Tough Locks Do Not Easily Come Undone

I lost your key because I was lost in a book about keys. It was a collection of short stories; everything pointed to keys, losing them, find ing them, keys in the ways you and I are yet to think about them. I almost said, “No, you keep them,” when you gave me the key but I shoved the words back into my throat because we just made up from a fight about the thing we always fought about: not meeting you halfway. While reading, I’d stop at the end of a sen tence, in the middle of a lecture, to clap and whoop. Other students would look at me, wondering if it was something the teacher said and I’d wave my hand at them, telling them to get on with their work. I became paranoid when I thought of your key. I rummaged my purse till I found it. 

A brief history of my purse: three years old, lived a hard life, never washed. Its contents had been lost, found and replaced numerous times; a single key had no business there. Yet every time I thought to remove the key and tuck it underneath the wooden shelf in my old room, I couldn’t. I thought that the Universe would guard the key in my purse till the day you arrived. 

One morning, I found my purse thrown carelessly on one of the leather couches, its con tents scattered, the key nowhere to be found. Dipping my fingers between the tight spaces in the leather couch, I found rusted keys (several others but yours), old pens, rulers, a compass. I spent three days searching and told you about it on the third. 

“I’m going to tell you something. Promise not to get upset.” 

“Okay. What is it?” 

“I lost your key. But don’t worry I’ll fix it.” “Okay. How do you intend to?” 

“I’ll find a locksmith.” 

“Do you know one?” 

“No. But I’ll find one. I’m really sorry.” “Okay. No worries. You good?” 

The author I was reading began to interest me. She had the power to enslave—or free— with the turn of every page. A sentence could be a pat on your hair, a brush on your cheek or a hand around your throat, depending on what you let it do. For me it was like rapture, something to which I’d given up control. I began to think about keys as everything, keys to everything. What was her fascination with keys? Why had she caused me to lose yours? And when you asked, “What’s been on your mind lately?” I said “Innocence, the feeling of being good. I feel like I’ve lost it.” To which you replied, “I do not think that innocence can ever be taken as it is an occupant of a core part of a soul guarded by choice, irrespective of how dirty our fingers get. I do think life is a dirty place and we are not immune. What truly mat ters is locked safely inside the soul. The key is yours to give.” 

I said, “This is all very nice but it is also very convenient.” I sounded rather curt, and hoped you heard a kinder voice. It was upset ting, thinking about my innocence as a key which was now long lost. I thought about how we’d pass hours in your house, how you’d say “Come for me baby. Come for me baby” and I’d think to myself, “Come where? I am already there waiting for you. I belong neither here nor there. I am in limbo, I have never belonged anywhere.” A nonsense array of thoughts aimed at blocking my sensibilities. But I should thank you for your patience, for reminding me to enjoy, if that’s appropriate. 

I downloaded everything this writer had ever written. Then I read her interviews. The way she sounded like a mystical creature, as though she’d scared her interviewers, just a little, so that they asked only questions she cared to answer. I imagined the interviewer disheveled, with ruffled hair and startled eyes, asking questions about keys and an elder sister she loved so much, questions about mystical things like her self. I found a podcast, which I listened to on my bed, my head pressed against the pillow and blotches of oil from my hair staining the yel low flowery material. I tightened my fist when the interviewer mispronounced her name. She sounded different from how she sounded in her written interviews. She sounded gentle, like a kitten speaking. She spoke about beauty, which was something she never wrote about. If she were going to write about the colour of hair, there’d be a reason, not because it was beau tiful but because it led to something bigger. Nothing for aesthetics: beauty could burn the plot, sentences too. The interviewer asked her about home and she said she moved to Paris on a “whim.” I chuckled and thought, As if. . . as if people like you do whimsical things, you thought about it for months. 

I felt as though I knew her, as though we were sisters and I put a portrait of her on my phone so that when people asked me who she was, I said, 

“She’s my sister don’t we look alike?” Goose bumps appeared on my skin when I reached the market and I folded into myself. On your street, I saw the carpenter painting a brown stool. They called him Baba. I told Baba you’d travelled and he said he would like to speak with you. I knew this was so he could brag: “I spoke to the young man when he was overseas.” He put my phone to his ear and said, “Na me oh your Baba” and I rolled my eyes. I sat in front of your house waiting for Baba who’d gone to purchase a cylinder for the lock and read Stephen King’s Finders Keepers. His portrayal of black people was demeaning and it irked me. But it was a good story, so I kept on, scoffing while at it. Your neighbor invited me into her house but I turned her down. I fear that should I ever accept her invitation some thing bad would happen to me. It is that her house is too dark. Whenever she walks into it, it is as though she’s stepped into a hollow pit: open the windows, air the furnace.

