1The Two O'Clock Call

Here is the first thing to know about locks, and it took me eleven years to learn it, so I’ll give it to you cheap: a lock is not a wall. A lock is a question. Somebody, some long-dead engineer with cold hands and a clean bench, sat down and thought hard about how to keep the wrong people out, and every clever thing he thought becomes, in the right hands at two in the morning, a thing he’s telling you about himself. A cheap lock is a question anybody can answer. A good lock is a question worth listening to. There is no lock in this city I can’t sit down in front of and, given time and quiet, talk my way through. People find that impressive. They shouldn’t. Walls are hard. Questions just want to be understood, and I have never once met the thing I couldn’t outwait.

That’s the trade. I answer questions in the dark for people who’ve forgotten the answer, and I charge them a call-out fee that doubles after midnight, and I don’t ask why they’re standing in a stairwell in their socks at that hour any more than a plumber asks what you were doing to the drain. The not-asking is most of the job. It’s the whole reason they call me and not somebody cheaper. I show up, I listen to the lock, I open the door, I write down the number, and I am gone before they’ve decided whether to be ashamed.

The call that night came in at ten past two, which is my favourite kind, because ten past two is honest. Nobody calls a locksmith at ten past two for a good reason. It was a woman’s voice, pitched low so as not to wake a hallway, and it said she’d stepped out to put the bins down and pulled the door and the door had done what doors do, which is decide, right then, to become the enemy. Fourth floor. No lift. I said forty minutes and it was thirty, because I was already three streets over and because the sooner I open your door the sooner I get back to mine.

Her building was one of the tall thin ones off the canal, the kind they put up quick after some war and never got round to loving. The main door was propped with a fire extinguisher, which told me everything about the building and nothing I needed. I went up. The stairwell had that smell they all have at that hour — cold concrete, somebody’s late dinner, the ghost of bleach — and on the fourth-floor landing she was exactly where the locked-out always are, standing too close to the door as if proximity might shame it into opening, arms folded over a cardigan, no shoes.

“You the locksmith,” she said. Not really a question. I’m always the locksmith. It’s the one thing about me nobody’s ever confused.

“Nell,” I said, because a name settles people, and set my bag down and had a look at the door before I had a look at her, which is manners, in my trade. Yale night latch, the common kind, the kind that’s less a lock than a strong opinion. I could have been through it with a strip of X-ray film and a bad attitude. But she was watching, and there’s a way of doing this that keeps a customer calm, so I took out the picks and knelt down and put my ear more or less to the thing and let her see a professional at work.

“Will it wreck the door,” she said. “I can’t be — I can’t pay for a door.”

“Won’t touch the door,” I said. “Doors are expensive. Locks are cheap. This is between me and the lock.” Which is the line I always say, and it always works, because it’s true and because it puts the two of us on the same side against a third party, and people like having a side.

The lock was a question a child could have answered. Two pins, lazy springs, a plug worn smooth by ten thousand honest turns. I raked it once for show and set the tension and felt the first pin give up its little secret, and then the second, the way they do, like something remembering it used to be open. Fifteen seconds, maybe. I held it there a beat longer than I needed, because thirty seconds of work at two in the morning at the after-midnight rate looks like a robbery even when it’s a bargain, and let it turn.

The door came open on a dark flat and a nightlight burning somewhere down the hall, low and orange, the kind you leave on for a kid or for yourself. She made the sound they all make — half a laugh, all relief — and her shoulders came down an inch, and for a second she was going to touch my arm, and I stepped back and busied myself with the bag so she wouldn’t. I don’t do the arm. You do the arm once and they want to tell you about the kid, or the ex, or the night they’re having, and then you’re standing in a stranger’s grief at two in the morning with your knees on cold concrete, and that’s not the job. The job is the lock.

“What do I owe you,” she said, and I told her, and she winced the exact amount I’d have winced, and went to find her bag, and I wrote the ticket. That’s the part of the trade that keeps me fed and the part I’d forget if you let me: the ticket. Address, lock type, fee, the little box for CASH or CARD. I have a shoebox of them at home going back years. Every one is a door I opened for somebody who couldn’t, and not one of them ever asked me who opens mine.

Nobody, is the answer, in case you were wondering. I do my own. A locksmith with a bolted door is a joke people think they’ve thought of before I have. I’ve got a good one on my place — a proper one, not a strong opinion, a lock that would make me sit down and work for it if I ever locked myself out, which I don’t, because I am careful about exactly one thing in this life and it’s that. You learn where to be careful. You learn it the hard way or you learn it the only way, which is the same way.

She paid cash, counted twice, and I was folding the ticket into my jacket when it happened, the first time, though I didn’t know to call it anything yet.

