Forty Ways

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."

"It's both," said Perry. He had come out as far as his step and no further, upright, collar done up. "She's frightened and she's right. Doesn't shift me, mind."

"I never asked you to shift," Nell said. "You get a share same as the rest. That's the point of forty."

"Paying me to be awkward."

"Paying you because you live here."

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.

"Read it out," Winnie said. "My eyes are no good under this lamp and I'm not having that box telling the street what I think 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."

A voice came out of the dark by the van, where nobody had noticed anybody sitting. "It was me spoke to them about the letter," Neil said. He came into the lamp with his hands in his jacket. "Weeks back. I asked when it ended and she wouldn't say, and I let it go, because I don't live in this street, I only come to it. That's my father's trick and I've got it off him."

"They were printed already," Dasu said from the kerb.

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.