Paid, In Ink

Nell wanted the three months written off in ink before her nerve went, because a debt you've lied about doesn't sit still, it grows teeth. If she didn't sign, she was a woman owed three months to a man who could have her out by Friday. If she did, she'd have sold something she couldn't name yet, and the price wasn't on the form.

She picked the form up off the van bonnet and read it properly, which took a while, because the small letters at the bottom were smaller than the rest.

"It says here I agree for the length of the trial, or any extension of it." She held it out so he could see the line, though he didn't look. "How long's an extension?"

"Nell, I don't know." Half a second later his own voice came down off the wall above her door, patient as a man talking to himself in a quiet room. *Don't ask me. I only want it finished.*

Dasu spoke from the ladder without turning round. "Leeds had that line. Same wording. Nobody asked me either, and I stood there while they didn't."

"That's not much of a comfort."

"It wasn't meant as one," Dasu said. "You asked what I knew. That's what I know."

Nell put the form flat, put her hand flat on it, and signed her name. It looked small and untidy and completely hers. Her landlord opened the rent book, licked his thumb out of habit, and wrote PAID across the three months in letters big enough to be seen from the pavement, then checked the date against the watch he keeps in his zip pocket — a fat gilt thing with an enamel face, his father's, wound every morning and still losing four minutes a day. He turned the book round so she could read it.

"There," he said. "Done. And I'm not proud of any part of this."

No second voice. The green light sat there under the mesh, uninterested, the way it goes quiet when a man is telling the truth.

"Thank you, Neil," Nell said, and was surprised to find she meant it, and that meaning it made her angrier rather than less.

Then he reached back into the van and came out with a bundle of the same forms, thick as a paperback, held together with a bulldog clip. He didn't offer them straight away. He weighed them in his hand first, which is how she knew what was coming.

"Forty doors," he said. "They'll not open to me. They'll open to you — you've washed their sheets, you know whose mother's bad. If you took these round—"

*They pay again when the forms come in.*

His own voice, unhurried, warmer than he was. He shut his eyes briefly, like a man who's walked into a door he knew was there.

"Right. Yes. They do. Half to you, then, and that's me being honest before the wall does it for me."

Dasu came down the ladder and stood with her spanner hanging at her side, saying nothing, letting the offer sit out in the open where the vent breathed warm damp over all three of them.

Down the bend a door opened, and another, people drifting out to look at what had been bolted above their heads. Neil held the bundle out. Nell looked at the forms, and at the doors, and lifted her hand.