Chapter 100: Notice
I found the new room by walking, which is how I find everything now.
Carrow Street runs down from the ring road to the canal and the buildings get lower as you go.
Number 40 had a card in the launderette window below and a bell that did not work.
The room was on the second floor at the back. Twelve feet by nine. I paced it.
Single bed, wardrobe with one door, a sink with a mirror screwed above it at the height of a shorter person.
Shared bathroom on the half-landing, shared kitchen below that, four other tenants, all men, all on shifts.
Six hundred and twenty a month, four weeks up front, no reference required, cash preferred but not insisted on.
The landlord was called Novak and he wore a lanyard from a job he no longer had.
He asked what I did. I said industrial laundry, five thirty to eleven thirty, Fairholme.
He said the man in the front room worked nights at the bakery and I should not expect quiet.
I asked if there was anywhere to put a mat down.
He looked at the floor and then at me and said the floor was the floor.
I took it.
There was no version of the month in which I did not take it.
I moved on the twenty-eighth with two bags and a bin liner.
Priya drove. She had a Nissan with a child seat in the back that belonged to her sister's boy.
We did it in one trip, which told me more about the last three years than anything I could have written.
On the second trip up the stairs she stopped on the half-landing with the bin liner in both arms.
“Are you going to say it or am I?”
“Say what.”
“That this is worse than the room Julian was paying for.”
“It's worse than the room Julian was paying for.”
“Good,” she said, and carried the bag up.
We unpacked in forty minutes. The wardrobe took everything I owned with space left.
Priya put the kettle on the windowsill, the eighteen-pound kettle, and photographed it, and sent the photograph to nobody.
Then she sat on the bed and took a brown envelope out of her coat.
It was a copy of the letter she had sent on the ninth of February, with the Commission's reference number on it.
The reference number meant it existed. It did not mean anybody had read it.
“They have twenty working days to acknowledge,” she said. “It's day fourteen.”
“And after they acknowledge?”
“Nothing visible. That's what I keep telling you. Regulators go quiet exactly when they get interested.”
“Or when they don't.”
“Or when they don't,” she agreed. “It looks identical from outside. That's the part you'll hate.”
I asked her the question I had been not asking for three weeks.
“If I'd signed it. If I'd signed the four pages. What happens to the letter you sent?”
Priya considered it properly, because she is a pharmacist and does not answer clinical questions fast.
“The letter's sent. They can't unsend it. But I'd be a member of the public with a theory and no witness who'd been inside the building.”
“So it dies.”
“So it probably dies. Yes.”
I stood at the window. Below, a man was loading a tumble dryer at nine at night in a launderette lit like an operating theatre.
“I want to say something to you once,” I said, “and then I'd like to not say it again.”
She waited.
“I refused a deal that would have ended a criminal charge against me. If it goes badly I'll have refused it for twenty-seven people I have mostly never spoken to, some of whom may have had nothing done to them at all.”
“That's true.”
“And if it goes badly I don't want you telling me it was noble. I'll want to have been right, and those are different things.”
Priya said, “You'll get whichever one you get.”
She left at ten. I heard the Nissan start twice.
There was no chair, so I ate standing at the sink, out of the pan, the way I had eaten for four years in a training hostel.
I washed the pan. I put it on the windowsill next to the kettle.
I put the mat down on the floor by the bed. It was a single blue crash mat from Tobias's store cupboard, sixty by ninety, two inches thick, split at one corner and taped.
It was not enough surface for a breakfall and I knew it.
I knelt on it in seiza and put my hands flat on my thighs.
I had knelt in a great many rooms in the last three years and had never once chosen the room.
The floor above the launderette was warm, which I had not expected, and smelled faintly of other people's washing.
I stayed there until my ankles complained, which took eleven minutes, and then I got up.