Page 5 of Worshipped by the BRATVA Grump

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.”

Mechislav

It’s less than a week after Daisy came to the freight yard and Bohdan's crew are taking the wall out.

Daisy's standing at the front of the shop in a hard hat that's too big for her with her camera up. She's been there since eight. When the last section comes down and the dust rolls up the length of the floor, the whole thing opens out exactly the way she said it would. Door to back window in one line. She lowers the camera and doesn't say anything at all for about fifteen seconds. I watch her from the mezzanine steps but don’t go down there, because if I go down there I'll do something about the look on her face.

She’s already gone part time at the paper, so now she's at the shop Friday through Monday, and most evenings. Bohdan's men have started calling her boss, which I like and dislike in equal measure.

Here is what I've learned about Daisy Bishop in three weeks of renovation.

She can’t leave a job to somebody else. If there's a broom she'll take the broom. She turns up with coffee for six men in a cardboard tray and knows every one of their names, including that Yusuf's daughter is doing her exams and Petro's back is bad in the cold. She argues with Bohdan about the shelving depth for twenty minutes, loses, is proved right four days later when the trial run of hardbacks won't sit flush, and does not say one word about being right, which I find harder to take than gloating.

She works in the cold with her hands going red and cracked because she won't wear gloves. Her mother sends them, I overheard her telling Delilah, and she loses them or leaves them in the car or forgets.

So I left her a pair on the workbench. Lined leather, women's small, the kind that will actually take a paint scraper without falling apart. Nobody says where they came from. She looks at them for a while, and then she looks around the shop at six men who are all extremely busy, and then she puts them on and gets back to work. I don't look up from the flue survey until she's crossed to the other end of the floor.

The thing she doesn't know yet is how much of what she said that first morning is being built.

She thinks she's getting a strip-out and a fair fit. She thinks the shelving is a standard commercial spec that happened to come in on budget. She hasn’t asked why a building being fitted plain for resale in the spring has the original flue being relined at a cost of four thousand one hundred dollars. I've had invoices for that work rerouted through the yard so that when she does ask, the number she's shown is the number I want her to see.

It’s the window seat that seems to make it real for her.

I'm up on the mezzanine going through Bohdan's variations when the door goes at half past six. She comes in straight from the paper with her bag still on her shoulder, and she stops three steps inside.