My Clocking In System

The corridor on 39 looks like the corridor on any floor. Grey carpet, a fire door, a print of something abstract in a frame.

He knocked twice and heard nothing for long enough to start working out how he was going to feel about that, and then the latch went.

She had the door on the chain.

"No," Mara said.

"I’ve not said anything yet."

"You’ve come down a floor at 9 o’clock at night, so I know roughly the shape of it." Hair up off her neck in a clip that was losing, cardigan over a t-shirt, no shoes. "And I’ve been sat in here since half 5 getting somewhere with it, and you’re about to talk me out of it."

"Then don’t let me in."

The chain stayed where it was for about 4 seconds.

Then she took it off and walked away down her own hall, which is how she lets people in.

Camilla’s front room had not changed. The enormous grey sofa nobody has ever fallen asleep on, the 2 armchairs at an angle nobody sits at, the glass bowl with nothing in it.

Over the top of all of it, the version that was hers. A jumper on one chair arm. Four pairs of shoes in a heap by the door. Her swimming costume over the radiator, dry now, the green gone dark where it had folded.

The phone charger still going across the floor at the angle you would trip on.

"Sit down or don’t, I’m not doing hostess."

"I’ll stand."

"You’ll sit down, you’re enormous and this ceiling’s a normal height." She went into the kitchen and came back with one glass of water for herself. "Right. Go on then. Whatever it is, and then I’ll tell you what I’ve decided, and then you’re going back up."

Danny sat on the end of Camilla’s sofa.

"How did it get up there?"

Mara stopped with the glass halfway.

"You’ll have to give me more than that."

"The page out of your notebook. It was on my kitchen island when I come in, squared up to the edge, folded once." He had his hands on his knees. "There’s no call button on the outside of that lift. There’s no button on the corridor wall, there’s nothing on 39 and there’s nothing on 12. So who put a piece of paper in my kitchen?"

"I gave it to the desk."

The lift went past in the wall somewhere, and the pipe in her kitchen made the noise pipes make.

"When?"

"About 20 past 5."

She put the glass straight down on Camilla’s coffee table. No mat under it.

"I went to the tube and I got as far as the barriers and I turned round and came back, and I stood in that lobby for 11 minutes deciding, and then I asked the lad for an envelope and wrote FLAT 40 on the front of it."

"Why not put it in my hand?"

"Because I was not going to knock on that lift like a woman delivering a note to a boy. And I’d already had one conversation with you on a staircase." Her chin had come up. "And I wanted you to read it on your own, upstairs, with nobody watching your face."

"Who did you hand it to?"

"The lad on the evening. Thin one, cardigan, glasses."

Danny sat very still on a sofa on the 39th floor.

That’s not how post works in this building.

Ray gets his post. Pat gets her post. There’s a grey dash where my name is on that directory, and in 7 weeks nothing has come up there. Not a leaflet. Not a takeaway menu. And I’ve never wondered why.

Because it doesn’t come up. It goes somewhere first.

"Mara."

"What."

"There’s no name against 40. There’s a line where a name goes." He said it slowly, because it was arranging itself as it came. "So when somebody hands in an envelope with FLAT 40 on it and no name, that lad can’t put it in a pigeonhole, because there isn’t one. He’s got to give it to somebody with a key."

Mara Doyle went the colour she goes, up the neck and under the freckles first.

"Say who you mean."

"Naomi Adeyemi’s office is behind that desk with a window onto the lobby and a blind that’s never shut."

"No."

"She’s got keys to everything. She’s the only person in that building who can stand in my kitchen."

"No." She was up off the arm of the chair. "No, because it was a folded piece of paper in a sealed..."

She stopped.

She had arrived there on her own. She stood in the middle of Camilla’s carpet and did the rest of it in her head with one hand over her mouth, and Danny watched her do it and said nothing, because there was nothing in that room that was going to help her.

"It wasn’t sealed," she said. "I didn’t lick it. I tucked the flap in."

