I Picked One Lock in the Yard. Now Something Is Coming Up the Stairs for Me.

Nobody in Ourense knew I was in A Coruña. I'd told my sister I was going to a trade fair in Vigo, and she hadn't asked which one, which is how she is with me now.

I got in on a Tuesday in mid-November, and the drizzle had already been going for days. It wasn't rain you could shelter from. It hung around and got into the collar of my jacket, and by the time I'd walked from the bus station to the old town my trousers were wet to the knee.

Baltasar Quintás ran a bar on a corner off Rúa Real, red in the face, black hair flat with sweat even in that cold. I'd nursed a coffee there for an hour before I said Anselmo's name. He stopped wiping the counter.

"Freire the locksmith? He's dead. Nine years."

"I know. I went to the funeral."

He looked at me longer than the question needed. Then he leaned on the bar and lowered his voice, though there were only two old men at the far end watching a football replay with the sound off. He said the shop was still down there, in the basement on Rúa Adormideras, and it still opened every night at the same hour. Nobody he knew had gone in. He knew a man who knew a man.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"You asked." He shrugged, but he wasn't easy about it. "One thing. If you're sleeping on that street, never answer a key that turns from outside. And always throw the deadbolt. Always. Understood?"

I said understood. I thought it was bar talk, the kind of thing people say about a street that has a bad name.

I should say why I wanted that shop so badly. Eleven years back, maybe twelve, I fitted a lock for a family in Ourense, and it failed. They came home from a wedding to an empty jewellery box and a kicked-in bedroom door. The lock wasn't the problem, or it was, I never settled it. People stopped calling me. My own brother-in-law stopped calling me. The only one who didn't was Anselmo, who took me on at nineteen and taught me to feel a pin rather than look for it. He phoned the week after and said, "Locks don't fail, Tomás. People ask too much of them." That was all. I've kept it seventeen years in my own shop and I've never felt it was true, but it was kind. I wanted to stand in his basement and have it said again.

The flat was on the third floor of a narrow block from the fifties, grey concrete gone black at the seams. I'd found it on a board and rented it from an administrator who took a month in cash and was gone in ten minutes. The stairwell smelled of wet plaster and bleach, and under those, faintly, of the water octopus gets boiled in. Somebody in the building cooked it all day. The ground-floor lock-ups were shuttered, all of them. From the flat window I could see a strip of the harbour, and every few minutes the foghorns groaned out there, low and long, and then quit.

I put my bag on the bed and didn't unpack. I couldn't sit still, so I went down and walked around the back.

There's a yard behind the building. It's walled on three sides, with rusting washing poles in two rows and a stone trough against the far wall, fed by a spring that ran into it through a pipe no thicker than my thumb. The gate was iron, painted green a long time ago, and it had a lock on it. An old warded thing with a modern cylinder somebody had bolted on beside it, badly.

I had my pick roll in my jacket. I always do. I'd like to say I thought about it first.

It took maybe twenty seconds. The cylinder gave, and it gave sweetly, easier than anything that age has a right to. I felt recognised. That's the only way I can put it. Not pleased with myself, recognised.

"Are you the new one on three?"

She was beside me, right at my elbow, and I hadn't heard her come. A small woman in a housecoat and apron, white hair pinned back, hands red from cold water. She had a basket of sheets on her hip and a mouthful of wooden pegs.

"Tomás," I said. "Today. Sorry, the gate was stuck. I only —"

She took the pegs out. "It's always stuck," she said. "Remedios. Second floor." She went past me into the yard as if I'd done her a favour, and started pegging.

I stayed in the gateway with the pick still in my hand, and after a while I put it away. It was a good excuse to watch her. She was quick. Sheet over the line, peg, peg, next one. There was no wind, and the drizzle came down straight, and the white cotton just hung there getting heavier. She said something about the damp, how nothing dried in this city from October to March and you did it anyway. I said in Ourense it was the same in the valley. It wasn't, but it was something to say.

Then the trough went still.

