Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
“Don’t Be Funny.”
The plan, such as it was, had three parts.
Part one: walk in through the front door.
Part two: don’t, under any circumstances, look at the security desk.
Part three: there was no part three. Part three was the part where he had run out of plan, and it began somewhere around the middle of the lobby, and Elliot had decided at four o'clock that morning, lying on his back on top of the duvet, fully dressed, staring at a ceiling, that the absence of a part three was in fact the entire point, that having a strategy would be a form of hiding, and that the correct approach was to have no strategy whatsoever.
He had then rehearsed having no strategy for approximately ninety minutes.
At six the alarm went. He got up, and showered, and stood in front of his wardrobe for a period of time that he refused to quantify, and put on the navy shirt, and then took off the navy shirt on the grounds that choosing a shirt was itself a strategy, and put on a different one, which he’d chosen, which was also a strategy, and he stood in his bedroom and said, out loud, "You’re twenty-five years old and this is embarrassing," and went to work.
He came up out of Liverpool Street at twenty past eight into a bright cold morning, the kind London does about eleven times a year. Bishopsgate was doing its rush: coffee cups, lanyards, a man on a Lime bike having a crisis. Elliot walked up the last hundred meters to Pellicorp Tower, and he didn’t slow down as he approached the side street that led to the loading bay, and felt himself not slowing down, and enjoyed it more than he could reasonably explain to anybody.
He pushed through the revolving door and into the lobby.
It looked completely different in the morning. That was the thing he'd forgotten in eleven days of avoiding it. At eight twenty it wasn't a black lake at all, it was full of people and daylight, forty or fifty employees of Pellicorp Holdings and its various subsidiaries queuing at the barriers with their passes out and their headphones in. Somebody's takeaway coffee had gone over near the lifts and a man in a hi-vis was dealing with it. The ugly canvas looked, in this light, slightly less like an accident. Only slightly.
Right, thought Elliot. Part two.
He looked at the security desk.
Gav was on it. Moustache, reading glasses, the Tupperware already out at twenty past eight, which raised questions Elliot didn’t have time to pursue.
Something in his chest dropped about four inches.
‘Well, obviously’, he told himself, crossing the marble at a completely normal pace. ‘He's nights. He's been on nights since Wednesday, Gav told you that himself, you’ve had this information for six days. He finished at six this morning. He’s currently asleep in Bermondsey. This isn’t a surprise’.
‘So why do you feel like someone's cancelled Christmas’.
"Morning, Gav."
"All right." Gav didn’t look up from his phone. "Lifts are slow. One of them's playing up."
"Which one?"
"Two."
Of course it was.
Elliot went and stood at the lift lobby with everyone else, in the middle of a crowd of accountants and analysts and one man from Facilities holding a mop, and when lift two arrived first he got into it.
He did it without ceremony, which he was pleased about. Eleven people got in with him. Fourteen. Twelve. Nine, and Elliot's stomach did a small identifiable thing at nine, a little hitch, the body remembering what the mind had decided to be relaxed about.
He looked at the ceiling of the car. Somewhere up there was a service hatch that a man had come through with a torch in his teeth.
‘Behave’, he told it.
The doors opened on fourteen. He got out. He walked to his desk, past the dead coffee machine with the Comic Sans apology on it, past Nadia's monitor with its seven post-it notes, and he sat down at four minutes to nine and turned on his screen and thought: ‘right. That's that done. Eleven days of nonsense concluded. What a colossal waste of everybody's time’.
He felt, unexpectedly and rather stupidly, brilliant.
Then, the reconciliation broke open at twenty past eleven.
He'd been on it since half nine, and he'd been on it the way he used to be on things, head down, second monitor filled with the ledger, first monitor with the workings, one earbud in playing something with no words in it, the noise going off. The eight hundred and forty from Monday had been a thread and he'd started pulling.
What he found was this: back in July, someone at Logistics had processed a batch of intercompany recharges through a suspense code that had been set up in 2019 for a project that had been cancelled in 2020. The code was still open. Nobody had ever closed it, because closing codes was one of those jobs that lived permanently on the second page of everyone's list. And because the code was still open, the recharges had gone in, and sat there, and never come out. Not stolen, not lost, not even wrong, exactly. Just parked. In a lay-by nobody had driven past in four years.
Elliot ran the query.
Twelve line items. He totaled them.
Four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds. To the penny.
He sat back in his chair and looked at the number and felt that entirely private joy that comes from having been right about something for eleven weeks in the face of universal indifference.
"Get in," he said.
"What?" said Nadia, without looking up.
"Nothing. I've found it."
"Found what?"
"The four one one six."
Nadia took her glasses out of her hair and put them on and rolled her chair over, and this, this was the thing about Nadia, and about this floor, and Elliot would think about it later that evening on the bus and feel something warm about it, she actually looked at the screen. Properly. For about forty seconds.
"Oh, that's filthy," she said, with real appreciation. "A dead suspense code."
"A dead suspense code."
"How long's it been sitting there?"
"Four years."
"And it's exactly the…"
"To the penny."
"You are a horrible little man and I'm very proud of you," said Nadia, and rolled back to her desk, and then, over her shoulder: "You're back, then."
Elliot looked up. "What?"
"You've been weird." She said it entirely without malice, typing, not looking round. "Properly weird. Quiet weird. And now you're weird differently."
"I've been fine."
