Forty Ways

Thank you for your continued participation. The trial period on your street has been extended.

Thank you for agreeing to act as collector for your street. No reply is required.

Ask yourself why they print the collector's name but leave the dates blank.

She dragged the folding chair out of the launderette and set it down in the doorway and stood on it and hit the shutter twice with the flat of a soap tin. Doors came open down the bend. Somebody's telly went off.

"Right," Nell said. "You all heard him. So here's mine, said out loud, under this thing, where I can't take it back." She pointed up at the box without looking at it. "It gets split forty ways. Not half to me and the rest nowhere. Forty equal bits, counted out on this pavement, and the ones who don't sign get theirs as well."

Half a second later her own voice came down off the wall. I want it off me. I don't want to be the only name on it.

Nobody laughed. Winnie was at her gate with her apron still on.

"That's not greed," Winnie said. "That's fright, that is."

Winnie came up the pavement with her hand out and something white in it, folded over twice. "Then you'd better have a look at this first, love. It come through at tea time. I thought it was the coal."

Nell got down off the chair. The letter had been opened with a thumb, raggedly, and Winnie's coal dust was on the edge of it.

Nell read the first two lines twice before she said them. Thank you for your continued participation. The trial period on your street has been extended. No date at the end of it, no month, nothing but a reference and a line saying the units would remain in service throughout.

"Continued participation," Nell said. "Winnie, you tore your form in half in front of all of us."

"I know what I did."

"Then they've written to you as if you signed."

They had come down the row by then, eight or nine of them, each one holding the same white fold. Perry had his in his fist with his tobacco tin. And on the launderette mat, pushed through while she was out at the van, lay one more, face up, with Nell's own name typed on it and the word Collector under it, and the whole bend waiting for her to pick it up.

She went in over the mat and came back out with it and didn't open it inside. She stood in the doorway with the box lit over her and got her thumb under the flap.

The paper was the same thin stuff as the others. "Dear Mrs," she read. "They've married me off. Dear Mrs. Thank you for agreeing to act as collector for your street." She stopped. "I've not agreed to anything."

"Keep going," Perry said from his step.

"Payment of the collection fee is made on completion. All forty. It'll not be posted. It says a representative will attend the street and hand it over in person."

Half a second behind her, off her own wall, flat: Good. Let her come and stand where we can all see her.

There was a second sheet folded inside the first. Nell opened it out and had to turn it to the light. A consent form, new, uncreased, with a name already printed on the line and the door number under it, and the little ruled collector box on the back with Nell's own name in it.

"That's mine," Winnie said. "That's my name typed on there."

"It is."

"I tore mine up in the road." Winnie's hand came out and then went back under her apron. "They've printed me another one."

Dasu came over and took the letter, left the form, and held it out at arm's length the way she holds everything now. She looked a long while at the bottom of it, where there were four words.

"Who's signed it," she said. She handed it back. "That's the Drayholt one. That's her name on every letter that come through them doors, including the one about the extension, and she rang me once off a payphone to ask how I was sleeping."

"Martha," Nell said.

"Aye."

Winnie was still looking at her own printed name. Nell had the forty in one hand and the new one in the other, and the pen was in her overall pocket, and Winnie put her hand out flat.

The form went into Winnie's hand and Winnie didn't look at the front of it. She turned it over, ran her thumb across the small ruled box on the back the way you'd feel a sleeve for a pin.

"Your name's in there."

"It's in all forty."

"Then take it out of this one," Winnie said. "Put mine."

Dasu came off the kerb fast for a woman her size. "No."

"I know what I'm saying. There was a woman in Drayholt had that box with her name in it and she was sixty-eight and she had a yard and a dog and by the end of it she had the dog." Dasu's hands were open. "They come to the collector. Everybody else gets to be cross with the collector. That's what it's for, that little box. It's a place to stand so nobody has to look past you."

"Well, I've a front room nobody sits in," Winnie said. "What's it going to cost me?"

She stepped up. One stiff knee first, then the other, up onto the launderette step with the lit box over her, closer to it than she'd been to anything since the day it went up.

Half a second later her own voice came down off the wall, thin and perfectly steady. If my name's on it they'll have to knock at mine.

"There you are," she said. "That's the worst of me, and it's not much."

Winnie flattened the form against the shutter with her coal-black palm, the back of it facing out, the little box waiting, and held her other hand out for the pen.

Nell took it out of her pocket. She thumbed the cap off and stood there with the nib an inch from her own typed name, the whole bend quiet behind her, Dasu saying her name once, low.