I hadn't been looking at it. I'd been hearing it, the small thin trickle from the pipe, and I only knew I'd been hearing it when it stopped. The water in the trough had a skin of drizzle-rings on it, and the rings stopped too. Flat, black, not a tremor.

The sheet in her hands was halfway over the line. It stayed halfway. It wasn't holding up on its own weight, it was just there, with a fold in it, in the air.

"Remedios?"

I looked up from the trough, and I had looked away for no time at all, and there was a basket on the ground and a row of pegs on the line and nobody in the yard.

The trickle started again. The rings came back on the water. The sheet dropped over the line and hung there, wet.

I stood in the gateway a while. I looked behind the poles and I looked at the wall, which was well over my head. Then I told myself she'd gone in the back door while I was staring at the water. Old women are quicker than you think. She'd gone up to her flat, and I'd been a stranger who picked her gate lock, and she'd had enough of me. That made sense. I said it over to myself twice going up the stairs, and by the second floor I was mostly believing it. Her door was shut. There was no light under it.

I didn't knock.

I ate bread and tinned sardines at the window and watched the harbour lights come on. The foghorn went at ten and again at midnight. I lay down in my clothes on top of the blanket with my boots by the bed, and I must have slept, because when I opened my eyes the clock on my phone said three ten.

I didn't know what had woken me until I heard it again, four floors down. A key going into the ground-floor door. Not fumbling, the way a drunk does it. A key sliding in, seated, patient. It started to turn.

Nobody had told me anyone else had a key to that door.

I was in the hallway before I'd decided to get up. The deadbolt on my flat was old and heavy, brass gone dark, and I put my palm flat on it and threw it. It slid across with a solid clack.

Somewhere inside the lock, one pin set.

I stood there with my hand on the bolt until the turning stopped. After that it was only the foghorn, and I went back to bed and lay on my back and didn't sleep.

The second night it was the first-floor door. I know because I heard it through the stairwell wall, the same slow slide and seat, only closer, and I counted the turns. I lay there and tracked it the way you track a drip in a ceiling, waiting for it to change. It didn't. At about ten past three it started, and a while later it stopped.

In the morning there was a key on the little table on the landing, the one where the post gets left. It hadn't been there the night before, because I'd put my keys down on that table myself. Brass, bright, freshly cut. You could still see the fine scoring on the shoulder from the file.

I picked it up. It was heavy for its size, and I knew the weight of it before I'd thought about anything. It was the front door of my parents' house in Ourense. I hadn't held that key in years, and I hadn't needed to. My hand knew the door. The swollen bottom corner that you had to lift a little. The two turns, the second one stiffer. My mother's coats on the hooks, the smell of floor wax, the cold brass of the letterbox flap on my wrist. I could have walked it in the dark. It was all there, complete, every scuff on it, and I stood on the landing holding a key to a house that wasn't in this city.

I put it in the drawer of the kitchen table and went down to find Anselmo.

The lock-ups on the ground floor were all shuttered, but only one had a padlock, and it was at the end, down half a flight of steps from the street. Anselmo's. The padlock was older than I was, a big iron thing with the maker's name worn off and rust blooming around the shackle. I crouched in front of it. My hand went to my jacket for the pick roll, and I left it there.

Under the shutter a thin wet line ran across the tiles, from the wall to the drain. It wasn't rain. It hadn't come from the steps. I put two fingers in it, and it was so cold my knuckles ached. I put the fingers to my lip, which I shouldn't have done. Salt.

"Anselmo," I said, quietly, in case anyone was on the steps. Nothing came back, and I hadn't really expected it to. I'd expected to feel something, though. I'd come a long way to feel it.

That night the key tried the first-floor door again and then it moved on, or I fell asleep for a bit and missed it. I'm not sure now. In the morning there was a second key on the table. I didn't try it in my head. I put it in the drawer with the first and shut the drawer with my hip.

Eladio was on the stairs when I went out. The administrator, the one who'd taken my month's rent in cash and left inside ten minutes. Raincoat buttoned to the neck, umbrella furled under his arm even though he was indoors, a pleasant round face.

