The Locksmith

Music:

"Give Me a Ticket to Heaven"

Victorian/Edwardian Sentimental Parlour Song

Sung by Benjamin Luxon

Content Warning:

Strong sexual violence references, strong sex references, strong language 

Transcript

The Locksmith

Stanley Craig was a locksmith. He was a business owner as well, of a small shop just off the high-street, adjacent to a newly established off-license (the town’s umpteenth). In his shop, he sold just about every extant kind of lock and bolt and latching device. Front door latch locks, AFIT Satin tubular door latches for internal doors, slim bathroom turn locks, thin frame door bolts, nickel-plated brass cylinder locks, chrome plated night latches, mortice latches, sliding bolt locks, zinc alloy 4-6 digit push-button locks. Stanley also occasionally sold strong chain padlocks, high security locks. To a restaurant owner, for example, who had a grand’s worth of his takings burgled one night from the safe in which he habitually stowed them. Fucking scumbags, the owner had kept muttering, fucking scumbags. And Stanley had agreed with him, both with the intensity of his inner violence, and his desire to protect what belonged to him.    

Stanley was also a key-cutter, and the majority of his time was spent duplicating keys. Sometimes, his key-cutting customers made him feel uneasy, as if he suspected something unscrupulous in their motivation. He sometimes wondered if the copy of the produced key he was paid to duplicate might play a key role in some act of larceny, perhaps a crime even worse than that. The eerie customer would receive his duplicate with curt, quiet thanks, dispatch it into his pocket, and be off quickly out the door, agitating the overhead bell as he left. Most of the time, Stanley knew that the duplications were to innocent ends: so two spouses could have two house keys, or perhaps give one to the neighbours as insurance; so a newly independent teenage daughter or son could have their own copy; so a woman could let herself into her ailing mother’s house- having just assumed power of attorney. 

            But, first and foremost, and it was the part of him of which he was most proud and which he tendered with the most confidence, he was a locksmith. He ministered to people in distress, who had lost keys and locked themselves out of domiciles and rented residencies, who, occasionally, had managed to lock themselves inside houses, warehouses, offices, apartments. He once let an entire disgruntled orchestra into the town hall where they were meant to be performing. He was ever on standby, his phoneline waiting to receive those reluctant, tortured calls, always ready to drop what he was doing, flip the sign, close up the shop, get in his van, and drive to the address weepily given over the phone.    

            These afflicted clients were always pleased to see Stanley when his lurid yellow van sailed into view and stopped by the property. More often than not, they were gratified by who got out of the van, with his hard-case of bypass tools, that it wasn’t a fat, lumpen, cantankerous old bastard in a boiler suit. Stanley was a slim, handsome man, with a defined jaw, broad shoulders, muscular upper arms, and intense, investigating eyes. He didn’t “jimmy”, with felonious imprecision and urgency, he caried out calm, meticulous non-destructive entries and opened doors for people.

            Most of these emergency locksmith jobs involved women, often quite young, attractive, well-spoken, well-to-do women, with an attractive ditziness or flustered-ness about them. He was an attractive proposition, a good-looking man in his late thirties with a masculine, pragmatic trade who offered aid to people, (damsels), in distress. He thought of himself as a knight, a knight in some kind of armour. But he always kept his relationships with clients professional, and, handsome as he was, he charged more handsomely. 

The facts of his profession did indeed enter the murky world of sexual fantasy. It was as though certain moments or aspects of the job broke off from their plane of reality and drifted down and down into the unconscious where they would appear to Stanley, while in the throes of masturbatory fervour, as shimmering mirages of realness, of possibility. He indeed masturbated, thinking of certain women into whose properties he had forged non-destructive entry, whose locked front doors he had successfully bypassed. In the fantasy, her gratitude would quickly morph into a well-lubricated sexual enthusiasm and before Stanley knew what was happening she was shutting the door, sealing them both inside the room, and hectically unbuttoning him… and so on and so forth. In more dispassionate daylight hours, he contented himself with the idea that a few of his female emergency clients had probably, at some point or other since their rescue, masturbated to the thought of him. He hoped at least one of them had. Maybe the tall, slightly fat girl, with the thick, brown hair, and the figure-hugging jeans of lightest blue.     

