Every Lock but Hers · novella
3Sully's Keys
Being careful is a job. Nobody tells you that. It isn’t the absence of doing something, it’s a whole shift’s work in itself, and I did eleven days of it and I was knackered.
I took no calls after one. I told Mar my van was playing up, which it was, in the sense that everything on it is always playing up. I did the lock-up in the afternoons like a man with a hobby. I cut keys at three in the day with the roller door open and the radio on and the sun coming in and absolutely nothing happening, which is what sunlight is for.
Eleven days, and on the twelfth Mar rang at ten past one in the morning and said one word, and I was in the van with my boots half on before she’d finished it.
“Sully.”
His name is Mr. Ilesanmi. He is seventy-eight years old and he lives on the second floor of Harrowgate Court with a view of the bins and a balcony he has made, against all reason and the council, into something like a garden. He was a signalman for thirty-one years, which is a job about being in the right place at the right time so that other people don’t die, and I think about that more than he knows.
I call him Sully because he told me to, on the fourth call-out, in the manner of a man conferring a knighthood.
This was, I worked it out on the stairs, the eleventh time.
He was sitting on the top step of his landing, as he always is, in his coat, with his shopping bag between his feet, because he always goes out for something and it’s always at the exact hour of the night when a person has no business wanting anything, and he always comes back and finds that his door has changed its mind about him.
“Nell,” he said, delighted, as if I’d dropped by. “You look tired.”
“I’m always tired. What have you got in the bag?”
“Milk. And a birthday card.” He held it up. His grandniece, apparently, turning nine. “There is a shop on Vane Street that is open all night and sells birthday cards and I do not know who it is for, Nell, except me.”
I sat down on the step below him, which I do, and I got my roll out, which I do, and I said what I always say.
“All right. Where’d you put them this time?”
I’ve kept a list. I’m not proud of the list and I’ve never shown it to anybody and here it is.
The fridge, twice — once in the door and once, memorably, inside a box of eggs, which took me twenty minutes because who looks in an egg box. Inside the clock on the mantelpiece, which is a carriage clock that doesn’t go, and which he opened for me himself with enormous ceremony when I found them, as if it were a magic trick I had performed for his benefit. Rolled in a sock, in a drawer of socks, and I’d like anyone who thinks that sounds easy to try it. In the toe of a shoe. In the letter rack. In the pocket of a coat. Under the tin of a biscuit tin, which is not the same thing as in the biscuit tin, and I would like that noted, because I looked in the biscuit tin first, like an idiot, like a woman who thinks she knows people.
And every single time, without fail, he is on the outside of the door. And the keys are on the inside.
That’s the trick of it, and it’s the reason it took me until the eleventh call to understand anything at all. A man who mislays his keys has them in the wrong pocket. He’s got them on him. He’s patting himself down on the landing and cursing. Sully’s keys are never on him. Sully’s keys are always in the flat, in a place a person had to choose, and then he has closed the door on them and gone out for milk at one in the morning and come back to a door that will not open.
You can only do that on purpose. Even if you don’t know it. Especially if you don’t know it.
He never rings the landlord. He never rings his nephew in Dagenham, who has a spare and who would come. He rings the night-call service, and gets Mar, and Mar sends me, and it costs him sixty pounds a time, on a pension, for a service he could have for the price of a phone call to a man who shares his blood.
I have never once said any of that out loud, and I want you to remember that I hadn’t, because of what happened next.
Getting into Sully’s is not work. It’s a euro cylinder in a uPVC door and it is, professionally speaking, an insult; I could open it with a bad mood. It takes me under three minutes and it always has, and after the third call-out I started slowing down on purpose, which is the single most dishonest thing I do in a job I do not otherwise lie in, and I have never charged him for the minutes I have added.
So I knelt on his landing carpet with my picks and took my time and he talked, above me, on his step, the way he does — about the balcony, and the tomatoes, which are a disaster, and the woman at number nine who has opinions about the bins, and the signal box at Thorne Junction in 1974 when the snow came down so hard that he and a man named Peters lived on tea and boiled sweets for two days and never once let a train past the board until they could see it.
“Two days,” he said. “You cannot let a thing through that you cannot see, Nell. That is the whole of the job. You hold it at the board and you wait.”
The lock gave. That little give, the there you are.
I stood up and pushed his door open and stood back, the way I do, and let him go in first, because it’s his.
And he stopped in the doorway. He does that too, and I’ve never asked, and I stood on the landing with my roll in my hand and watched a seventy-eight-year-old man take one small breath at his own front door like a swimmer, and go in.
I found them in nineteen minutes and I hated all nineteen.
Not the fridge. Not the clock, not the socks, not the biscuit tin, not the shoes, not the rack. I went round that flat twice with him talking to me from the kitchen where he was, without asking, putting the kettle on — he always puts the kettle on, and I always say no — and I could not find them, and I was starting to get the cold feeling you get when a thing you’re good at stops working.
