The Collector's Box

Nell wanted the forty forms off Perry's table and into her own hands tonight, because Friday was coming with written notice on it and the end of the month after that. If she had the bundle she had something Neil wanted, and a man who wants something will talk terms. If she did not, she had a rent book with three months written back in and a Tuesday wash.

She knocked. Perry came with the lamp behind him and the forms squared up on the table under the window, a magnifying glass sat on top of them like a paperweight.

"I've come for them," she said. "The forms."

"I know what you've come for." He did not move out of the doorway. "I've been at them since my tea. Reading, with a glass and a pencil, same as them in Leeds. Paper doesn't get broadcast, does it. You can hold a thought on paper all night and it stops where you put it."

"Perry, I'm not arguing the paper with you. I need them in my hands by the morning."

Her own voice came down off his lintel, half a second behind her, light and quick and absolutely hers. *I want them so I can write the names in myself.*

The street heard it. Two doors along a window went up. Nell stood there with her ears going hot and her hand still out.

"Aye," Perry said. "That's a Friday talking."

"I wouldn't do it."

"You've thought it, though, and thinking it is where it starts." He stepped back off his step into the hall, out from under his own box, and when he spoke again nothing followed him. "I'll stand in here, if it's all the same. You're getting the truth off me free, so I'll keep the rest."

"That's not fair and you know it."

"It isn't. I'm old and I'm taking what I can get." He picked the top form up and turned it over and brought it to the light so she could see the back of it. There was a small ruled box down in the corner with printing in it, not handwriting, the same grey type as the rest. "Read that."

She read it. Collector, it said, and under that her own name, and under that the launderette, number eleven, the bend. Typed. Printed before the bundle ever came out of a van.

"That's on all of them," Perry said. "Forty of them, your name on every one, and he never wrote a word of it. They had you down as the woman who knocks before he ever stood in the street and offered you half. Somebody at that office knew who washes the sheets on this row."

"Then who told them?"

"That's your question, not mine." He held the bundle out, both arms, the way she had held it out to Neil. "Our Walter used to say every light on a coast has its own count, and you lie out there in the dark counting the gaps and that's how you know whose water you're in. I've no count on these people at all. Take them. I'd sooner it was you than him, and now I've heard what's in your head I'll be at that window all night."

The forms were heavier than she remembered. Up the row Winnie's gate went, and the window that had opened did not shut, and Nell stood on the pavement with forty copies of her own printed name against her chest.