28th January 2019Charlie’s Couriers was doing quite well. To be clear Charlie wasn’t the eponymous Charlie of Charlie’s (there actually wasn’t one) but the name pleased her and she’d made herself indispensable pretty quickly. While she wasn’t officially a partner, being Noah’s star employee, she was spending a lot more time at the office and a lot less time on the bike. And the number of jobs, and riders to go with them, had climbed steadily while she’d been there.

  She watched from the alley as Noah wheeled in her ratty Moto Guzzi and unceremoniously dumped the bike on the lift. Clearly Noah wasn’t intending to ride today. To be fair, when she brought the Guzzi to work she usually wasn’t pnning to do any dispatch riding, even if the state of the thing did make it look like a courier bike. Noah not riding wasn’t really unusual. But her putting the bike on the lift on a work day was a bit of a rarity.

  The rain dripped off Charlie’s nose, and as she reached up to wipe it away Charlie was dragged back to the moment. She watched as Noah realised the rain was dripping from her own hair and grabbed a towel before swinging the big door shut. Everything seemed so normal. Charlie looked back up the alley, then cautiously up and down the street. Nothing. Perhaps she’d imagined the morning’s insanity. She took a single step out towards the street. Immediately she fshed back to the image of someone unknown, someone wearing a police uniform but who she was starting to think was not police, framed in the window of her ft. Standing there and holding a mug she’d chipped after it had contained a little too much vodka.

  She turned to go back to the alley. Too soon. She had arrived here too soon. They might come any moment. As soon as they worked out who else lived in the ft. She paced anxiously back and forth across the narrow space trying to come up with a pn. Eventually, her circur train of thought was broken by the sound of Noah’s habit of narrating her bike maintenance.

  “Aww, c’mon gorgeous, give it up...” Muttered curses poured forth. “Look honey, I know you want a new fuckin’ tyre, so just give me the...” An unpleasant creak from seized metal and some yipping noises came from inside.

  Charlie snapped back into the moment and decisively turned back towards the arches. After a final anxious check she jogged across the road, rounding the door to be confronted with a wet, dirty Noah performing something faintly reminiscent of interpretive dance. Noah looked up, saw Charlie and danced over to her singing cheerfully.

  “I got the fuckin’ thing,” she waved the offending nut at Charlie.

  “I see that.”

  “I dunno what that feckless idiot,” – Noah’s pet name for the previous owner – “had put on it, but it was bloody hard to get off. You know me though, if I want someone’s nuts, I’ll get ‘em.” She grinned her slightly manic grin and shimmied across the space over to the coffee machine and happily flicked it on.

  Most of the ‘office’ bore a pretty good resembnce to any dispatch bike office. A couple of ratty sofas, some ancient and dubious gas fires, some things that might once have been coffee tables (mostly weighed down with broken bits of bike since Noah had installed a lift and a set of decent tools), some distinctly ratty PCs, and random other mismatched furniture looking much like it had been beaten with sticks and then set on fire.

  But on the counter stood Noah’s coffee machine. The shining bck and chrome Gaggia Internazionale was Noah’s exclusive domain, ancient and unreliable but the producer of amazing coffee, and Noah performed her early morning routine as Charlie finally decided on her pn. She’d spent months repairing it in her down-time and treated the thing like her firstborn.

  “So, Jess moved out.”

  “’bout bloody time, you’re better off, honestly, hon. You can do so much better.”

  Noah ground some coffee, the wail of the grinder killing conversation for a moment.

  “Yeah... she kinda took the furniture... and, well everything, kinda. Hers... and mine...”

  “She what?!” Noah looked around angrily.

  “Uh, one other tiny thing,” Charlie trailed off looking at Noah’s face. she looked like she was about to go and hunt down Jess herself. “There was kind of a...well...a...small, err...well, err, tiny, really, err...um..raid. More of a raidette? Maybe? Uh, on, uh, the, um...f...” Charlie felt Noah’s intense gaze on her and squeaked to a stop. Noah was pacing in front of the coffee machine which was spitting out an angry stream of espresso. “...it’s okay though,” Charlie tried, ‘“’s not like I was in. And she’d taken everything anyh....”

