My Clocking In System

Chapter 5: Landlady

Danny woke without an alarm, and for a few seconds, he did not know what was wrong.

Then he worked it out. Nothing was wrong.

That was the strange part.

Grey light bled through the gap in the curtain he never fully shut. The Wednesday noise of the estate drifted up through the single-glazed window:

Grrr-clunk-screeech. A bin lorry grinding its gears.

"Jayden! Get ’ere!" A school-run mum yelling a name twice.

Yap-yap-yap. A dog that never stopped.

Underneath all of it, in his own body, a feeling he had no recent memory of. He was rested. He lay there and took stock of it the way you pat yourself down for injuries and find none.

No beep-beep-beep of an alarm dragging him up in the dark.

No grit behind the eyes from four hours stacked on four hours. He had slept the whole night through, and the last time he could remember doing that he had been seventeen.

He was twenty-eight now. Eleven years. He had handed the best of his sleep to other people’s parcels and not even clocked it going.

He reached for the phone on the mattress, half expecting last night to have been a fever thing his starving brain cooked up.

Tap.

He opened the banking app, and his thumb hovered before he let it load, because he genuinely did not know which would be worse, the money gone, or the money still there.

Swish. The screen refreshed.

£10,087.58.

Still there.

Ten grand from the thing on his phone, and under it the £64.40 from the depot for eleven hours in the rain yesterday, and a few pence of interest the account had never earned because it had never held anything.

He looked at the two numbers for a long while. He did not laugh this time. He was doing a different sum now, the wary one, the one the estate had taught him: nothing was free, and the things that looked free were the ones that cost the most in the end.

How long, he thought.

That was the real question, the one under all the others. How long does a thing like this give a man money before it stops, or turns, or asks for the bill?

Apps did not hand strangers ten grand for nothing. Either it would dry up the moment he leaned on it, and he would be a fool who quit a job and spent a windfall and woke up poor again with the habit of not being poor.

Or it was real, and the bill for real was always worse than the bill for fake. He did not know which. He could not know. And that, he decided, lying there in the cold, was exactly why he was going to move fast and move quietly.

If it dried up tomorrow, he wanted to have got something solid out of it that no one could take back. If it was real, the same rule held. Either way: take what it gives, turn it into something that lasts, trust it about as far as he could throw the phone.

He opened the app with the dark square and the gold line.

Vwomp. A soft, heavy vibration pulsed in his palm.

[ Good morning, host. You slept. ]

[ One reward remains. The host deferred it. ]

[ To accept what waits, go to the address and sign in. In person. ]

"Course I do," Danny muttered. His voice came out rough with sleep. "Go on, then. Where."

Click. Clack. Click.

The address wrote itself slow, letter by letter, the way it did everything.

Apartment 14, The Sterling, Riverwalk.

He sat up.

He knew Riverwalk the way you know a country you will never get a visa for. The glass stretched on the good side of the water, the towers that had gone up over five years while the estate watched them rise from the wrong bank. He had delivered to the Sterling once.

They had sent him round the back to a loading bay with a buzzer that did not work, and he had stood in the rain pressing a dead button for ten minutes until a cleaner let him in out of pity.

And now the thing on his phone wanted him to walk in the front and accept a supposed reward.

He looked down at himself, and the problem arrived all at once.

He was sitting on a free mattress in a jumper his mum had got him two Christmases back, washed grey, and he owned one other set of clothes no better than this one, and a delivery jacket with a split seam, and shoes the rain had got so far into they had given up the argument.

He crossed to the wardrobe, which was a rail and four wire hangers.

Skrrrt.

He slid a hanger across the metal bar and confirmed what he already knew. There was nothing in there a man could wear into the Sterling and not be sent round the back a second time.

He stood in the middle of the cold room and almost laughed at it. He had ten grand and the strangest poverty he had ever had: money in the bank and nothing on his body the world would believe it on.

Clothes first, he thought, and it was not vanity, it was strategy, and he knew the difference because he had spent his life on the wrong end of it.

The thing on his phone paid him for getting through doors he was not welcome in. But getting through them in the first place, past the men at the curved desks who decided what you were in under a minute, that part was on him, and nothing decided what you were faster than what you had on.

The jacket marked him before he opened his mouth. If he was spending real money today, the first of it would not go on a thing he wanted. It would go on armour.

Eat. Dress like a man they would let in. Then the Sterling.

He was reaching for the kettle when the knock came. Three hard ones, flat of the hand.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

He knew it. He had been hearing it for a month.

"Daniel Flynn." A woman’s voice, even, unbothered, certain he was there. "I know you’re in. Six mornings I’ve been by and you slip off before light every time. Not today."

Adaeze Nwosu owned three flats in the block and a couple more across the estate. Late thirties, and she carried it lightly, a woman who had worked hard and early and got out the other side.

Last year she had stopped working the job that bought all those flats and started, in her own words, doing nothing on purpose.

Danny had heard it on the landing months back and chewed on it for a week. Retired at thirty-eight. He had not known you were allowed.

Click. Clack.

He undid the locks and opened the door. She stood there in a good soft coat, arms folded, not angry, just tired in the specific way of someone owed money by someone who hasn’t got it.

Down the landing, a toddler from number eight was banging a plastic spade against the railings, Clack-wang-clack, while his nan begged him to pack it in.

The lift, broken a month, ticked and groaned somewhere in its shaft. Tick... groooaan and went nowhere.

But that was not what stopped him.

She was in a nightgown under the coat. Just the coat and a thin nightgown, and he could see it... the shape of her, the absolute certainty that there was nothing under it but her skin.

She had come straight from bed to collect what was owed.

The nightgown was thin enough that he could see the long, soft line of her torso, the proud swell of her tits, and the dark, tantalizing shadow of her nipples pressing against the fabric.

Thump-thump.

His body, his stupid, starved body, registered the heat of her before his brain could catch up and tell it to stop. He forced his gaze upward, locking his eyes firmly on her face.

"Two months," Adaeze said. If she noticed where his eyes had just been, she didn’t show it. "And the second notice, which you got, was because I posted it myself. I’m not cruel, Daniel. I’m not a charity either. So."

Rustle.

She shifted her weight, her chin coming up. "What are we doing?"

The hardness was real. But the hardness was also, Danny knew, mostly for show. He knew it because of the things she didn’t say.

She didn’t mention the winter; he had been three weeks behind and she had let it ride without a word until he caught up.

She didn’t mention the bag of groceries that had mysteriously appeared outside his door once... no note, a gift he only knew was hers because he’d caught a glimpse of her car pulling away.

She had been carrying him in small, quiet ways for two years, acting stern to his face so he wouldn’t feel like a charity case. And he had repaid her kindness by climbing out the window of his own life every morning to dodge her on the stairs.

Oof.

The shame of that... the heavy, familiar kind burned up his neck right on cue.

"How much, all in...?" Danny said.