The trouble was, Stanley was scared of intimacy, and all the preludes to intimacy. He wasn’t scared of sex per se but he was scared of closeness. He was scared of conversation just as he was scared of dating, and he was scared of dating because he was scared of intimacy, and he was scared of intimacy because he was scared of rejection, and he was scared of rejection because he was scared of how rejection made him feel, and he was scared of how rejection made him feel because that feeling led him to self-destruct, and he was scared of self-destruction because he was scared of death. It was a door he preferred to keep shut, locked. He was able to float placidly on the surface of this troubled existence, so long as he kept the other sex at bay, privately and solitarily releasing sperm at regular intervals just like any other liquid superfluity.

When he was occupied and busy he felt quite well; boredom caused unwellness in his existence. And he was bored a lot of the time. No emergency calls, few or no customers in the shop, no keys to cut, no locks to sell- having determined the appropriate sort. During such bouts of inactivity, he would sit in the back office, rocking back and forth in his chair, perhaps listening to music, perhaps reading a newspaper, or working his way through his seventy-third puzzle book. Often, he would engage in a kind of dark, mental masturbation. He would imagine and ponder, practically, the terrible misdeeds and infractions he could perpetrate, the houses and rooms and apartments he could enter in the night, the locks he could bypass, the doors he could unlock. The things he could do; if he wanted to do them; if the courage to do them was somehow summoned. It was on such a day, while his thoughts were on such a meander, that Ms. Rosemary Phillips dialled the number in the phone directory of a Mr. Stanley Craig, locksmith. 01209 574578. 

In the shop, the phone rang. It was an old rotary telephone and it produced a cacophonic, startling ring. Startled, Stanley picked up the receiver. The voice that came through was eerily calm. It was a sweet, girlish, young voice, a woman’s. It informed Stanley of the situation, and of the address to which he should come as soon as possible. Stanley put down the phone, flipped the sign, shut the shop, and drove there, swiftly.

Stanley parked his van in a place where there were no double yellow lines, a few meters beyond Ms. Phillips’ address. Where she apparently resided was an enormous, detached house, with, as well as its number, a name- which Ms. Phillips had not provided: Berry-bush. There was no sign of anyone. The street was tree-lined, the ground littered with the first yellow leaves. The quiet was eerie, the locale had a lifelessness: it was as if some sinister voice were saying Drive on, nothing to see here. Stanley got out, his case of tools swinging beside him with the swing of his walk. He opened the front gate and shut it behind him. He walked up the garden path to the threshold of the house. Approaching, he realised that the front door was open, only just slightly ajar. This was very curious. He knocked on the wood of the door and called out:

“Hello! Anybody there? It’s Stanley Craig, locksmith…” 

Nothing. He ventured inside. It was dark within. He was confused. Was this some kind of prank, or practical joke, a time-waste?

“Hello!” he called out, the note of anger in his voice more pronounced. 

A voice answered, fairly similar he thought to the one he’d spoken to on the telephone. “Upstairs!”

He climbed the stairs. His big boots felt clumpy and indelicate on the velvet with which the stairs were carpeted. In a place where a beam of pale sunlight penetrated the general gloominess, through a not quite curtained window, Stanley noticed the little coughs of dust his footsteps raised from the stair-carpet as he climbed. 

Stanley was intrigued. The woman had said she was “locked out”. Not locked out of her house but “locked out”, the implication being that she was locked out of her house. Was she locked out of some room or other within the house? He had never bypassed the lock of an interior door in any building other than an office block or apartment complex. 

“Second on the right,” the woman, presumably though not self-evidently Ms. Rosemary Phillips, crowed. It was a scratchy, spectral holler that she produced, different to the sound he had heard over the phone, harsher than the sound he had heard from the bottom of the stairs. 

There was a further storey but Stanley turned away from the stairway that led to it. He advanced up the corridor. Except for one, the doors were all shut, and much of the corridor was in darkness. But through the jamb of the doorway to the second room on the left, a low level of light streamed and lay in a glowing section upon the floor and skirting board and lower wall. He walked up to it and stopped outside it, standing in the doorway, looking in. 