"Señor Varela. I'm doing the round for the building charge. Forty euros, whenever's convenient."

I gave him two twenties from my wallet. He put them in a small envelope and wrote something on the flap.

"You're settling in, I hope? The flat suits?"

"It's fine. Quiet."

"It's had a few tenants this autumn," he said. "Tradesmen, mostly. A joiner, a man who did boilers. They all left rather suddenly. Work elsewhere, you know how it goes." He smiled at the envelope. "You've not had any trouble."

"No."

"And you haven't found anything in the hallway? On the landing. Left by a previous tenant, perhaps. Things do turn up."

He said it lightly. But he'd looked up when he said it, and there was too much in his face for the question. He wanted to hear a particular answer. I've sold locks to people who've been burgled, and I know that look, the one that isn't about the lock.

"No," I said. "Nothing."

"Good. Good." He tucked the envelope inside his coat. "Any problems, you know where I am." I didn't. He hadn't given me an address, only a phone number that rang out the one time I'd tried it. He went on down the stairs, and I heard the street door open and close.

The keys were in the drawer, upstairs. I thought about that all the way to the second floor.

I stopped at Remedios's door because I couldn't not. Still shut. No light, no radio, no smell of anything cooking. Beneath it the mat lay square and dry. I stood for a while with my hand half up and then I went on down to the first floor, where I could hear a television.

Two doors faced each other on that landing, and both opened when I was still deciding which to knock on. A woman in a cardigan, plump, with short auburn hair that had been dyed by someone who did it themselves. A tall bald man in a wool jumper. They came out at the same time, each with a hand on their own door.

"I'm on three," I said. "I met Señora Louro in the yard the other evening. Remedios. I wanted to see if she was all right."

"She's gone to her daughter in Lugo," the woman said.

"She's gone to her daughter in Lugo," the man said.

It was the same words, and the same speed. She had a half-beat lead on him, no more, and the way he caught up to her wasn't natural. I'd have noticed it if I hadn't been looking for it. I was looking.

"When was that?" I said.

"Uxía," the woman said, and touched her own chest. "And this is Ramiro." He nodded. Neither of them answered me.

"When did she go?"

"Oh, a few days now," Uxía said.

"A few days," said Ramiro.

I'd picked her gate lock four days before. She'd been alive and pegging sheets, and there'd been a basket on the ground. Nobody had left with a basket.

"She didn't say she was going," I said.

"She wouldn't," Uxía said. "Not to you. You'd only just come."

Ramiro smiled at me. It was a kind smile, almost. Then they both went back in and closed their doors, one after the other, and I heard the television get louder.

I didn't sleep the third night. I lay on my back with my boots on and watched the ceiling get its shape from the harbour lights, and I waited for ten past three the way you wait for a tooth to be pulled.

It came on time. The key slid in four floors down and I heard it seat, and this time there was no long climb through the building to reach me. I'd known where it would be. It went into the second-floor door, Remedios's door, and it turned.

It turned and turned. On the first night it had turned once, patiently, and stopped. This was the same slow half-turn over and over, a hand that couldn't find the end of the travel because the door had nothing left to hold it. Nobody was on the other side to answer. Nobody had been on the other side for three days.

I got up and stood in the hallway with my palm flat on my own door. The wood was cold.

I'd picked that gate because I can't leave a lock alone. I never could. Give me a padlock on a bicycle and my fingers start before I've decided anything. And it had opened so sweetly, and she'd been standing right there with her pegs in her mouth. The gate wasn't stuck because of rust. It was shut for a reason, and Remedios had been the one standing in the way of whatever that reason was. When I looked at the trough, she stepped into the space I'd made.

"Remedios," I said, quietly, to the floor.

The key turned once more and stopped. Nothing else. I stayed in the hallway until the foghorn went at four.

