Chapter 135: Anything For Forty IV

"Mr Flynn."

He turned round.

Naomi Adeyemi was looking at the folder on her desk and not at him, and she had gone very still in the shoulders.

"You came down here on a Friday afternoon," she said, "to ask me what I did with an envelope."

No.

No. You’ve done it again.

You came to find out if she’d read it and the asking is the telling. Same as the staircase last night. Same as Monday’s letter.

She had it in her hand for 2 minutes and she didn’t look, and now she knows there was something in it worth a man crossing a lobby for.

"Naomi..."

"Do not." She sat down. "I have had this in a room in my head since Wednesday with the door shut, so that on Monday I write what I can prove and not one word past it. And you have gone and put something new under the door."

"That wasn’t what I came in for."

"I know it was not. That is what makes it worse." She pulled a folder square. "What was in it?"

Danny said nothing.

"Good. Keep it." She picked her pen up and did not write with it. "On Monday I am going to put in my letter that I withdrew a declaration because a filing I relied on did not exist. That is the whole of it. There is nothing in it about post and there is nothing in it about you crossing my lobby."

"Thanks."

"That is not a favour." She looked up for the first time since he turned round. "It is what I can stand behind in a room with a loss adjuster in it. And if you come back through that door before Monday I am putting it in writing, and then neither of us has a choice about anything."

He stood on the pavement outside the Sterling at half 2 with the traffic going over the bridge both ways, and did the one thing all day that nobody else was going to pay for.

[ A shift is available, host. ] [ Saturday. 06:00 to 10:00. ] [ Grade 4. ]

It had been sat there since Wednesday lunchtime.

confirm

[ Confirmed. ] [ The location is issued at 05:30. ]

what do i bring

Nine seconds.

[ Nothing is required of the host. ]

is it like the hospital one

[ That is not a question the Concierge is able to answer. ]

He put the phone in his coat and stood there a bit longer.

4 hours. And the last Grade 4 was 30 minutes.

So either they’ve got that wrong, or 4 hours of it is a different thing altogether and I’ve just said yes to it stood outside my own front door.

He got to Battersea at 6 with the envelope in his inside pocket and a carrier bag of shopping he had done in the Lidl on the way, because turning up with nothing at 6 on a Friday is a thing she notices and does not say.

Denise caught him on the half landing going the other way with a bin bag in each hand.

"She’s in. She’s been in since 4, and she’s had that front room door open and the telly on, so you can stop looking like that."

"I wasn’t looking like anything."

"You were doing the face you do on them stairs." Two steps down. "Tell her I’ve got her Radio Times, she left it in mine."

The fire was on 1 and the telly was on with the sound down. His mother took the carrier bag off him in the doorway and went through it standing up, like a customs officer.

"You’ve bought the wrong butter."

"You said that butter."

"I said that butter on offer. It’s not on offer now, is it. I looked Tuesday."

She went through to the kitchen with it.

He sat down in the front room. The brown chair by the window had been put back against the wall, turned to face the glass again, cushion on, and neither of them said a word about it.

She came back with 2 mugs, sat down on the settee, and put her feet up on the little stool. He waited until she had done all of it.

"Mum. I’ve got to give my solicitor Dad’s address on Monday morning."

His mother put her mug down on the arm of the settee. Then she reached over and turned the telly off at the button, which took her 2 goes.

"Right. Start at the beginning, and don’t do the thing where you make it sound smaller than it is."

So he told her. The will, the executor, the substitute if she goes first, and the box at the bottom that wants a name in it and a date of birth if he has one and a last known address.

"And you have got one."

"You know I have."

"Where does it go?"

"Into her file. And into a schedule on the letter of wishes, which has got no legal force. Nowhere else. Nobody reads a will till you’re dead."

"Till you’re dead. And then it’s in a drawer in Clapham with his name and his road on it, and one day somebody I’ve never met reads it out in a room with me sat in it."

"That’s about the size of it."

Upstairs in Denise’s the pipe went knock, knock, the way it has done his whole life.

"I said I wanted telling before and not after," she said. "So you’ve done it."

"I’ve done it."

"And I’m not going to say don’t, because I asked you to do it properly and you can’t do it properly and leave him out of it, she’ll have told you that."

"She did."

"Right." She put the mug down and stood up. "Then you can wait there a minute."

She went out. Not to the kitchen. He heard her go into her own bedroom and heard the wardrobe door, which sticks, and heard her on her knees on the floor with the sound a person makes doing that at 52 with a hip that is not her own but is going the same way.

She came back with a carrier bag.

An old one. Green, soft as cloth, gone white along the folds, with the handles stretched into loops.

"Sit forward."

She put it on the coffee table between them and did not open it.

"That’s the letters."

She sat back down.

"From the finance lot, all of them, October 2014 through to about the March after. The 2 off the bailiff company are separate in the middle in a bit of foolscap. And my own ones are in there going back at them, because I wrote to every single one of them by hand and I kept a copy of what I sent, and I did all of that in this room at that table with you asleep down the hall."

Danny looked at a carrier bag on a coffee table.

"Eleven years."

"Twelve in October."

"Why’ve you kept them?"

"Because I never thought anybody would believe me." She said it the way she reads a meter. "Not the ones on the phone and not the one that come to the door. I always reckoned there’d be a day when somebody official sat in that chair and asked me to prove it wasn’t me that did it, and I wasn’t having that day happen with nothing in my hands."

"And nobody ever asked."

"Twelve years in that wardrobe and not one person." She smoothed her skirt over her knee. "And now a solicitor in Clapham wants the dates."

His mother pushed the bag 2 inches towards him with the back of her hand.

"It’s about time somebody got some use out of it."

He did not pick it up.

"There’s something else in there and you’re going to find it, so I’ll say it now instead of you ringing me about it off a bus." She had her eyes on the fire. "There’s 3 of his in there an’ all. Not to me. To you."

"To me."

"Two from 2015 and one from 2018. They come to this address with your name on the front and you were 17 and 20, and I never give you them."

She was looking at the fire and not at him.

"And I’ve had 8 years of working out whether that was for you or for me, and I’ve never got to the bottom of it, and I’m not going to tonight. So you can be as cross about it as you want and I’ll not argue with any of it."

Danny sat in his mother’s front room with a green carrier bag on the coffee table and the fire on 1.

"Are they open?"

"No." She got her mug back. "And I’ll be in the kitchen."