I went up her stairs at nine with a bottle that wasn't cheap and I knocked, which the man I was wearing had never done.
She opened the door and looked at the bottle and then at me.
"You said you'd come by."
"I said."
"Nobody knocks."
"I'm not nobody."
She let me in.
The rooms were what the memory had said — paper on the wall going brown at the seams, a bed too narrow, a washstand, a chair with her good dress over the back of it. A candle and a lamp. It was cleaner than the memory. She'd been expecting someone, or she'd stopped expecting anyone and cleaned for herself, and I couldn't tell which and it mattered less than I'd have liked.
She took the bottle and found two glasses.
"They're talking about you," she said, pouring. "In the Marquis. In the Garrison. Kaplan's yard's grown, you know — it's a bigger yard every time somebody tells it. Last night it was thirty men and you'd cut two of them."
"It was one."
"I know it was one. I heard it from Lovelock." She handed me the glass. "He didn't like it."
"Lovelock?"
"He said you enjoyed it." She sat on the bed and looked at me over the rim. "Did you?"
I could have lied. It would have been easy and she'd have let me. But she was asking the way she'd asked about the hand in the street — not to catch me, just to know — and I'd decided somewhere between the chandler's and her door that there was going to be one person in Birmingham I didn't lie to about the small things, so I'd have somewhere to stand when I lied about the large ones.
"Yes," I said.
She drank.
"Well," she said. "At least that's new."
It was not the memory.
The memory had been quick and mean and mostly about the price, and this was — I was in a body that worked now, that didn't shake and didn't run out, and she noticed the difference about a minute in and stopped, and looked at me in the candlelight with her hair coming down, and said, "What happened to you," and it wasn't a question she wanted answered.
I took the glass out of her hand and put it on the floor.
I had another man's memories of what she liked, and I used them, and it was the first time since the headlights that I'd been glad to have them. And there was a point — her hand flat on my chest, her mouth an inch from mine, the candle guttering — where she stopped being careful, and I felt it go, and I thought there, the way I'd thought it in the yard when the man at the back put his cap on.
After, she lay with her leg over mine in the narrow bed, exactly as the memory had said, and smoked, and I looked at the ceiling and waited for the right moment, and then decided there wasn't going to be a right moment and started anyway.
"I've a proposition."
"Course you have." She didn't move. "Men always have, after."
"Not that kind."
"There's only one kind."
"I'm taking rooms," I said. "Proper ones. An office. I'll be running a book of my own, and a bit more than a book — and I need someone in the office who can read and write and keep a ledger, and who knows every man on Watery Lane and what he's ashamed of."
That got her. She turned her head.
"An office."
"A desk. A door with my name on it. Two pound a week."
She laughed — a real one this time, short and disbelieving. "Two pound a week to sit at a desk."
"To sit at a desk, and open the post, and write down who came and what they wanted, and tell me what I've missed. You'd be better at the last part than any man I could hire."
"And what else."
"That's it."
"Jack." She sat up and pulled the sheet with her. "Two pound a week's what a working man brings home. You're offering it to a whore to sit in a chair. There's what else. There's always what else. Say it or I'll say it for you."
So I said it.
"You'd stop. The stairs. Nobody comes up them but me."
She was quiet.
"There it is," she said.
"There it is."
She got up. She didn't bother with the sheet. She went to the washstand and poured water and stood with her back to me and washed her face, slowly, the way you'd do a thing to give yourself time, and I let her have it.
"Let me tell you what you're buying," she said to the basin. "Because I don't think you've thought about it, and I have, because I've had this offer before. Not the desk — the other. A man decides he wants a girl to himself, and it sounds like a kindness, doesn't it. Sounds like being rescued." She dried her face. "What it is, is: I stop having twenty men who each want a little and start having one man who wants everything, and the day he gets bored, or gets married, or gets cut in an alley, I've got no trade, no name, and no twenty men, because they've all found somewhere else to go."
"That's not—"
"That's what it is, Jack. That's what it is." She turned round. "So tell me what I get. Not the wage. The wage is the desk. What do I get for the stairs?"
I sat up.
I'd had the whole speech ready. Protection. Respectability. A way off the street. I'd had it ready since the hill, and I looked at her standing naked by the washstand with her arms folded and her face shut and I understood that if I said any of it she'd put her dress on and I'd never get up these stairs again.
"You get me," I said. "That's what you get. Not the way you mean — I'm not promising you a ring, I'm not that stupid and neither are you. I mean: anyone who comes at you comes through me. Anyone who talks about what you did, in the street, in the Garrison, at the market — they answer to me for it. And when my brothers come round, because they will, John or Arthur or any of them, and they think they've got a right — I'll be the one they have to have that conversation with. Not you."
At John's name her thumb stopped moving against her folded arm. Only for a second, and then it started again.
"Your brothers."
"My brothers."
"Tommy?"
"Tommy doesn't come up stairs. Tommy sends."
She almost smiled at that. Almost.
"And the office," she said. "Your legitimate business. Your book of your own. With what money, Jack? You had three shilling in your pocket at Easter, I know, because I counted it."
"I've got money now."
"You keep saying."
"Because it keeps being true."
She looked at me a long time. A wage. A door. A Shelby's name on a piece of paper that said she was something other than what the street said. Whether any of it was real. Whether I'd last.
"Fridays," she said finally. "Paid Fridays, in my hand, not sent. My own key. And I'm not your wife and I'm not your property and if you ever once talk to me in that office like I'm either, I walk, and I take what I know with me, and I know a lot."
"Agreed."
"You didn't even think about it."
"I did. It's a good deal for me."
That made her laugh again, properly, and she came back to the bed and sat on the edge of it with her back to me and reached for the cigarettes.
"Two pound a week," she said. "A desk."
"A desk."
"Christ." She lit one. "All right. Jack Shelby. All right." She blew smoke at the ceiling. "But I'll tell you now what I'll tell you every Friday. I'll believe in your office when I've seen it. I'll believe in your legitimate business when a legitimate man walks through the door. And I'll believe in the money" — she turned and looked at me over her shoulder — "when I've counted it."
"Fair."
"It's not fair. It's sense." She stood, and found her dress, and put it on. "Go home, Jack. You've got an office to rent."
I dressed. At the door she stopped me with a hand on my arm.
"The man you cut," she said. "James. He's got a boy."
"I know."
"Everyone knows. That's why they're talking." She let go. "Just so you understand what they're saying, when they say your name. It's not the cut. It's that you knew about the boy and did it anyway."
She shut the door.
I stood on the landing a while in the dark.
Then I went down her stairs, and at the bottom I put my hand in my empty pocket and thought about the key she'd asked for.
One employee, one wage, one door I haven't rented. And a woman who's going to count every penny of it.
She'd won the last word. I noticed that. I let her have it.