Fourteen Doors

Daz Cole had keys to fourteen front doors on the estate.

They lived on a ring the size of a bangle, clipped to his belt loop, and they announced him before he turned any corner. Pat’s at number 22, with the purple fob. Mr Okafor’s, for when his daughter’s shift ran late and somebody had to let the gas man in. Two for the Kowalskis, because one stuck. The community room. A shed on the allotments he’d never once been inside but had promised to “keep an eye on.” A small brass one nobody could identify any more, which he kept anyway, because somebody had trusted him with it once and that felt like enough.

At twenty to seven on a Monday morning, he couldn’t get through his own.

He heard the latch go behind him the way you hear a glass leave your hand. Too late, perfectly clear. He was on the landing in his work jacket, one boot not laced, a flask of tea in one hand and a van to get to. His own keys were on the kitchen side. He could picture them. Next to the bowl. Next to the letters he’d opened now, at least, stacked in the order Samuel had once helped him write on the back of an envelope.

Daz stood looking at his front door like it had said something rude.

Then he laughed, because that’s what Daz does first. One short laugh, out loud, to nobody. “Fourteen keys,” he told the landing. “Fourteen.”

The landing didn’t think it was funny. It was doing what estate landings do at that hour — cold concrete holding the night a little longer than the sky, the stairwell window grey and smeared, somebody’s radio two floors down murmuring the traffic news like a prayer for the A23. A pigeon on the rail outside, unbothered. A smell of toast from somewhere he couldn’t place.

He rang the locksmith. Two hours, maybe less. Eighty-five quid call-out. He said “lovely, cheers, mate” in the voice he uses to make bad news sound like a favour, and then he sat down on the top step with the flask between his boots and the ring of other people’s doors resting on his thigh.

It is a strange thing, to be locked out of your own life while you’re carrying everybody else’s.

Number 22 opened.

Pat, in her dressing gown and the slippers her granddaughter bought her that look like two small sheep, peering round the frame the way people do when they’ve heard a man laugh alone on a landing and want to know which kind of laugh it was.

“Darren?”

“Morning, Pat.”

“What you doing sat out here?”

“Admiring the view.” He waved the flask at the stairwell window. “Locked out.”

She looked at the ring on his leg. Then at him. Then at the ring again, and he watched her work it out, and he braced, because Pat has known him for eleven years and she does not do polite.

“You’ve got my key on there,” she said.

“I have.”

“And who’s got yours?”

He opened his mouth to make a joke, and nothing came, which hasn’t happened to Daz since about 2009.

“Nobody,” he said.

Pat didn’t say anything clever. She went back in, and he heard the kettle, and four minutes later she came out with tea in the mug with the chipped handle — the one she always gives him, as if it’s his — and a slice of toast on a saucer, and she put both on the step next to him without asking if he wanted them.

“Drink that,” she said. “And don’t tell me you’ve already got tea. That’s flask tea. That’s not tea.” And she went back inside and left the door on the latch, open a hand’s width, so the warm from her hallway came out onto the landing.

He sat in that warm for a long time.

He didn’t need to go anywhere. The locksmith had said two hours, and the van could wait, and for once there was nobody to fix. So at half seven he walked down the stairs, the ring jangling on every step like it was keeping score, and out across the green.

The grass was silver with wet. A fox went the other way along the fence, not hurrying, the way they do round here, like it pays council tax. The parade was opening itself up one shutter at a time — the bakery first, then the shoe-repair place with the hand-painted sign that still says KEYS CUT WHILE U WAIT, the U fading to almost nothing.

Samuel was walking back from the early shop with a pint of milk, like he does. Dark wool coat. Flat cap. Grey beard catching what little light there was. He changed direction without seeming to change direction, and they arrived at the bench at the same time, the way people do when one of them has been watching.

Samuel moved his bag. Daz sat.

“You’re early,” Samuel said, “for a man with no van.”

“Locked out.”

Samuel’s eyes went, slowly, to the ring on Daz’s belt. He didn’t laugh. He took his time, the way he does, as if every sentence has to be walked to the bench before it’s allowed to sit down.

“How many doors is that?”

“Fourteen. Fifteen if you count the brass one, and nobody can tell me what it opens.”

“And none of them yours.”

“Mine’s on the kitchen side.”

“I meant,” Samuel said, “none of them are a key to you.”

Daz turned the flask in his hands. The bakery’s extractor fan was breathing warm sugar across the parade. A bus pulled in, sighed, pulled out with nobody on it.

“Why do you think,” Samuel said, “you’ve got everybody’s key, and nobody’s got yours?”

The easy answer came first. Daz let it come. “‘Cause I’m the one who comes. Somebody’s locked out, somebody’s boiler’s gone, somebody’s mum’s had a fall — I’m round the corner. That’s the job. That’s what I’m for.”

“And when it’s you behind the door?”

“Then I’m sorted.”

Samuel didn’t say anything. He just let sorted sit there on the bench between them until Daz could hear exactly how it sounded.

“What do you think would happen,” Samuel said eventually, “if somebody could get in?”

And Daz thought about his flat. Not the front of it. The real of it. The washing up he leaves till it’s a decision. The sofa he sleeps on some nights because the bed is where the sums start. The letters, opened now, but still there. The quiet. The fact that on a bad week the only thing in the fridge is milk and a lemon he doesn’t remember buying. Nothing dramatic. Nothing anyone would call a crisis. Just a life with the curtains half drawn.

“They’d see it,” he said.

“See what?”

“That I’m not —“ He stopped. Started again, lower. “That I’m alright for everybody else, and I’m not always alright in there.”

Samuel nodded once, slow. “So you made yourself easy to reach,” he said, “so nobody would ever need to come in.”

It wasn’t a question. It landed like one anyway.

What if I’ve made myself so easy to reach that nobody’s ever actually been let in?

Daz didn’t say it. You don’t say that on a bench at half seven with a pint of milk going warm beside you. But it went into him and stayed, the way a splinter does — small, exact, not leaving.

They sat. The parade woke up around them. A woman went past pushing a buggy with one hand and holding a coffee with the other, and nodded at both of them, and Daz nodded back without the joke, for once. Just a nod.

“Not everybody wants a key to your mess,” Samuel said, getting up, tucking the milk inside his coat. “But somebody’s been knocking for a while. Might be worth finding out what they’d do if the door opened.”

And he walked off towards his block, unhurried, like the morning was something he’d paid for and intended to use properly.