2The Closer

The address Mar sent me was a first-floor flat over a chip shop on Dolvin Road, and I sat outside it in the van at twenty past three in the morning with the engine off and the heater ticking as it died, and did the only part of a closer that ever takes any time, which is the part where you sit outside it.

I want to be straight about the money, because people are never straight about the money and it’s the whole of it.

A lock-out at two in the morning pays me sixty. A closer pays two hundred and forty. Same lock, same picks, same twenty minutes on my knees on cold concrete; the difference in price is not skill and it isn’t risk. It’s that the landlord is buying something he can’t do himself, and it isn’t the lock either. He’s buying the not being there. He wants the key to stop working and he does not want to be standing in the stairwell when it does. So he pays a woman with a van to be the thing that happens to him, and then he can be sorry about it later at a comfortable distance, and I take the two hundred and forty and I am the reason a man comes home to a door that has changed its mind about him.

Two hundred and forty. I’ve thought about it a lot, that number. It’s exactly what I’d charge to open the same door for the same man if he’d only lost his key instead of his tenancy. That’s the trade, top to bottom. Same hands, same hour, same door. All that changes is which side of it you want me on, and whether you can pay.

I didn’t know his name. That’s the rule, my rule, and I hold it the way other people hold a religion. No names, no stories, no letterboxes looked through. A landlord who tells me why gets told to shut up. It’s not squeamishness. It’s housekeeping. You start collecting the reasons and you’ll find you’ve got a shoebox of them, and there’s already a shoebox at my place full of tickets and I have never once been able to throw it out.

So: no name. What I had instead, because you can’t help what you see, was a doormat, worn through in the middle, and a pair of steel-toed boots left outside the door the way a man leaves them when he comes home too tired to do more than step out of them, and the smell of vinegar and old fat coming up the stairwell from the shop below, which is not a bad smell, actually, at three in the morning; it’s the smell of somewhere still open.

Night shift, said the boots. Whoever he was, he worked nights, and he’d be back at the end of one, and that’s why the landlord wanted it done before dawn — so that the lock would be a stranger by the time he got to it.

I got out of the van. I did the job.

There’s no drama in it and I won’t invent any. The old lock was a five-lever mortice, decent, twenty years old, cut by somebody who cared. I took it out in eleven minutes. You get the screws, you draw the case, you clean the mortice with two fingers and a rag because there’s always a fur of dust and brass filings in there, the sheddings of every turn of every key that door has ever known, and I brushed it out onto the landing carpet like it was nothing, which it was.

The new lock went in in nine. Good one, too. Better than the one I took out — that’s the joke of the closers that nobody laughs at, that a man gets locked out of his home by a better lock than the one that used to let him in. I cut three keys for it right there at the van, one for the landlord, one for the agent, one spare. I taped the notice to the door, the one the agent had emailed me, the one that says a lot of words in order to avoid saying your key doesn’t work. I put the old lock and the old keys in a bag for the landlord, because they always want them back, and I have never once in my life understood why.

The boots I left where they were. He’d want them. I couldn’t do a thing about the door but I could leave a man his boots, and if you want to tell me that’s nothing, I’ll agree with you, and I’ll do it again the next time.

Twenty-two minutes. Two hundred and forty pounds.

It’s only a lock. Say it enough and it stays true right up until it doesn’t.

I was pulling out of Dolvin Road at five past four with the notice taped up behind me and the money not in my hands yet and already spent in my head, when I saw him in the mirror.

He came round the corner from the bus stop end with a rucksack over one shoulder, walking the walk they all walk, the one where the legs have gone and the man is being carried home by habit alone. Big lad. High-vis half unzipped. And I watched him in my mirror the whole length of Dolvin Road, going smaller, because I did not speed up, and I did not slow down, and I did not stop, and I want to be exact about this: there was a moment — the length of a breath, no more — where I had my hand on the gear stick and the van still had a choice in it.

He went up the steps. He got his keys out. Even from that far away and that small in a mirror, you know the shape of a person getting their keys out, it’s the last easy thing you do at the end of a shift.

And then I turned onto the main road, and the mirror was full of nothing but the chip shop sign, and I never saw him try it.

That’s the mercy the trade gives you. You never see them try it. You’re always already gone.

I drove home the long way for no reason I’d have admitted to, and I sat in the van outside my own building with two hundred and forty pounds coming to me and my own good lock waiting up there, the proper one, the one that’d make me work for it, and I thought about a five-lever mortice cut by somebody who cared, and a fur of brass filings twenty years deep, brushed out onto a landing carpet by a woman who does not ask questions.

Then I went up and slept, badly, the way you do in daylight, and did not dream about it, and woke at four in the afternoon feeling like the inside of the mortice.

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So that was Tuesday. Wednesday is where it starts, properly, and if I could go back and not say the thing I said, I honestly don’t know if I would.

