Chapter 187 Room 4 III

Danny sat with his hands between his knees.

The first shift. The one with my dad in it, that Mum gets told before anybody. And there’s nothing on me anywhere before the 11th. She was doing this job before my mum was born.

"What did you ask for?" he said. "When you asked. What words did you use? I want them exact."

Ida closed her eyes for a second to get them.

"I asked for a boy who’d need a door of his own by the Saturday," she said. "And who’d keep the roof on other people. That’s what I said. I’ve said it in my head every night since. I didn’t ask for you by name. I didn’t know you had one."

"And the house went looking, and found me."

"Yes."

"On the Sunday, a woman came to my mum’s door in Battersea." Danny looked at the secretary, who was writing nothing in her folder. "She said she’d come about a flat for Daniel. My mum said I lived with her. She said then he will not need it yet."

"Your mother had her shoes off," said the secretary.

Danny turned round in the chair.

The secretary looked back at him without moving anything but her eyes. Her stockinged foot swung once, and stopped.

"She remembers that," Danny said. "11 years, and she remembers my mum’s feet."

"That’s her job, love," said Ida. "Don’t take it out on her."

He turned back to the bed. His voice had gone lower.

"And then on the Monday. Something happened in our flat on the Monday. I’m not going to tell you what, and my mum’s not told anybody in 11 years. And by the Tuesday night I was stood in the doorway saying I was going, and by the Wednesday I was on Mare Street signing for a flat with a ceiling somebody’d booked 2 days before I walked in." He kept looking at her. "Did your asking make the Monday happen? Did you do that to us?"

Ida Marsh didn’t answer straight away. Her hands moved on the crossword, flattening a crease that wasn’t there.

"I don’t know," she said. "That’s the truth, love, and I’ve had it on my chest 11 years. I asked for a boy who’d need a door by the Saturday. I’ve lain in this bed 3 weeks asking myself whether there was always going to be a boy like that, and the house just found him, or whether I asked and there had to be one. I’ve never been allowed to know."

Nobody said anything. Outside the French windows a blackbird landed on the bird table and turned round on it twice.

"That’s why I asked for you to come," Ida said. "Not to say sorry. Sorry’s no good to you, I know that. I’ve had 3 weeks in this bed to work it out."

His phone buzzed on his thigh. He looked at it without meaning to.

PC HALE: At the Kensington address 10:12. Front door standing open so went in with a colleague to check welfare. Hall completely bare now, not even the table. Dust on the stairs. Looks like nobody’s been in for years. I’ll come to you after.

Danny read it twice. Last Thursday there’d been a table in that hall and a clock going upstairs. He turned the screen to the bed. Ida put her glasses on off the chain and read it with her lips moving.

"It’s empty because nobody’s asking today," she said. "I saw it like that once in 1979, dust and all, and the next week the table was back with a pen on it. Don’t fret about the house."

He typed bench by the ramp, Jodie’s on it and sent it, and put the phone away.

"Then what did you want me in this room for?" he said.

Ida looked at the secretary. The secretary closed her folder.

"Because there’s one thing I’ve got left." Ida smoothed the blanket. "And I want it used right. When a host stops, she gets to close 1 record, and it stays hers to close till she’s in the ground. They tell me that’s Thursday, or before. The doctor here says a week. They know better than him.

"I meant to close my own. That’s what we all mean to do. Then I come in here and I found I wanted it written down. 61 years. Somebody should have it down. So I’ve got it, and I don’t want it. And I think you’ve 2 people you’d give your arm to get off that list."

Danny went cold from his neck down.

"Jodie," he said. "And Mr Pemberton. That’s who you mean."

"Miss Carter’s on there because of you," said Ida, quite gently. "Don’t look like that, it’s not a thing you did wrong. The house writes down whoever the host shows the work to. I showed my Stanley my book in 1966, and he was written down the same week, and he never knew. You showed her your phone."

"A Monday night," Danny said. "At 20 to 12, in my flat. And before we’d gone to sleep she was on it. The phone said it wasn’t done by the Concierge."

"It wasn’t. It was done by the house."

"And Pemberton wants his closed so he can be buried next to his brother with nobody keeping a list of him."

"I know what he wants. Everybody in that hall knows what he wants. He’s been coming to that hall since I was a girl."

