Daisy
The Calloway Courier operates out of two rooms above a carpet warehouse on Anders Road. Every morning the whole floor smells like burnt coffee and the underlay they store below us.
Ron Tiernan has edited this paper for twenty-six years and has the posture of a man who has spent all of them leaning over somebody's shoulder saying ‘that's not a lede.’ Penny does the advertising, the accounts, the phones, and the classifieds.
Callum is nineteen and does the website and social media.
And then there's me, staff reporter, which since they let Frank go two years ago also means staff photographer, staff picture editor, and the person who drives forty minutes into the city in the rain to photograph a check.
It is, this morning, an actual check. It's four feet wide and made of foam board stating the children’s football club has raised three thousand dollars for the hospice. It’s a genuinely good thing done by genuinely good people, and I need six of them to hold it up and smile.
I have done this exact photograph, I would estimate, two hundred and forty times.
“Nice one?” asks the chairman.
“Beautiful,” I tell him, and I mean it kindly, and I drive back with the heater on my hands.
I love this job. I love that Mrs. Vasey cut out my piece on the framing shop's fortieth anniversary and taped it inside her own window. But nothing can stop progress even when progress is killing what came before. The paper used to be thick and chunky. Now it’s barely a dozen folded pages and most of that is advertising.
I suggested to Ron that we go down to a small magazine style booklet, but he looked so affronted that I never brought it up again.
I'm back at my desk with the check pictures open when the email comes in. I ignore the stupid little flutter my heart does. Then I tell myself it’s just excitement about chasing my dreams and nothing to do with the man who made my toes curl three times in one night.
Federov Freight. Attached: a draft lease, thirty-one pages of it, and a one-page summary at the front that somebody has clearly written specifically so I don't have to read the rest.
Five years, break at three, mutual. Structure, roof and wiring theirs. Damp remediation theirs, completed before commencement. Fit-out mine. Rates estimated. It's all exactly what he said it would be, and it's clean. There's no clause in it that makes my stomach drop.
Except the rent.
I read the number three times. Then I open a new tab and pull up the two commercial listings currently live on this side of the river, then I pull up the archive because I wrote a piece about frontage on Calloway and I had actual figures in it from an actual agent.
It's low. Not a little low. It's not a fair-price-for-a-place-that-needs-work low. It’s somewhere around sixty percent of what that unit should command.
I close the laptop and grab my jacket.
The café at half four is a wall of warmth and steady routine.
Delilah is behind the counter leaning back slightly to counterbalance seven months of pregnancy, Duchess keeping a close eye on her.
Sammie is standing with Baby Misha against her shoulder, doing the slow rhythmic bounce of a woman on her second child who has stopped believing anything is an emergency.
Kimmie is opposite her with her hands wrapped around a mug she isn't drinking from.
“There she is,” Delilah says. “Bishop. Sit. What's happened, you've got a face.”
I frown. “Nothing's happened.”
“Something's happened,” Sammie offers, handing Misha to me so she can wipe down the tables.
I sit at Kimmie’s table and Misha settles against me in a way I didn’t think I’d ever achieve with babies. For some reason, this one seems to like me.
All three women are looking at me expectantly, so I tell them.
I mean to be measured about it; I put my phone on the table with the summary page open and I talk for four minutes straight about the ladder and the stove and the wall coming out.
By the end of it Sammie has stopped cleaning and Delilah has come around the counter with a plate of cake that she slides across the table to me.
“You're taking it,” Delilah says.
“I'm considering it.”
“She's taking it,” Sammie says to Kimmie.
“I'd have to go part time at the paper, at least at the start.
Ron would have to agree, and honestly Ron might be relieved because it's a salary he could stop paying.
I have savings but they're bookshop savings, they're not bookshop-plus-eight-months-of-no-income savings, and there's a very real chance I spend everything I have on a room full of books that nobody in this town wants to buy.”
“And next door,” Delilah says, “is a business built entirely on people paying four dollars for a coffee so they can sit near a cat and eat questionable cake.”
Kimmie hasn't said anything, which is unlike her to the point of being alarming. She's turning the mug around on the table.
“Kim?”