I hoped she didn’t see me when I looked ap palled by the spots on her legs or the blisters on her face. Sometimes, when I’ve been away from people for long I forget my manners. I strolled out of your compound, crossed the street to buy Gala and the woman who sold it looked askance at me. I thought, why do you look at me like that? A large group of men sat at the side of the road discussing and whenever I walked past them, they fell silent and I felt their eyes press against me. It was uncomfortable so I walked fast, resisting the urge to run. I told you about this and you said, “Just ignore them”, then you said “You are pretty, enjoy it.” 

I know it felt like the right thing to say be cause earlier, we talked about how I didn’t use my beauty. But then, what could I use it for? One of the men—a dark man who had hov ered around me while I read in front of your house—left the group of men he was with and followed me saying, “Can I get to know you? I want us to be friends.” 

I ignored him. Baba never came back and I got tired of waiting. I told your neighbor, Mary, that I was leaving. “When the carpenter comes back, tell him not to do anything. I’d be back on Monday.” 

The next time I went, I was prepared, less uncomfortable. I went earlier too, before the young men of your street settled into nocturnal lethargy. I even said a prayer, “Dear God, today is the day I fix the locks.” I asked about Baba and a young girl with cornrows shook her head and said he’d travelled. 

“Do you know any other carpenter around?” I asked. She shook her head again. I walked further down the road and saw the dark man who’d followed me on Friday. He greeted me and I answered. “Is your friend around now?” he asked. I wondered what his business was. I asked if he knew any carpenter around and he left the car he was washing and walked to the next building. It was like an abattoir, they were killing rams and the sound of sharp knives clinking against the floor mixed with loud laughter. They beckoned to me to wait for the carpenter in their midst. Although I was skep tical, I walked towards them, when the blue-car guy told me not to. He pulled out a wooden bench for me to sit on. He asked me what I did for a living and I said “Student.” He said, “I’m into events planning, bouncing castles, candy floss. I also do kiddies entertainment, clowns, I have it all.” He poured water over his car, and as he spoke he began to look strangely famil iar. The new carpenter smiled when he saw me waiting for him. His name was Sule. Sule asked me questions about you, about the house, about the key, if there were any spares. Nearly losing my patience, I told him, about four times that there were no other keys. We got to your house and he stuck a metal in strument into the lock and began hitting it with a hammer. Then he heaved himself against the door continuously and tried to force it open with the mass of his small body. It was such a loud process; tough locks do not easily come undone and so I twitched, ashamed of myself for being so careless. I began to fret. A neighbor might accuse me of trying to break in and enter. I repeatedly asked Sule, “Are you done now? Is this what it means to break a lock?” Little won der Baba fled. I’d seen him painstakingly paint the leg of a stool with brown paint, so much love in his eyes. To ask him to break the lock would have been to ask him to drink poison, to die slowly on my behalf. I stepped inside your house and examined the lock. Then I cleaned thoroughly, cleaned everywhere but the bath room. I started with your books, brought them out, dusted and rearranged them, stacking the smaller ones on top of the bigger ones. They were mostly about photography but I read few lines from some and found it interesting how they described the essence of everything with pictures. They wrote things like, “So and so’s pictures are a study of what we eat, wear, drink. A study of how very unusual and eclectic our tastes are.” 

Sule examined the lock and, like Baba, asked to buy another cylinder. I asked him how much and he gave me a price. I asked him how much he needed to transport himself to the market, to which he replied that he needed nothing. I asked him how long he’d be gone for and he said, “Thirty minutes, my bag is here.” point ing to his bag. His phone was sitting on the generator, I told him to take it and he said he’d forgotten it. By the time he returned, I’d piled a mount of dirt. That’s how to clean: upset everything until it’s a mountain of surmountable dirt and then sort. Sule returned and immedi ately went back to fixing the old cylinder tell ing me that if I could still find the old key that 

I should find it because the price of cylinders in the market had doubled plus hundred. “The. Key. Is. Gone,” I said for the last time, stopping him from putting back the old lock, calming him down. I gave him some more money and he returned to the market. I wondered why he hadn’t asked me for more money initially, why he’d given up so easily. 

