Every Lock but Hers · novella
6The Job She Can't Do
Two nights after the survey, Mar rang at half past midnight with a closer out on the Marsh Lane side, and I said yes the way I always say yes, which is to say before she’d finished the address.
“You’re up,” she said.
“You’re always up,” I said, which is the wrong way round, she says it to me, but I was tired and I’d been sleeping worse since the lock-up, in the specific way you sleep when there’s a cold spot in you that used to be a warm stone, and Mar let it go the way she lets nothing go, by filing it.
“Closer,” she said. “Agent wants it done before six. Flat’s empty.”
“Flat’s empty,” I repeated, because you do repeat it, it’s the one question my no-questions rule allows. Occupied is the line. Every locksmith in this city who’ll take a closer at all keeps that same line: you change the lock on a door, never on a person, and if there’s a light behind the glass you walk, and it isn’t kindness, it’s just that the trade has rules the way locks have wards, and that one’s load-bearing.
“That’s what the sheet says,” Mar said. “You keep the ledger.”
“I keep the ledger even,” I said, and hung up, and if you’d stopped me on the stairs that minute and told me the ledger had about four hours left in it, I’d have laughed at you, and I’d have been wrong.
Marsh Lane at one in the morning is two rows of flat-fronted terraces that used to be railway housing, and the number I wanted was the end one, up a shared path, ground floor, with a black door that somebody had painted well once and nobody had painted since.
I sat outside it in the van with the engine off. That’s the job, I’ve told you: the sitting outside is the whole of a closer, everything after it is just screws.
Here is what there was to see, for a woman with a rule about not seeing.
There was a buggy in the shared porch, chained — chained, with a proper chain and a decent little padlock, and I knew the make and I knew what it cost, which is more than a person chains a buggy with unless the buggy is the last big thing they own. There was a pair of wellies on the step, red, with frogs’ eyes on the toes, the size that means the owner has to be helped into them. And taped to the inside of the front window, facing out — facing out, mind, at the path, at the street, at whoever came — there was a drawing. Felt-tip. A house. The kind children draw before anyone’s told them different: square, door in the middle, sun in the corner, smoke going straight up, and everybody — there were three people, stick people, holding hands — everybody standing outside the house, in front of the door, smiling.
I sat there and I did not ask a single question, and the answers came anyway, the way they’d been coming for three weeks now. The hour had turned while I sat. I could feel it, since the survey I can always feel it — the give at the edges of things, the pressure off — and I kept my hands flat on the wheel and my mouth shut, because it was the hollow hour, and my van keys were in reach, and since Ferrier Street I have known exactly what it costs to say a true thing with a key to hand, and I could feel true things lining up behind my teeth like tenants. The trade teaches you to mind your fingers near a moving wheel. Nobody teaches you to mind your mouth in the small hours. You learn it the way I learn everything, which is the expensive way.
There was a light on behind the curtain. Not the big light. The little one, the lamp light, the one you leave on when the dark is a thing you’re managing.
Flat’s empty, said the sheet.
I got out of the van, and I went up the path meaning — I’ll be honest with you, because being honest with you is apparently the whole trouble with me lately — meaning to check. That’s all. Meaning to establish, professionally, that the sheet was wrong, so that I could ring the agent and say occupied and walk, clean, the way the rule allows. I had the word in my pocket like a cut key. Occupied. It opens the way out, that word, no charge, no questions.
I never got to spend it.
“I know the key still works,” said the door.
A woman’s voice, low, quick, from a foot behind the wood, at one in the morning, which meant she’d been standing in her own dark hallway watching my van through the spyhole for the better part of ten minutes. I know that standing. I’d heard about it, once, from the other side of a different door, and had spent three years telling the story where it wasn’t me.
“I know it works,” she said. “I’ve bolted it. You can tell them the key works and the bolt’s thrown and there’s nothing wrong with this door, and I’m not opening it. I don’t open it. That’s not a thing that happens any more, me opening this door, so whatever you’ve got — a notice, a parcel, a face — you can keep it, and you can tell whoever sent you the door’s fine.”
There was a pause, and then, smaller, further off, from down the hall: a child’s voice, the pitch that carries through any wood ever hung.
“Is it the man?”
“It’s no one,” she called back, bright as a shop bell, terrible to hear. “Go back in, love. It’s no one.”
And then to me, through the door, flat again: “You’re no one. No offence.”
“None taken,” I said, and I meant it, and I stood there on her step with my tool bag in my hand, every pick and tension bar and drill I’d need to be the thing that happened to her, and I could not have told you my own name just then, because I was listening to a woman hold a door shut with her voice, and I have been on both sides of that door, and I knew, the way you know a lock by the first pin — not with the front of your mind, with your hands — which side I was standing on tonight.
Here’s the thing I’d have told you about bolts, any night before that one, if you’d caught me in a talking mood. A lock is a question. That’s trade-lore, that’s mine, I’ve worn it smooth. A lock asks who are you, and a key is one answer and a pick is another, and there’s a conversation in it, there’s a maybe in it. A bolt isn’t a question. A bolt is a door’s mind made up. You can’t pick a bolt, there’s nothing to pick, no keyway, no wards, no maybe; it doesn’t care who you are. The only hand that can move it is the one that threw it, from the side it was thrown on. I fit them, I sell them, I recommend the good ones. I have one on my own door, top and bottom, fitted the week I moved in.
She’d thrown hers. And the job — the actual job, the two-hundred-and-forty-pound job, the one on the sheet — the job wanted me to make the bolt not matter. Wait out the flat some morning when she finally had to be somewhere with the kid, school or the surgery or the food bank, and be there in the twenty minutes the door stood undefended, and take out her lock, and put in a better one, and tape up the notice with all the words, and be gone before she came back and put her key in a door that had changed its mind about her. With the drawing still taped in the window, facing out. Three stick people, holding hands, outside the house, smiling.
