Chapter 160: Received From I

Danny looked up.

The shop ceiling was flat and white over the 6 drops, and the cold was coming in under the half-raised shutter.

For a second it wasn’t this ceiling. It was a white one over a mattress on a floor, top of the stairs, end of the landing, with a bin bag of clothes in the corner.

The room had smelled of wet chalk for a fortnight. He’d lain under it the first night with his hands behind his head and not been able to sleep for how white it was.

"Top floor," he said. "End flat. Was it the top floor?"

Deniz pushed his glasses up onto his head and left them there.

"End of the landing. The old one had come down in a single sheet on the boards, lath and all. I took 3 bags of it down those stairs on my back." He was watching Danny’s face now. "That was you."

"I moved in on a Saturday. I was 17. I’d a mattress and a bin bag."

"And a new ceiling over the both of them."

"I thought the landlord had done it," Danny said. "I thought that was what flats were like."

Deniz turned the envelope over in his hands.

"I’ve done 4,000 ceilings and I remember about 20," he said. "I remember that one. Nobody does a ceiling for a tenant. You do it for a sale, or for the insurance, or when it’s fallen on somebody’s head."

"He paid you on the stairs."

"Cash, on the stairs, for a flat he didn’t live in, for a lad he never brought to meet me. And 50 on top to have it done before the Saturday." He tapped the word on the front. "Now he’s paying me again. Same hand. For your shop."

"Priya said not 50 quid off anybody while the bank’s looking at me," Danny said. "I see her in the morning. He swears it’s not a loan."

"I don’t care what it is to you. I care what it is to me."

Deniz went out under the shutter to the white van and came back with a duplicate book, a biro clipped to the cover. He sat on the bottom step of the trestle and counted the twenties out on the board in stacks of 10, licking his thumb, all the way to 160 notes.

Then he opened the book on his knee and wrote slowly in capitals, pressing hard enough for the carbon.

RECEIVED FROM MR PEMBERTON, BY HAND OF D. FLYNN. ￡3,200 CASH. SKIM AND FINISH, CEILING AND WALLS, VERNEY RD. PAID IN FULL.

He signed it, dated it, and tore the top copy off along the perforation.

"There. You’ve not borrowed. That says he’s paid me for my work and you carried it. Take that to your solicitor."

Danny read it twice.

"That’s better than anything I’d have written."

"30 years self-employed. You learn to write a receipt."

He unbuttoned the top pocket of his overalls and took out the shop key. He put it in Danny’s palm and closed Danny’s fingers on it with his own big hand.

"In your hand," he said. "Like I told you."

"Thank you."

"Say it to Pemberton." He put the cash back in the envelope and the envelope inside his coat.

"My wife keeps every carbon book since 2002 in the loft, in shoe boxes, with the years written on the ends. I’ll find the one from 11 years ago. It’ll have the date on it, and his name, spelled the way he spelled it for me."

A date on paper in somebody else’s book. Mum would have that in the pad before the kettle boiled.

"I’d want that," Danny said. "More than the key."

"You’ll get both." Deniz picked up his bucket. "Errol?"

"Not on the 2nd. Not till the bank lets go."

"Then I’ll ring him and say the ceiling’s ready whenever he is. I’ll not leave him finding out off a voicemail."

He ducked under the shutter with the bucket, and the van started, and went up Verney Road towards the lights.

Danny got the pad out and leaned on the new counter and wrote it down.

21:04. Deniz. Pemberton paid him to plaster my Pembury ceiling 11 years ago, before the Saturday I moved in. 50 extra to get it done in time. Today’s receipt names Pemberton as payer. Key back in my hand. Old carbon to come.

His phone buzzed on the counter.

Have you decided. Is it written down. Don’t lock up.

Done and written. Why?

Because I’m on the bus and I’m a few stops off.

She came in under the shutter at 25 past 9, ducking, with her coat buttoned to the chin and the dark blue wool showing at the hem. Her legs were bare under it, in this cold, on a bus.

Her hair was still down from the bedroom and her mouth had the last of the lipstick on it.

"Show me," Jodie said.

He gave her the pad and the receipt. She stood under the 6 drops and read both with her lips moving, the way she read a pattern.

"Received from Mr Pemberton, by hand of." She looked up. "Who thought of that?"

