My Clocking In System

Chapter 4: Vespa?

"Oi! Oi, mate!" He swayed off the curb, grinning, arms wide.

"That a hairdryer? You riding a hairdryer? Get a proper bike, you nonce!"

His mates wheezed behind him.

"My nan’s got more cc than that!"

Six months ago it might have landed.

Tonight Danny looked at him, this red-faced lad shouting about engine size outside a pub at midnight, and then thought about the ten thousand pounds sitting in his account, and something that was almost a smile went across his face.

"She probably has, mate," he said, and the light went green, and he rode off and left them laughing, and for once the laugh was not at him, or if it was, he had stopped being able to feel it.

He told himself he would look at the garage, and that was all.

Confirm the scooter was real, eat, sleep, deal with the rest when his hands were not shaking and his stomach was not eating itself.

There was one reward left, the phone kept saying, an address it wanted to send him to, though it would not say what waited there. It could wait too. He had learned a long time ago not to chase a good thing in the dark on an empty stomach.

He had told himself, on the worst nights, the lying-awake nights, that if money ever came, the very first thing he would do was eat a proper meal and sleep a proper eight hours, because he could not remember the last time he had done either.

He was not going to let a magic phone talk him out of the one promise he had ever made himself.

Pembury House had a garage underneath it, a low concrete cave that flooded in October and stank of damp and someone’s exhaust. Half the bays sat empty because half the building could not afford cars. Bay nineteen had been Danny’s, before he gave it up.

There was a scooter in bay nineteen.

Pale green, gleaming under the one strip light that still worked, not a scratch on it.

The Vespa from the shop window, the one he had stood and looked at through the glass a hundred times. Sitting in the bay that was supposed to be empty.

He walked to it and put his hand on the seat. Leather, cool, real. He crouched and looked at it the way he used to look at it through the glass, the lines of it, the chrome, the thing he had wanted and could not have. Up close it was better than the window.

He crouched there a while, the cold of the garage working into him, and went to push his hands into his jacket pockets the way you do to keep them warm.

His fingers closed on something in the right one.

He frowned. He had not put anything in there. He drew it out, and it was a key. Not his.

The Honda’s key was where it always was, still in the ignition of the rusted bike behind him, where he had left it two seconds ago because nobody on this estate was stealing that.

This was a different key. The little shield on the fob. A Vespa key.

He looked at the rusted Honda, key in its ignition. He looked at the gleaming Vespa, and at the key in his hand that fit it. He had not been near the Vespa’s ignition.

He had not picked anything up. The pocket had been empty on the walk home, he had checked it twice for his phone. And now there was a key in it that opened a bike that had been a picture on a screen an hour ago.

His hands were not quite steady.

"That was not in my pocket," he said.

The phone buzzed once, gentle.

[ The inventory delivers what the host requires, when the host requires it. ]

[ You required the key. ]

[ One reward remains. An address awaits you. ]

"Tomorrow," Danny said.

The cursor, if a thing like that had a cursor, seemed to pause.

[ You do not wish to see it tonight? ]

"I’ve been up since six. I’ve not eaten since breakfast and breakfast was two eggs. I’ve been rained on for eleven hours and called a thief by a man in a dressing gown." He pocketed the key.

"Whatever it is, it’ll keep. I’m going to eat, and I’m going to sleep, and if you’re real, you’ll still be real in the morning. And if you’re not, then I’ve had a sandwich and a kip and I’m no worse off."

A pause.

[ ... That, too, is wisdom. ]

[ Rest, host. The door will be there tomorrow. ]

Danny climbed the stairs, because the lift had been broken a month, and let himself into the flat.

He peeled off the soaked delivery jacket and hung it on the back of the door where it always dripped, and without the jacket and the hood he looked like what he was underneath all the tiredness, which was a good-looking man going to waste.

Dark hair, too long because a barber was a luxury, pushed back wet off a face that was sharper than the rest of him let on, a jaw a few days unshaved, eyes that would have been the first thing you noticed if the rest of him were not so plainly worn down.

It was a face that had been handsome at seventeen and had spent eleven years being too exhausted and too overlooked to be anything at all. In the cracked mirror by the door he caught himself for a second, and looked away, because there was no one to look good for and never had been.

The room took the rest of him in. One room, really, the bed against one wall and the kitchen along the other and a window that did not shut all the way. Damp bloomed in the corner above it.

The radiator he had bled and banged and given up on. A single bulb with no shade, because the shade had broken and four pounds was four pounds. The fridge held the empty milk bottle and nothing else.

The mattress he had got free off the estate WhatsApp because someone three blocks over was throwing it out. The face-down letter on the counter, second notice, fourteen days.

It was a small, cold, hard room, and Danny had lived in it for three years, and tonight, for the first time, he was not going to bed hungry in it.

He put the kettle on, because tea was a habit that cost nothing.

He sat on the edge of the free mattress in his dry-by-now clothes, in the terrible little room, and unwrapped the egg and cress sandwich, and ate it slowly, properly, the way you eat when you have learned not to know where the next one is coming from.

It was a three-twenty-five meal deal sandwich and it was, without question, the best thing he had eaten in a year.

When it was gone he drank the tea, and turned off the bulb with no shade, and lay back on the free mattress that pressed flat under him, and looked at the damp on the ceiling in the dark.

Ten thousand pounds. A scooter he had wanted for two years. All of it for one parcel, carried up to a fourth floor like a hundred parcels before it, to a block people barely scraped their way into.

And one reward still sealed, behind a door he had been too tired to open.

It had already paid more than he made in months, and there was something left over he had not even seen.

Behind the disbelief, behind the small animal contentment of being fed and dry and lying down, the old useful part of him that had kept him alive for twenty-eight years was already awake, already doing the sum.

A white stone house in Kensington.

A chandelier the size of a small car.

A concierge who had locked the door in his face.

A house worth not hundreds of thousands but millions.

Eight figures, some of those streets.

If one ordinary door, in a block people barely scraped into, paid a scooter and ten grand and more besides.

What did a door like that pay?

He did not set an alarm.

That was the thought that finally let him sleep, lying there in the cold room with sixty-four pounds of honest wages and ten thousand pounds of something else in the same account: for the first time in eleven years, Danny Flynn did not have to wake up at the crack of dawn for anyone.

He could sleep until his body was done sleeping. He could wake up, and eat, and go and find out, in daylight, with his head clear, exactly how far the doors of this city went.

The phone screen dimmed itself on the mattress beside him.

[ Goodnight, sir. ]

And Danny Flynn, fed and dry and warm enough, slept eight hours straight for the first time in longer than he could remember, and in the morning the money was still there.