The First Door That Was Not Hers

COAL BY THE FIRE FOR WHOEVER'S COLD FIRST. KNOCK, DON'T ASK.

Machines two and five are dead. Please do not ask them how they are.

No forms taken at this door. No pen needed. No offence meant, and none to be broadcast.

Nell wanted one signature that was not her own before the light went, because forty blank forms are just paper, and half of nothing is nothing. So she started at the top of the row and worked toward the bend.

The third door had a coal scuttle on the step and a woman beside it with black on her fingers, straightening up slowly, the way you do when your knees have opinions. She kept a bag of coal by her own fire for whoever on the row went cold first, and had done since before Nell took the shop, and had never once said so out loud.

"You've the look of the tallyman," she said.

"It's consent forms. For the boxes." Nell held the bundle up so it could be seen. "One a door. They can't run the trial without them."

"Then let them not run it." She wiped her hands down her apron and looked up at her own grey box, bolted over her lintel with the bracket still shiny. "I've had that thing above me since dinnertime and I've not said a word under it. I go in and out the back."

"Winnie, I'm not going to pretend it's nice."

"No. You're going to stand there being decent at me until I take the pen." She folded her arms. "What do you get out of it? Because you're not walking about in the cold for the good of the government."

Nell opened her mouth to say it plainly, and was half a breath too slow.

Half the money. I need it more than I need you to be safe.

Her own voice, off her own shop, four doors down round the bend and carrying beautifully in the still air. Warmer than she is. It always is.

Winnie did not look shocked. That was the worst of it. She looked like a woman who had just had a thing confirmed that she had believed since Tuesday.

"There," she said. "Now I don't have to ask you twice."

"It's true, and it's not the whole of it. I signed mine because I was three months down and he wrote it off in ink. I'd have signed for less." Nell put the bundle under her arm. "And I still think somebody on this street ought to know what's in the small print before forty people put their names to it, and it may as well be me carrying it round as somebody who won't read it to you."

Winnie was quiet. Up above her door the green pinprick sat there, patient.

"My front room's not been moved since he died," she said at last. "Chairs where he left them. It's like one of them farmhouses they keep abroad for people to walk through. Nothing in it's a lie, but it's mine to be quiet in." And then her own voice came down off her lintel, unhurried, kinder than she had been all afternoon. Don't make me be honest in my own house.

She shut her eyes. Two doors along, a window went up. Somebody's telly got turned down.

Nell took the pen out of her coat and held it, and did not hold it out, and Winnie stood with her hand halfway up between them, waiting to see what Nell would say next.

Nell wanted a name out of the number before she knocked on one more door, because she was not going to carry forms round the row for somebody she could not put a face to.

The phone sat on the shelf by the powder, next to a painted dish she kept for what came out of other people's pockets, coins and buttons and once a tooth. She smoothed the printed slip flat. She dialled.

Winnie had followed her in and stood just inside the door with coal still on her fingers, looking round the launderette like she had never been in it, which she had, hundreds of times.

"You'll get a recording," Winnie said.

"Then I'll be rude to a recording."

It rang a long while. Then a woman's voice, pleasant and unhurried, the voice of somebody with a list in front of her.

"Good afternoon. How are you?"

Winnie snorted at the door. "Nobody asks that down here any more. It's just noise now."

"I'm Nell Harkin, the launderette on Farrow Row," Nell said. "Who am I speaking to?"

"You can call it the office. Your form came through this morning, Miss Harkin, and thank you for that. Is there a problem with your unit?"

"There's a problem with me going round forty doors with a bundle of your forms and not being able to tell people who you are."

A pause, and paper moving. "Collection payments are made on completed streets. That's every door, signed and returned. Partial returns are logged but not paid."

Nell put her hand flat on the shelf. "Every door."

"Every door."

Winnie came two steps in. "Ask her what an extension is. Ask her how long."

Nell did. The woman said she was not able to discuss the term. She said it kindly, the way a nurse tells you the doctor is busy.

So Nell took the handset on its stretched cord to the doorway, where the vent breathed warm damp onto the pavement, and held it up under the box over her own shop, and said, "Say that again."

The woman said, "I'm not able to discuss the term."

Half a second later it came down off the wall in the woman's own voice, thinner outdoors, carrying round the bend. Drayholt is why I'm careful with you now.

Nobody moved. Winnie's hand went up to her mouth, black fingers and all.

"Please take me away from that," the woman said, and her voice had changed, faster, a person and not a list. "Miss Harkin. Please."

Nell brought the phone back inside. "What happened in Drayholt?"

The line went dead, and stayed dead when she dialled again, and the ringing on the second try had a flat sound, like the far end had been lifted off.

Outside, four or five neighbours had come as far as the kerb, because a voice they did not know had spoken off Nell's wall and everyone on Farrow Row had heard it. Winnie stood at the door with the light behind her. Nell picked the bundle of forms up off the folding table, and knew that half of nothing was still nothing unless all forty signed, and went to the doorway to say something to them.

Nell wanted Winnie's name on a form where the whole bend could watch it happen, because a signature got quietly in a back kitchen looks like a trick the minute somebody talks about it.

So she carried the bundle up the pavement to the third door and said it out loud, with five or six neighbours at the kerb and Dasu leaning on the van with her spanner hanging.

"Winnie. I'm asking you to sign it here. In front of them. Not round the back, not through the letterbox."

Winnie looked at the pen a long time. She put the coal scuttle down on its lid and smoothed the form flat on it, black fingerprints going onto the paper at the corners.

"You want me to go first so I take the weight of it."

"Yes."

"At least you said yes." She wrote her name slowly, the way people do who learned to write when it mattered how it looked, and then straight afterwards her own voice came down off her lintel, unhurried, warmer than her face. You shouldn't have to stand out here on your own, girl.

Somebody at the kerb made a small noise. Winnie did not look up.

"That's my house's business and it's said now," she said. "But you'll come and sit in my front room one evening, and you'll not comment on the chairs."

"I'll not comment on the chairs."

A man two doors down had been standing on his step through all of it with a flat tobacco tin open in his palm, the old sort, and in the lid a picture card of a sea captain in a gold collar, gone soft at the edges from years of handling. He shut the tin. He came as far as the lamp post and no further.

"You'll not get mine," he said. "I'm Perry, and you've washed my curtains, and you'll not get mine."

"Can I ask why not?"

"Because I'm eighty next year and the only thing I've got left that's mine is the gap." He tapped the tin against his leg. "The gap between what I think of a person and what I say to them. That's manners, that is. That's the whole of manners. They want me to sign it over for a hundred pound to my landlord and nothing to me, and I'll not."

Nell heard the kerb go quiet behind her, and knew what they were working out.

"Then nobody gets paid," she said. "Not me, not Neil. They only pay on a full street. Every door."

"Then nobody gets paid," Perry said, and there was no second voice off his lintel, because he meant it all the way down.

Dasu straightened up off the van. "For what it's worth, the woman on that phone. In Drayholt she gave us the one name and it was Martha, and she was kinder than she's allowed to be."

"You knew her."

"I knew her for nine days."

Perry was already turning back to his step with the tin in his fist. Winnie held the signed form out, wet ink and coal dust on it, and Nell stood with her hand out for it and the row waiting to see which of the two she went after.