Question Three

Units remain in service throughout. Residents are reminded that the equipment is not weatherproofed and should not be covered.

Installers: all three questions to be completed. Sheets returned with question three blank will be returned to you.

Second round's always the backs. Yards, ginnels, the step where you go for a smoke. Bring the long ladder.

The nib went through her own name twice, there and back, and the ink spread a bit where the paper had damp in it from Winnie's palm.

"Steady," Winnie said. "Don't go through it."

"It's thin stuff." Nell held the form flat with her knuckles. "Give me it proper, then. How it's on your rent book."

Winnie said it, all of it, and Nell wrote it in the little ruled box and it didn't fit, so the last of it ran out over the line and down into the margin. Twenty-odd years at that gate and she'd never written the woman's name down before.

Winnie took the form off the shutter and looked at the back of it a long time, holding it near her chest, turned away from the others.

Perry hadn't come off his step. "Every time she wins one of these," he said, to nobody in particular, "she comes back with less of her. I've watched it all week. That lot come back bigger when they lose."

Dasu turned round first, listening for a van. There was no van. A woman had come round the bend on foot, in a plastic mac with the rain still on the shoulders of it, carrying something flat in a document wallet under her arm, and she had stopped in the road, by the drain, with a good yard of wet tarmac between her and anybody's step.

"Eleven," she said. "Is that the launderette."

"It is," Nell said.

"Then you'll be the one who's been ringing," she said. "I'd come up, only I'd rather stand here, if it's all the same."

"You've a name, I suppose," Nell said.

"You can carry on calling it the office." The woman moved the wallet to her other arm. "I'm told there's a difficulty with the collector box on your street."

"There was," Winnie said. "It's been sorted." She held the form up, back outward, the wet ink catching.

The woman didn't look at it. She looked at Nell. "I've a thing to put to you that I'd sooner put quietly," she said. "Ten minutes inside, and then I'll say whatever's left of it out here, in front of this lot, and you can hold me to that."

The launderette door was behind her with the key still in it. The step was between them, lit, a yard across, and the woman stood in the road waiting to be told which way it went.

Nell came down the step and put her hand out, flat, the way you'd help somebody off a bus.

"Ten minutes," she said. "You can have them here."

"I'd sooner not stand under that."

The woman looked along the row once, at the windows, the way you'd count something. Then she took Nell's hand and let herself be walked up, one step, into the light, the wallet still clamped under her arm.

Half a second later her own voice came down off the box above the door, level, a shade slower than she talked.

Get her name back in that box or there's nothing to hand anybody, and I'll be the one stood here saying so.

"That's about the size of it," the woman said. She didn't flinch at her own voice. She'd heard it before, Nell thought. Probably a lot. "Biro over a printed name goes in a drawer. I didn't make that rule and I can't bend it from a pavement."

"Then you've come a long way to say no."

"I've come to say there's another way of doing it." She got the wallet out from under her arm and opened it against her chest. One sheet, printed, three questions down the page, the first two filled in small. The third line was empty. "You'll have seen one of these."

Dasu came up off the kerb edge then. She hadn't said a word since the woman arrived.

"Three," Dasu said. "Who does the street go to."

"Hello, love."

"Don't."

"You slept, then," the woman said, and the box gave her back, I'd have liked her to shout at me, and Dasu turned her face away into the dark part of the road.

Nell took the sheet by the corner and turned it to the lamp. Two streets were named at the top in somebody's neat hand and she didn't know either of them.

"What's this got to do with my forty doors?"

"Nothing," the woman said. "That's the point of it. Your street's a mess and it'll stay a mess. But there's a fee attached to that line, and it's paid on the answer, not on completion, and it's paid to whoever writes in it." She said it carefully. "You'd have it in your hand tonight. Not a letter. Hand."

"Forty ways," Winnie said quietly. "You promised us forty ways. You never said whose money."

Nell had the sheet flat against the shutter with her knuckles, same as before, and the pen out of her overall pocket, and the third line lay under her hand, ruled and empty.

She wrote it in capitals because the line was short, pressing hard through the damp paper, and the nib snagged twice on the ruling.

FARROW ROW.

Martha didn't take the sheet back straight away. She read it where it was, flat on the shutter under Nell's knuckles, rain coming off the gutter behind them both.

"That's this street."

"It is."

"That line's for somewhere we've not been."

"You never said that." Nell capped the pen. "You said a street name and a fee paid on the answer. You said it twice because you wanted them all to hear you say it."

Martha stood with the wallet against her chest and let a car go past the end of the bend before she spoke.

"Right," she said. "Then I'll tell you what you've bought, and then I'll pay you, and you can have both in the open same as I promised. You don't survey a street that's already live. You fit it out."

"Meaning."

"Meaning somebody comes with a ladder," Dasu said from the kerb. She hadn't moved. "Yards. Back doors. The ginnel between eleven and thirteen, because that's where people talk."

Perry had come out as far as his gate. He had the tobacco tin in his fist, the way he always had it, lid down.

"Then there's nowhere to stand," he said.

"There's indoors," Nell said.

"Aye. On my own." He looked at her for a while, not unkindly, and Nell waited for him to say the rest of it, and he didn't. He went back up his path and shut the door with no noise at all.

Martha opened the wallet against her forearm and counted notes out of the back of it, slow, turning each one over so the row could see there was nothing clever in it. She put them in Nell's hand and closed Nell's fingers on them with her own hand, the way you do with a child at a bus stop.

"There. In your hand, in the wet, in front of forty doors."

Half a second later the box over the launderette gave it back out loud.

I'd have written anybody's street on that line. It's only I know this one's already ruined.

Neil had come up level with the step. He had his hands out of his pockets and the one nearest Nell was half open, not reaching, just ready.