I Know What I Saw

Ebadi can’t alter the chemical properties of the admixtures used in the cement. The rate of cement hydration would remain at a fair constant. That’s simply chemistry. If the mixture went down on Wednesday, it would have crystallised to some extent by now, but that process would still be ongoing. In other words, the grout lines and the adhesive would still be hardening. It is still only Sunday. The mix in this relatively cold weather would still be hydrating the cement. I still had some time left, if I could get to the tiles and lay my fingers across them, I could prove that it was recently laid. The grout would come away under my nail. The tiles could be moved without cracking them.

Somehow, I have to get inside.

20 Sunday

For now, all I can do is wait. The hours pass, bearing witness to just a few souls passing by. People arrive occasionally by car, drivers stepping briskly out to open doors and shut them again. But pedestrians – there are only a handful. Nobody notices me. In the anonymity of these clothes, I am absolved from the usual sidelong glances of people that see me as a threat, without looking at me properly.

The afternoon has drawn in and the chill comes. It begins to occur to me that he might not be there. He might have left just before I came. Perhaps he’s not even in the country. The curtains are drawn too tightly to discern anything. A spike of cold air prods at my body so I get up to look for some insulation. It only takes a few minutes to find a newspaper on the seat of a nearby bus stop and to stuff balls into my cuffs. A few minutes later and I begin to warm up, swollen with paper.

I rub my hands before putting them into my pockets. My fingers touch the cigarette lighter and I draw it out to examine it in the light. A flash of a memory comes to me. Lighting a cigarette in the heavy rain. Pushing open that door to 42B.

Seb in fact didn’t smoke. Or at least he didn’t when I knew him and hasn’t these last days. Nina and I were the smokers. She, the elegant smoker with thin cigarettes that smelled like Turkish Delight. Me, the needy chain-smoker. Grace didn’t like smoking and made a face whenever I lit up. ‘Could you try cutting down?’ she’d say.

‘I could. But then I wouldn’t be cool any more.’

And then another memory comes slicing through the fog. I met her for dinner once, after she had left me, and she lit up a cigarette at the table as the waiter brought our menus. I raised an eyebrow at her.

‘What? Only you’re allowed to smoke?’ she’d said.

‘No, I just—’

‘What?’ she said irritably.

‘I just thought you were smarter than that.’

She stubbed out the cigarette on a saucer. The top of her chest flushed – red and bare. She caught me looking at the place where her pendant used to sit. ‘I lost it somewhere in the move,’ she said, fingering the space. ‘In the flat.’

Now I see the door to number 42B open. Ebadi steps out and shuts it behind him to an elongated beep. He walks along the street away from me, merrily almost, jangling keys at his side and over to a small silver Porsche. The indicators flash as he opens the door and gets in. Then he is gone, the car growling as it powers up the road and away out of sight.

I look up again at the house. Silent. Locked. Empty. Can I get in?

That door opened once before. I try and remember what it was like on the inside and the lock, was it an old Yale?

When we were teenagers at school, there was a craze of trying to pick locks. We had all seen something on TV with the Man from U.N.C.L.E. or James Bond or something else implausible. A hairpin would go in, the hero would grin at the girl and a flick of the wrist later there’d be the confident oiled click of an opening lock.

When Rory and I tried it, it didn’t work. Not once in hours of trying.

Then, because we were who we were, we took out books and read in encyclopaedias about how locks worked. Some of the words come to mind now: base pins, cylinders, the shear line where all the pins line up. We learned about ‘bumping’ and how you could force a key through the lock to make the pins jump before quickly turning the lock.

But it never worked. We never managed to pick a single lock, though we pretended to the others at school that we had. That we didn’t have the tools on us, but we could do it if we ever needed to.

There was another way, though. Funny, I haven’t thought of this for so long I have to close my eyes to lure the memory into light.

In the early days when I squatted, when the street hadn’t yet penetrated into me. When I was fresh. I remember how much I hated communal living, the smells, the grating nerves and tensions. But occasionally people shared tips. Where to get soup on Monday, who had a supply of methadone. Which shelters had waiting lists and which ones would never turn you away.

In one of the bigger communes, I remember a man – I don’t remember his name – a snake-faced man with no hair and round blue eyes. He grinned all the time as if he knew something nobody else did.