"Right."

"I tucked the flap in because I’d have had to ask him for a pen to write the flat number and I’d already asked him for the envelope, and I was stood there feeling like a mad woman, so I tucked the flap in and pushed it across the desk and went."

"Right."

"Stop doing that." It came out very even and very fast. "Tell me what’s on it."

"Your handwriting. P. Anand, a correspondence address above a dry cleaner’s, a line about the building manager coming down from 40 in the private lift at 25 past 10. And my name at the bottom in newer ink, pressed harder."

"And she writes to the insurer on Monday."

"Monday morning."

Mara sat down in Camilla’s other armchair, the one at the angle nobody sits at, and put both hands flat on her knees.

"Thirteen days," she said.

"It might be nothing. She had it 2 minutes in a lift. Nobody reads a stranger’s post going up 40 floors."

"You don’t believe that."

"No. But it’s a thing that could be true and you’ve not got any way of knowing either, so I’d rather you had it."

"Thirteen days of having 2 things and refusing to make them into a man. And I was good at it. I was good at it for no reward whatsoever with nobody watching me do it." She had both hands on the back of the chair now. "And I’ve handed the whole lot to the one person in this building who was hunting you. In my own handwriting. Because I did not want to knock on a lift."

"You didn’t know what happens to post for 40. I’ve lived up there 7 weeks and I didn’t know."

"I’m not asking to be let off." Flat. "I’m telling you what I’ve done, because in about an hour I’m going to start telling myself I couldn’t have known, and I’d rather get the true version said out loud first while it still hurts."

The fridge in her kitchen changed note.

"Right, my turn," she said. "Because I’d decided this before you knocked and it stands. I’m sacking Priya Anand in the morning."

Danny’s head came up.

"Don’t."

"I’ve had since half 5 on it."

"Mara, she’s the only person who’s moved that flat in 8 months."

"I know."

"You said it in the pool yourself. She told you in 11 minutes what a man in Marylebone hasn’t told you in 8 months. And it’s 450 fixed however many letters she writes, and Rupert’s 600 an hour to not answer an email."

"I know what it costs. I’ve done the sum 4 times tonight and it comes out the same every time and it’s still happening."

She had the glass back in her hand and was not drinking out of it.

"Because she’s yours and she’s mine. I have sat in that chair 4 feet from a filing cabinet with your name in it, and from tomorrow I know what’s in it." Her chin was up. "That’s not a conflict for her. She’s done nothing wrong. It’s a conflict for me."

"That’s not a thing you have to do..."

"It is. Because on Thursday afternoons I’d be sat opposite a woman I like, who is the straightest person either of us has ever met, and I’d be the one in that room holding something."

"You’d manage."

"I’d be excellent at it. That’s what I can’t have." She put the glass down. "I am extremely good at being pleasant to people while I’m lying to them. I had training off my mother. And I’m not doing it to her."

Danny sat on Camilla’s sofa with his coat still on.

She’s right.

And she’s about to pay £450 and 8 months and go back to a man who charges 600 an hour to not answer, because I told her a true thing on a staircase to make myself feel better.

"Let me pay Rupert," he said.

Mara put the glass down on the glass and it made a noise.

"And we’ve got there in 11 minutes."

"I’m serious."

"I know you’re serious. That’s what’s wrong with it." She had a hand up. "You’ve got money. I worked that out in October off a grey dash in a directory. And the first thing you’ve done with it in this room is offer to buy the consequence off me, about 20 minutes after telling me you can’t say where it came from."

"I didn’t say that to you."

"You said it to somebody today. It’s all over you."

Nobody said anything for a bit. Down on the river something went under the bridge with a light on the front of it.

"No," she said. "I’ll eat the 450, and I’ll go and sit in front of Rupert in January and be talked at, and that’s mine, and in about 3 years I’ll be able to tell it as a funny story."

"Mara."

"Don’t." She stood up. "And now the other thing, and then you’re going."