Terms of Her Own

Her father was going to say no to the seventy-four thousand. Iris had known that for a week, the way you know weather.

What she had not let herself say out loud — not once, not even driving the long way home past the Brannock yard on a Sunday — was that the only other man in Marlcaster with that kind of money was her father's oldest friend, and that somewhere in the spring she had stopped thinking about the money first.

She got there twenty minutes early on purpose. April, and the town doing its Sunday impression of a town nobody lived in: the shutters down along the whole run from the crossing to the old post office, one man walking a whippet, a smell of rain that had not arrived yet coming up off the pavements. She let herself in — the key still had a paper tag on it that said BEATTIE in somebody's biro, and she had not taken it off — propped the door with the fire extinguisher she had bought and not yet mounted, and stood in the middle of the floor with her hands in her coat pockets to see it the way he was going to see it.

It did not look good. That was the honest answer and she made herself have it. Her father would come in off the street out of the grey light and he would see a gutted room twelve metres by nine with the counter torn out and the sockets hanging, a ceiling with two holes in it where somebody had gone looking for the joists, and ninety years of butcher's tile — white, ox-blood border at waist height, a hairline crack running the length of the north wall like a river on a map. He would see the drain in the middle of the floor with its brass grating and its faint permanent smell of cold water and old iron, and he would think: they hosed this room down every night for a lifetime and now it is a hole in a street where nothing opens.

Iris looked at the same room and saw eight tables. She had seen them since October. She could put her hand out and touch where the pass would be.

He came at twelve, because he had said twelve. She heard the van before she saw him — the Hilux he would not replace, the door that needed slamming twice — and then Roy Averill was in the doorway in his good jacket, filling it, doing the thing he did on every site he had ever walked onto, which was to look up first.

"That's not been felted since the eighties," he said.

"Morning to you too."

"Morning, love." He kissed the side of her head, briefly, and went straight past her to the north wall, put the flat of his hand on it, and stood there a moment with his head on one side, listening to the building the way other men listened to an engine. "Sound, though. That's nine-inch solid, that. They knew what they were at." He looked at the crack. "Movement's old."

"Nineteen-seventies, the surveyor said."

"The surveyor." He said it the way he said the council. But he was smiling a bit, and Iris felt the first small treacherous lift of hope, which was exactly the thing she had told herself in the car not to feel.

She walked him through it properly, because that was the deal she had made with herself: no pleading, no performance, just the room and the numbers, in the order a professional would want them. She showed him where the kitchen went, along the back, against the party wall with the party wall's chimney already there and already lined, which was the entire reason she had signed on this building and not the unit by the ring road with the parking. She showed him the drain, which was six inches from where she needed it and which meant she would not be lifting a floor. She showed him the yard door and the yard, four metres deep, big enough for the bins and the crates and the extract, and she told him what the extract cost, and he made a noise.

"Go on then," he said. "What am I looking at?"

"Coal grill." She put her hand where it went. "Waist height, a metre four, firebrick, cast iron bars, a winch on the grate so you can drop it. Whole fish over it, chops, the lot. That's the room. That's what people come for."

"And that's the thing you've not paid for."

"That's one of the things I've not paid for."

Roy walked out to the middle of the floor and stood on the drain with his hands behind his back. "Right," he said. "So say it in a number."

She had it ready. She had had it ready since March. "Seventy-four thousand."

He did not flinch and he did not whistle, and she loved him for that for about two seconds.

"Against what?"

"Against a hundred and thirty-one all in. I've got the rest. Fifty-seven — my savings, eleven years of it, and what I could get off the brewery on a beer tie I negotiated myself and which I will be paying for in margin till the day I die." She said it flat, because flat was the register that worked with him. "Seventy-four gets me the kitchen, the grill, the cold, the joinery, the extract, the electrics, and the weeks of not being open."

"And the lease."

"Signed in January. Fifteen years, break at five, two months' rent free which ran out on the sixteenth of last month." She let that sit. "So I'm paying rent on this room right now. I'm paying rent on it standing here."

"I know you are." He turned round. "Who was the money?"

"Mick Loyne."

"Ah." Roy pushed his tongue into his cheek. "And Mick Loyne's said no."

"Mick Loyne has never said no. Mick Loyne said he was in for eighty in November, said it in front of four people, and stopped answering his phone on the sixth of March." She heard her own voice go somewhere she had not authorised and pulled it back. "He'll be at the opening. If there's an opening. He'll shake my hand."

