My Clocking In System

Chapter 37: The Only One I

Danny sat down that night and, for the first time in his life, thought about money.

Not the way he’d thought about it for twenty-eight years. That kind of thinking he could do in his sleep. Had done in his sleep. Waking at three with the sums already running.

Rent, phone, the standing order to his mum, how many drops till payday, whether the card would go through for a meal deal or whether he’d have to put the sandwich back at the till in front of people.

That wasn’t thinking about money.

That was fear wearing a calculator.

This was different. This was a man sitting on a sofa that had come with the flat, in a flat he could not sell, with a number on a screen that was his and had no wolf attached to it, trying to work out what to actually do.

He opened the banking app.

£165,935.42.

He looked at it for a long time.

A week ago that number would have been a printing error. A week ago the largest sum he had ever had at one time was four hundred and ten pounds, the day he got paid and his rent hadn’t gone out yet, and even that had felt like holding something that belonged to someone else. He’d once found a tenner in a coat and felt rich for an afternoon.

Now there was a hundred and sixty-five grand, and Danny sat with it, and made himself do the thing he had never once been able to afford to do, which was think past next week.

Here was the problem, and it had taken him four days and a letter and his mother’s kitchen to see it properly.

The flat was worth eight and a half million pounds. And it was worth nothing.

He couldn’t sell it.

The moment he tried, a solicitor would want to know where it had come from, and the answer was a company that led nowhere and a purchase with no story, and the whole thing would come apart in his hands. He couldn’t borrow against it, same reason.

He couldn’t even really own it, not the way you own a thing you can point at and say mine and prove it.

He lived in the most expensive place on the river and if the system switched off tomorrow he wasn’t sure the flat wouldn’t switch off with it, doors that stopped opening, a name that stopped being on a lease, Naomi Adeyemi coming up in the bronze lift to ask him, kindly, to explain.

The eight million was a picture of money. It wasn’t money.

The money, the actual money, the money that would still be money if the phone went dark and never lit again, was the hundred and sixty-five grand.

And a hundred and sixty-five grand, Danny made himself understand, sitting there, was not a fortune.

It was a lot. It was more than his mum had earned in the best five years she’d ever had. But it was not the kind of number that lasts a life on its own. Spend it and it was gone.

Sit on it and it did nothing. And behind it there was no salary, no next paycheque, no Monday. There was only the doors, and the doors depended on a thing he did not understand and had not asked for and could not control.

He’d spent four days celebrating being rich. He sat there now and understood, cold and clear, that he wasn’t rich. He was holding something. And a man holding something is a man who can drop it.

He needed the money to make money. He needed a thing that stood on its own, that had books and a landlord and a name on a piece of paper, that would keep being real if the magic went away.

He needed, he thought, and it surprised him, something to do.

He put the phone down. Picked it up again.

There was a question he’d been not-asking since the first night, the way you don’t put your tongue on the tooth that hurts. He’d danced around it. He’d told himself it didn’t matter. Sitting there with the number and the eight-million-pound picture-frame and the whole strange machinery of his life, he found he had to know.

"Are there others," he said, out loud, to the empty flat.

The gold line came, the way it did, unhurried.

[ Others. ]

"Like me. People this has happened to. People with a phone that does this." He heard his own voice and how much he wanted the answer to be yes. "Am I one of a lot? Is there, I don’t know, is there a group of us somewhere? People I could ask?"

A pause. Longer than usual. He’d have sworn, if it were a person, that it was choosing.

[ No. ]

Just that.

"No what. No there’s no group, or, "

[ No. There is you. ]

Danny sat very still.

[ There has only ever been you, Danny. There is no one else it is happening to. There is no one who has what you have, no one who has seen what you have seen, no one who would believe a word of it if you told them. ]

[ You are the only one. ]

The city sat outside the glass, all its lights, ten thousand windows with ten thousand people behind them, and Danny understood that not one of them, not a single soul in all of it, could be told.

Jodie couldn’t be told. His mum couldn’t be told. There was no forum, no support group, no one who’d been through it who could put a hand on his shoulder and say the first year’s the worst, you’ll get the hang of it. There was him, and a phone, and a secret the exact size of his whole life.

He’d thought being rich would feel like being let into something.

It turned out to feel like being the last man on earth in a city of eight million.

"Right," he said, to nothing, and his voice came out rougher than he meant.