Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Keys I Keep From Myself
A caretaker works a round of thirteen points and can find twelve doors, and one of his keys is worn bright from use.
- dated: "the caretaking year"
- narrator: "Arthur Pinch, caretaker"
6th of January. Signed on this day for the caretaking of the block, the year's inventory taken over with the trustees' countersignature against mine. One brass ring carries the trust's mark flat on the band, and the ring carries nine keys, stamped: STAIRS, CELLAR, BOILER, METERS, ROOF, VOID, 4A, GATE — and a ninth with no label on it at all. The inventory says KEYS (9) and no more, so the inventory and I are quits. The daily round sheet is printed to match nothing I can walk: DAILY ROUND — THIRTEEN POINTS, thirteen ruled lines, points one to twelve named, point thirteen ruled and waiting with its name gone to a smudge on every sheet, as if the printing had been through the works too often to hold the word.
2nd of February. The keys have had their month of bedding in. The eight labelled ones are all of one batch, cut at Wray's the smith before Christmas, and they look it: new mint, edges keen, flat of the shank still carrying the file. The ninth is worn bright. Its teeth are shallowed to a shine, its flat polished like a stair-rod, the shape of a key that has gone in and out of something every day for forty years — and it will not enter a lock I can find. I have tried it at every door on the round, taking a landing at a time when nobody was about, and it fits nothing in the block: will not even half-enter and be turned off. It rides the ring outermost, canted outward, the cant of a key that is lifted oftener than it is hung. I do not lift it. I have begun to notice the cant at the end of every round, and I note the noticing.
July. It is the sheets that carry the matter now, so I will set the sheets down. I tick twelve points of a round, all twelve walked, all twelve signed in my own time of walking. The sheets return to me weekly from the trust office put onto the file, and they come back with thirteen ticks and thirteen initials, the thirteenth in pencil, light, even pressure, A. P. I have run four rounds with my pencil left shut in the office drawer and my initials kept home in my pocket, and the sheets came back the same: thirteen, in pencil, A. P., never scratched, never blotted, always before my own line like a porters' mark goes on before the goods. "Careful" is my trade, so I have stopped puzzling at it on the stairs and taken it to where puzzling can be filed.
24th of October. Year's end: two hundred and forty rounds walked, and the file holds two hundred and forty thirteenth initials, every one of them mine and none of them put there by my hand as far as any honest accounting can carry the sentence. I put the query in writing the way the trust requires. The reply came back stamped at the corner of the card: POINT THIRTEEN IS IN ORDER. CARRY ON. I carried on; that is the whole of a caretaker's warrant. Twelve doors answer my keys and everything else answers my pencil, and somewhere a thirteenth door takes the ninth key nightly and lands my initials on it into the bargain. If that door is in my block I have missed a landing, and I have not missed a landing in this life. If it is not in my block, then whose floors is the key worn down on, and whose hand comes off with my name — and which of us is keeping which, the key or me?