Sully Ilesanmi

A retired signalman locked out of his own flat, night after night, by his own two hands

Mr. Ilesanmi — Sully, to the one person he has knighted with it — is seventy-eight, lives on the second floor of Harrowgate Court, and has turned a council balcony into something like a garden, against all reason and the tomatoes’ own wishes. He was a signalman at Thorne Junction for thirty-one years: a job about being in the right place at the right time so that other people don’t die. You cannot let a thing through that you cannot see. You hold it at the board and you wait.

He is Nell Corrigan’s most frequent hollow-hour call-out, and the cheapest sixty pounds he spends. Every few weeks he goes out at one in the morning for milk, or a birthday card he does not need, and comes back to a door that has changed its mind about him — because his keys are inside, in a place a person had to choose: the egg box, the carriage clock, a rolled sock, the toe of a shoe. Latterly, the pocket of a navy coat by the door that is not his and has not been moved.

He knows he does it. That is the thing that undoes Nell. He is not going soft and he is not confused; he is simply an old man who does not want to come home to a flat where nobody will be at the door, and who has arranged — without ever deciding — for the door not to open, so that somebody comes.

He is the book’s mirror, and its kindest one. He tells Nell the difference between losing a key and hiding one, with no idea on earth that he is describing her.

Appears in

Every Lock but Hers novella