you’ve come in here with your biscuits in a tin and you’re going to retire me?"

"Mum, "

"What am I meant to do?" Her voice cracked. Danny understood, suddenly and completely, that this was not pride. "What am I meant to do, sit here? In this? On my own, all day, in this flat, looking at that chair?"

She had a hand out toward the front room. Toward the brown chair by the window that nobody had sat in for eleven years.

Danny stood very still.

He had come here with a hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds in a bank account and a plan that had seemed, on a scooter, on a bridge, unarguable. Take her off the rota. Give her the money. Fix it.

And she had just told him, in one sentence, that he had understood the problem exactly backwards.

It was never only the money. The money was the reason. But the rota was the shape her days had.

And the buses were where she saw people. And Denise upstairs and the woman at Tower Court who saved her the good chocolates at Christmas were, whether anybody said it out loud or not, most of the people his mother spoke to in a week.

Take the work away and you didn’t give her a life. You gave her a room.

"All right," he said slowly.

"Don’t you all right me."

"I’m not." He came round the table. "I’m listening. You’re right."

"I’m what?"

"You’re right, and I hadn’t thought it through, and I’m not going to pretend I had."

That stopped her. She looked at him with her arms folded and her eyes still red. Danny saw her recalculating the size of her son.

"But you’re getting off that rota," he said. "The four o’clock one. The five-thirty starts. The stairs. The bins. All of it. Because you’ve done twenty years of it and your hands are going and you’re on a bus in the dark. And I’m not having it, Mum. I’m just not. Not now. Not when I can stop it."

"And do what instead?"

"I don’t know yet."

"Well, that’s marvellous."

"I don’t know yet," Danny said.

"But I’m going to work it out. Something with people in it. Something you’d be good at, where you sit down sometimes and somebody says thank you."

He was making it up as he went. He could feel it forming as he said it. Some shape he couldn’t see the edges of yet. "Give me a bit. Don’t hand your notice in tomorrow. Just, don’t do the Saturdays. Start there. Tell them no to the Saturdays."

His mother looked at him for a long moment.

"You’ve changed," she said.

"Have I?"

"You have. You’ve gone very sure of yourself." She said it like she wasn’t certain whether it was a good thing. "You never used to finish a sentence."

"Yeah, well."

"Is it the money?"

"No," Danny said. And that, at least, was completely true. "It’s not the money."

She let that sit.

Then she came over and did the thing she did, which was to take hold of the front of his coat in both hands and give it a small shake. The same way she had when he was fifteen and towering over her and in trouble.

"Danny."

"Mum."

"Are you in trouble?"

"No."

"Because you can tell me. If you’ve done something. If someone’s, " her jaw went. "If someone’s got a hold on you. You can tell me, and we’ll sort it, and I won’t say a word about it after."

And that, out of everything, was the thing that nearly finished him.

Because she wasn’t asking whether he was a criminal.

She was offering. This woman who had scrubbed offices at half five in the morning for eleven years to pay off a man who’d emptied her accounts and gone. Offering to take on whatever it was and never mention it again.

"I’m not in trouble," Danny said.

"Swear it."

"I swear it."

She held onto his coat a second longer.

"Then there’s one more thing," she said. "And then I’ll leave it."

"Go on."

"Don’t disappear again."

He couldn’t speak.

"You did it once." She wasn’t crying now. That was somehow much worse.

"You were seventeen and you went, and I know why you went, love, I do, I’ve always known why. But you went, and it was four months before I had a phone number, and I want you to understand that I have never got that back."

She let go of his coat and smoothed it down where she’d creased it. "So whatever this money is, and however it came, if it starts taking you off somewhere, you ring me. That’s it. That’s all I want out of the whole business. You ring me."

"I’ll ring you," Danny said. "Every week."

"Every week."

"Every week, I swear."

"All right." She stepped back. Became brisk immediately. Which was how she got through things. "Right. Well. You’ll have something to eat."

"Mum, "

"There’s a chicken thing in the freezer. It’s no trouble, it goes in the oven, it’s not cooking, it’s just heat."

So he stayed. Ate a chicken thing out of the freezer at his mother’s little table. She talked about Denise’s hip and a woman at Tower Court who’d been caught taking the good bin liners home. She did not once mention the letter, which lay where they’d left it, face up between the salt and the pepper, with a nought on it.

At half seven he got his coat.

She came to the door with him the way she always did. Stood in it with her arms folded against the cold coming up the walkway. He was three steps down the stairs when she said it.

"Danny."

He stopped. Looked back up.

She was in the doorway with the hall light behind her. Her face had gone strange. She was looking at the letter in her hand as though it had only just occurred to her.

"Your father sent money once," she said.

Danny’s hand tightened on the rail.

"What?"

"Just once. Years ago." Her voice was very flat and very careful. The voice she used for things she’d decided a long time ago not to feel about. "Cash, in an envelope, no note. It come through that door there. Nineteen hundred pounds."

"Mum, "

"And I never told you," she said, "because you were sixteen and you’d have gone looking for him, and I’d have lost you as well."

The walkway light buzzed above them and went off, the way it did, and came back on.

"When," Danny said.

"Does it matter?"

"When."

His mother looked at him for a long moment. Then she stepped back into the warm.

"Ring me Sunday," she said. The door shut. The chain went across.

Rattle.

Danny stood on the stairs of the block he grew up in with his heart going like a hammer. Eleven years of a very simple story about his father. The story in which the man took everything and left nothing and never once looked back. Coming apart quietly in his hands.

Nineteen hundred pounds.

Which meant that at some point, somewhere, his dad had been alive and solvent and thinking about them.

And had sent money instead of coming home.

Down in the car park two boys were still going at the bike. Tick-tick-tick. Someone’s telly was still on too loud. Out past the estate the whole gold blaze of the city sat on the other side of the river. Forty floors of it with his name not on the door.

Danny got on the Vespa.

He did not start it for a minute.

Then he took his phone out of his pocket, and for the first time in four days he wanted the thing on it to talk to him. Wanted it badly. Wanted a gold line to slide down and tell him something.

The screen stayed dark.

"Yeah," Danny said. "Thought so."

The engine caught first time. Brmm.

He rode home the long way. Over the bridge. Into the light.