Who Does the Street Go To

Dasu had the van's back doors open and was counting brackets into a plastic tray, two at a time, under the lamp at the bend. Nell laid the form down on top of the brackets, face down, with her thumb on the little ruled box in the corner.

"That's typed," she said. "Not written. Typed before Neil ever opened his mouth at me. Who put me in there?"

Dasu picked it up. She held it out at arm's length and did not look at it long.

"Sit down a minute."

"I'll stand."

"Aye." Dasu set the form on the van floor and put a bracket on it so the wind wouldn't have it. "When I survey a street I fill a sheet at the end of the day. Doors, which walls'll take a fixing, where the damp is. Three questions at the bottom. Last one asks who the street goes to."

Nell waited.

"I walked this row in January," Dasu said. "Before any of it. Tuesday, raining. I stood under your awning twenty minutes waiting for it to pack in and four people came past that door and every one of them said something to you through it. One of them left a bag. One of them left a dog. So I wrote: the launderette, number eleven, the woman who does the sheets."

"You wrote me down."

"I wrote what I saw."

"You've been stood at my kerb since Monday telling me to read every line of everything before I put my name near it." Nell's voice had got loud and she let it. "And you'd already put my name on forty pieces of paper for them."

"I didn't put your name on anything. I didn't know your name in January." Dasu rubbed her mouth with the back of her wrist. "They found that out themselves. I gave them a doorway and they came back with a woman."

Up the row a window was open that had been open an hour. Nell could feel it on her neck.

"Say the rest," she said. "You've the rest of it in your face."

Dasu looked at the brackets.

"Leeds," she said. "Same sheet. Same last question. I wrote number nine, because she had everybody's spare key on a nail in her kitchen and she'd been on that street fifty year. And when the forms came off the van her name was printed on the back of every one of them, and she knocked the doors, and she got the half, and when it all went wrong there was only one name on the paper to be angry at. That's the woman that sold her yard. Nobody would stand with her by then."

"You never said."

"No."

"You said you tell people first. You've said it to this street with your own mouth."

"I tell them about the box." Dasu's hands had stopped. "I've never told anybody about the sheet. I'm telling you."

Nell looked past her. Her own grey box sat lit over the launderette door, eight or nine steps off, and the window up the row was still open, and Dasu was stood on the kerb, well out of the box's hearing.

"Come and tell me by my door," Nell said, and put her hand on Dasu's sleeve.