The Bundle Back

Nell wanted the bundle out of her hands before the pen touched that page, because every door she knocked on from now would be a door she was paid to knock on, and the whole row knew the price. If she kept the forms she kept the half share, and the three months stayed written off. If she gave them back she was in arrears again by morning, with the meter and the soap bill and nothing coming in but a Tuesday wash.

She stepped off the kerb and held the bundle out flat, both hands, the way you pass something hot.

"Take them. Knock the doors yourself."

Neil did not take them. He kept the rent book open on his forearm with the pen capped in his fingers and looked at the paper like it had been dropped in a puddle.

"Don't be daft."

"I'm not being daft. They'll not open to you, and that's the point of it, Neil. They open to me because I wash their sheets and I know what's in their pockets, and you've been using that." She pushed the bundle nearer. "It's yours. Your name's on the top one and you've had your hundred a door already."

He took it then, because she would not lower her arms, and the moment it was against his chest he looked smaller with it. Up the row somebody's front door clicked shut. Winnie stood by her scuttle with the two torn halves still in her apron pocket and did not say a word, which from Winnie was a kind of shouting.

"You know what you've just done," Neil said. "Three months goes back in tonight."

"I know."

"You'll be out by Easter and there'll be no launderette on this street at all, and they'll all be sat there with their bags on the bus to the Co-op wondering why." His own voice came down off the box over her shopfront then, half a second behind him, flat and tired and absolutely his. *I don't want to be the one that does it.*

He went white round the mouth. He looked up at the grey box, and then at the kerb, at nine or ten of them stood there with their arms folded.

"That's not what I said."

"It's what you meant, though," Perry said from the lamp post. "You've the bundle. Go on and knock. First door's mine and I'll tell you the same as I told her, and you can have it in your own front street where it does the most good."

Neil stood a while. Then he walked up the pavement to Perry's step, and he did not knock, he put the whole bundle down on the step and set the rent book on top of it so the wind would not have it, and came back down with his hands empty and his face set.

"Rent book's up there," he said. "I can't write in it from here, can I. You fetch it down to me and I'll put your three months back in and we're straight. Or you leave it where it is on the old man's step, and I'll come for it Friday, and we'll see what you've got by Friday."

The card with the sea captain on it was still shut in Nell's fist. She looked up the row at the rent book sat on Perry's step with her PAID in it, and she started walking.