You said not to let anyone into your house, not even the carpenter, that they were all crim inals. I was going to get upset about you be ing obnoxious again, implying that I couldn’t handle replacing the locks myself. And besides, what were they going to steal from you? Also, why on earth would any random person just walk into your house while I was there? Plus the carpenter needed to be inside the house to fix the locks so what was your point? I didn’t say all these things because I’d have hated for us to fight again. I assured you that I wouldn’t let anybody into your house. Then I began to think about the blue-car man again. Where was it that I’d seen him before? Why had he, all of a sudden, look so familiar? That face—that black face— and those vacant, worn-out eyes. I thought for long trying to trace the faces in my mind and remember where I’d seen him before. And it was as though my thoughts summoned him because I looked up from the books I was cleaning and saw him standing there in the room with me. There I was, holed up in a small room, in a tight position, stunned and almost speechless with the carpenter inside, facing the door, holding the lock and this strange blue car man inside now, looking around, taking in everything, the pictures on the wall, the dirt, me… My heart raced. 

“What are you doing here?” I vomited these words, found them first and then threw them out, anger mixed with fear and confusion. “I just said I should come.” 

“No, you can’t be here. Get out.” 

“Why?” 

“Because it’s not my house and I did not in vite you and I don’t even know you and you’re not supposed to be here so get out.” 

Looking offended, he walked out and my heart still raced. 

“Did you invite him?” I asked Sule. 

“No, I didn’t,” he answered, “I thought he was your friend.” 

I rambled on and on, about how we just met, about how all I did was ask for a carpen ter. I found myself trying to defend myself, to say that it was not my fault that the man had come. He’s an animal. That’s what Sule said. Sule said his services cost “whatever I had,” and I gave him five hundred naira. I’d later reach the bus stop, unable to shake the thought that I had underpaid a good man, walked back to your street and doubled the payment. I searched for him amongst the men on your street and he tried to dissuade me from doubling the pay. But I insisted. I remembered how he finished his work and asked me if I could cook. When I said yes, he offered me mutton to take home and cook. Although I turned down his offer, I thought that was really kind. Tired from the day, I walked back home through puddles of mud thinking about how when I left the new key with Mary, I’d told her about the blue-car man. She’d wanted to follow me and find the blue-car man and warn him and I realised how she cared about you. It was how eager she was to protect you, how she said that you were “only her brother” as though you belonged to no one else in the neighborhood but her. Then I finally figured out where I’d seen the blue-car man before. He looked like an actor from the Yoruba movies we watched. I would watch the humor-filled movies with my family and we’d laugh. In one, he was maltreated by a woman whom he cared deeply for and always found himself returning to her. He gave her his school fees and later came back to collect it when he realized he wasn’t getting the love he deserved but she had spent it all and they’d fought an animated fight, him clutching the hem of her skirt and demanding for his money back. In another, where he played a thug, he won a visa to South Africa and dumped his wife in the house of someone he met as a house-help and ran off. Things didn’t go well for him, he came back and his wife had already married the other man. 

To miss someone is to be polarized by your separation from them and even though you can be there, you choose not to be because it wouldn’t be enough. I thought about our last argument. How I hadn’t called you after your show. I said, “Fam, don’t pretend like you were not an asshole earlier,” and you said other things, many other things that I tried to for get by reading them over and over again until they bored me. And then we talked, about what we were, what we were doing, where we were headed, you called it “putting your house in order,” and we knew it was only right. And the consequences of losing a single key, keys in the way I’d begun to think about them. How I’d given you the keys to parts of me and with held some. I apologised for the mess I’d caused, for letting the weird man into your house and you told me to never apologise for such a thing again, that the man had tried to take advantage of me. You said also, that you found out from people on your street that he was slightly out of his mind. 

Later, in my dream, I e-mailed the writer and asked her why she made me go through such a rigorous weekend. She said she did it for the culture.