Thirty-Nine

Nell wanted Winnie's name off that paper before the ink had properly dried, because a woman who signed for nine days and found she had signed for the rest of her life had been robbed, and robbed in Nell's name. If she tore it, the street could never be a full forty, and nobody saw a penny, Nell included. If she did not tear it, she was only the woman who takes half and keeps hold of the paper.

She put the form back in Winnie's black-fingered hand and kept her own thumb on the top corner.

"Hold it," she said. "You pull."

They pulled. It went across the middle, through the printed clause and through the signature, and the sound of it carried further than a bit of paper has any business carrying. Somebody at the kerb said oh. Winnie stood with half a form in her fist and her chin going.

Then her own voice came down off her lintel, half a second late, warm as a kitchen. *I wanted you to talk me out of it.*

"Well," Winnie said. "There you are. I did and all. I wanted arguing with, and you went and did as you were told." She wiped her eye with her wrist, coal and all. "That's twice this week that thing's told the truth on me in front of my neighbours."

"I'll sit in your front room anyway," Nell said. "Signed or not."

"You'd better."

The van door banged up at the bend. Nell's landlord came down the pavement with the rent book wedged under his arm the way he always carries it, and he had seen the whole of it, because he had been sat there long enough to see the whole of it.

"Thirty-nine," he said. "There's no thirty-nine, Nell. There's forty or there's nothing, and you've just gone and made it thirty-eight, because he won't sign either." He nodded up at the lamp post without looking.

"Then it was never going to be forty."

"It was going to be forty by Friday." He got the rent book out and opened it one-handed, and held it up so the row could see the page, PAID written across her three months in his own hand. "I wrote that because you were going to earn it back for me. If there's no collection there's no second payment, and if there's no second payment I can't carry you. I'll put the three months back in. Tonight, if you like."

"You'd do that in front of them?"

"I'm doing it in front of them. That's your machine's doing, not mine." And nothing spoke off any wall, because he meant every word of it exactly as he said it.

Up by the lamp post the old man came down off his step. He worked the flat tin open with his thumbnail, lifted the soft little picture card of the sea captain out of the lid, and put it into Nell's hand, closing her fingers on it like a man passing over a key.

"Mind that," Perry said. "I've not changed my mind. But I'll not have you standing there with nowt in your hands either."

Nell stood on the pavement with the bundle of unsigned forms against her ribs and the card in her fist, and her landlord waiting with the rent book open and the pen already uncapped.