Over the Biro

Nell took the form out of Winnie's hands and the damp came through it to her fingers straight away.

"Hold the end," she said.

"Do it on the shutter. You did the last one on the shutter."

So she did it on the shutter, turned over, back outward, with the pen off her overall pocket and Perry's card shifting against her hip. Winnie's name sat across the little ruled box in biro, the letters gone furry where the rain had got at them, running out over the line at the end because there hadn't been room. Nell put a line through it. Then she wrote her own above, small, to make it fit, and the nib went through the paper on the second letter and she carried on anyway.

Up at thirteen a child woke and called for its mam, twice, and a window got shut on it.

The box over the door took its half second.

*I'd not have her sat in that front room with a stranger knocking. She'd answer it. She'd put the good cups out.*

Winnie didn't look up at the box. She hadn't once all night.

"So you've decided I can't stand it," she said.

"I've decided I'm not having it both ways. You said write my name or we both get nothing. I've written it."

"You've written it because you think I'd make a show of myself." She shifted the money against her cardigan to free a hand, and the coppers in it moved. "I've buried a husband on that step. I can take a man knocking."

"Winnie."

"No. You've had it off me now, so let's have it all." She picked the button out of the pile with two fingers, the white one off somebody's duvet cover, and set it on the windowsill between them. "That's yours. I'll not have it put about that I took a button off you as well."

Neil was at the kerb with the rent book under his arm, well off the step, watching the pair of them the way he watched the lit box.

"It wants signing on the front," he said. "Her name's printed on it. Without her signature it's one more they log and don't pay."

"I know what it wants."

"I'm only saying what they told me."

Winnie turned the wedding ring round with her thumb, round and back.

"Then I'll keep that," she said. "My signature. It's the last thing on this street that's mine and nobody's typed it on owt yet." She said it flat, no heat in it. "You can come and ask me in the morning if you like. I'm not promising how I'll be."

"You've got my till in your hands."

"I have. And you've got your name back, and we're square, and I don't like you much tonight." She went up the pavement with the notes crushed to her chest and her knee stiff on the kerbstone, and this time she didn't stop when Nell said her name.

The form lay against the shutter with the ink still wet in the box, the front of it blank where Winnie's hand should go. The postbox was down at the bend. Neil had the rent book open on the sill again, the pen uncapped, waiting.