"Right," said Nadia. "Anyway. You're back. Rob owes me a fiver, I said it'd be by Friday."
"You've been betting on me?"
"We bet on everything, Elliot, it's an accounts department." She turned round properly, and gave him a look over the top of the red glasses. "Was it a bloke?"
"Was what a bloke?"
"The weirdness."
"It was a reconciliation, Nadia…"
"Mm," said Nadia, and went back to her screen, and that was, mercifully, the end of it.
*
At half four he went for a walk, which he never did, and ended up doing a lap of Devonshire Square with a coffee and a genuine attempt at thinking clearly.
Here was the position, as far as he could establish it.
A man had held his face in one hand thirteen floors up and kissed him like the roof was coming off, and had then apologized as though he'd trodden on him, and had gone down a fire escape at speed. That man had also, and this was the part Elliot's brain kept returning to, turning over, holding up to the light, told him, unprompted, standing under a broken strip light, that he watched the lift indicator come down from fourteen and knew he wasn't in it.
Both of those things were true. Both of them had happened on the same night, within about four minutes of each other.
‘So he's frightened’, Elliot thought. ‘That's it. That's the whole diagnosis. It's not that he doesn't want it, I've got a bruise on the back of my head that says otherwise, it's that he's never said it out loud to a single human being and he's got a six-year-old and a life he's arranged very carefully, and I turned up in his lobby being loud about it’.
He sat down on the edge of a planter.
‘And here's the thing’, he thought. ‘You can't do that bit for him’.
That was the conclusion, and it’d taken him from eleven o'clock last night to half four this afternoon to arrive at it, which he thought was reasonably efficient given the circumstances.
He wasn’t going to chase. Not out of pride, although there was a satisfying amount of pride available, and he intended to draw on it freely, but because it wouldn't work. Every single instinct Elliot had, the whole apparatus, timing and material and charm, was completely useless here, and might actually make it worse, because the man's entire problem was that he’d spent his life being managed by things and Elliot wasn’t going to be another one.
So: no chasing. No engineering. No standing about in lobbies with a coffee he didn't want.
But.
He drank his coffee and looked at the pigeons and let the but arrive on its own.
But he was also not going back in that stairwell. Not once. Not ever. He was finished with the eleven miles and the deodorant in the drawer and the flattening himself against breezeblock next to a trolley of blue roll. He was going to use the front door and the lift and the coffee machine in the lobby, because those things were his, he worked in that building, he had a pass and a payroll number and a dead suspense code he'd personally exhumed, and he was going to do all of it exactly as loudly and exactly as much like himself as he’d done before any of this started.
And if that happened to be extremely visible from a security desk between the hours of six p.m. and six a.m., then that was a matter for the architecture.
‘The ball's in his court’, Elliot thought. ‘And I'm going to be spectacularly easy to find while he decides what to do with it’.
He finished his coffee. He felt, in a way he hadn’t felt in a fortnight, entirely on his own side.
He left at ten past six.
This was later than usual by about forty minutes, and he had a reason for it, and the reason was the suspense code write-up, which Marjorie wanted before Thursday, and which he had genuinely been working on. He’d also, and he was prepared to admit this to himself, in the interests of the new honesty, been aware since approximately half four that the night shift started at six.
The lobby at ten past six was in its evening state: the daylight going, the lights coming up, the last of the day's people crossing the marble in ones and twos.
Elliot came out of the lift and walked out across the floor.
He didn’t look at the desk. He’d told himself, quite firmly, in the lift, that he was not going to look at the desk, that looking at the desk was a form of chasing, and that the entire strategy, the non-strategy, depended on being magnificently indifferent.
He got about nine meters.
Then he looked at the desk.
Theo was there.
He was in the middle of the six o'clock handover, standing beside the chair rather than in it, with the log book open in front of him and Gav next to him pointing at something on the second screen, and he was in the uniform, and his hair was wet at the front like he'd come straight from a shower, and he was listening to Gav with that flat total attention he gave to absolutely everything.
And then, without any warning at all, he looked up and directly at Elliot across fifteen meters of marble.
It wasn’t a glance. There was no pretense in it. He had, Elliot understood immediately, been waiting to do it, had been standing there through the entire handover with the door of his attention wedged open, and had felt the lift, and had looked up the second there was something to look at.
Elliot's whole body went hot in a single wave from the collar down.
Four seconds. Maybe five. Across a lobby, in front of Gav, in front of six departing employees of Pellicorp Holdings, with a log book open on the desk.
Then Elliot smiled at him. Small, closed-mouth, entirely for one person, and lifted two fingers off his bag strap in something that was not quite a wave.
"Evening," he said. Perfectly polite. Perfectly ordinary.
Theo's mouth opened.
Nothing came out of it.
*
Theo Marchetti didn’t move.
Not on the Thursday. Not on the Friday. Not on the Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of the week that followed, during which Elliot Reyes crossed the lobby a total of nineteen times and said the word "evening" on eleven separate occasions and received, in reply, some combination of a nod, a two-syllable acknowledgement, and, twice, nothing whatsoever.
What Theo did instead was fall apart very slowly, in public, in a manner detectable only to a trained observer.
Elliot became a trained observer.
He would like it noted, and he did note it, repeatedly, to himself, in the shower, that this wasn’t the same as chasing. He was simply present, in a building he worked in, using facilities that were available to him as a matter of contractual right. The fact that he had developed, over eight working days, an almost forensic sensitivity to the state of one man's log book was neither here nor there.