The rule sat differently in my head after that. Never answer a key that turns from outside, and always throw the deadbolt. Baltasar had said it with his eyes on the counter, and I'd nodded like a man who'd been given good directions. I'd thrown that bolt every night. Three nights, three throws, and every time the sound had been so solid and so reassuring. Anselmo had fitted that lock himself. I knew it the first night, without knowing I knew it. The brass had his weight to it, and the bolt shot home with the little dip he used to put in the travel so it never felt hurried. He'd done the same on the safe in his shop in Ourense.

So on the fourth night I got the torch out of my bag and knelt in front of the door at nine o'clock, well before anything could happen, and took the strike plate off the frame.

The screws were brass and came out easily. Someone had oiled them recently. That should have told me something, and it did, I just wasn't ready to hear it. Then I backed out the two long screws in the door edge and eased the cylinder out into my hand, and I turned it under the torch.

Five pins. Two were the way Anselmo would have cut them, clean, square-tipped, sitting up high in their chambers. The other three were low. Their tips had been filed to a slope, all in one direction, a long shallow angle no pin ever needs, and the three low ones had turned themselves round to face it. The springs behind them were so light I could have blown on them. Nothing in that lock had been made to stop a key. It was cut to let one in, and it was only waiting to be told which shape.

Three pins, and I'd thrown the bolt three times.

I held it in the torchlight a long while. There was a smell off the brass, faint and cold, that I couldn't place until it came to me that it was the smell of the wet line under Anselmo's shutter. I didn't try to work out how it could be there. Every time I'd put my shoulder into that bolt and felt safe, I'd been turning something. Baltasar hadn't lied to me, I don't think. He'd passed it on the way it was passed to him, and whoever passed it to him had done the same. It was a good rule. That was what made it work. Everybody who ever slept in that building had done exactly as he was told.

I put the cylinder back the way it had come out, because I couldn't think what else to do with it, and I screwed the plate on. Then I sat on the floor with my back against the door and my knees up. I kept my hand well away from the bolt.

I thought about Anselmo, and I'll say it plain: I didn't know what to think. He'd taught me to feel a pin instead of look for it. He'd told me locks don't fail, people ask too much of them. I'd carried that for seventeen years as the kindest thing anyone ever said to me. Now I sat with my spine against his work and I couldn't get at what he'd meant. Maybe he'd known what he was fitting. Maybe he'd been asked too much himself. Nine years dead and I couldn't ask him, and the shop I'd come all this way for was a padlock and a line of salt water.

At three ten I was still on the floor. I didn't throw the bolt. I held the brass thumb-turn between finger and thumb, not turning it, and I listened to the ground-floor key slide in and seat and turn.

It went on for a minute or two. It stopped. Nothing moved up the stairs. I heard no key in any door, not the first floor, not the second, not anyone's. The foghorn sounded and the building settled the way old blocks do, water in the pipes, a door somewhere shifting on its hinges, and nothing was coming.

I'll tell you, I nearly cried. I got up off the floor and made a coffee on the two-ring stove, and I stood at the window with the cup while the harbour lights slid on the water. I drank it slowly. I thought, that's it, then. That's all it was. Don't throw it, and it goes away.

That lasted an hour, more or less. I'd gone back to the floor beside the door, with a blanket, because the bed felt too far away from everything. The drizzle ticked at the window. I was close to sleep for the first time in three nights.

Then something touched the bolt.

Not from the stairwell. The stairwell was quiet, and there was no key. It was on my side of the door, a hand's width above my head, inside the flat, where the brass thumb-turn sat. A small dry scratching, and then a pause, and then again. Very patient. It worked at the thumb-turn the way you work at a knot you know you'll get eventually, without hurry, without any need to be quiet.

I didn't move. The blanket was over my knees. I listened to it try.

It went on until the window turned grey. Then it stopped, and I was left with the drizzle and a silence that wasn't empty. It felt attended to.