I keep a lock-up on Ferrier Street. It’s not much: a roller door, a bench, a key-cutting machine older than I am and better tempered, a pegboard of blanks, a kettle, a chair I found. It’s where I do the work that isn’t standing in stairwells. That Wednesday night I was there past midnight cutting spares — the landlord had rung to say he wanted two more keys for the Dolvin Road lock, because of course he did, because a man like that wants a drawer full of keys to a door he’ll never walk through — and I had the machine going and the smell of hot brass in the air, which is a smell I like, and I do not like very much.

There’s a door at the back of the lock-up. Just a cupboard, really. Broom, spare cylinder boxes, a coat I never wear. It’s got a rubbish lock on it, a little cheap thing that came with the unit, the sort of lock that’s less a question than a shrug.

It was a bit past one. I know because the machine has a clock on it, and because I remember thinking, in the ordinary way, one o’clock and I’m cutting keys for a man to keep in a drawer.

The key came off the wheel hot. I stood there turning it in my fingers to cool it and looking at it — this bright new brass thing, no wear on it, no history, a key to a door that had thrown a man out twenty-eight hours ago — and I said, out loud, to nobody, in an empty lock-up on Ferrier Street:

“I hate the closers.”

That’s all. Four words. I’ve thought about them a great deal since and they are, as far as I can establish, the truest thing I had said out loud in three years, and I’d never said it, not to Mar, not to the shoebox, not to the ceiling at four in the afternoon. I take the closers. I’m known for the closers. I’m the one you call because I don’t flinch and I don’t ask and I don’t tell you a single thing about how I feel about it — including, apparently, me.

And the cupboard door came open.

Not banged open. It swung, easy and unhurried, the way a door swings when somebody on the other side has just walked through it and left it to itself, and the little cheap lock made a sound I have made a living out of and no cupboard has ever made — the give, the there you are, the sound of a question being answered.

There was no cupboard behind it.

There was a landing. Third floor, brown carpet, a strip light with a moth in it, and a smell — that’s what took my legs — the smell of the stairs of a building I have not stood in for three years, cold concrete and somebody’s late dinner and the ghost of bleach, and a door, a green door, number eleven, with a bad bit of filler under the spyhole where I fitted the lock myself the week I moved in.

My old door. Seen from the outside. From the landing. From the side you stand on when you’re the one knocking.

There was a shape at the edge of the light, half out of it, standing not-quite-square to the door the way you stand when you have been standing a long time and are trying to decide whether to lift your hand.

And it was raining somewhere behind all that, I could hear it on a window I couldn’t see, and it had been raining that night too, that’s the thing, that’s the exact thing I have spent three years not letting into a sentence, it was raining, and I heard — God help me, I heard — one knock. Just the one. The polite kind. The kind you give a door when you already know what it’s going to say.

I hit that cupboard with my shoulder hard enough to bruise for a week.

It shut. The brass key went off across the floor of the lock-up and under the bench and I did not go after it. I stood with both hands flat on a cheap plywood door in a rented unit on Ferrier Street with my heart going like a machine and I said, out loud again, because apparently that’s what I do now:

“No.”

Silence. The kettle. The tick of the cutting wheel slowing down.

I opened it. I made myself. You have to open it, that’s the trade, you don’t get to be a locksmith who won’t look — and it was the cupboard. Broom. Spare cylinder boxes. A coat I never wear, on a hook, with the shoulders gone dusty.

I sat down in the chair I found and put my head in my hands and did the arithmetic, and this time I made myself do it properly, because I’d had one of these on Monday night as well, hadn’t I, a kitchen that shouldn’t have been there, and you can call one of them a tired eye and you cannot call two of them anything at all.

Monday, on the landing off the canal: I’d said something to a lock. Something true and daft and small — that’s all it ever takes, somebody to sit down and listen — and the door had opened onto my old kitchen with the steam still coming off the mugs.

Wednesday, at the bench: I’d said something true I’d never said to a living soul, and a cupboard had opened onto the landing outside my own front door on the worst night of my life.

Both of them after one in the morning. Both of them a lock in my hands. Both of them, and this is the part I could feel the shape of the way you feel a pin set, paid for — with something out of my own mouth that I’d never once let out of it.

Say a true thing. Get a door.

I sat in that chair a long time with the smell of hot brass going cold and I understood, the way you understand a lock — not with the front of your mind, with your hands — exactly what was on offer, and exactly what it cost, and I said, to the empty unit, to the roller door, to the woman who charges two hundred and forty pounds to be the thing that happens to a man at the end of a night shift:

“Absolutely not.”

I got the broom out. I put the coat on a different hook so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I found the brass key under the bench and I cut the second one and I locked up and went home and did not go anywhere near the hollow hour for eleven days.

Eleven days is a long time to be careful about two things.