The Tenth Day

Pencils on string by every door. Paper is cheaper than being overheard, and the postman never told on anybody.

Pencil on a string by the door. Not for shopping. Just in case you want to say something properly.

She still had Winnie's form in her hand, the ink wet, coal dust on the corner.

"Dasu. Nine days, you said. What happened on the tenth?"

Dasu wiped the spanner down her vest and took her time about it. "You want that here?"

"Here's where everybody is."

"Right." She leaned back on the van. "Tenth day a letter came. One through every door, same morning. It said the trial period had been extended and thanked us for our continued cooperation. No date on it for the end. Just extended."

Winnie's hand went to her apron. Up at the lamp post Perry stood with his tin shut in his fist and did not move at all.

"We'd signed for that," Dasu said. "Every one of us. It was in the form, the trial or any extension of it, and not one of us had asked what an extension was, because the first nine days we loved the thing. I want you to hear me say we loved it. Forty years some of them had lived next to each other being polite, and for nine days nobody had to guess."

"And after the letter?"

"After the letter the street went quiet." Dasu looked down the row at the boxes over the doors, green pinpricks all the way to the bend. "Somebody worked out it only hears a voice. So we wrote. Backs of envelopes, shopping lists, pencil stubs on string by the door. Kids running notes up and down for coppers. By teatime on the tenth day you could stand in the middle of that street and hear a bus two roads over."

"That's not silence," Perry said from the lamp post. "That's manners with a pencil. I'd have joined in."

"You would. The first thing anybody used the paper for was a man offering to buy the yard off the widow at number nine for less than it was worth, in writing, where the box couldn't say what he thought it was worth." Dasu shrugged. "She took it. He'd never have got that out of his mouth on the ninth day."

Nell said, "And it's finished now. The trial. In Drayholt."

"The boxes are still up," Dasu said. "I was back in March. Still up, still lit. That's why I tell people before I hang one. First three days there I didn't tell anybody anything, I just said it was a trial and went home, and I'd like to stop owing that."

The kerb had gone very still. Winnie turned round slowly on her stiff knees and looked at Nell, at the paper in Nell's hand with her own name on it, drying.

"Give it back," she said. "I signed for a trial, girl. I never signed for the rest of my life." And she put her black-fingered hand out flat between them, and the row waited, and Nell stood there holding it.

She put the form back in Winnie's black-fingered hand and kept her own thumb on the top corner.

"Hold it," she said. "You pull."

They pulled. It went across the middle, through the printed clause and through the signature, and the sound of it carried further than a bit of paper has any business carrying. Somebody at the kerb said oh. Winnie stood with half a form in her fist and her chin going.

Then her own voice came down off her lintel, half a second late, warm as a kitchen. I wanted you to talk me out of it.

"Well," Winnie said. "There you are. I did and all. I wanted arguing with, and you went and did as you were told." She wiped her eye with her wrist, coal and all. "That's twice this week that thing's told the truth on me in front of my neighbours."

"I'll sit in your front room anyway," Nell said. "Signed or not."

"You'd better."

The van door banged up at the bend. Nell's landlord came down the pavement with the rent book wedged under his arm the way he always carries it, and he had seen the whole of it, because he had been sat there long enough to see the whole of it.

"Thirty-nine," he said. "There's no thirty-nine, Nell. There's forty or there's nothing, and you've just gone and made it thirty-eight, because he won't sign either." He nodded up at the lamp post without looking.

"Then it was never going to be forty."

"It was going to be forty by Friday." He got the rent book out and opened it one-handed, and held it up so the row could see the page, PAID written across her three months in his own hand. "I wrote that because you were going to earn it back for me. If there's no collection there's no second payment, and if there's no second payment I can't carry you. I'll put the three months back in. Tonight, if you like."

"You'd do that in front of them?"

"I'm doing it in front of them. That's your machine's doing, not mine." And nothing spoke off any wall, because he meant every word of it exactly as he said it.

Up by the lamp post the old man came down off his step. He worked the flat tin open with his thumbnail, lifted the soft little picture card of the sea captain out of the lid, and put it into Nell's hand, closing her fingers on it like a man passing over a key.

"Mind that," Perry said. "I've not changed my mind. But I'll not have you standing there with nowt in your hands either."

Nell stood on the pavement with the bundle of unsigned forms against her ribs and the card in her fist, and her landlord waiting with the rent book open and the pen already uncapped.