I looked at my hands because I had to look at something. They were lying open on the blanket, and the light was coming in enough to see them. I turned them over. The fingertips were smooth. Not worn, not scrubbed. Smooth. I ran my thumb across my forefinger and felt nothing of the ridges that used to catch on a pin. Seventeen years I'd read locks with those tips.

I got up, stiff in the knees, and went to the window. I pressed two fingers flat to the glass and held them there and counted five. When I took them away the glass was clean. Not a smear, not a whorl, not the greasy ghost anyone leaves. I did it with the other hand and got the same. I breathed on the pane and did it a third time, and that fogged, and the fog closed round the place where my fingers had been as though they never touched it.

The thumb-turn above me hadn't moved. Still unthrown. I didn't look at it long.

I packed. That took a minute, since I'd never unpacked. Shirt, razor, the torch, the pick roll into my jacket where it lives. I left the two brass keys in the kitchen drawer and shut it with my hip. I thought about phoning my sister and I thought about what I'd say, and I put the phone in my pocket. She hadn't asked which fair. She wasn't going to ask this either.

I didn't throw the bolt when I went out. I pulled the door to and let the latch catch, and I went down past the second floor without turning my head. Remedios's mat was square and dry. Down on the first floor a television was already on.

Outside it was coming down steady, fine enough that you don't see it until you're wet. A van was unloading crates of bread at the corner. A woman went by with a trolley and didn't look at me. I got to the bottom of the steps and stopped, because I'd turned to check the portal I'd just come out of and there were four of them side by side. Same grey concrete, same green paint, same brass number plates gone dull. I had a key in my hand. It was my own key, the one Eladio gave me. I looked at the first door and it was mine. I looked at the second and it was mine. The third, the fourth. Every one of them was mine and not one of them was.

"Come on," I said, out loud. My voice sounded flat against the wet.

I walked. Bus station was down through the old town, twenty minutes, I'd done it in the other direction with my trousers soaked to the knee. I kept my head down and my bag on my shoulder and the street went by. Baker's shutter, pharmacy, a bar with its chairs stacked on the tables.

I noticed at the pharmacy. My hand was on the handle. I hadn't decided that. I was leaning very slightly on the door, the way you do when you want to know without being seen to want to know. It didn't give. I let go. I took another step and I did it again, at the bar, and again at a portal with a cracked fanlight, and again on a door with no sign. Gently, each one. Just enough weight to feel the bolt take it.

Every time I felt my shoulders come down. That was the worst of it. It wasn't a habit or a nervous thing. It was relief, plain and warm, the way it is to get in out of the rain. A door held, and I knew the shape of it, and for a second nothing in me was pulling.

A man under an awning had stopped to watch me with his coffee halfway to his mouth. I took my hand off a chemist's grille. He looked away first.

I stood in the middle of the pavement with water running off my collar. I'd been more frightened lying on that floor with the scratching over my head, and I'd told myself that was as bad as it got. It wasn't. That had been something outside, and I could've walked away from it. This was me, and I'd carried it two streets before I noticed.

I tried to think of where I'd go. My flat over the shop in Ourense had a bolt on it that I'd fitted myself, and I couldn't picture the door. I tried my parents' house and got the swollen corner and the two turns and the second one stiffer, and my hand went out for it, empty, in the rain. The bus station was ten minutes off and I'd have to sit in it with these hands. Have them on a ticket counter. Have them on a bus door.

I ran. My bag hit my hip the whole way and my boots were full by the time I hit the top of Adormideras, and I didn't slow for the woman with the trolley or for the crates at the corner. I had nowhere else that felt like mine, and I hated that it was true. I hit the steps and the door was there, the right one, and I knew it the second I put my hand flat on it.

Inside, the stairwell smelled of bleach and wet plaster and the octopus water somebody was already boiling. The light was thin and grey through the little window on the half-landing. I stood at the bottom with my chest going and rain dripping off my elbows onto the tiles.

Then I started up. I kept my hand on the banister, and the iron was cold, colder than it should have been, and my fingertips drew along it without catching on anything. No grip. No drag. Just the cold going up ahead of me, floor by floor.

