Question Three

Nell came down the step and put her hand out, flat, the way you'd help somebody off a bus.

"Ten minutes," she said. "You can have them here."

"I'd sooner not stand under that."

"No. I know." Nell kept the hand where it was. Rain was coming off the gutter behind her. "You walked up this street on your own two feet in the wet. You knew what you'd find on the wall."

The woman looked along the row once, at the windows, the way you'd count something. Then she took Nell's hand and let herself be walked up, one step, into the light, the wallet still clamped under her arm.

Half a second later her own voice came down off the box above the door, level, a shade slower than she talked.

*Get her name back in that box or there's nothing to hand anybody, and I'll be the one stood here saying so.*

"There," Winnie said. "That's us told."

"That's about the size of it," the woman said. She didn't flinch at her own voice. She'd heard it before, Nell thought. Probably a lot. "Biro over a printed name goes in a drawer. I didn't make that rule and I can't bend it from a pavement."

"Then you've come a long way to say no."

"I've come to say there's another way of doing it." She got the wallet out from under her arm and opened it against her chest. One sheet, printed, three questions down the page, the first two filled in small. The third line was empty. "You'll have seen one of these."

Dasu came up off the kerb edge then. She hadn't said a word since the woman arrived.

"Three," Dasu said. "Who does the street go to."

"Hello, love."

"Don't."

"You slept, then," the woman said, and the box gave her back, *I'd have liked her to shout at me,* and Dasu turned her face away into the dark part of the road.

Nell took the sheet by the corner and turned it to the lamp. Two streets were named at the top in somebody's neat hand and she didn't know either of them.

"What's this got to do with my forty doors?"

"Nothing," the woman said. "That's the point of it. Your street's a mess and it'll stay a mess. But there's a fee attached to that line, and it's paid on the answer, not on completion, and it's paid to whoever writes in it." She said it carefully. "You'd have it in your hand tonight. Not a letter. Hand."

"In the open?"

"In the open. I said I'd not do anything indoors and I'll not."

*I want her to say no where they can all hear her do it,* said the wall, in the woman's voice, and the woman shut her eyes for a second and kept hold of the wallet.

Neil had come up the pavement and stopped. Perry's door was open behind him. Nobody said anything for a while. The rain kept on in the gutter.

"Forty ways," Winnie said quietly. "You promised us forty ways. You never said whose money."

Nell had the sheet flat against the shutter with her knuckles, same as before, and the pen out of her overall pocket, and the third line lay under her hand, ruled and empty.