Chapter 198: Fridays I

Danny put the card down on the Formica, writing side up, and kept his finger on the corner of it so it couldn’t move.

His mother was watching his face. She sat with her hands in her lap and waited for whatever he was going to say, and he could see she’d already decided she deserved it.

She read that in her coat in that hall, and put it in a tin, and went to work at 6 the next morning on the 44.

Why would Vic push it through face down? So she’d read it. He wanted her frightened. He wanted her to tell me and send me to him.

"He wanted you to show me," Danny said. "That’s why he put it through backwards. He wanted you to read it and tell me in a panic, and then I’d ring that number on my own. That was his plan, Mum. Frighten you, and I’d come."

His mother didn’t move.

"And you put it in a tin and never said a word. So he had to wait a whole year for me to be old enough and out on a bike where he could see me. You gave me a year at home with you, not paying anybody. You never knew you’d done it."

"I hid it, Danny."

"You kept him off me for a year with a biscuit tin." He turned the card face down so the capitals were hidden. "If you’d shown me that at 16, I’d have rung that number the same week and started paying out of my paper round. I know I would, and so do you."

She looked at the card, and then at him, and something in her shoulders went down an inch.

"I’ve been sat on that for 12 years," she said. "Thinking it was the worst thing I ever did."

"It’s not even close. He wrote it." He tapped the back of the card. "Him and his capitals."

She got up and filled the kettle and stood with her back to him while it boiled, and he let her. When she turned round she had her rota face on, the one she did sums with.

"I’m going to write to him," she said. "At that address you copied off the back of his envelope. Sharon Whatsername. I’m going to write it in capitals so he can read it, and I’m going to tell him Vic Harrigan’s dead and what his son paid him, to the penny. Then I’m going to post it and never think about him again."

"Wait a day for me, Mum. Just one day."

"Why a day?"

"Because there’s 2 more of his. The ones you kept for me in the green bag, from 2015 and 2018. I’ve never opened them. They’re in my solicitor’s drawer in Clapham, sealed. I said if I opened the 2018 one and it said the boat had gone I’d pay it."

He put Vic’s card in his inside pocket, beside Ida’s book and the old man’s fountain pen. Pemberton had refused to take the pen back at the wake. Keep it for your asking, Mr Flynn.

"I’m going to open them tomorrow," Danny said. "Then you’ll know what to put in yours."

She poured the tea and put his in front of him and sat down.

"Then open them with somebody who’ll make you read them to the bottom," she said. "I’d stop you halfway."

He went down the walkway at 9 with Vic’s card against his chest. Denise’s door was open a crack with the telly flickering behind it and an eye at the gap, and the eye watched him all the way to the stairs.

Jodie was on the stairs at Pembury when he came up.

She was sitting on the top step outside their door in his grey jumper and nothing else that he could see, with her bare feet on the step below and her arms round her shins. She’d heard the street door. The landing light was on its timer and it clicked off as he reached the last flight, and she reached up behind her without looking and slapped it on again.

"I heard you on the first floor," she said. "You walk different when it’s bad. Heavier."

He sat down on the step beside her. The concrete was cold through his jeans. Somebody’s telly was going 2 floors down, the same muttering as always.

"Out here, Jodie? On the stairs, in the cold?"

"Yes. I’ve had it owed me since the night you held your phone out at 20 to 12, and I’m not waiting while you take your coat off."

So he told her, on the top step of Pembury House, with the timer light going off every 2 minutes and her reaching back to slap it on. He told it word for word, the way he’d told his mother.

The street outside the flats, and Vic’s ring. 9 years of Fridays at the bottom of these same stairs, and 2 more on a walkway in Stockwell when Vic got too ill to come. The door on the latch, and Vic in his chair from 10 till 3. His father’s capitals on the back of a card. The gold at 25 past 3, and Good evening, host.

She didn’t interrupt once. When he stopped she sat with her chin on her knees.

"At the bottom of these stairs," she said. "Down there by the meters. And then you came up here and went to bed."

"And got up on Saturday and went to work, and nobody in my life had a clue."

She turned her head and looked at him.

"The gold came after you stayed," she said slowly. "You could have put the envelope down and walked out, and you didn’t. You sat with a man who’d bled you for 11 years and held his bowl while he was sick, and then the phone went." She was working it through out loud. "Ida asked for a boy who’d keep the roof on other people. Anybody keeps the roof on their friends. She meant somebody who’d stay with Vic."

He sat with that.

She’s got it. One telling on a cold step and she’s got the thing I never saw.

"I never thought of it like that," he said. "I thought it came because of Dad. Because of what he’d done."

"It came because of what you did." She put her hand on the back of his neck. "Your dad wrote you down on a card in a pub. You went and sat with the man who’d been holding it. That’s why it picked you, Danny, and your dad’s got nothing to do with that part."

The timer clicked off. She didn’t reach for it this time.

In the dark she turned on the step and kissed me, slow and deep, with both hands on my face, and I could taste the tea she’d been drinking while she waited. Then she stood up on the landing behind the step, over me, in nothing but my jumper. It came to the tops of her thighs.

"Down 2 steps," she said. "Go on."

I went down 2 steps and turned round. She sat back down on the top step and put one bare foot on the step on either side of me, and opened her knees.

There was nothing under the jumper. In the light coming up the stairwell from the floor below I could see her, pale and dark-curled and already wet, and she slid her arse forward to the very edge of the step and put her hands flat on the landing behind her.

"On your knees," she said. "Somebody might come up. I don’t care."

I knelt on the cold step and put my mouth on her pussy. She was soaking. She tasted of salt and of herself, and she let out a breath that went all the way up the stairwell. I licked her slowly, long strokes from the bottom to her clit, and her heels came up off the step and pressed into my shoulders.

Down below, a door opened on the first floor and somebody put a bag of rubbish out. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and held me still, and we both froze, my mouth on her and her thighs clamped round my head, till we heard it close again.

Then she pushed my face back into her and said don’t stop through her teeth.

I sucked her clit and pushed 2 fingers into her, and she bit her own wrist to keep quiet. Her hips rocked off the edge of the step onto my mouth. I felt her start to go, the long tightening up through her thighs, and she came with her wrist in her teeth and her other hand gripping the lip of the step, shaking, her cunt pulsing round my fingers and her heels digging into my back.