Eladio was on my landing. I saw his shoes first, black and wet, then the hem of the raincoat, then the rest of him leaning on the wall beside my door with his umbrella tucked under one arm. He had the ring in both hands, held low, the way a man holds a hat in church.

I stopped on the top step. My lungs were still going from the run and my boots squelched when I shifted my weight.

"Señor Varela," he said. "You're soaked."

"What is that?"

"This?" He lifted the ring a little and it chimed. There were a hundred keys on it, or near enough, some so bright they still had file dust in the grooves and some worn down to a soft yellow, the bows rubbed thin by hands. "Those are what the building is for."

I didn't say anything. The octopus pot was going somewhere below us, and it had been on for hours by the smell. It was midday.

He told me the rest without any hurry, the way you'd explain the bins to a new tenant. There was a thing on the stairs. He didn't call it anything. It was wet and it was cold and it had been in the block longer than the block, and certain people paid well for what it could do, which was open doors. Any door. They didn't want to know how. They wanted keys that worked, and a tradesman was the only sort of person who could make one that the thing would answer to.

"It has to be someone who feels the lock," he said. "Not someone who reads it. You'd be surprised how few there are. The joiner was close. The boiler man cried a lot."

"Where are they?"

"Each of them cuts a fresh set before the end. That's all I ask." He said it kindly. "I put them in a decent flat and I don't charge for the first week. I've never had a complaint."

"Remedios."

"Señora Louro was in the way." He shook his head, a little sorry. "The gate had been shut for years. Nobody could open it, and the rust wasn't why. Then you walked up and did it in twenty seconds, on your first evening, with a pick roll from your own pocket." He smiled at me, and it was warm. "You're the best yet. I've had eleven, and none of them opened the yard themselves. I only ever had to hope."

My hands were open at my sides. I looked down at them, at the fingertips with nothing on them.

"The two in your drawer are yours, of course," Eladio said. "I don't mind you keeping them until Thursday. You told me on the stairs that there was nothing. That's all right. They all say nothing at first."

I don't remember crossing the landing. I remember the drag of my wet sleeve and the sound it made, and then my right fist went into his face. He was standing there with his hands full and he didn't get either of them up. His head went back into the wall and the umbrella clattered on the tiles and rolled, and the keys rang out on the ring all at once.

It hurt. My knuckles split. That was the last honest thing I felt for a while, and I was glad of it.

He slid a few inches down the wall and stopped. Blood ran from his nose over his lip and into the corner of his mouth. He touched it with the back of his wrist, looked at that, and then looked at me. He was smiling. There was blood on his teeth and he was smiling at me as if I'd been very good.

"It doesn't matter," he said, thick. "You can do that as often as you like."

I stood over him with my hand throbbing. I wanted to hit him again and I wanted to be sick, and I didn't know which was going to win. Below us, someone's door opened, and a television started up and was closed off again. Nobody came up.

He didn't get to his feet. He raised one finger, the one with a key ring still hooked around it, and pointed past my shoulder at my door.

I turned my head.

The deadbolt was the same old dark brass as it had been that morning, and the thumb-turn was where I'd left it, pointing up. It was unthrown. I hadn't touched it since I walked out. Nobody had touched it.

Inside the lock, small and dry, a pin clicked home.

The bolt goes over with a solid clack, and it goes from the wrong side. I hear the fifth pin set.

I'm already on the stairwell. I don't remember the door opening or the flat behind me. The tiles are cool under my bare feet, and where I put them down they leave wet, two small shining prints that smell of the sea. The foghorn goes at the harbour. Up on the roof the drizzle is loud, a steady clapping that seems to be for me.

I hold my hands out in the little light from the half-landing window. Nothing on the fingertips. No ridges, no lines. Seventeen years I read locks with those hands, and I can't feel a thing on them now that I miss.

The banister is cold. I go down with my palm on it and it doesn't catch.

