Off the Step

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.

"There," Nell said.

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.

"That's not a signature, that," Neil said. "That's biro on a printed form. They'll bin it."

"Then they'll bin it," said Nell.

"And where's that leave you when they come?"

"Where I was before."

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."

"You could sign and shut it," Neil said.

"I could."

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.

The woman looked up at the box over the door, and then at Winnie's, and then along the row. She shifted so she was square between two gates, where the lamp didn't reach her properly.

"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."

Dasu came down to the kerb edge and stopped. She didn't say anything.

"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."

"She promised us the open," somebody said from a window.

"I did," Nell said.

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.