Within the room, which was featureless except for a single bed and the palest, thinnest silk curtains over the windows, was a middle-aged woman in a dressing gown. The dressing gown was a calming shade, difficult to determine in the light that washed her, pale mauve or milky blue or lilac perhaps. She had a smile on her face that looked fixed-on. She wasn’t an unattractive woman; not at first glance. A little old, perhaps. A little old for what? Stanley found himself asking himself. She was beginning to show the wear and tear of her years, creases were creeping into the skin around the base of her neck. She showed a modest, wrinkled cleavage. The dressing gown went down to her ankles when she stood up; while sitting, it did not reach lower than her shins. Her feet were bare. It took Stanley a while to notice how long and discoloured and ugly-looking the toe-nails on her left foot. The right was less of a disaster. She had hair which looked like a wig, hazel-nut and luxuriantly thick but somehow incorrect on her head. Her eyes were blue and beautiful with big, engulfing lashes. On her lips she wore a lipstick that was just a little frightening, the shade of violet just a touch too dark against her cheeks. Stanley managed to take in all of this before breaking the silence, having accepted that she would not be the first to do so. 

“I’m Stanley Craig. I’m the locksmith. I thought you wanted me to let me into your house; I thought you were locked out. Are you Rosemary, Rosemary Phillips?”

The woman smiled and growled, in a voice about an octave lower and in a tone even rougher than before:

“I’ve lost the key.”

“The key for what?”

The woman, whom Stanley took for Rosemary Phillips but who offered no proof either way, stood up, slowly. Joints in her legs creaked softly as she did so. She turned away from Stanley, towards the translucently curtained windows, and shrugged off her dressing gown, undoing the cord. It fell to the floor, revealing something incredible on her back. On her lower back, just above her coccyx, there was a brass lock. It was dirty and had lost all of its original gleam. The lock was suffused with the flesh, sunken into it. What did it unlock? 

Stanley looked at her, incredulous, speechless with this incredulity. The long, curved trail of her spine showed in her bony back like a trapped snake. Right above the twin dimples of her tail-bone, as though they were the indentations of two inner rivets upholding the mechanism, the lock stared like a squinting eye or a tiny, whistling mouth. It was a front-door latch-lock from the looks of it. It sat there, gazing out, with a look of impatience about it, as if it were saying Well, locksmith, what are you going to do about this? What are you going to do about this? 

To Stanley, there was something oddly, tangibly sexual in all this. His penis became erect. He stood, gawping at this most peculiar of locks, as well as its immediate environment. He stood, stupidly, gawking at this woman’s back, and spine, and coccyx, and bum in its baggy knickers. She was loudly fragrant; her body breathed flowery, heavy odour, citric perfume inseparably mixed with something powdery and raw and innate.        

It was all terribly peculiar. But Stanley Craig, locksmith, had a job to do and, for all its strangeness, he understood the job he was obliged to do, the task he was obligated to perform. He opened his box of tools and set about bypassing the lock on this woman’s back, as undamagingly and non-destructively as he had ever bypassed before in his fifteen years of professional locksmithing. There was a first time for everything, no forward progress without failure. Stanley composed himself and did his job, seeing proceedings to, what he took to be, their natural conclusion. No matter how passionately she cried, no matter how audible, how intense her agony, he did his job.     

***

The police came to Stanley’s business the next day. The police-car pulled up and the two bobbies loomed suddenly, blackly, in the windows and plate-glass of the door. They entered the shop, agitating the bell over the jamb. They approached the key cutting booth where Stanley was duplicating a key for a client. Still, he was shaken with the events of yesterday. The appearance of these two visiting policemen did not immediately trouble him; he assumed it was something to do with the restaurant burglary; or perhaps a key, cut at his establishment, had been identified and stored for evidence. The officers approached, the darker skinned of the two leading the way, his pasty partner- or perhaps subordinate- behind. The officer in front removed his helmet; while the one following kept his on, and remained silent and grave-faced throughout the dialogue that followed.

            “We need you to come to the station, please, Mr. Craig.”

            “Why?” Stanley asked the officers.

            “We’ll explain once we’re there, Mr. Craig.” 

            “Stanley, please.” That was the trouble with having a surname that could also be a first name. It never sound right with “Mr” on the front of it. “Am I under arrest?”