Past the second floor, Remedios's mat is square and dry. I stop there a second. I'd like to say I knocked. I put two fingers against her door, gently, and it holds, and the relief comes up through me warm as a bath. Then I let it go and keep walking.

First floor. The television has been switched off. Uxía and Ramiro are behind their doors, listening, both of them, I can tell. I don't try their handles. Not yet.

Eladio is sitting on the bottom step with the ring in his lap and his umbrella across his knees. His nose has swollen and gone dark, and dried blood is crusted in the crease of his lip. He's still smiling. He looks up at me the way he looked up at me on the landing, patient and pleased.

"There you are," he says. "I said Thursday. But I won't complain."

He holds the ring up a little, so it chimes. A hundred keys. The bright ones and the yellow worn ones, all of them warm from his hands. Some of them I could name now. The door of my parents' house. A shop in Ourense with my name on the glass. A gate I opened on a Tuesday because I couldn't leave it alone.

"You'll want these," he says. "For the buyers. There's a man in Vigo who asks about the new ones every week. You'd only need to keep cutting, and I'd see to everything else. The flat, the rent. It's a very comfortable arrangement, Tomás."

"Give them here," I say.

He does. That's the part I keep noticing. He holds them out with both hands and lets go, and the weight of a hundred keys drops into my palm. I close my fingers. They're cold now. They were never really warm.

"Careful with the old ones," he says. "The thin ones." He's still smiling. He thinks he's handed me a job.

I look at him a while. He's a soft, courteous man with a raincoat buttoned to the neck and no idea what he's been feeding. Eleven of us, and a twelfth who opened the yard himself. He thought that was luck. He thought the building was his and the thing on the stairs was staff.

"Thanks, Eladio," I say. It comes out quiet, the way I used to talk to customers on the doorstep.

I go back up. He stays where he is on the bottom step, and I don't hear him move behind me.

I don't need the ring, as it turns out. I carry it anyway, because it's comfortable in the hand, and I hold it against my hip so it doesn't ring. On the second floor the doors are all shut. On the first floor somebody breathes out on the other side of the wood. I go past them and up to the third, past the smell of octopus water that somebody, somewhere, is always boiling.

My door is at the end of the landing. The old dark brass bolt is thrown, and I can see the edge of it in the gap, where it sits in the frame Anselmo cut. He fitted it himself. I know his work. I put my palm flat on the wood and I don't reach for anything. I don't think about a pin or a pick or a wrench. I want the door. That's all. It's a plain, easy wanting, and it's been with me since I was nineteen, in a basement in Ourense, watching an old man's hands. It's the oldest friend I have.

The door opens for me the way the gate did. A sweetness goes through me, the feeling of being known, and for a second I could weep with it. The bolt slides back on its own weight, without a sound, like it was waiting for me to come home.

The flat is dark. The harbour light is on the ceiling, going and coming with the horn. His bag is on the bed, still not unpacked, and his boots are by the bed with the laces tucked in. The blanket is on the floor where he slept against the door. Two brass keys are in the kitchen drawer, and I don't open it.

He isn't here.

I check the bathroom, the window, the corner behind the door where he sat with his knees up. I check because it seems polite. There's nobody. There's only the shape of him, which I've put on the way you put on a coat that's been hanging by the door, still warm from the last person. It fits. His shoulders. His narrow jaw. The stiff knees, the split knuckles, the guilt that hangs about the chest and doesn't go anywhere. It's comfortable. It's better than anything I've worn.

I sit on the bed and lay the ring beside me. The keys settle. It's quiet, and I let it be quiet.

He thought Anselmo forgave him. I don't know if that was true. I think Anselmo was only tired, and asked too little of everyone, and it looked like kindness. I'd tell the man that if he were here to hear it. He isn't, and I don't mind.

Tomorrow night, and the night after, I'll wait until the harbour horn has gone twice and the drizzle is at its loudest. Then, at ten past three, I stand up.

At three ten I try the next door.

Somewhere in the block a sleeper wakes, lies still, and listens to the turning. Then they get up in the dark, and they reach to throw the bolt.