I’d left my picks in the lock. Careless — I’m not careless — but I’d been writing and she’d been counting and the little tension wrench was still seated in the plug, and as I reached to draw it out my hand knocked the door and it swung, and I said, under my breath, the thing you say to a lock when it’s been easy and you’re tired and a little sorry for the woman with no shoes. I said, there you go, that’s all it ever takes, somebody to sit down and listen. I say things to locks. Everybody in the trade does. They don’t answer.

This one did.

The door swung, and it was not her hallway.

It was a kitchen. Yellow, a bad hopeful yellow, a colour you pick when you’re young and broke and sure you’ll paint over it in a year and then never do. There was a radio on the counter playing something with brass in it, low. There was a chair pulled out from the table at the angle a chair gets pulled to when somebody’s just stood up from it, and on the table two mugs, and the steam still coming off the near one, and I knew that kitchen. I knew the burn mark on the counter by the hob. I knew whose flat it was because it had been mine, six years and a lifetime ago, before, back when there were two mugs on my table as a matter of course and I’d never once thought to be grateful for it.

I stood on a fourth-floor landing off the canal and looked through a stranger’s front door into my own old kitchen with the steam still rising, and the brass on the radio turned over into the bit I knew was coming, and my chest did something I don’t let it do.

“You all right?” the woman said, behind me. “You’ve gone —”

I pulled the door shut.

It was her hallway. Of course it was her hallway. Nightlight, coats on a hook, a bike with a flat against the wall. I stood there with my hand flat on the door and my heart going like I’d taken the stairs at a run, and I told myself the thing you tell yourself, which is: long night, tired eyes, a tired man’s trick of the light, except I wasn’t a man and it wasn’t light, it was a kitchen, and I could still smell it, that’s the part I couldn’t put down, I could smell the coffee.

“Bad shift,” I said, which is a thing that explains anything if you say it flat enough. “You’re all in. Get some sleep.” I had my bag up and I was three stairs down before she’d finished thanking me, and I did not look at the door again, because I am careful about exactly one thing, and I had just watched it fail.

The van was where I’d left it, cold and smelling of oil and yesterday’s coffee, which was a smell I was suddenly not on good terms with. I sat in it. I don’t sit in it, usually; usually I’m moving, because moving is another lock I keep on things. I sat there and looked at the propped door of the tall thin building and did the arithmetic I do, which is: what did that cost me, and can I afford it, and the answer to both was I didn’t know, and I don’t like not knowing, it’s the whole reason I do a trade where the answer is always in the lock if you’re patient enough to hear it.

That’s when the phone went.

I knew before I looked. There’s one person rings me at half two, and it isn’t a locked-out woman with no shoes; those come through the service. This came through the old number, the direct one, the one I’d give to two people in the world if there were two people in the world I’d give it to. The screen said MAR and I looked at it ring for a second the way you look at a bill you already know the size of.

“You’re up,” I said, which is our hello.

“You’re always up.” Mar’s voice is gravel that’s been rained on for years and made its peace with it. In the background I could hear the dispatch room, the little rattle of the heater she won’t let anyone fix. “Got a closer for you. Tonight, if you’ve the stomach. Landlord wants it done before the tenant’s back, so it’s a before-dawn or it’s nothing.”

A closer. That’s the trade word, ours, for the other kind of job — not opening a door for somebody who’s lost the key, but changing the lock on somebody who still has theirs and doesn’t know yet they’ve lost the right to use it. Eviction work. Lock-change on a tenant being put out, done quiet, done before they’re home, so they come back to a key that’s suddenly a question with a new answer, and the answer is no. Nobody wants the closers. That’s why they pay. That’s why they come to me.

“Where,” I said, and I heard myself say it, and I hated the sound of it about as much as I hate anything, which by then was quite a lot, on a night when doors had started lying to me.

“I’ll text you the address.” A pause, the heater rattling. “You don’t have to, Nell. I keep saying that. One of these days you’ll believe me.”

“You keep the ledger,” I said. “I keep the ledger even.” Which is our other hello, the one that’s really a goodbye, and I hung up before she could say the thing she says, which is there is no ledger, which is the kindest lie anyone’s ever told me and the one I have never for one night been able to afford to believe.

The address came through. I put the van in gear. Somewhere behind me on the fourth floor a woman was asleep in a flat I’d opened, and somewhere on my own table, years ago, two mugs were going cold that I would have given the whole night’s fee and the shoebox besides to sit back down at, and I drove toward a door I was being paid to shut on a stranger, and told myself, the way you tell a lock, that it was only a lock. It’s always only a lock. I’d been saying it for eleven years. It had never once, until that night, said anything back.