The Rent Book on the Bonnet

Nell wanted to get it out of her own mouth before the box over her door said it for her. Three months she had told her landlord trade was good, and if a machine broke the news instead, she'd be a liar as well as broke, and out by Friday with six machines and nowhere to put them. So she walked to meet him instead of waiting behind the counter like she'd planned.

He came round the front of the van with the rent book under his arm and his hand already up in a wave.

"Trade's bad," Nell said. "It's been bad since spring. Two of my machines have been dead since June and I've been lying to you about it every month since, to your face, on this pavement."

Half a second later her own voice came down off the wall, soft as a person leaning in. *I'm frightened you'll take the shop.* She heard it and kept her chin up, which cost her something.

He stopped walking. He looked at the grey box, at the green pinprick under the mesh, awake and patient as an owl on a beam.

"Right," he said. "Well." And then his own voice, unhurried, from over her door: *I already knew. I've been stalling you.*

The woman on the ladder didn't turn round. Dasu, she'd said her name was, somewhere between the bracket and the bolt, and she carried on tightening as though she'd gone deaf on purpose.

"You knew," Nell said.

"I've had my eye on that vent. Nobody dries that much washing." He rubbed his face. "I'll tell you what I got for putting those things up, because you'll hear it anyway if I try it any other way. A hundred pounds a door. Letter came with no name on it, just a printed slip and a number to call, and when I called it a woman thanked me and never said who for. I signed for the lot. Your door as well."

"And you spent it."

"It's spent." No second voice that time. Apparently the box only bothers when you're hiding.

Down the bend someone's window had gone up, and three or four neighbours were out arguing about the boxes all at once, nobody waiting for anybody, everyone louder than the last, the way people get when the thing is big and nobody knows the manners for it yet.

He set the rent book on the van bonnet and slid a folded form out of the back of it. "They want signatures. Tenant consent, one per door, and they're short. I'm told the trial doesn't stand up without them." He smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. "You sign that, and the three months goes down as paid. Paid, in ink, in the book, and we never mention it again."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'm a man owed three months." Beat. *Please just take it.*

Dasu came down two rungs and said, to the wall more than to anyone, "Leeds had forms too."

He held the pen out. The vent breathed warm damp over all three of them, and the green light sat there like it had all night, and Nell looked at the form, and at the doors going away round the bend, and did not yet reach for it.