            “Not at this stage, Stanley, but I do need you to come with us. The car’s this way.”

            Stanley exited the key-cutting booth and went with the officers. He closed the shop quickly. A steady, weighty hand on his upper-back guided him into the bright, emergency-service-coloured car.

They drove to the police-station. Stanley sat in the back, the two police-officers sat in the front. The backs of their heads were silhouetted against the daylight of the windscreen. A grate divided the front and back of the police-car. 

The drive did not last longer than five minutes but the silence was tense, the discomfort it created in Stanley unignorable.

In the station, his presence was recorded. It was explained that he was not being detained at this time but that his participation in the investigation was mandatory. He was taken to an interviewing room by the two officers. It was explained that the interview was going to be recorded. The only one who had spoken up to this point pressed record, and stated the date and time, as well as Stanley’s full name. Then he said:

“Do you know or have you ever come into contact with a Ms. Rosemary Phillips?”

Stanley was amazed, so amazed that he couldn’t speak for a moment. He’d had no idea what the topic of the interview would be but he had not expected Ms. Rosemary Phillips’ name to come up. It was obvious by the look of recognition in Stanley’s eyes what the answer to the officer’s question was.   

“Yes,” he replied. “I met her for the first time, yesterday. She called my emergency hotline, asked me to do a job for her. I’m a locksmith, officers.”

“Yes, we know,” the silent officer said at last. His lips curved downwards; his eyes were very hard and cold. 

“So, you drove out to her address to do the job?” the other officer enquired.

“Yes, exactly that. I didn’t have any difficulty finding it.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I got out of the van and did the job.”

“Just tell us precisely what happened Stanley, moment by moment. Try not to jump ahead. You got out the car…then what?”

“Er…” Stanley seemed suddenly insecure. In his mind’s eye, he saw, again, how she had turned around, dropped her dressing gown, and revealed the ghastly sight: that brass lock sunk within her middle-aged flesh. He thought of the mess that was made in bypassing it, the intense scream she had emitted throughout. Stanley went on: “Well, I took my tool-case. Er…she didn’t say exactly what she needed me to do over the phone…she said she was locked out. And…erm…I assumed that she was locked out of her house and needed me to bypass the front door. And…” He didn’t immediately continue. There was a taut, expectant silence.

“Go on…” the paler officer said.

“And…er…I was correct. She met me by the front door. She was round the back of the house trying to get in through the back, I think, through a window or something. I called out and…er…well, she was pretty upset, flustered, you know. And…er…she said she’d mislaid her key- she had no idea where- and she couldn’t think of anyone else who might have a copy in their possession, and so I…erm…I made my entry into the house. Took about five minutes. I did my job…then I left.”

The officers nodded, only very slightly, a little robotically. Their expressions were quite impenetrable. They had listened inscrutably to Stanley’s testimony and it was impossible, once it was over, to tell how it had been received, how credible they found it. The officers both were hatless now. The darker skinned officer said:

“Ms. Phillips rang us at nine o’clock, last night, to tell us that a locksmith, named Stanley Craig, had forced entry into her house and sexually assaulted her. She told us that at roughly three forty PM, you bypassed the front door, you walked upstairs, you woke her up from her afternoon nap, and you committed a serious sexual assault as detailed under Section 4 of the Sexual Offences Act, 2003. Ms. Phillips alleges that you touched her inappropriately on her thighs, breasts, and buttocks; that you penetrated her anus with two fingers; that you masturbated to orgasm and ejaculated on her feet-” Vividly, Stanley saw that frightful left foot, with its chaotic toenails. “She alleges also that you were verbally abusive towards her, and physically threatening. And that you stole a, and I quote “antique, treasured, and costly” bell.” The officer consulted notes while he quoted. Then he put them away.

            Stanley was amazed. He listened to the officer, stunned and unbelieving. He couldn’t emotionally characterise the way he felt; he was just, simply, incredulous; he could not believe what he was hearing. His eyes were popping out with disbelief, his jaw hung open. He had no idea what face he was making; he was too absorbed by the officer’s deadpan report, with its litany of bizarre and shocking transgressions, to manage his expression.

            “A bell?” Stanley finally said. 

            “Yes. A bell,” the officer assured. 