"He will and all," Roy said, and for a moment they were on the same side of it, father and daughter, both of them looking at a man who had wanted the credit and not the risk, and Iris thought: this is going to be all right.

He walked the room once more. He looked at the ceiling holes, and the consumer unit, and the window she was taking out, and he asked two decent questions about the extract run and one about the neighbours upstairs, and then he said, "Come back to the house. I'm not talking about money standing up."

She locked the shop. She did not take the paper tag off the key.

Her father's kitchen had not changed in eighteen years except that her mother was not in it. Same brown oak units he had fitted himself the winter Iris was nine, same tea towels, same cork board with the same photograph of the Longstone job pinned at the corner. Going up the stairs to use the toilet she passed the photographs on the wall, and there was the one that had been there her whole life: her father at nineteen or twenty on a scaffold, skinny, grinning, his arm round a tall dark-haired lad with a cigarette behind his ear who was Hal Brannock before Hal Brannock had grey in him. She had stopped noticing that photograph when she was about nine. She noticed it now, briefly, the way you notice a door.

Roy made tea neither of them wanted. He set the mugs down and sat and put both forearms on the table, and she knew before he opened his mouth, because she had watched him do this to subcontractors.

"No," he said.

Iris kept her hands round the mug. Her throat had gone hot, which it did before she had decided to be angry, and she was not going to be angry, because angry lost. "You've not asked what the return looks like."

"I don't need to. Your covers'll be your covers and you'll work like a dog and in three years it'll be worth what you've put in it, if the town holds."

"Then what's the no?"

"The no is I'm not putting seventy-four thousand pound round my daughter's neck," Roy said. "That's the whole of it."

"It's not round my neck if it's not borrowed. Put it in. Take a share."

"And be your landlord as well as your father." He shook his head slowly. "No. Listen. You've never had a hand round your throat, and I have, and it doesn't feel like a hand. It feels like a bad month. Then it feels like a year where you take work you'd not have looked at, because the payment's on the fourteenth and it doesn't care what you think of the job. Eighty-nine, I had nine grand out on a van and a JCB and I put twenty months into other men's rubbish paying for it, and I'd have told you at the time I was doing grand." He turned his mug a quarter turn. "Two years, Iris. Two more years at the Warrener, on your money, saving what you save. You'd walk in that shop in two years and every brick of it'd be yours and nobody in this town could say a word to you about it."

"There is no in two years. There's a fifteen-year lease with my name on it and a rent demand on the twenty-fourth of every month, and Kellow want eighteen thousand deposit by the twenty-seventh of this month or I lose the joinery slot, and if I lose Kellow's slot in May I don't get another until August, and I cannot pay four months' rent on an empty room while I wait for a joiner. So the choice isn't two years. The choice is now or I hand back the lease and eat the dilapidations and start again at twenty-nine on somebody else's pass." She had not raised her voice. She was pleased about that later. "You taught me to read a schedule. Read that one."

Her father looked at her for a while. There was nothing unkind in his face. That was the difficult part; she could have done something with unkind.

"Then you signed too early," he said.

"I signed on the building I wanted."

"You signed on a promise off Mick Loyne."

She did not answer that, because it was true, and because he had not said it to score with it. He had said it the way he pointed at a wall that was out of plumb — because it was out of plumb, and pretending otherwise cost money later.

"I'd give you the money tomorrow if I thought it'd do you any good," Roy said. "I'm not short. You know I'm not short. And if you're stood there thinking the old man's tight, well." He shrugged. "Think it. I've been called worse by better."

"I don't think you're tight."

"What do you think, then?"

I think you've decided what's good for me and you're calling it a principle, Iris thought, with a clarity that surprised her, and she did not say it, because she wanted to be able to come to Sunday lunch for the rest of her life.

"I think I'm going to be forty minutes late for a service," she said, and stood up.

He came to the door with her, and at the door he put his hand on her arm, and said, "You're the best cook in this county and it'll still be true in two years," which was, she recognised, both the kindest thing he had said in a year and the exact shape of the refusal, and she got into the car before her throat could do anything about it.

She drove back the long way, over the river and along Corve Street, and that took her past the Brannock yard: the blue hoarding, the racked scaffold, the telehandlers lined up nose-out, HIRE • SALES • TRAINING in three-foot letters, and one light on in the offices above the hire counter on a Sunday afternoon, because of course there was.

Iris slowed to about fifteen without meaning to. Then she indicated, and went on, and did not stop, and told herself all the way to the Warrener that she had only been looking at the telehandlers.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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