Ida reached out and put her small dry hand on top of his on the blanket. It weighed nothing.

"So that’s what I’m giving you. You say a name to her." She tipped her head at the corner. "By Thursday. Before they put me in. And that one’s closed and it stays closed. A record can’t be opened again once it’s shut, not by the house or anybody else. You don’t sign anything, and you don’t owe anything for it."

"The house never said this." Danny looked at the secretary. "I stood in that hall last Monday and asked you about records, and you told me only the host can close one, after he signs. You never said there was another way."

"You asked about yours," said the secretary. "This one is not yours. It is hers."

"And if I don’t say a name by Thursday?"

"Then it closes nothing." Ida sniffed. "And I go in the ground with it in my hand, and that’s a waste, and I’ll be cross about it wherever I am."

He sat back in the chair. The plastic creaked.

Jodie, who said she’d never speak to me again if I signed. This isn’t signing. Pemberton, who sat in that hall the best part of 2 days without water to ask for it, and got told no, and wrote me not to sign for him. This isn’t signing either.

So it’s just me. Choosing which one of them stays on.

"Can it be split?" he said. "Half each. Close part of each of them. Close the bit that sends cards."

"No, love."

"Can I close it for somebody else? My mum? Is my mum on it?"

"Your mum’s not on it," said the secretary. "Your mother has never asked for anything, and you have never shown her the work."

"Then it’s Jodie or him, and nobody else."

"That’s it, love," Ida said. "And I’m sorry about that and all."

For the rest of the 4 hours she talked.

She started on a dance hall where the town hall car park is now, and a boy called Stanley Marsh who could foxtrot and couldn’t do anything else, and that took her to the first door they ever sent her to: a house in Highgate with a dying judge who held her hand and called her by his wife’s name. She’d let him.

Then the money. Most of it she’d given away in brown envelopes through letterboxes in Bow, and the house never minded. Then she asked Danny about the café, and he told her, and she wanted to know what the coffee would cost and said it was daylight robbery.

She didn’t ask him which name. Not once in 4 hours.

At 12 a nurse came in with soup, and Ida ate 3 spoonfuls and said that’d do her. At 1 she slept for 20 minutes with her mouth open and her lipstick on, and the secretary sat in the corner with her stockinged legs crossed and watched her, and Danny watched the secretary.

"How long have you been with her?" he said quietly.

"Since I was sent to her."

"That’s not an answer. Give me a number of years."

"It is the only one I am able to give," said the secretary.

She was quiet for a moment, still looking at the bed.

"I was sent to her a long time before you were asked for, Mr Flynn. I will be sent somewhere else on Thursday."

Ida woke up at half 1 and said where was I, and went back to Stanley.

At 2 minutes to 2 she stopped talking and took his hand again.

"Go on," she said. "Your girl’s on the bench. I can see her through the hedge, she’s been sat there 4 hours in the cold with her knees together. She’s lovely. Look at her legs. If I’d had legs like that I’d never have gone in service."

"I’ll come back," Danny said. "Before Thursday. With the name."

"I know you will," said Ida Marsh.

[ Clocked off. 14:00. ] [ Shift complete. 4 hours. ] [ Grade 3 wages: 400,000. Paid. ]

Outside the cold hit him in the face. PC Hale was standing by the railings in his uniform with his hat under his arm, talking to Jodie on the bench, and they both looked round at the same time.

Jodie stood up with the page in her hand.

"Out," she said. "Write it."

He wrote 14:01 with Pemberton’s pen, and signed it, there on her knee with her holding the page flat, in front of a policeman.

At 14:05 he rang his mother. She picked up on the ward on the second ring.

"Where are you?" she said.

"Mare Street, on a bench outside a hospice, with Jodie and a policeman. I’m all right, Mum. I’ll come tonight after your shift and tell you all of it."

"10 o’clock, then. I’ll have the kettle on."

He put the phone away. Hale was waiting with his notebook out. Jodie wasn’t waiting. She’d seen that face on him on Thursday, coming out of the black door.

Danny took the page back off her knee. Under 14:01 and his signature, where the page had a few lines of blank left at the bottom, he wrote with the old man’s black ink while she watched every letter go on.

1 record. Yours or Mr Pemberton’s. I choose. By Thursday.