On the Coal Scuttle Lid

Nell wanted Winnie's name on a form where the whole bend could watch it happen, because a signature got quietly in a back kitchen looks like a trick the minute somebody talks about it. If Winnie signed first, the rest of the row had a woman to follow who owed nobody anything. If she would not, Nell was just the woman who takes half, standing in the cold with paper and a pen and two machines still dead.

So she carried the bundle up the pavement to the third door and said it out loud, with five or six neighbours at the kerb and Dasu leaning on the van with her spanner hanging.

"Winnie. I'm asking you to sign it here. In front of them. Not round the back, not through the letterbox."

Winnie looked at the pen a long time. She put the coal scuttle down on its lid and smoothed the form flat on it, black fingerprints going onto the paper at the corners.

"You want me to go first so I take the weight of it."

"Yes."

"At least you said yes." She wrote her name slowly, the way people do who learned to write when it mattered how it looked, and then straight afterwards her own voice came down off her lintel, unhurried, warmer than her face. *You shouldn't have to stand out here on your own, girl.*

Somebody at the kerb made a small noise. Winnie did not look up.

"That's my house's business and it's said now," she said. "But you'll come and sit in my front room one evening, and you'll not comment on the chairs."

"I'll not comment on the chairs."

A man two doors down had been standing on his step through all of it with a flat tobacco tin open in his palm, the old sort, and in the lid a picture card of a sea captain in a gold collar, gone soft at the edges from years of handling. He shut the tin. He came as far as the lamp post and no further.

"You'll not get mine," he said. "I'm Perry, and you've washed my curtains, and you'll not get mine."

"Can I ask why not?"

"Because I'm eighty next year and the only thing I've got left that's mine is the gap." He tapped the tin against his leg. "The gap between what I think of a person and what I say to them. That's manners, that is. That's the whole of manners. They want me to sign it over for a hundred pound to my landlord and nothing to me, and I'll not."

Nell heard the kerb go quiet behind her, and knew what they were working out.

"Then nobody gets paid," she said. "Not me, not Neil. They only pay on a full street. Every door."

"Then nobody gets paid," Perry said, and there was no second voice off his lintel, because he meant it all the way down.

Dasu straightened up off the van. "For what it's worth, the woman on that phone. In Leeds she gave us the one name and it was Martha, and she was kinder than she's allowed to be."

"You knew her."

"I knew her for nine days."

Perry was already turning back to his step with the tin in his fist. Winnie held the signed form out, wet ink and coal dust on it, and Nell stood with her hand out for it and the row waiting to see which of the two she went after.