  Noah stood staring at Charlie. Her voice was clipped and quiet, revealing an upbringing that most people didn’t expect from the bck-cd walking profanity that they usually met.

  “She took everything you own, cleared out the ft that you’ve been paying for, and left you there so the ft could be raided and you’d be caught and that’s –” the pause didn’t seem good, “something you’ve decided is good in some fucking obscure way?”

  Charlie paused for a moment considering her answer. “This is my life we’re talking about.” Charlie smiled a crooked optimistic smile at her friend. Noah continued to stare at her for several seconds before finally cracking and dissolving into peals of ughter. “Yeah, okay. I guess it’s not the first time you’ve started from fucking nothing.”

  Charlie smiled. Noah turned back to the coffee machine and extracted her espresso before dumping herself down on the sofa. Tall and irritatingly rake-like, Noah looked like a model. Well, what a model might look like if she regurly bathed in motor oil. She absentmindedly flicked her still soaked hair away from her shoulders, tucked her booted feet up on the couch and stared at Charlie.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” Charlie started, and then quickly added, “I mean…there’s quite a lot of ‘Well?’ to go around today.”

  “Okay, let’s start with, they raided your ft, are they going to come here? Do we need to exit, pursued by a bear?”

  Charlie paused. For a moment she’d forgotten the anxiety, but now it was back and slithered over her. She swallowed slowly, listening again for sirens, or the chorus of police cars she half expected to pull up outside any moment. Outside, the rails above tinged with the metallic ctter of an approaching train. Charlie paused and forced herself to take a breath.

  “I…don’t know,” she finally managed to slip out before the train rumbled overhead. It seemed like an eternity before the final carriage passed. “I don’t. I’m not sure they.” She swallowed. “I’m not sure they were really police. And I don’t know whether they were after me or her. I think her?”

  Noah uncurled and sat forward. “And you think they might look here?”

  Charlie hesitated before answering. “I can’t be sure. It seemed like it was Jess they were after.”

  Noah sipped on her coffee and gazed at Charlie. “Okay,” she said, “Perhaps start at Friday.”

  Charlie had been chatting to Noah on Thursday about how she’d got fed up with covering for Jess’s ck of income, and that Jess’d become increasingly withdrawn. It also felt, for some reason Charlie couldn’t put her finger on, like Jess was lying to her. By the end of the day she’d decided to confront Jess.

  The discussion had ended with Charlie screaming “Get. The. Fuck. Out!” and first Jess, then Charlie leaving. Friday Charlie’d called Noah and said she was taking some personal time, pnning to go away for a week. Riding and riding and riding. At least that’d been the pn before she ended up coming back on the back of a recovery van, dumping the bike and its flickering oil pressure light in the garage with disgust.

  She’d added in a weekend of self-fgeltion - expecting to come home to a Jess who’d completely ignored every word and was still deeply involved in whatever she’d been up to for the st few months. Jess cimed she wasn’t hacking, but even though Charlie was rusty, the evidence was there. And Jess’s secrecy about it was unsettling. There wasn’t a huge amount to add to that, really. The ft was pretty much bare when she got back, apart from the sleeping bag lurking at the very back of the cupboard that also held the ancient hot water tank. A few scattered papers lying on the floor, a few table lights (also on the floor, there being no tables) and, in a strangely generous gesture, Charlie’s favourite mug, which she now realised would be with the ‘police’. That was all that was left of the things she’d paid for.

  Noah’s hand waving in front of her brought Charlie back to the present. She wafted the steam rising from a tte she thrust at Charlie for a moment before Charlie got the hint and took the drink. “Do you think more coffee’s really a good pn?” she questioned “‘ve already been by Suzie’s.” Charlie broke a little and smiled unevenly at Noah. “You know how hyper I get with too much coffee.”

  Noah smiled back before muttering “Suzi’s doesn’t serve coffee, Charlie. She serves some fucking filtered shite.”