Chapter 103: Six Dresses III

Another one came up.

[ 19:30. ]

[ Kit has been delivered. ]

He typed with his thumb, one-handed, down by his knee where she could not see it.

whats it pay

He watched himself send that.

That’s the first thing you’ve asked. Not where. Not what it is. Not who’s there.

[ Grade 4 wages: 900,000. ]

Danny put his hand over his mouth and took it away again.

Nine hundred thousand pounds.

Three feet in front of him a woman with a pencil through her hair was running a green sleeve under a needle, and 2 hours ago she had sat on that floor with a calculator and worked out that she was on £4 an hour, and had gone quiet about it, and then got on with it.

Four quid.

She’ll do 42 hours on these 6 dresses and clear £168 if they all sell, and she has booked 4 days of her own annual leave to do it, and she was pleased. She was pleased, Danny. She hid in her wine about it in a Portuguese restaurant.

And I’ve just been offered 900 grand for an evening and I don’t know what the job is.

where

[ You will be told at 18:00. ]

i can’t do half 7

Nothing came back for 14 seconds.

[ Noted. ]

And that was all. No argument, no pressure, no consequence named, and he sat there with a phone in his hand and understood exactly what he was about to do.

It’s not going to make you. It never has. You said no to a 2 on Saturday and it wrote Noted and it did not do one thing about it.

So don’t sit here telling yourself you’ve got to go.

You’re going because it’s a 4 and you have never seen one.

Because it said you’d not reach a 6 for a long time and you have been thinking about that since Saturday morning like a boy looking up a ladder.

And because 900 grand is the whole shop and the ceiling and Keisha’s wage for 3 years, and you want to know what it looks like in the account.

That’s it. That’s the entire reason.

She’s on 4 quid an hour on that floor and you’re going to go because you’re curious.

"Jodie."

"Mm." She did not turn round.

"I’ve got to go."

The machine stopped.

She turned round on the chair with the pin still in her mouth and took it out.

"Now?"

"About 5. I’ve got to get back over the river and then I’ve got a thing."

"What thing?"

And there it was, and he had 4 hours of tea and collars and a bit of paper with 9 quid an hour on it behind him, and nothing at all to put in the gap.

"It’s for the shop," Danny said.

Jodie looked at him for 2 seconds longer than she needed to.

"At half 7 at night."

"Yeah."

"Which bit of the shop’s open at half 7 at night?"

"It’s not the shop, it’s a bloke about the shop."

"Right." She put the pin down on the table, which she had not done all day. "Which bloke?"

And he had 6 hours of tea and collars and a bit of paper with £4 an hour on it behind him, and nothing at all to put in the gap.

"Jodie."

"No, go on. You’ve met about 40 blokes this month and you’ve told me all their names." She was counting them off on her fingers. "Norman. Ray. Errol. Wasim. Terry. That woman with the laser thing. Lloyd, who you told me about yesterday, who sits in his van from half 6 so he’s never late."

"It’s not like that."

"Then what’s it like?"

"I can’t."

The machine had been off for about 40 seconds by then and it was the longest that room had been quiet all day.

"Right," Jodie said.

She turned back round on the chair and picked the pin up again.

"Go on then. You’ll hit traffic."

"Jodie..."

"I said go on." Brrrrrp. It was a short one and it stopped again straight away. "And I’m not being funny with you, I’m just not going to sit here and do the bit where I ask 4 more questions and you go grey."

Danny stood in the middle of her front room.

"I’ll come Wednesday."

"Yeah, all right."

"I mean it."

"I know you mean it." She was not turning round. "That’s not the thing, is it."

He put his hand on the back of her neck on the way past and she did not lean into it, and she did not move away from it either, and the machine started up again before he had got to the door.

He was on the Wandsworth Road at 6 on the dot when it went in his pocket, and he pulled in at a bus stop to read it.

[ 19:30. ] [ Grade 4. ]

Then the address on its own line, and a floor number under it.

He read it twice with the engine running and the indicator still going, and then he put the address into the maps to see what it was, because a floor number is not a room and he wanted to know what he was walking into.

It came up as a hospital.

Not an NHS one. One of the private ones, the kind on a street of white houses with railings, that has a name like a person and a doorway you would walk past a hundred times without clocking what it was.

And the floor he had been given was not reception, and it was not the restaurant they all have, and it was not the bit where you go and have your knee looked at.

Danny sat at a bus stop on the Wandsworth Road with the indicator still going and the light gone and a woman 3 miles behind him sewing sleeves by a lamp that was the wrong colour.

A door that refuses you.

That’s the whole of the job. It’s never been anything else. The bigger the refusal, the bigger it pays, and it has just offered me 900 grand.

So what’s behind a door on that floor that’s worth 900 grand of refusing?

An 87 pulled in behind him and put its indicator on and waited, and the driver did not lean on the horn, and Danny got the stand up and pulled out and let him have the space.

He went north over the river and did not think about anything else the whole way.