The evidence, as compiled:
Exhibit one: the rounds. Theo's rounds had, for four months, occurred at half past six, half past eight, half past ten, and so on through the night. Elliot knew this. As of the second week they were happening at ten past six. Which was, and Elliot had checked this against his own leaving times over four consecutive days, using the clock on his laptop, like a lunatic, the exact ten-minute window in which he came down.
Meaning Theo was now doing his rounds ‘specifically so as not to be at the desk when Elliot walked past it’.
"That's cowardice," said Priya.
"That's strategy," said Sef.
"It's cowardice with a clipboard," said Priya.
Exhibit two: the log book. Elliot had never given the log book a second's thought in his life. He now knew that it lived open on the desk, that Theo wrote in it in small square capitals, and that the entries had got noticeably shorter, from three or four lines to, on Tuesday, a single word, which Elliot had read upside down at a distance of two meters while pretending to look at his phone and which had been "ROUNDS."
A man who wrote four pages about a broken lift was now writing one word.
Exhibit three: the fob.
On the Friday, Theo dropped his fob. Elliot was six meters away, walking, mid-evening. It went off the edge of the desk and hit the marble with a clatter that carried the whole width of the lobby, and Theo said something under his breath and bent to get it, and Elliot kept walking and didn’t laugh until he was fully inside the revolving door.
On the Tuesday, he dropped it again.
Exhibit four: the looking.
This was the one Elliot couldn’t be objective about, so he tried to be rigorous instead. He counted.
Over eight days he caught Theo looking at him nine times. Not glancing, looking, in the way he had that first evening across the handover, the door of his attention wedged open. And every single time, without exception, Theo's eyes went back to the monitors approximately half a second too late to be convincing, and every single time some enormous fist closed around the whole of Elliot's chest and squeezed.
Nine times in eight days. He knew, because he'd counted.
‘This isn’t chasing’, he told himself. ‘This is data’.
"Right," said Priya, on the Wednesday, in the pub. "Escalation."
"There's no escalation."
"There's always escalation. Sef?"
Sef put his pint down. "Okay. So. You need to be seen with someone else."
"Absolutely not."
"Hear me out…"
"No."
"You get someone to meet you in the lobby. Someone attractive."
"Sef…"
"…I'm available."
"You are not available, you live with a man named Fergus and I've met him and he's lovely."
"Fergus would understand. Fergus is a pragmatist."
"I'm not running an operation," said Elliot. "That's the whole…that's the entire point. Everything I know how to do is the wrong tool. If I start doing bits at him he'll just...if I turn up doing tactics he'll clock it in four seconds and that'll be that."
There was a pause.
"That's very mature," said Priya, sounding faintly appalled.
"I know. I'm as surprised as you are."
"So what's the plan?"
"There isn't one. That's the plan. I go to work, I use the front door, I use the lift, I get my coffee, I say evening. And he does whatever he's going to do."
"And how long do you do that for?"
And Elliot opened his mouth to say something breezy, ‘oh, indefinitely, I've got a payroll number and no dignity’, and found that he didn't have it.
"I don't know," he said instead.
Dom, who hadn’t spoken for eleven minutes, put his glass down.
"He'll come," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"He's been looking at him for four months and now he's dropping things," said Dom, to the table. "He's not deciding whether. He's working up to it."
Then he picked his glass back up and drank, and Sef said "well, Delphi's open for business," and Priya threw a beer mat at him, and the evening went on.
*
On the second Friday, Theo nearly did it.
It was twenty past six and the lobby was emptying and Elliot came out of lift two with his bag over his shoulder and a suspense code write-up finished and filed, and he was in an actively good mood, and he set off at his ordinary pace.
And halfway across he registered that the rounds hadn't happened.
Theo was at the desk. Ten past six had come and gone and he was at the desk, which he hadn’t been at that hour for eight working days, and he was standing rather than sitting, and the log book was closed.
Elliot's step didn’t falter, but the entire rest of him went very alert.
"Evening," he said, at the usual distance, in the usual voice.
And Theo said: "Reyes."
Not a nod. Not two syllables. He said the name, and he said it in the way he'd said it in the stairwell, which is to say as though it were the first three meters of a much longer sentence, and he came round the end of the desk.
He actually came round the end of the desk. Elliot had been going past that desk twice a day and the man had never once come round the front of it, and now he was standing in the open, two paces clear, in the middle of the lobby of the building he was paid to watch, with his hands doing that thing where they didn't know where to be.
Elliot stopped walking.
Everything in him went very quiet and very fast at the same time.
"Yeah," he said.
"I wanted to…" Theo said, and stopped, and started again. "There's a thing I've been…"
And the revolving door went round, and a courier came in.
At speed, wet, aggrieved, holding a scanner and a plastic wallet and talking before he was fully through the door: "Yeah, all right mate, I've got a same-day for a…hang on…for a Pellicorp Logistics, needs a signature, and I'll tell you now I've been to the wrong building twice, is this fourteen floors or is that the other one…"
Elliot watched it happen.
He watched Theo turn, and become, in the space of about a second and a half, entirely professional: the shoulders resetting, the face going flat, the hands finding a purpose. He watched him say "Which company," and take the wallet, and check the screen, and hold out a hand for the scanner, and he watched the whole enormous careful apparatus close over whatever had been standing there ten seconds earlier like a shop shutter coming down over a lit window.
