My Clocking In System

Chapter 42: Everyone’s Asking I

Back across the water, in a small office behind a curved marble desk, a third woman was about to do something she’d regret.

Naomi Adeyemi did a thing on the Thursday night that she had not done in sixteen years on the job, and she knew, the whole time she was doing it, that it was wrong.

She stayed late.

She told herself it was the rota for the following week, and it was, partly; she did the rota. But when the rota was done and the lobby was quiet and Priyanka had gone home, she sat at her own screen in her own small office behind the desk, and she looked up Daniel Flynn.

Not the company registered to the apartment.

She’d already done the company, and the company led nowhere, a clean dead end, a registration behind a registration behind a name that dissolved when you touched it.

That was suspicious enough and it was, arguably, her job, knowing who owned the flats in her building.

This was not her job. This was the man.

And it bothered her that she was doing it, and it bothered her more that the reason she was doing it was not entirely professional. She was a composed woman.

She had built sixteen years of composure from the front desk up, and she did not, as a rule, sit in a dark office after hours running searches on a resident because he had a way of looking at her when she came round the desk, like he saw exactly what she was doing and found it, quietly, a game worth playing.

She did not, as a rule, notice a resident’s forearms, or the specific stillness of him, the way he held whatever he was holding just under the surface.

She noticed Danny Flynn.

That was the truth of it, sitting in the dark, and it annoyed her, and it was half of why she was typing his name into a search bar she had no business typing it into.

She found nothing.

She sat back.

She tried again, differently.

His name, the building.

His name, the city.

His name and any of the ordinary flotsam a twenty-eight-year-old man leaves across the internet like everyone leaves, a tagged photo at somebody’s birthday, a five-a-side team, a review of a kebab shop, a school, a job, a face in the background of a stranger’s holiday.

Everyone was somewhere. She’d looked up enough residents over the years to know that everyone, everyone, was somewhere, even the ones who thought they weren’t.

Daniel Flynn was nowhere.

Daniel Flynn was nowhere.

Not private. She knew private. Private was a locked account, a stern photo, a name that came up thin.

This was not thin. This was absent.

It was as if a man had been carefully, thoroughly lifted out of the record, and the space closed over so smoothly you’d never know he’d been there, except that a twenty-eight-year-old with no trace at all is not a private man; he is an impossible one.

She looked at the empty search results for a long time, in the dark, with the lobby quiet beyond the glass.

"Everyone’s somewhere," she said, softly, to the screen.

And felt, for the first time since he’d walked in and laid his phone on her desk and turned out to own the roof, not suspicion exactly, and not attraction exactly, but the cold, alert, wide-awake feeling of a woman who has found a hole in the world exactly the shape of a man she can’t stop thinking about.

She logged off. She did not like that she’d done it. She knew she’d do it again.

And on the estate where all of it had started, at a kitchen table in a paid-for flat, the fourth of them was cross with herself, and losing.

Adaeze had been thinking about the dinner, and she was cross about it.

She was a woman who had retired at thirty-eight precisely so that she would never again have to want anything she couldn’t simply go and get.

Here she was, a year later, at her own kitchen table in her own paid-for flat, tea gone cold at her elbow, thinking about a thing she’d said on a stairwell to a man eleven years younger who used to climb out of his own window to avoid her.

We should do dinner sometime.

She’d said it.

She’d meant it, in the moment, in the warm rush of the stairwell, with the memory of his arms still on her and the strange bright fact of the change in him.

And then she’d walked to the shops and thought, Adaeze, you are a foolish woman and he is a boy you have been collecting rent off, and had spent the days since trying to make herself believe it.

It wasn’t old.

That was the thing.

She looked in the mirror and there was nothing old there, a handsome woman in her prime who’d kept herself, and she knew it, and that was half the trouble, because knowing it made the wanting harder to dismiss.

She thought about the hug.

She had replayed it enough times now to be honest about the order of events. She had stepped into him.

That was the first fact, and she made herself keep it.

Two years of watching that boy shuffle up her stairs like a ghost, two years of him climbing out his own window to avoid her on rent day, thinking she didn’t see, and then one afternoon on her stairwell he’d paid two months’ back rent like it was nothing and stood there different, present, solid, there, and she had stepped in and put her arms round his neck before she’d decided anything at all.

And her body, which she’d had on sensible terms for years, had committed several acts of treason in the space of four seconds.

MMH! The moan.

That was the first treason. Small, low, entirely involuntary, slipping out of her against his collarbone at the plain animal fact of a warm strong man against the length of her. She’d felt him hear it.