In Capitals

She wrote it in capitals because the line was short, pressing hard through the damp paper, and the nib snagged twice on the ruling.

FARROW ROW.

Martha didn't take the sheet back straight away. She read it where it was, flat on the shutter under Nell's knuckles, rain coming off the gutter behind them both.

"That's this street."

"It is."

"That line's for somewhere we've not been."

"You never said that." Nell capped the pen. "You said a street name and a fee paid on the answer. You said it twice because you wanted them all to hear you say it."

Martha stood with the wallet against her chest and let a car go past the end of the bend before she spoke.

"Right," she said. "Then I'll tell you what you've bought, and then I'll pay you, and you can have both in the open same as I promised. You don't survey a street that's already live. You fit it out."

"Meaning."

"Meaning somebody comes with a ladder," Dasu said from the kerb. She hadn't moved. "Yards. Back doors. The ginnel between eleven and thirteen, because that's where people talk."

"Dasu."

"You know it's right. I've done it. Second round's always the backs."

Perry had come out as far as his gate. He had the tobacco tin in his fist, the way he always had it, lid down.

"Then there's nowhere to stand," he said.

"There's indoors," Nell said.

"Aye. On my own." He looked at her for a while, not unkindly, and Nell waited for him to say the rest of it, and he didn't. He went back up his path and shut the door with no noise at all.

Martha opened the wallet against her forearm and counted notes out of the back of it, slow, turning each one over so the row could see there was nothing clever in it. She put them in Nell's hand and closed Nell's fingers on them with her own hand, the way you do with a child at a bus stop.

"There. In your hand, in the wet, in front of forty doors."

Half a second later the box over the launderette gave it back out loud.

*I'd have written anybody's street on that line. It's only I know this one's already ruined.*

Nobody said anything. The rain kept on in the gutter and somewhere down the bend a sash came down.

"That's honest, at any rate," Martha said.

"Don't you tell me what's honest."

"No." She slid the sheet into the wallet, squared it, and tucked the wallet under her arm. "Martha, by the way. Since she'll not say it."

"I said it in Leeds till I was sick of it," Dasu said.

Neil had come up level with the step. He had his hands out of his pockets and the one nearest Nell was half open, not reaching, just ready.

"Forty ways," Winnie said. "You said it under that thing, so it counts."

Nell stood on her own lit step with the notes going soft in her fist, Neil's hand at her elbow, Dasu already backing off the kerb, and Martha waiting at the edge of the lamp to see what she did with it.