The Number on the Slip

Nell wanted a name out of the number before she knocked on one more door, because she was not going to carry forms round the row for somebody she could not put a face to. If the number rang out, she was a woman walking forty doorsteps for nothing, with two dead machines and a repair man who wants cash in his hand. If it answered, she meant to keep it talking.

The phone sat on the shelf by the powder, next to a painted dish she kept for what came out of other people's pockets, coins and buttons and once a tooth. She smoothed the printed slip flat. She dialled.

Winnie had followed her in and stood just inside the door with coal still on her fingers, looking round the launderette like she had never been in it, which she had, hundreds of times.

"You'll get a recording," Winnie said.

"Then I'll be rude to a recording."

It rang a long while. Then a woman's voice, pleasant and unhurried, the voice of somebody with a list in front of her.

"Good afternoon. How are you?"

Winnie snorted at the door. "Nobody asks that down here any more. It's just noise now."

"I'm Nell Harkin, the launderette on Farrow Row," Nell said. "Who am I speaking to?"

"You can call it the office. Your form came through this morning, Miss Harkin, and thank you for that. Is there a problem with your unit?"

"There's a problem with me going round forty doors with a bundle of your forms and not being able to tell people who you are."

A pause, and paper moving. "Collection payments are made on completed streets. That's every door, signed and returned. Partial returns are logged but not paid."

Nell put her hand flat on the shelf. "Every door."

"Every door."

Winnie came two steps in. "Ask her what an extension is. Ask her how long."

Nell did. The woman said she was not able to discuss the term. She said it kindly, the way a nurse tells you the doctor is busy.

So Nell took the handset on its stretched cord to the doorway, where the vent breathed warm damp onto the pavement, and held it up under the box over her own shop, and said, "Say that again."

The woman said, "I'm not able to discuss the term."

Half a second later it came down off the wall in the woman's own voice, thinner outdoors, carrying round the bend. *Leeds is why I'm careful with you now.*

Nobody moved. Winnie's hand went up to her mouth, black fingers and all.

"Please take me away from that," the woman said, and her voice had changed, faster, a person and not a list. "Miss Harkin. Please."

Nell brought the phone back inside. "What happened in Leeds?"

The line went dead, and stayed dead when she dialled again, and the ringing on the second try had a flat sound, like the far end had been lifted off.

Outside, four or five neighbours had come as far as the kerb, because a voice they did not know had spoken off Nell's wall and everyone on Farrow Row had heard it. Winnie stood at the door with the light behind her. Nell picked the bundle of forms up off the folding table, and knew that half of nothing was still nothing unless all forty signed, and went to the doorway to say something to them.