"Deniz."

"Good. Priya will like that." Her finger went down his page and stopped. "Before the Saturday. When did you sign the tenancy?"

"At Mare Street. Robin Hollis. A Wednesday."

"So you sign on the Wednesday, and by the Saturday there’s a new ceiling. Somebody knew on the Wednesday."

She tapped the page.

"Hollis knew. He signed it. So either Hollis rang his brother that night and said there’s a lad moving in on the top floor, get the plasterer. Or his brother had already told him to expect you."

"I’d not thought of it that way round."

"Write it as a question." She gave him the pad back. "Not an answer. You don’t know yet."

He wrote it. Did Hollis tell Pemberton, or did Pemberton tell Hollis?

Then she put her hand in her coat pocket and took out a pair of black knickers, balled up small, and pushed them into the pocket of his coat.

"I stepped out of those on my bedroom floor for you," she said. "After you’d gone I got dressed in a hurry and put them in my pocket instead of on. I’ve sat at the back of a bus for 20 minutes thinking about that."

The shutter was still half up. The road was out there past the open door, the lamp across the street, Ray’s bay door dark.

Danny went out into the doorway, got his hands under the bar and brought it down. Ksssshhhh. CHANG.

When he turned round she was undoing her coat.

I took over the buttons. I did them from the top down, slowly, with her watching my hands, and pushed the coat off her shoulders onto the dust sheet.

Then I put my hand under the hem of the dark blue wool and up the inside of her thigh, and she was bare all the way up and already wet.

"Told you," she said against my mouth.

I kissed her and slid 2 fingers along her pussy, slow, from the bottom to her clit and back, and she held onto my collar with both fists.

She got my belt open one-handed and my jeans down, and took my cock out and stroked it while I stroked her, the 2 of us standing in the middle of the shop with our foreheads together, breathing on each other.

"Zip," she said.

I took it down to the bottom. The dress slid off her into a heap round her ankles and she stepped out of it in front of me with nothing on, freckled all down her front, her tits bare and her nipples gone tight in the cold air off the shutter.

"It’s freezing in here," she said. "Do something about it."

I picked her up by her arse. She wrapped her legs round my waist and her arms round my neck, and I walked her out past the open door into the doorway and put her back against the shutter.

Chunk. The whole width of it rattled.

"Somebody’ll hear."

"Then be quick about the first bit."

I held her up with one arm and got my other hand between us, rubbed her clit with my thumb till she was squirming against the slats, and lined myself up. Then I let her weight come down and slid into her in one go, all the way to my balls.

"Oh, fuck, Danny..."

Her heels dug into the backs of my thighs. I fucked her against the shutter with long hard strokes, and every one shook the slats behind her, chk, chk, chk, the whole front of the shop going with us. She had her hands in my hair and her mouth open on my jaw.

A bus came down Verney Road. Its lights came through the slats behind her and caught her hair in stripes, and the engine shook the shutter as hard as we did, and she laughed out loud with me inside her.

"Ray’ll think you’ve got burglars."

"Ray’s at home with his tea."

"Then don’t stop."

I didn’t. I pushed her higher up the metal and went deeper, and her pussy clenched on my cock every time I drove up into her, and her breath went short and high in my ear.

"I love you," I said into her neck, before she could ask for it.

She pulled back far enough to look at me, with the street light coming through the slats round her head.

"Unasked," Jodie said. "Put that in your pad."

"I’ll put it in yours."

She came with her teeth in my shoulder through my shirt, her heels hammering the backs of my thighs and the slats rattling behind her, and her cunt gripping my cock so tight it dragged at every stroke. I held her against the shutter and kept going through it until she was shaking.

Then I came, buried in her to the hilt, with my forehead on the cold metal beside her head and her name coming out of me.

The shutter went on humming after we’d stopped.

She slid down me until her shoes were back on the doorway tiles and stood with her hands on my chest, getting her breath back.

"I’ll never get that dress on now. I’m shaking."

"I’ll zip you."

"And then you’ll get me a taxi home with Pemberton’s money."

"Every penny of Pemberton’s money’s gone to Deniz."

She looked at me with her hair everywhere and my come running down the inside of her thigh.

"Then you’ll walk me to the stop." She bent for the dress. "And keep your arms round me till the bus comes."