I knelt down. I don’t fully know why. Knees gone, maybe, or the tiredness; I’ll tell you the truth, which is that kneeling at a locked door with my ear near the wood is the first shape I ever made that was mine. It’s where the whole trade started, on a mat, thirty years ago, ear to a door with a five-year-old’s patience on the other side of it saying my name like it was the answer to something. I can hear you doing it. I can hear you. I knelt on this stranger’s step in the hollow hour and put my ear a hand’s width from the wood, and on the other side of it I could hear her breathing. Guarding a bolt that no one in the world was trying to open but her.
“I’m not delivering anything,” I said, to the door, quietly. “I’m going.”
She didn’t answer. Her breathing didn’t move. She’d heard every promise a door gets told, that woman. I got up, and my knees told me about it, and I picked up my bag, and I walked back down the path past the chained buggy and the frog wellies, and I sat in the van, and I looked at the clock until it said ten past two — until the hour was over, and the leak was shut, and whatever I said next was only going to cost me the ordinary way.
Then I put the keys on the dash, well out of my hand, from habit or from superstition or from the plain fact that I no longer trust my own mouth, and I rang the agent’s out-of-hours line, and a young man answered with his voice still half in a pillow.
“The Marsh Lane closer,” I said. “I’m not doing it.”
Rustling. A light going on somewhere in his life. “Is there — sorry — is it occupied? If it’s occupied you just note it occupied and we re-sheet it for a vacancy check, there’s a box on—”
“I know about the box,” I said. There it was, the clean way out, held open for me one more time, the technicality with my name on it. Occupied. Tick it and walk and the rule takes the weight and the ledger stays even and nobody ever knows what it was or wasn’t, least of all me. I’m going to want credit for this someday, from somebody, so I’ll say it plainly here: I did not tick the box.
“Don’t re-sheet it,” I said. “It’s not that she’s in. I’m not doing this one. Send it to another firm if you want, that’s your business. But it doesn’t go back on my sheet.”
“Right,” he said, in the voice of a man writing nothing down. “And — sorry — who do I say refused?”
“Corrigan,” I said. “The one who doesn’t refuse.”
I want to be exact about what I’d just spent, because I’m the one keeping the ledger and lately it’s the only job I seem to be any good at.
It cost me nothing, on paper. There’d be another van on Marsh Lane inside a week — I knew that, sitting there; I want you to know I knew it, that I hadn’t saved her, that refusing a job and stopping a thing are two different trades and I’d only just taken up the first. Some other firm, some bloke with fewer rules and a worse mortice, would wait out her twenty minutes and do in twenty-two what I wouldn’t. Refusing hadn’t drawn her bolt back or torn up the notice. All it had changed, the whole of it, was which side of her door I was standing on when it happened.
It turns out that was not nothing. It turns out that was the most expensive thing I owned after the truth about the hairpin, because I’d been fifteen years the one you call because I don’t flinch and I don’t ask, and she doesn’t refuse was a load-bearing wall in a structure I’d been calling a life, and I’d just put a drill through it, sober, on a Tuesday, for a woman whose name I did not ask, because of a drawing of three people smiling outside a house.
The phone went while I still had my hand on the ignition. Mar. Of course Mar; the agent’s out-of-hours line and Mar’s switchboard are the same three streets of gossip wearing different hats.
“You’re up,” she said, careful as a woman crossing ice.
“You’re always up,” I said.
“Word is my closer’s coming back to me unclosed.”
“Word’s fast,” I said. “It’s right. I’m not doing that one, Mar. And before you ask — no. Not because she’s in. I’d have walked on occupied and taken the next one and slept fine, or slept the way I sleep. I’m not doing that one.”
I heard her heater tick, the one she won’t let anyone fix. I heard her decide, and file, and decide again. Fifteen years I’ve been hearing Mar think, and I could not read a word of it, and that frightened me more than the door had.
“Well,” she said at last. “That’s that, then. First one you’ve ever handed back, you know that? I’ve had you down for every ugly job on this book since before some of my drivers could drive. Never once said no. I used to wonder what it’d take.” A pause with a whole winter in it. “A bolt and a kiddie’s drawing, apparently.”
“Mar—”
“Come in and see me,” she said. “Tomorrow. Daylight, even. There’s a thing I’ve been not saying to you for three years, and I’m done keeping it.”
“What thing?”
“The ledger,” said Mar, who has cut that sentence off at the same word for three years, every time, like a woman closing a door on it — and this time she didn’t close it. “Nell. There is no—”
She stopped herself. Not the way she usually stops. The way you stop when you’ve decided to do a thing properly or not at all.
“Tomorrow,” she said, and the line went, and I sat in my van on Marsh Lane in the dark with the keys on the dash where I couldn’t reach them, which no longer felt like superstition. It felt like a woman who had finally worked out which of the things in arm’s reach was dangerous.
Behind me, back up the path, the lamp behind the curtain went out. She’d watched me the whole way gone, then. You do. It’s the last thing you do at the end of a night like that, you watch the van leave, and then you check the bolt with your hand, once, the way I check mine.
I drove home. I did not check mine.
First night in three years. I stood in my own hallway with my hand up, halfway to the habit, and I looked at the bolt — good bolt, top of the range, fitted by the best hands in the city — and I left it, and I went to bed with the door only locked, like anybody, like a person, and I lay there listening to a flat that sounded exactly the same and was not, and somewhere across the city Mar was sitting up with her terrible heater, deciding to spend a truth of her own.
The hollow hour was long over. Nothing in the city owed me a door.
I slept anyway.