The courier talked for a further forty seconds about the traffic on Houndsditch.
And Elliot understood, six feet away from a man who had been about to say something to him, that the moment was not coming back, that whatever it had cost Theo to come round the front of that desk, he wouldn’t be able to spend it twice tonight.
He waited anyway. He gave it a full minute, standing there, like an idiot, watching a courier explain the concept of a one-way system.
Then Theo signed the thing and handed the scanner back, and the courier said "cheers mate" and left, and there was a beat in which Theo didn’t look up from the desk.
He did not look up from the desk.
"Night, Marchetti," said Elliot.
Quietly.
He saw Theo's hands go still on the log book.
Then Elliot walked out through the revolving door into the rain, and in the two-second gap in the middle of the turn, the one where the performance is over and the street hasn't started, he had to close his eyes.
Behind him, in the bright empty lobby, a man stood with both hands flat on a desk and his head down, breathing, for a considerable length of time.
Elliot didn’t see it. He was already on Bishopsgate, walking fast, in the wrong direction, for two full streets before he noticed.
*
The following Wednesday there was a child in the lobby.
Elliot registered it from inside the lift, through the closing gap of the doors as they opened, a flash of yellow, movement at knee height, something wrong with the scale of the room, and then he stepped out and the whole picture assembled itself and he stopped walking entirely.
There was a small boy sitting in the security chair.
He was six, at a guess, and he’d been installed behind the desk like a very junior member of staff: the chair wound down to its lowest setting, a dinosaur backpack open on the floor beside him, and in front of him, on the desk, on the actual desk, in the space where the log book lived, a fan of A4 paper and about forty felt-tips distributed across the marble.
He was drawing on the back of what were unmistakably incident report forms.
And crouched beside the chair, at eye level, in uniform, with his forearms on his knees and his whole enormous frame folded down into a space about a third of its natural size, was Theo Marchetti.
"…no, but that's the thing, that's what I'm telling you," Theo was saying. "He can't fight. He's not got the arms for it. Look at the arms."
"He's got a spiky tail."
"He's got a spiky tail, yeah, all right, granted…"
"The spiky tail is for fighting."
"The spiky tail is for defense," said Theo, "which is not the same thing, and I'll tell you why…" and he reached over and took a felt-tip out of the pile, the wrong color, apparently, because the boy immediately took it off him and handed him a different one, and Theo said "cheers," and started drawing something on the corner of an incident report.
Elliot stood in the middle of the lobby with his bag on his shoulder and forgot, for a moment, entirely, what he’d come down here to do.
Because he'd known. That was the thing. He'd known since half past midnight in a hot box eighteen days ago, ‘got a kid, Mateo, he's six, means I never miss a morning’, and he had built, on the basis of about nine sentences, an entire picture of a good father doing his best. He hadn’t been wrong. He’d simply had no idea of the scale of it.
The man was transformed.
Everything Elliot had spent four months reading as flatness, the stillness, the economy, the stoic face, was still there and had been turned completely inside out. The stillness had become patience. The economy had become attention, total and undivided, a man crouched in a marble lobby giving a six-year-old the kind of focus most people can’t summon for their own doctor. His voice had gone somewhere Elliot had never heard it go: lower, slower, all the gravel warmed out of it.
And he was funny. He was properly funny. Elliot had spent four months trying to extract a single laugh out of this man and here he was doing an entire committed bit about the structural inadequacy of a stegosaurus, deadpan, at length, to an audience of one.
"He'd get destroyed," Theo said. "In a fight."
"He would NOT."
"He'd get absolutely done. He'd be crying."
"Dinosaurs can't cry…"
"Everyone can cry, mate."
The boy shrieked with laughter and Theo's mouth did the thing, the almost-smile, except it wasn't the almost, it was the whole one, the unrationed one, the one Elliot had spent a night in a broken lift trying to earn twice and had earned twice and had thought about a genuinely humiliating number of times since.
He gave it away like it cost nothing at all. To a six-year-old. Over a stegosaurus.
Elliot's chest did something painful and complicated.
He should go. That was clear. This was obviously a private thing occurring in a public place, and the correct behavior was to cross the marble at speed with his eyes forward and be gone.
He got four steps.
"Are you a man who works here?" said the boy.
Elliot stopped.
The child had spotted him. Theo's head came up fast.
"I’m…a man who works here," said Elliot.
"What floor?"
"Fourteen."
"That's the top."
"It’s not remotely the top, I'm afraid. There's forty."
"Forty…"
"Mate," said Theo. "Let him get his train."
"There's forty floors?"
"Yeah," said Elliot, "and the top nine are all one company and none of us have ever seen them and we think they might be a rumor."
The boy stared at him with his mouth open.
Theo stood up. Slowly, unfolding to his full height, and there was something in his face that Elliot couldn’t immediately identify and that turned out, on inspection, to be pure undiluted panic.
"His mum's stuck at the dentist," he said. "There's been a…the childminder's kid's got chickenpox and Dani's got an emergency root canal, so." He gestured, uselessly, at the entire situation. "He's here for a bit. I've cleared it with Control."
"You've cleared it with Control."
"You have to log it. If there's a…" Theo stopped. "It's fine. It's forty minutes."
"Marchetti, I'm not from the council," said Elliot. "I'm not going to report you for having a child."
And Theo laughed.
