The Tenth Day

Nell wanted the rest of it out of Dasu before the kerb emptied, because she was carrying paper round for people she could not put a name to and the whole bend was watching her do it. If Leeds had ended badly and Dasu would say how, Nell could stop knocking tonight and say honestly why she had stopped. If it stayed unsaid, it would come out in six weeks, with thirty-nine doors signed and her holding the bundle.

She still had Winnie's form in her hand, the ink wet, coal dust on the corner.

"Dasu. Nine days, you said. What happened on the tenth?"

Dasu wiped the spanner down her vest and took her time about it. "You want that here?"

"Here's where everybody is."

"Right." She leaned back on the van. "Tenth day a letter came. One through every door, same morning. It said the trial period had been extended and thanked us for our continued cooperation. No date on it for the end. Just extended."

Winnie's hand went to her apron. Up at the lamp post Perry stood with his tin shut in his fist and did not move at all.

"We'd signed for that," Dasu said. "Every one of us. It was in the form, the trial or any extension of it, and not one of us had asked what an extension was, because the first nine days we loved the thing. I want you to hear me say we loved it. Forty years some of them had lived next to each other being polite, and for nine days nobody had to guess."

"And after the letter?"

"After the letter the street went quiet." Dasu looked down the row at the boxes over the doors, green pinpricks all the way to the bend. "Somebody worked out it only hears a voice. So we wrote. Backs of envelopes, shopping lists, pencil stubs on string by the door. Kids running notes up and down for coppers. By teatime on the tenth day you could stand in the middle of that street and hear a bus two roads over."

"That's not silence," Perry said from the lamp post. "That's manners with a pencil. I'd have joined in."

"You would. The first thing anybody used the paper for was a man offering to buy the yard off the widow at number nine for less than it was worth, in writing, where the box couldn't say what he thought it was worth." Dasu shrugged. "She took it. He'd never have got that out of his mouth on the ninth day."

Nell said, "And it's finished now. The trial. In Leeds."

"The boxes are still up," Dasu said. "I was back in March. Still up, still lit. That's why I tell people before I hang one. First three days there I didn't tell anybody anything, I just said it was a trial and went home, and I'd like to stop owing that."

The kerb had gone very still. Winnie turned round slowly on her stiff knees and looked at Nell, at the paper in Nell's hand with her own name on it, drying.

"Give it back," she said. "I signed for a trial, girl. I never signed for the rest of my life." And she put her black-fingered hand out flat between them, and the row waited, and Nell stood there holding it.