I had just finished kicking myself and was beginning to drop off, my chin resting between my knees, when a van rattled up my pebbled driveway. I glanced at my phone (11:00pm) and, upward at the other flats in the complex. Their windows were predictably dark, and, I hoped, shut tight.
He hopped out of the front seat - with a dirty navy blue cap on, despite the hour. Wiry, and much younger than I was expecting. No older than late-twenties.
'So - I take it you're Rebecca?' He had a strong Aussie drawl.
'Sorry to call you up in the middle of the night.'
'That's alright.' He grabbed his tools. 'You're only the tenth stupid person today.'
Just last week, management had insisted on installing new industrial-strength security doors. The locksmith took a one look, and shot me a grimace that sank my heart. 'I could try picking it. But these new locks have security pins that drop down from the top when you try to pick 'em.' He demonstrated.
'Could you give it a go?' I whined. 'It's just that - I've got an early 8am start at work tomorrow.'
'Oh. What do you do?'
'I work at the hospital.'
'Nice. Well - there's two things I can do: I can try to pick it - it'll take time, but I'm pretty good and I've got more experience than most guys. Or I can take the door down, replace the lock - which is going to cost you an extra $200. I don't like doing it, but I will if I have to.'
I opted for Option A, and figured we could try Option B if all else failed.
'How about the balcony?'
I'd had friends attempt it earlier that night. I had stupidly left the balcony doors shut too.
'Nah, I was thinking it might be easier to pick the locks up there.'
Without asking for permission, he snatched up his lock-picks. He was almost a head shorter than my other friends who'd scaled the columns and they'd had each other to give them a leg up. I looked on worriedly as he supported himself with the neighbour's rotting wooden fence, and then the roof of our adjacent garage. This was, I was sure, not in his job description.
'You don't have to do this,' I projected in a loud whisper, conscious of the time.
'I have to. It wouldn't feel right if I didn't try to do my job the best I could.' In that instant, we seemed to have traversed the boundary between mere tradesmen and client, and passed into a semi-comfortable, pseudo-friendship.
'I wouldn't know what to do if you broke a leg.'
'Do you trust me?'
'Um.'
'Besides, don't you work at the hospital?'
'I can't perform on-site impromptu surgery. Or any surgery. Heck, if you fell - I don't even think I could wrap it up.'
'Alright, fine.' He laughed, and conceded. 'The fence felt rickety anyway.'
Half an hour of thunderous clacking from the mechanical lock-pick, and I was on the verge on insanity. I had stopped worrying about waking up the neighbours and had instead resolved to apologise for their sleeplessness with a batch of cookies. It's too bad that my baking skills are so shoddy.
'It's only taking so long because of the pins.' I wondered if he'd sensed my frustration and impatience, but one glance at his face told me he was only venting his own frustrations.
'Do you have another job lined up after this?'
'What?' When he turned around in surprise, his reddened face was damp with perspiration. 'Nah. It's the middle of the night. Worse case scenario, there's plenty of tradies around. Someone else can take care of it. If they're willing to wake up in the middle of the night.'
'You woke up for this job?'
He brushed aside my concern - and guilt. 'Don't worry about it. The contractors - not you - pay good money for this. Wouldn't have gotten up if I didn't want to.'
'If you want, just take down the door. I don't mind paying extra.' It wasn't that I shat gold, it was a time-versus-money thing. I would now effectively be exchanging dollars for sleep - for the both of us.
'I just - hate doing it, you know?'
I distinctly remember it coming up in conversation before, and the phrasing had felt odd then, too. 'What about taking the door down don't you like? It's part of the job, right?'
'Yeah and no. It - kind of feels like I failed the job and now I'm taking the easy way out.' He seemed embarrassed at his confession, but continued sheepishly. 'It's just not what I signed up to do. Not what I like to do. Not what I'm good at.'
'You like the lock-picking.' Statement, not a question.
'Yeah. I feel like I've achieved something, when I picked a lock.' He winked. 'I started this locksmith thing - proper - when I was seventeen. But I'd learned to pick before that. Of course, it didn't start off being honest. I just never got into trouble. Probably because I never brought home the stuff. But it got me in with my older brother's friends.'
'That's pretty cool.'
'What? The breaking in?'
'No,' I laughed. 'No, I meant how you love your job. That's pretty special. Don't know that many people can say the same thing.'
'So what do you do?'
'I'm a part-time pharmacist, and a student.' Which sometimes felt more like being a pharmacist, and a part-time student, if I'm honest with myself.
'Do you like it?'
'Yeah. I'm one of the lucky ones. I love working with people.' I told him about the community pharmacy I worked at down in Melbourne, the nature of the program and the type of characters you'd meet. Meanwhile, he'd begun drilling through my brand-new week-old door, which was demoralising in itself - I couldn't keep my door unscathed for even seven whole days! - but more importantly, was much louder than the mechanical clacking. Two batches of cookies, I swore. One of them, choc-chip.
'You're a good person.' He said this as my new vanilla-coloured door was leaning against Unit 2's vanilla-coloured frame. There was little to no chance of anyone leaving their unit at 1am, unless it was to chastise me for the racket. I was inside, perched on the arm of my couch, silently promising it, the other furniture, the toasty warmth and the general insides of my home that I loved them, and that I would never leave them again.
'What makes you say that?
'I had a friend of a friend that was involved in a program like that.' I was surprised that he'd even heard of it. I had a feeling that if it was made common knowledge, a majority of the general public would be outraged that taxpayers' money was being used to fund recovering heroin addicts. Little do they know how ubiquitous the habit actually is. 'We need more people like you.'
'What happened to being the tenth stupid person today?'
'Hey - sometimes bad things can happen to the nicest people.'
He had unscrewed and replaced my lock with a new one. 'It'll look exactly the same,' he assured me. 'You'll just need a different key. Here - you think two's enough? Or are you going to lose both of them too? Should I give you three?' Cheekily.
I snorted indignantly. 'Two will be just fine.'
We sat in silence for a moment, while he admired his handiwork (admittedly sourly) and I contemplated restricting my diet to bread and water for a month, minimum, as so to not exceed my budget.
He spoke first. 'You know what?'
'What?'
He wrote a receipt for a hundred bucks less than I'd been expecting. 'I'll round it off.'
'You don't have to do that. You stayed an hour for longer than you were meant to - and it's late.'
But he wrote it anyway, with the reduced price, outside, leaning on my balcony ('I can't get any reception in here! Geez it's warm!' To be fair, he'd been doing a lot of sweating, and I'd been doing a lot of nothing). 'Nice place you've got here.'
'Thanks.' I only went as far as the balcony frame, not ready to reliquinish my re-acquaintance with indoor heating. 'It's a pretty area.'
'Aw, I don't know. You should still be careful.'
'I used to go for walks in the dark in summer. It was fine.'
'Saw you sitting on the steps when I drove in, and I thought, you should go inside - knock on the neighbour's door, or something. Young, pretty girl like you, outside at midnight - ' He shook his head. 'Just stay safe, okay? Don't go out walking in the dark by yourself.'
'Okay.' Half-heartedly.
His expression was unfathomable as he left. I paid the amount, left the receipt on the coffee table and turned in time to catch his stare - glassy, see-through like the sea but infinitely deep. I wondered if he was searching for something within himself, reliving memories with his brother's friends, or -
'Well, I'm off.'
He'd interrupted my train of thought. But I couldn't help thinking it was a strange juxtaposition to his usually laid-back disposition. 'Bye. Thanks - for the door. And the bill. And everything.'
'Nah. Thank you.'
0 comments:
Post a Comment