It was short and came out of him before he could get anywhere near it, and it was the first sound of that kind Elliot had heard from him in nineteen days, and both of them registered it happening at the same moment, and both of them looked away.
"I'm Mateo," said the boy, into the silence.
"Elliot."
"Do you want to see my dinosaur?" said Mateo.
"Desperately," said Elliot, and put his bag down on the marble.
The dinosaur was, objectively, magnificent.
It was drawn on the reverse of Incident Report Form SEC-114 and it had eleven legs, which Mateo explained was because he had lost count and then decided he liked it, which Elliot considered an unimprovable piece of artistic reasoning. It had a spiky tail. It was orange, and then, from about the middle, green, for reasons that were never disclosed.
"He's called Barry."
"That's a serious name for a dinosaur."
"He's a serious dinosaur."
"Well, quite. You can tell by the legs."
Elliot had, at last count, eleven cousins under the age of twelve, a coastal childhood spent in a house where there were always at least four children in the kitchen, and a working understanding, arrived at early and never revised, that small children and he operated on identical principles: maximum volume, no filter, everything is a bit, and the funniest thing in the world is somebody committing very hard to something stupid.
Within ninety seconds he was in.
Within four minutes he had been given a felt-tip and a designated area of the desk and instructions to draw "a shark but not a normal one," and had come up with something so genuinely upsetting that Mateo went silent for a full second before falling off the chair.
He was laughing so hard he made no sound. He lay on the floor of the lobby of Pellicorp Tower in a school jumper with his arms out and made no sound at all, and then said, weakly, "it's got a hat…"
"It's a bowler hat, that's an important detail."
"WHY HAS IT GOT A HAT?"
"Because he's a professional!"
And Elliot, in the middle of it, looked up.
Theo was standing about two meters away with the log book in his hand and hadn’t written anything in it.
He was watching them. And whatever was happening on his face had gone so far past his usual defenses that it was, frankly, indecent to look at in a public building, a great naked wide-open thing, some enormous unmanageable tenderness that had come up from underneath and simply arrived. He was looking at his son on the floor. And then he was looking at Elliot. And then, catching himself, at the log book, at which he continued to write nothing.
Elliot's whole body went hot.
"Right," said Theo, to the log book. "Off the floor, mate. That's a public floor."
"It's cleaned…"
"It's cleaned at half four in the morning by a woman called Rosa who's got a bad back, get up."
Mateo got up. He climbed back into the security chair, took possession of the bowler-hatted shark, examined it, and then said, in exactly the same tone, at exactly the same volume, without any change of gear whatsoever:
"Are you Dad's friend?"
Elliot opened his mouth.
"He hasn't got any friends," said Mateo.
There was a small, complete silence.
It wasn’t delivered as a complaint. It wasn’t even delivered as information, particularly. It was delivered as a thing that was simply the case, like the number of legs on Barry, offered up in passing on the way to something more interesting, and the boy had already gone back to the felt-tips before it’d finished landing.
Elliot didn’t look at Theo.
He wanted to, more than he’d wanted anything in weeks. But he quickly realized he couldn’t. Because the single cruelest available act at that moment would be to turn and look at a man's face while a six-year-old described his life to a stranger.
So he looked at the shark.
"I'm a colleague," he said. "Which is worse. There's paperwork."
Mateo accepted this instantly and asked whether the shark had a job.
And out of the very edge of his vision, three meters away, Elliot watched Theo Marchetti put the log book down on the desk, very carefully, with both hands, and stand there.
Daniela arrived eight minutes later.
She came through the revolving door at speed with one side of her face visibly numb, in a coat that was too thin for the weather, saying "I know, I know, don't say anything…" before she was fully in the building, and Mateo said "MUM" and went off the chair like something released from a trap.
She was small. Elliot had built a picture, he had, he realized, built quite a detailed picture, over eighteen days, of a woman in a dressing gown at two in the morning holding a bottle of Calpol, and the actual article was about five foot two, dark-haired, mid-twenties, with a face made for being unimpressed and a laugh you could hear coming.
"Don't," she said to Theo. "Don’t start. It was ninety minutes. They gave me a temporary crown, I've got a temporary…is that my child on your incident forms?"
"It's the back of them."
"That's worse, that's the same paper…"
"Look at the dinosaur."
She looked at the dinosaur. She held it at arm's length with one eye slightly narrowed, and Elliot watched something pass between the two of them, a whole conversation with no words in it, fifteen years long, entirely unavailable to anyone else in the room, and she said, "Eleven legs."
"He lost count," said Theo.
"And then he committed."
"And then he committed."
"That's yours, that is. That's absolutely yours." She folded it and put it in her bag, and then she straightened up and looked at Elliot.
It lasted about two seconds.
That was all. Two seconds, in which Daniela's eyes went from Elliot, to the felt-tip still in his hand, to the second drawing on the desk, to Theo, who was looking at the floor, and back again.
And something happened in her face.
Very small. Not a smile, exactly, and it was nothing so crude as a raised eyebrow. But rather a woman being handed a piece of information she wasn’t expecting and understanding it completely and instantaneously.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," said Elliot.
"Thanks for entertaining him. He's got no volume control, I'm sorry."
"He's the best company I've had all week."
"Yeah," said Daniela. "He does that."
