My Clocking In System

At 7:48 the man in the chair by the window said something.

Danny did not catch it and it was not for him. It was 4 or 5 words, quietly, in the direction of the solicitor, and the solicitor said "yes" and then said "yes" again and finally opened the folder.

What came out of it was one sheet.

He read it out. It took about 40 seconds and Danny understood perhaps a third of it, because it was all the undersigned and the aforementioned and with effect from, and the only part of it he got hold of was a date, and the date was 3 weeks ago.

Then the solicitor stopped, and put the sheet down on the wheeled table over the bed, and turned it round.

The son took a step forward.

"He can’t."

"Charles."

"He can’t sign that. Look at him." His voice had come up and he pulled it back down at once, because of where they were. "He doesn’t know what day it is. He didn’t know who I was on Sunday."

"He knew on Sunday," said the man in the chair.

"He did not know on Sunday."

"He knew me."

And there it was, the whole thing, in about 9 seconds, and every person in that room understood it and nobody said any more about it.

Danny stood by the door with his hands where he could see them and found that his mouth had come open about a quarter of an inch.

He’s right.

The son’s right and everybody in this room knows he’s right, and there’s 6 people stood here and not one of them is going to say so.

You could say it.

You could say one word. You could say the son’s right, and it would stop, because a solicitor cannot carry on once somebody in the room has said it out loud, that’s the whole reason he doesn’t want to open that folder.

One word and this doesn’t happen.

He did not say it.

He stood against the wall by the door in shoes with the noise taken off them and let his mouth shut, and the reason he gave himself at the time was that he did not know anything about any of it, and that he had walked in 20 minutes ago, and that the old boy in the chair had known the man in the bed for 50 years and Danny had known him for a third of an hour.

And 900 grand, said the other bit of him, from further back. Let’s have that one on the table an’ all.

That’s what this is.

That’s an old man signing something at 10 to 8 at night in a room with a solicitor and a witness and his son telling him he can’t, and somebody has spent £900,000 having a bloke with no name stood by the door while it happens.

The woman in the good coat had not moved.

Danny’s eyes went across the room and caught on somebody, and stopped.

Because 8 feet to his left, on the other side of the door, there was a man of about 60 stood against the wall in a dark suit with nothing shiny on him.

And he was stood exactly wrong.

Not wrong for the room. Wrong for a person. Weight even on both feet, hands loose at his sides rather than crossed, chin level, eyes not on the bed and not on the son and not on the paper.

He’s not watching any of it.

He’s stood there the way you stand when you have been told to be somewhere and given nothing else to do.

He’s got the same shoes on.

The man turned his head about 10 degrees and looked back at him.

And that was all it took. A second and a half, the way it always is, and both of them had it.

Hang on.

It told me. Saturday morning, in my own kitchen, I asked it who else works here and it said there are others and you will not meet them.

And it has never once told me a lie. It’s declined to answer me about 4 times and it has never told me a lie, and I’ve checked, I’ve gone back and checked.

So either that’s the first one.

Or it’s not supposed to be stood 8 feet away from me.

Neither of them moved and neither of them said anything, and on the other side of the room a very old man in a bed had a pen put into his hand by a solicitor who did not want to be doing it.

Danny watched it happen. Everybody did.

The old man’s hand went where it was put, and he made a mark, and it took him a long time, and about halfway through it he said something that was not a word.

The son turned round and faced the window.

At 8:01 the phone went once in Danny’s inside pocket.

He got it out in the corridor with the carpet under his rubber soles and the big man against the wall not looking at him.

[ Clocked off. 20:00. ]

[ Shift complete. 30 minutes. ]

Then, on its own:

[ Grade 4 wages: 900,000. Paid. ]

Thirty minutes.

He stood in a carpeted corridor in a private hospital and did the sum without wanting to, because his head does it whether he asks it or not.

Thirty minutes. That’s 30 grand a minute.

She’s doing 40 minutes a sleeve by hand.

And that’s the account at one million, two hundred and sixteen thousand, four hundred and twelve pounds, and 87 pence.

Which I have just watched myself work out to the penny in a corridor, stood 20 feet from an old man who has signed something he did not understand.

The lift came without him pressing anything and took him down, and he went out past the desk and the woman said good night to him and he said it back.

The other one was on the pavement.

He was stood at the bottom of the steps just past the second bay tree with his hands in his coat pockets, and he was not waiting for a car, because he was not looking up the road.

He was waiting for Danny.

Danny came down the steps and stopped 6 feet off, and neither of them did anything for a second, and a car went past at the end of the street.

"You’re new," the man said.

"Yeah."

"Thought so." He had a London voice with 40 years of somewhere else under it. "You looked at everybody."

"Is that wrong?"

"It’s not wrong. It’s just new." He got a hand out of his pocket and rubbed the side of his own jaw. "You’ll stop."

Danny stood on a wet pavement in shoes that made no noise.

"What was I there for?"

The man looked at him.

"You know what you were there for."

"I don’t."

"You do." He said it without any edge in it at all. "You’ve been stood in that room 30 minutes working out who everybody was, and you got it, all of it, I watched you do it. So do the last bit."

And Danny, stood there, did the last bit.

Five people in that room and every one of them will be asked.

The son’ll be asked. The solicitor’ll be asked, and he’ll have to answer, because it’s his licence. The girl with the bag is there to write it down. The woman in the coat is there so somebody who isn’t family saw it.

They can all be asked. Every one of them is a name, and an address, and a diary with tonight in it.

And there’s me.

Nobody in that room asked me my name. There’s no name on that desk downstairs except the one that was already on the list. I’ve been in this country 28 years and there is not one photograph of me anywhere.

I’m the person in the room who cannot be asked.

He looked up.

"I’m not a witness," he said.

"No."

"I’m the opposite of one."

"That’s it." The man put his hand back in his pocket. "That’s the job. It was the job when I started and it’ll be the job when you finish."

"How long have you been doing it?"

"Nineteen years."

Danny had nothing at all for that.

Nineteen years of standing in rooms. Nineteen years of shoes with the noise taken off them.

"Does it, " He stopped and did it again. "Do you know what you’re for, every time? Or is it just this one?"

"You never know. You work it out about a third of the time and you’re wrong about half of those." The man was already turning to go. "Best not to work it out at all, if you can manage it. I can’t either, so that’s no use to you."

"Wait."

He waited.

"Was there somebody before me?"

"There’s always somebody before you."

"On this. On these. Somebody doing what I’m doing."

"Yeah."

"What happened to him?"

The man stood on the pavement outside a private hospital with the light off the portico on one side of his face, and he took long enough over it that Danny knew the answer was going to be true.

"He got to a 6," he said.

Then he went off up the road towards the main road, in shoes that did not make any noise, and Danny stood on the pavement and did not say anything at all.