And then I turned round in his hallway and looked at the coat hooks by the door.
There are two. There have always been two. On the right, his — a brown thing, and a scarf, and a cap. And on the left, a coat that is not his: navy, good wool, a bit worn at the cuff, hanging where it has hung since before I ever came to this flat, with a scarf still tucked into the collar the way you tuck a scarf when you are coming straight back.
I have picked that lock eleven times and I have never once looked at that coat, because it is none of my business, and because I have a rule.
The keys were in the pocket.
I stood there in Sully’s hallway with his keys in my hand and the kettle going in the kitchen and the whole of it landed on me at once, the way it does, all the calls at once — every hiding place, in order, every one of them a place in his home where he had to go and put his hand, and the last one, the one he’d worked round to, the one he’d been circling for eleven call-outs like a man walking round and round a hole in the floor he has decided isn’t there.
He came out of the kitchen with two mugs.
He saw the keys in my hand. He saw where I was standing. And he did not go red, and he did not bluster, and he did not do a single one of the things I’d have done, which is when I understood that Sully is a considerably braver man than I am.
He just said, “Ah.”
And then, because I hadn’t said anything, and because he’d had a long time on that landing to work out what he thought:
“You believe I am going soft.”
“I never said—”
“You have thought it. It is all right. It is a reasonable thing to think and it is not what is happening.” He put the mugs down on the little table by the door. He was very calm. “I know that I put them there, Nell. I do not know it while I am doing it. But I know it after, when I am on the step, and I know it while I am walking to Vane Street for a birthday card I do not need at one o’clock in the morning.”
“Sully—”
“A person does not lose a key,” he said. “Listen to me, because you are a locksmith and nobody has told you this. A key gets lost. That is a thing that happens to you, and you are not to blame for it, and you may curse and be innocent. But a key that is hidden is a thing you have done. And the particular gift of hiding a thing from yourself” — he tapped his temple, twice, quite cheerfully — “is that you get to have done it, and not have to know that you did, and so you never have to say why.”
The kettle clicked off in the kitchen.
“I do not want to come home,” he said, “to a flat where nobody is going to be at the door. So I arrange, without deciding, for the door not to open. And then somebody comes.” He shrugged, an old man’s shrug, entirely without self-pity, which is why it went through me like a pick through a bad cylinder. “It costs sixty pounds. It is the cheapest thing in my life.”
I want to tell you that I said something.
I have gone over it since — many times, at four in the afternoon, in the daylight I sleep badly in — and I’ve built about forty sentences that I could have said, and some of them are quite good, and I did not say any of them, because I was busy.
I was busy holding a door shut with my shoulder.
Because he wasn’t talking about me. He had no idea he was talking about me. He was seventy-eight and lonely and honest and he was talking about a navy coat with a scarf still tucked into the collar, and every word of it went past him and hit me square in the chest, and I stood in his hallway with his keys in my fist and a hard grey ringing in my ears and I thought, in the voice I use for the job, the flat one, the one that gets me through the closers:
It isn’t the same. He’s lost somebody. I sent somebody away. It isn’t the same thing at all.
Which is true.
It’s just not different in any of the ways I wanted it to be.
I gave him his keys. And he held the mug out to me — the same mug, the eleventh time, the one I have said no to for a year — and I heard myself, from about a foot behind my own head, say:
“Go on, then.”
And Sully Ilesanmi lit up like a signal box, and we sat at his little table with the balcony door open onto the cold and his disastrous tomatoes, and we drank a cup of tea at twenty to two in the morning, and he told me about Peters and the snow, and I let somebody give me something for eleven minutes.
It was the hardest work I did all week.
I got home at three.
My building has a good door and I have a good lock in it, because of course I do — a proper one, a British Standard five-lever that I fitted myself in an afternoon of what I described at the time as housekeeping, and which would take a decent thief twenty minutes and a great deal of swearing.
I stood on my own landing with my key in my hand.
It was, according to the phone in my pocket, six minutes past — no. It was three in the morning. The hollow hour was long gone, and I had been careful, and I want that on the record: I was careful, all the way home, right up until I was standing in front of my own front door with my hand out.
And the thing was right there. In my mouth. The true thing, the one that’s been sitting behind my teeth for three years, and I could feel the shape of it, and I knew — the way you know a lock will give, from the load on the pick, before it gives — that if I said it out loud on that landing the door would open onto somewhere that was not my flat.
I stood there for a long time.
Then I put my key in my own lock, and turned it, like anybody, and paid nothing, and got nothing, and the door opened onto my flat: the shoebox on the shelf, the kettle, the chair, the dark.
That’s what doors do, when you don’t pay.
I bolted it behind me. Top and bottom, the way I always do, in a building with a good street door and a working entryphone and nobody in the world who is coming up those stairs.
Every lock in that flat was on the inside.
I’d fitted every one of them myself.