And that was it. She got Mateo's coat on him while he protested about the shark's employment status, and got the backpack, and shepherded him toward the door, and Mateo shouted "BYE, MAN WHO WORKS HERE" across the whole lobby, and Elliot shouted "BYE, MATEO" back, and Rosa's cleaned floor carried both of them beautifully.
At the revolving door Daniela stopped.
She turned back and said something to Theo. It was two, maybe three seconds of speech, low, from about a meter away, with her chin slightly down, and Elliot, fifteen feet off and thoroughly occupied with picking up his bag, didn’t catch a single word of it.
He caught the reply, though. Or the absence of one. Theo said nothing at all. He stood there and took it, whatever it was, and his jaw did the thing.
Then she was gone, out into the traffic, with a child attached to her hand.
Elliot walked to Liverpool Street and got on a train and stood up the whole way even though there were seats.
He was not, he established, in the state he’d expected to be in.
He'd had eighteen days of a very clear and reasonably comfortable situation: a man who wanted him and wouldn't say so, and a decision not to chase, and a certain amount of pride to draw on, and the whole thing conducted at a distance of fifteen meters of marble twice a day. It had been painful in a way that was almost enjoyable. There had been a shape to it.
That was gone now.
Because he'd seen him crouched down at a chair with his forearms on his knees giving a six-year-old his entire undivided self, and he'd heard him give away the whole laugh, the one Elliot had worked for, for free, over a dinosaur, without noticing he'd done it. And he'd watched a woman who had known that man since he was eleven years old look at Elliot for two seconds and understand everything and decide to be kind about it.
And he'd heard a child say, in passing, on his way to something more interesting: ‘he hasn't got any friends’.
Not ‘he's lonely’. Children don't do editorial. Just the plain load-bearing fact of it, stated once and moved on from: a thirty-six-hour-a-week fortress of a man, twenty-seven years old, with a son and a job and a flat with a balcony he can't stand on and, at the last count, nobody.
The train came into Bethnal Green.
‘This isn't a lift anymore’, Elliot thought, holding the rail, looking at nothing. ‘There's a kid’.
He got off at his stop and walked home through the cold with his hands in his pockets and didn’t think of one single funny thing to say about any of it, all the way to his front door.
*
Marjorie asked him on the Tuesday.
"Board's on Monday. Nine o'clock. You're doing ten minutes on the suspense codes."
Elliot stopped walking.
"I'm sorry?"
"Ten minutes. Slides if you want them, I'd advise against, Ian doesn't read them and it makes him fidget." She didn’t break stride. "It's your work. You found it, you fixed it, you wrote the note. I'm not standing up and taking questions on something I'd have to lie about."
"Marjorie…"
"Ten minutes, Elliot," she said, from the door of Meeting Room 3. "Don't be funny."
And she went in, and the door shut, and Elliot Reyes stood in a corridor on the fourteenth floor of Pellicorp Tower with a lukewarm coffee in his hand and a feeling in his chest he couldn’t immediately identify because he hadn’t had it in a while.
‘Don't be funny’.
She hadn't meant it unkindly. She'd meant it as ‘this is a serious room’ which was, when he took it apart on the walk back to his desk, possibly the single nicest thing anyone had said to him in eighteen months.
He’d never presented to the board. He’d been in the room twice, both times carrying paper for somebody else. Junior accounts clerks didn’t do ten minutes at nine o'clock on a Monday. They did the analysis and somebody with a better job title said it out loud in a warmer voice.
He sat down at his desk and looked at nothing for a while.
Then he opened a blank document and typed BOARD - 10 MINS at the top of it, and underneath, after some thought, ‘don't be funny’, and underlined it twice.
By Thursday night he had drafted it eleven times and couldn’t get past the first ninety seconds.
That was the whole problem, and he’d identified it by Wednesday lunchtime and had spent thirty hours failing to solve it: every single opening he wrote had a joke in it.
Not big ones. He wasn't going to walk into a board meeting doing material. But they were there, every time, threaded into the sentences, a little self-deprecating aside about being the man who reads dropdown menus for pleasure, a wry line about the code being older than the intern, a neat rueful shrug of a phrase that said ‘don't worry, I know I'm the junior, I'll get there first and be funny about it so nobody has to feel awkward that I'm the one talking’.
Every draft. Eleven of them. He'd take the jokes out and the paragraph would go stiff and dead and sound like Callum's segmental commentary, and he'd put something back in to warm it up, and there it would be again, the fence, going back up, one plank at a time, in a Word document.
So at twenty past nine on the Thursday night he was still on the fourteenth floor, alone, with a printout in his hand and the overheads switching off in sections above forty empty desks.
He'd stayed on purpose. He'd told Nadia he had a thing, which was true, and he'd let her assume the thing was work, which was also true, and what he was actually doing at twenty past nine at night in an empty office was standing up.
He stood up. He came out from behind his desk, into the aisle between the rows, and faced the dark bank of monitors and the green pinprick of the photocopier and the blue breath of the vending machine down the corridor.
"Good morning," he said, out loud.
The empty floor received this without comment.
"Good morning. Thanks, Marjorie. So…the intercompany reconciliation flagged a variance of four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds, and when I traced it…"
He stopped.
"When I traced it," he said again, and heard his own voice do the thing, the little upward lift at the end, the reflex reaching for the room, the automatic ‘I'll make this pleasant for everyone’, and he put the printout down on the nearest desk and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
‘Right’, he thought. ‘Right. Come on’.
