Past Due

Cole Ferreira kneels in eleven tonnes of concrete with his hands on a girl's chest, and the bill comes up in the air in front of him like a receipt printing.

TO RESTART THIS HEART 6 YEARS · YOUR MOTHER'S NAME · THE ABILITY TO TASTE

He says, "Fine."

Then, before it clears — because he has already looked past her, down the length of the collapsed east concourse of Hallam Park Stadium, at the nine hundred people still under it:

"What else have you got?"

The girl's heart restarts. Six years leave him with no sensation whatsoever, which is the thing nobody who has never Borrowed can be made to understand: it does not hurt. It is not a wrench or a drain or a cold hand. You simply agree, and then you are a person who has agreed, and somewhere in you a quantity has changed that you will not notice for a very long time.

His mother's name goes at the same instant.

He knows he had one. He knows she died in 2011 and that she wore a blue coat and that she liked a particular kind of boiled sweet and that he loved her enormously. The name is a shape with nothing in it, like a word in a language he never learned, and he will spend the rest of his life not being able to say it out loud.

Here is what nobody who has never Borrowed understands, and Cole Ferreira has tried to explain it eleven times and given up: the invoice is not a temptation. It is not a bargain with anything. It is a price tag, and the thing about a price tag is that it is completely indifferent to whether you can afford it.

He was nineteen the first time. A car went into a canal in Kidderminster and he was on the towpath and the type came up in the air in front of him — TO GET THAT DOOR OPEN — 3 WEEKS — and he had no idea what it meant and said yes anyway, because he was nineteen and the alternative was watching.

He found out what it meant six days later when a woman from the Registry knocked on the door of his student flat with a leaflet.

Fifteen years and seven callouts. He has spent, before tonight, perhaps three and a half years in total, which puts him in the middle of the distribution, and he has always been faintly proud of that. Careful. Sustainable. A man who reads the second line.

The invoice does not care about any of that either.

"Cole." Someone on the radio. "Cole, are you—"

He is already moving.

• • •

The east concourse came down at 8:41 in the evening during the second half, and the reason it came down is a matter of eleven separate lawsuits and does not concern anybody kneeling in it. What concerns Cole Ferreira, thirty-four years old, structural engineer, Borrower since the age of nineteen, is that there are three thousand people in the collapse zone and the fire service cannot get a vehicle within four hundred metres and the upper deck is going to follow inside twenty minutes.

He knows it is twenty minutes because he can see the deflection in the raker beams from where he is standing, and because it is his actual job.

He puts his hands on the first slab.

TO LIFT THIS 4 MONTHS · YOUR LEFT EYE

"No," says Cole, "counter," and the bill flickers, which is a thing nobody has ever satisfactorily explained, and comes back:

TO LIFT THIS 11 MONTHS

"Fine."

The slab goes up. It weighs nine tonnes and it goes up like a table leaf and nineteen people come out from under it in ninety seconds and Cole Ferreira has eleven months less of whatever he was going to have.

He does the next one at fourteen months.

The one after that wants a year and the memory of his first apartment and he takes it without reading past the second line, and by the fifth slab he has stopped reading the second line at all, which is the single most dangerous decision of his life and he makes it in about a second and a half at 8:52 in the evening.

• • •

By 8:58 the fire service has understood what is standing in their collapse zone.

There is a protocol for this. There are, in this country, somewhere between four and eleven thousand Borrowers depending on whose estimate you believe, and about two hundred are known to emergency services, and Cole Ferreira is one of them because he registered voluntarily in 2019 and has been called out nine times.

The incident commander is a woman named Roz Achterberg and she has worked with him twice before and she knows exactly one thing about Borrowing, which is that it is finite.

"Ferreira. FERREIRA. What's your balance?"

He doesn't answer.

"Cole! What have you got left?"

He has, at that moment, spent four years and eleven months, and he has by his own rough accounting something like fifty-one years in the account, and the upper deck has fifteen minutes in it, and there are two thousand six hundred people still underneath.

"Enough," says Cole Ferreira.

And he walks into it.

• • •