“Sorry.” She looks up and her eyes are bright. “Sorry, I'm listening, I'm thrilled. I'm just…” She stops. She looks at Delilah, then at Sammie, then back at her mug, and she laughs at herself in a wobbly way. “I was going to wait until Sunday and do it properly. I had a whole thing planned.”
The café goes very quiet, the only sound is that of Lemur purring on the shelf above the window.
“Kimmie Farrow,” Delilah says slowly.
“I’m pregnant,” Kimmie says. “I saw it, it's got a spine, it's got a little spine already. Natan has watched the video approximately nine hundred times and hasn't said one word about it. He just keeps putting his hand on my stomach and looking at me like I’m the reason the universe exists. And then, well, you know…” she trails off with a blush and looks at us, swallowing like she isn’t sure what our reaction will be.
We all cheer at once, waking Misha who Sammie takes back as she adjusts her top to feed him.
Delilah cries happy tears, hugging her friend and promising all the burnt cake she could ever want.
A couple of tears escape from the bottom of Sammie’s lashes, which she swipes away.
I snap a few photographs of the moment on my phone, because that’s what I do with my hands when I don't know what to do with my face.
Later, in the car, I look at them.
They're good. Kimmie smiling, with a mixture of relief and pleasure. Delilah with her forehead against Kimmie's shoulder. Sammie laughing with a furious baby and a wet face. Three women in a warm room, and me on the other side of the lens, where I always am.
I put the phone down and drive to the yard.
The Federov Freight yard sits at the far end of the industrial road across the bridge with floodlights on poles and a gate that stands open pretending to be welcoming.
I've driven past it four hundred times and never once turned in.
It's bigger inside than it looks. Containers stacked three high along the eastern fence, a long shed with the doors rolled up and light spilling out, men in high-vis uniforms moving pallets under the glare, and the noise of it, the beeping and the hydraulics and somebody yelling instructions.
Nobody stops me. I park beside a truck and get out with my bag over my shoulder and my heart beating too fast. Two men glance at me before going back to what they're doing.
I climb an external metal staircase toward a lit window because that's where the office obviously is, and I'm a reporter walking uninvited into a building owned by a family I've written the words organized crime about in my own notebook.
It occurs to me somewhere around the ninth step that this might be the stupidest thing I have ever done.
Mechislav opens the door before I reach it.
He's in shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned back, his tattooed forearms reminding me of the last time I saw them when they were wrapped round my thighs.
I gulp to try and quash the memory before it blooms into something more.
He looks at me standing on the stairs in the cold with absolutely no surprise whatsoever, which means he watched me park.
“Bishop.”
“Your rent's wrong,” I say.
He steps back and holds the door open. “Come inside, it's freezing.”
“I don't want to come inside. Your rent is wrong, and you know it's wrong, it’s sixty percent under. I told you. I stood in that shop and I told you specif—”
He cuts me off. “The building needs work.”
“You're doing the work. It says so on page four.”
“Structural work,” he says. “Plus, you'll be trading through a fit-out in a unit that's been shut for nine years with no footfall history and a street that's half empty. The rent reflects the risk you're carrying.”
My shoulders drop despite the frustration I’m feeling. “That's a very good answer.”
“Because it's true.” Mechislav is wearing a look that I can’t decipher. His eyes have softened a little, like he is waiting for me to catch up with him, but not in a patronizing way.
“It's a very good true answer that is also completely beside the point, because I asked you for one thing.” My voice has gone up and I don't care. “One thing, and you said understood, and then you sat down and did exactly what I asked you not to do. Now if this works, I won’t know whether it worked because of me, or because a Federov put his thumb on the scale.”
He doesn't interrupt me once, and there's something maddening about being allowed to finish.
“I want to earn the win,” I add.
Mechislav is quiet for a moment, but it’s clear he is weighing his next words carefully.
“That's the rent,” he says, shifting slightly to bring his face lower towards mine. “It's low. I know exactly how low it is because I set it. And if I were giving you what I actually want to give you, Daisy, there wouldn't be any rent at all and significantly more orgasms.”
The wind comes across the yard and I don't feel it.
My entire body has lit up, threatening to take him up on his offer before I get a chance to silently chastise it.
“Page eleven has the deposit terms.” He straightens off the frame like nothing happened, like he didn’t just say the word ‘orgasm’ in a public place. “Read those tonight. It’s up to you Daisy. Take it or leave it.”