It was, he was aware, an absurd tableau. Twenty-five years old, alone in a dark office at half nine at night, in a building with one other human being in it, rehearsing ten minutes of accounting commentary out loud to nobody. If Sef could see this. If Priya could see this, she'd never recover, she'd have it on a mug by Christmas.
And underneath the absurdity, sitting quite still, was the other thing.
Which was that he’d been performing for people since he was eleven years old and had never once, in fourteen years, stood up in front of anybody and simply ‘said what he thought’ without a single piece of protective equipment on.
Not at school. Not at parties. Not to Marcus, in three years, including at the end. Not to Priya and Sef and Dom, who had known him for fifteen years and had watched him do the Marcus story four times as a bit and had never once heard the version where it hurt.
He had done it exactly twice in his life. Once in a hot lift at three in the morning with the lights off, and once in a stairwell on a floor that didn't officially exist, both times to the same man, both times more or less by accident.
And the second one had ended with that man running down a fire escape.
He picked the printout back up.
He got a pen out of his shirt pocket, and he went down the first page, and he crossed out every single joke.
There were nine.
Then he stood in the aisle and said it again, plain, no lift at the end, sixty-eight seconds of a man explaining what he’d found and why it mattered and what he thought should happen, and when he got to the end of it the floor was completely silent and his ears were ringing slightly and he felt, unexpectedly, as though he’d just put something heavy down.
"Yeah," he said. "All right."
He did it four more times. By the fourth it was better than anything he'd written in eleven drafts.
He sat back down at twenty to eleven, saved it, and emailed it to himself, and then crossed his hands behind his head, feeling absolutely magnificent for approximately nine seconds.
And in the tenth second, his brain produced the following:
‘I want to tell him’.
Not Nadia. Not Marjorie, who would say "hm" in the good register on Monday. Not Priya, not Sef, not Dom. Him. The man eleven floors down with the log book.
He put his hands over his face.
‘Right’, he thought. ‘That's new. We'll file that and go home’.
He shut down. He put his coat on. And at four minutes past eleven he walked down the length of the office toward the lifts and thought, with clean, entirely honest, absolutely watertight reasoning, ‘I'll get a coffee on the way out’.
He would have said it under oath. That was the thing he'd maintain afterwards. He wanted a coffee. There was a machine in the lobby. It was on his way out of the building. He was leaving anyway. These were four separate true facts arranged in a line, and if a line has a shape, that is a property of geometry and not of intent.
The lift went down. Twelve. Nine, the little hitch, still, every time, six, four, two.
Ping.
And there he was, Theo. At the desk, blue-lit from below, head down.
Elliot walked out across the marble.
Theo didn’t look up.
Elliot went to the coffee machine, which lived against the far wall, past the desk, and stood in front of it.
‘Flat White, Large’. The machine made its noise and began, grudgingly, to think about it, and Elliot stood there with his back to the room and his bag on his shoulder and every nerve in his body pointed backwards.
Fifteen meters behind him, a page of a log book turned.
The coffee finished. He picked it up. It was terrible. It was reliably, magnificently terrible, the same war crime in a paper cup it’d been on the night the lights went out, and he took a sip of it and then didn’t, for reasons he couldn’t have defended to a tribunal, leave.
He leaned against the wall by the machine instead.
And drank his coffee.
At eleven minutes past eleven at night. In the lobby. Alone with the night security guard, fifteen meters apart, neither of them saying a single word.
It went on for a very long time.
Three minutes, four, some interval that stretched and pooled, well past the point where any reasonable person would have finished a coffee and left, and well past the point where the silence was a silence and into the territory where it became a structure, a thing standing up in the room with both of them inside it.
Two grown men in an empty marble lobby at eleven at night: one drinking a coffee he didn’t want, extremely slowly, against a wall. The other reading a log book that Elliot would have bet a month's salary contained the single word ROUNDS.
Theo turned a page.
Elliot took a sip.
‘Say something’, Elliot thought. ‘You're the one who talks. That's the arrangement, he does the silence and you do the noise, and if you stop doing the noise there's just this.
But he'd been doing the noise for eighteen days. He'd said evening eleven times. He’d walked across this floor thirty-odd times being loud and bright and entirely himself, and had said ‘night, Marchetti’ in a voice with all the armor off, and it’d got him a nod, twice nothing, and a sentence three meters long that a courier had walked in and killed.
He wasn’t going to be the one. Not tonight. Not after a six-year-old had told him, in passing, that his father had nobody.
‘Your move’, he thought, at the back of a bent head, fifteen meters away.
He finished the coffee.
He looked at the empty cup for a moment, which was, he recognized, absolutely pathetic, and then he pushed off the wall and dropped it in the bin by the machine, which made a noise entirely disproportionate to the size of the object, and walked back.
He passed within four meters of the desk.
Theo's head stayed down. Elliot saw the top of it, the dark hair, the set of those shoulders under the too-small uniform, one enormous hand flat on the open page. He saw a muscle go in the man's jaw.
He kept walking.
‘Fine’, he thought, and it came up in him hot and fast and got behind his eyes. ‘Fine. That's fine. That's genuinely fine. I've got a fridge with food in it and two hundred and eighty-six grand in dead codes and a life, and I’m not going to spend it standing in a lobby waiting for a man who has had eighteen days and a courier's worth of nerve and can't…’
He hit the revolving door.
And that’s when it happened.
He heard a desk chair go back across marble.
