Collector

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.

"You don't have to do that out here," Winnie said.

"I've been saying everything else out here."

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.*

Nobody said anything to that. Neil moved up off the kerb into the lamp.

"In person," he said. "To the collector."

"To the name in the box."

"Then I'll be stood at your elbow when they come, and you can hand me mine out of it."

"You'll be stood where everybody else is stood," Nell said. "On the pavement. Getting a fortieth, same as Perry, same as her, same as me."

"I don't live here."

"No," said Winnie. "You don't."

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."

"They've printed you another one."

"Like I'd lost it. Like I'd dropped it down the grid."

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 Leeds 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."

Perry had his tin in his fist and hadn't opened it. "When our Walter went out," he said, "the letter my mother got had the name of a light on it. Norwegian coast. Some rock with a lamp on it. That was the whole of what she was given, a name of a place she'd never see, and she kept it in the clock for thirty year." He looked at the form in Nell's hand. "Names on paper. They're very free with them, that lot."

"Will you sign now?" Nell said. "Knowing somebody's coming to this street to put money in a hand?"

"No."

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.