Page 3 of Worshipped by the BRATVA Grump

She takes a breath and gets her notebook out, and I watch a different woman arrive in her body. Her shoulders come down. Her voice drops half a register. This is her at work, and it's the most attractive thing I've ever seen in an old, empty building.

“Term,” she says. “Rent, and how it's reviewed. Deposit. Who's liable for the gutter I saw around the back, the wiring and the damp in that corner. Whether the lease is assignable if it all goes wrong, because I'd rather ask that now than find out in eighteen months. Business rates. And whether there's a break clause, on both sides.”

“Five with a break at three,” I say. “Structure and wiring are ours. Damp is ours. Interior fit-out is yours, and anything you build stays with the building unless we agree otherwise in writing. I'll put it all in front of you by Friday.”

She writes it down. Then she stops writing and looks up at me.

“I need to say something,” she says, “and I need you to not be offended by it.”

“Say it.”

“I'm not taking a Federov discount.” She closes the notebook and holds it against her chest like a shield. “I know Sammie and Delilah are next door and I know Kimmie's across the road…I know exactly how this street works now. I also know what we did—” the tips of her ears go pink now as she takes a deep breath. “and none of that is going to be a reason I pay less than the going rate for a business premises. If this doesn't work as a business then it isn't a business, it's a hobby you're funding, and I'd rather not have it at all. I need to be able to say I did it.”

She's braced for an argument. She's got her chin up and her weight on her back foot. I wonder if she rehearsed this in the car.

“Understood,” I say.

She waits. “That's it?”

“You want a fair rent. I'll send you a rent.”

“Right.” She narrows her eyes at me, unsatisfied, because she wanted the fight and I've declined to give her one. “Okay. Good.”

I hold the door. She goes out and stops on the sidewalk to look up at the old gold lettering with her breath clouding around her, then she pulls herself together and goes next door into the warmth and the noise. I hear Delilah shriek before the door has even shut.

I stand in the empty shop for another twenty minutes.

I pace the wall she wants opened, heel to toe. It's twenty-two feet. The flue in the back room is sound as far up as I can see with a flashlight. The window in the front is deep enough for a seat without eating the floor, and the boards under the dust are wide oak and only want lifting and turning where the racks were bolted down.

Then I call Bohdan, who has done every job my family has needed doing for two decades, and I tell him to price a full strip-out and fit for the corner unit on Calloway. Oak throughout, a sliding ladder on a brass rail, and to find out what we need to get the door to the café put in.

“That's a lot of money for a rental unit,” Bohdan says. “I’ll be available late today if that works for you?”

“That works for me.” I give him the address and hang up.

I sit down on the bottom step of that staircase in a freezing building and I think about a woman standing in the middle of it apologizing for wanting something. Picturing all the things she was saying as I look around, I understand with total clarity that I'm going to spend whatever it takes to give her her dream.

That’s how I know I'm fucked.

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.