Elliot came out of the revolving door into the cold and got four steps.
Behind him the door went round again, fast.
"Reyes."
He turned.
Theo had come out onto the pavement without a coat. He was standing on a public street in his uniform shirt in November, no jacket, no radio at his shoulder, the doors of the building he was paid to watch turning slowly and unattended behind him.
He’d left the desk. He’d come out of the building.
"Yeah," said Elliot.
Theo opened his mouth.
Nothing came out. He stood there on the wet pavement about four feet away with the light off the road catching him and his hands doing that thing where they didn't know where to be, and his chest going, and Elliot watched him try, actually try, visibly, physically, the way you'd watch a man try to lift the front of a car.
"I'm no good at this," Theo said.
"Okay."
"I'm not…" His jaw worked. "I've been stood behind that desk for days and every night I've…" He stopped. He tried a different one. "When you come out the lift I know it's you. Before the doors. I know it off the sound."
"Marchetti…"
"I've not stopped," said Theo. "I've not stopped for one single…"
And then he ran out.
He simply ran out, mid-sentence, and stood there with his hands half-raised and his face open and absolutely nothing left in him, and looked at Elliot with an expression of such total helplessness that something in Elliot's chest turned right over.
Which is when Elliot started talking.
He had no control over it whatsoever. It was the oldest reflex he had, the one from the bus stop at fourteen, the one that’d been keeping him alive since he was eleven years old, and it arrived now at the single worst possible moment and wouldn’t stop.
"Right…okay…so, first of all, you've left the building open," he said. "That's…I'm not being funny, Marchetti, that door's just going round, anyone could walk in, and you're the guy who wrote four pages about a lift, so I feel like on a professional level this is a…"
"Reyes…"
"…and second, you haven't got a coat on, it's November, it's about four degrees, you're going to get…I mean genuinely, you'll get something, people do, my nan got shingles and she swore it was a bus stop…" He was aware of his own voice and couldn’t do anything about it. "And listen, it's fine. Whatever this is. You don't have to say it. I've watched you try to do the sentence twice now and I can't take it a third time, it's like watching someone parallel park…"
"Reyes."
"…and I want to be really clear that there's no…nothing's owed here, nothing at all, we can just go back in and I'll get the lift and you'll do the log book and I'll say evening for another eighteen days, honestly, I've got stamina, I've been doing this since I was eleven…"
"Reyes…"
"…also, unrelated, I met your son, which you know, obviously, you were there, and he's the cutest person, he drew a dinosaur with eleven legs because he lost count and then he committed to it…"
Theo took a step forward.
"…and I've got a board presentation on Monday," Elliot said, faster, "which…I don't know why I'm telling you this, it's not relevant, but Marjorie's asked me to do ten minutes at nine o'clock in front of Ian Pellicorp and I've written it eleven times and there was a joke in every single opening, every one, so tonight I stood in an empty office and crossed all of them out, nine of them, and said it out loud to nobody, four times, which is genuinely the saddest thing I've ever done and I'm telling you, and I don't know why, and I can't…"
His voice went.
"…I can't stop talking," he said. "Because…because if I stop…I'll have to find out what's happening."
And Theo, standing on a wet pavement on Bishopsgate at twenty past eleven at night with no coat on, said, very quietly, almost wonderingly, like a man arriving at the end of a very long piece of arithmetic:
"Don't you ever shut up, Reyes?"
"No," said Elliot. "Never. It's a…"
He didn't get to the end of it.
Theo closed the four feet in a single step and took the whole of Elliot's jaw in one hand and kissed him.
And it was nothing, nothing, like the stairwell.
The stairwell had been a collision: two men going off like something dropped from a height, all impact and no direction, over in ninety seconds and followed by an apology. This was slow. That was the first shock of it. This was slow and it was decided, and Elliot understood in the first two seconds that the man had made his mind up somewhere in the last eighteen days and had come out here to do exactly this, and the difference between the two was the difference between falling and diving.
Theo's other hand came round the back of his neck and held him there.
There was no apology in it anywhere. No sorry, no hesitation, no half-second of checking whether he was allowed. He kissed him like he'd been given permission by himself, at last, and had absolutely no intention of asking anybody else.
Elliot made a sound into his mouth and grabbed two fistfuls of uniform shirt.
They came apart about an inch. Theo's forehead against his. Both of them breathing like they'd run.
"Right," said Elliot, at no volume at all.
"Yeah."
"So that's…"
"Yeah."
"Because in the stairwell you…"
"I know what I did."
"Right." Elliot's hands were still in his shirt. He could feel the man shaking again. "Are you going to run down another fire escape? Because I'd like to know now, I've got a coat on and you haven't, I'd absolutely catch you…"
"No," said Theo.
"No?"
"No." And then he said, in a voice that was doing something Elliot had never heard it do: "Let’s go inside."
Elliot's entire body understood before his brain did.
"Inside," he said.
"Building's empty." Theo hadn't let go of him. "Nobody in it till the cleaners at half four. There's nobody on the floors, there's no one on this street, and I…" His hand tightened at the back of Elliot's neck. "I've got ninety minutes till rounds and I'm not walking you to a bus stop."
"Marchetti…"
"Say no if it's a no."
And Elliot Reyes, who had spent fourteen years talking his way out of every room he’d ever been in danger of being known in, said:
"Oh, It's definitely not a no."
(To be continued…)
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