            Stanley didn’t say any more. He was suddenly scared, and went quiet with the fear. He thought back to the way she had been dressed, scant, and he recalled her manner, seductive and enigmatic. He remembered getting an erection, not long after he had first set foot in her room. He got an erection thinking about that erection. It was a very guilty feeling to have to harbour. As secret as he knew it to be, as secret as he kept it, he couldn’t help the feeling that his erect penis was announcing itself to the world. 

            “What is your response to the outlined allegations?”

            He was still dazed and incapable of remark. At last Stanley answered the officer:

            “It’s all absolute nonsense. Lunacy, fabrication. I did my job.”

            “Do you deny the allegations?”

            “Yes. Yes, of course, I deny it all.” He felt sad all of a sudden. He felt bereft of a former innocence, though he knew he was, still, innocent. He felt a feeling of grief for a life, a way of life, or perhaps an illusion, that was no more. It was sad to stand accused, to have to protest that he was guiltless, to have to hope that he was believed over his accuser. There was betrayal in there as well. Whatever the nature of their intimacy, it had been intimacy, and had been theirs, Stanley Craig and Rosemary Phillips. He hadn’t been able to share it with the officers, he hadn’t been able to make known any of task’s particulars, because of their ridiculousness and their unpleasantness. The strange lock on the client’s body was a secret it was his privilege to know, something he would not disclose. No matter how badly she betrayed him, no matter how disgraceful the lies she told about him, no matter how hotly he hated her, abhorred her, detested her, he would not reveal what he had been shown in confidence.     

            “I did my job,” Stanley said. “Like I always do. People often have obscure and complex motives for the things they do, mysterious motives they themselves do not understand. I have cut keys for people who used the duplicates to commit terrible crimes, to burgle, and terrorise, and psychologically torture, and rape, and plant evidence. I have bypassed door-locks for unscrupulous people, the very people whom the locks were meant to keep out. I am a good locksmith. I am not a fool. My competence comes with a responsibility, and a caution. And I have sometimes considered abusing the responsibility, the trust, the ethical code that comes with my competence. I have indulged in disordered and transgressive thoughts. I have lusted after my clients. I have lusted after them and wished for them to lust after me. I am a locksmith and I help people. I cut keys for people, I make and sell locks. I break into buildings with clinical precision. To do my job as well as I can is my only wish in this life, to open doors and help people protect their property. There is no civilisation without locked doors, without chains and iron jaws and carefully kept keys. Ms Rosemary Phillips was clearly an unwell woman. She repulsed me, physically. But I did what she asked, seeing her distress. And now, I think she is punishing me because her desires, having been fulfilled, are revolting to her, they disgust her. So, she makes me into a perpetrator. She makes me into the rapist, the abuser, when, if anything, I was the one being abused. But I accept my punishment. I am a locksmith and I believe in civilisation and I accept my punishment, my locked door, my prison cell. I did it. Officers, I did it. I did it because it was my job.” 

            Nobody said anything. The recording device continued to listen, listening to the silence the same way it listened to what was said, to all that was said.   

            “You’re free to go,” said the darker officer. “But you may hear from us again…”

            Stanley got up and went, neither slowly nor quickly. 

            He was relieved to get outside. The door shut behind him and locked automatically. He breathed almost perfectly free. A fork of birds passed beautifully over his head. Just for a moment, it was good to feel the calm and freeness, the winged liberty, of a species unacquainted with locks.                               

            Walking through the town, he saw people suffering. He witnessed the distress of people locked in, and of people locked out. Their multiple, different clamours, the various sounds they made, all amassed into a general music. Stanley heard it as he walked. How he heard it! He saw a congregation pound the doors of its church; he saw a lover, a man, pound the double-door entrance of an apartment block. He saw shadows, silhouettes, ghostly forms flat their palms and faces against windows, and beg for release. Lock-in at The Bull: absurdly early for a lock-in, Stanley thought. But he well knew that they were locked in, and quite a few more were locked out. Those locked in shouted, and pounded the wallpaper with its plaster daisies and fleurs-de-lys, the panelling and the double doors: those locked out shouted and pounded also, equal and opposite. For a while, he would do nothing for them. There was nothing he could do, not even for one of them. And for just a while, that caused him joy, not pain, in his heart.