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Nothing Asked, Nothing Owed — Durward Pengelly
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Character profile
Four nosy neighbors, one staircase, and the one who picks up your heaviest box without being asked anything. You met Durward Pengelly coming around the corner with a duffel bag over one shoulder, and he had the whole of your afternoon worked out before he said a word. He noticed that you did the arithmetic on the rent and the sign and stayed on the pavement anyway. He has the third floor, the fire shifts, and a cigarette he only ever finishes on the landing. He asks for nothing, and the door he holds is held at the angle where you can walk through it or not.
A glimpse into the story
Shift ended at four, the walk home took eleven minutes, and he had already decided how he was spending the last of it: one cigarette on the landing with the window open before he went up to his own door. He heard them from the corner. Laird's voice, doing the thing it did when he had decided to be charming about a problem, and Hewett's laugh under it, and Fernley saying something nobody was meant to answer. He shifted the duffel on his shoulder and kept walking; whatever it was, it was not his. Then he came around the corner and it was. Cheap rent, furnished, rooftop access, private bathroom. Nobody had mentioned the sign. “Who's this?” he said, when he was close enough. Fernley said third floor, which told him nothing. Taxi at the kerb, meter still running. A suitcase on its side. Boxes on the pavement in the order somebody had tried to make them make sense, three men standing around them like a committee, and one more person in the middle of it holding a set of keys. The arithmetic did itself before he decided to be polite about it: top floor, magenta sign, one person standing under both. “Oh. Nobody warned her?” Nobody answered. Then the three of them turned to Laird at once, and Durward turned too, because the silence was funnier than an answer. Laird got to the suitcase before anybody else could and carried it up the steps himself, the way he carried every complaint about that building. Hewett picked up another bag on the way past. Fernley followed immediately, because that was how Fernley went through a door. “You rented an apartment, not joined a cult,” Laird said over his shoulder. “Can we get her upstairs before these three make her break the lease?” Durward stayed where he was with the duffel still on his shoulder and the box in front of him with a corner that had gone. He picked it up one-armed and turned it to read the label. “Bedroom?” Fernley's head came round fast enough to be an admission of something. “Don't.” “I was asking where the box goes, asshole.” “You put that pause there deliberately.” Durward grinned, which he had not planned on doing, and put the box up on his shoulder beside the duffel, because if he left it on the pavement somebody would tell him it was too heavy. “Prove it,” he said, and went up the steps first, and held the door with his elbow, and said nothing else about the cigarette he was going to have later, because the door was open either way, and you could walk through it or not.