At 11:20 Lucía puts her key into the lock of flat 5B and it stops halfway, as if it had met a hand on the other side.
Not a hand. A key. There is a key in my lock, on the inside, and someone has turned it.
Lucía, who meets every guest at 5B and sees each one off with her phone in her hand, tries again. The same half-turn, the same dead stop. You can see it in her face: the whole day's schedule has just gone out of the window.
Check-out was at eleven. The next guests arrive at four. In between sit the three hours a flat needs to become somebody's home again. And a door someone has locked from the inside.
Flat 5B, on the top floor, knows this door by ear and believes it knows people the same way. It is proud of its ceilings, its mosaic floor, its terrace. It takes offence at shutters kept closed. Since Tuesday the bedroom shutters have been down, day and night, with the bedroom door shut behind them, and 5B has never learned to like not knowing what goes on in its own rooms.
Monday, 15:10
The guest is called Emil, according to the phone in Lucía's hand, and he has booked three nights. He rides up in the lift without a word and carries one canvas bag with no wheels.
No wheels. Don Paco will approve. Don Paco approves of nothing, so it's a start.
Lucía shows him the door: from the inside it only closes with a shove of the hip. She shows him where, and how hard. He doesn't try it. “I'll take your word for it,” he says, which is the first thing he has said that isn't “thank you”.
She is explaining the air conditioner (“it works, if the remote has batteries”) when he takes the remote from her, opens the back and lays both batteries side by side on the table. Then he slides the cover shut. Lucía has been saying that sentence about the batteries for years and has no line for this.
He takes his bag into the bedroom and closes the door behind him. Not hard. The way you close a door on someone asleep.
A shut door in my own flat, and behind it a man with a bag. I'll find out. I always find out.
Tuesday, 7:10
The bin lorry goes by under the balcony, on time. At 7:40 Emil goes out and comes back forty minutes later with a loaf and a little packet of jamón. On the balcony he says “Buenos días” to the orange tree, quietly, like a man greeting a neighbour he has never been introduced to. Then the bedroom shutters come down with their long rattle and do not go up again.
Ten in the morning. Winter sun on the whole street and a terrace he hasn't looked for. It isn't rudeness. It's worse. It's indifference.
Every night at ten, through the bedroom door, 5B hears him wind a watch: click, click, click. Twenty-two clicks. It counts them on Monday, on Tuesday, and on Wednesday it waits for them and they don't come.
A man can forget once. People forget all the time: on the top shelf I keep a whole box of things guests have left behind over the years.
Thursday, 10:58
At 10:40 the bathroom tap runs for a minute. Then shoes, not slippers, cross the mosaic and stop in the hall. At 10:52, in her pocket, Lucía's phone buzzes with a message from him; she will read it aloud later, twice. At 10:58 a key turns in the lock of 5B. Twice. From inside.
5B waits for the sound that always comes next. Every guest who has ever left makes the same sound on this door: a hip against the wood, a thud, and then the lift. This time the thud doesn't come. The steps go away from the door, the bedroom door closes, not hard, and the flat is quiet in a way it can't read.
Now, at 11:25, Lucía knocks three times with a knuckle and then with the flat of her hand. She says his name in English, in Spanish, and then in Valencian, which she keeps for emergencies and her mother.
Then she reads the message aloud, to the door. “Out by eleven. Thank you for everything.” She reads it again. “It's polite,” she tells the door. “Why is it so polite?”
She rings him. Behind the bedroom door, a phone begins to shudder against a wooden bedside table, and the sound travels through the boards like a small animal looking for a way out. Once. Twice. On the third call it stops in the middle of a buzz, which, 5B tells itself, is what happens when the other end gives up.
At 11:50 Rosa comes up the last flight on foot, one hand on the rail, her glasses swinging on their cord, with a bucket she has nowhere to put. She puts it on the top step and sits down beside it. She looks at the door the way she looks at a stain: not whether it will come out, but how long it will take.
“Has he gone?”
“His bag is in there.”
“How do you know?”
“I don't,” says Lucía.
Thursday, 12:10
In the wall, the pipes begin to sing. Someone is running a tap, and it runs for exactly one minute. Lucía puts her ear to the door and her whole body goes still. “He's in there,” she says. She hits the wood with her palm and shouts his name. The water stops.
“It's Paco,” says Rosa from the step. “Same pipes.”
“Paco has never run a tap before one o'clock in his life.”
The pipes are one pipe. A tap in 5A sings in my wall as if it were mine. I should be able to tell. I have always been able to tell.
At 12:40 Lucía writes to the owner, standing on the landing, and the answer arrives before she has put the phone down. One word. She turns the screen to Rosa, who reads it with her glasses off. “¿Cerrajero?”
“Already called one,” says Lucía. “For two o'clock.”
On her phone, a ticket has been lit since eleven: cleaning of 5B, by 15:00. She puts the phone face down on the step.
At 12:55 the lift hums, rises and opens its doors on the empty landing. Nobody gets out. The doors wait for a while, as if someone had changed their mind, and close, and the lift goes down. At 13:20 it does the same again.
“Somebody's calling it from below,” says Lucía.
Rosa says nothing and takes her glasses off.
I didn't do that. I'd like it written down, this time. No one is writing anything down.
Thursday, 14:05
The locksmith is young and smells of cold air and cigarettes. He kneels at the door with a flat case, and 5B feels it in the lock, a thin tickle deep inside, like a hair caught in the throat. At 14:11 the key on the other side comes loose and drops onto the mosaic with a ring that goes through the whole flat. Nobody catches it. Nobody had been holding it.
The door opens inward, and for the first time in hours the landing light falls into the hall.
Lucía goes in first. She crosses the mosaic as if it could crack. “Emil?” Her hand settles on the bedroom handle, which goes down the way a hand goes down when it hasn't decided.
I can put up with a guest I don't understand. I can't put up with a door I can't see through. Steps, water, a hand on a handle: that is all I ever get. Tell me what you're touching.
The door opens. Four steps. A pause. Nothing settles onto the bed.
The bed is made so tight it looks as if nobody has slept in it. The bag has gone. On the pillow lies a watch, stopped at a little after ten, and beside it, neat as buttons, the two batteries from the remote.
Lucía goes round the room. She opens the wardrobe: empty. She looks under the bed. Then she stands in the middle of the bedroom and looks at the watch without touching it.
Empty. A key in my lock, on my side, and nobody in me. I counted every step. One of them I didn't hear.
Rosa puts the bucket down, raises the shutters with three days of dust and a rattle that rolls through the flat, and opens the window: the room hasn't been aired for three days. Cold air comes in with the smell of oranges, diesel and coffee from the café downstairs, and for the first time since Tuesday 5B can hear the whole street.
Lucía stands at the window for a long time with the phone in her hand before she writes to the owner.
At 15:40, on the landing, she says into the phone: “Tonight, a different flat. Yes, just for one night.”
Thursday, 20:00
Rosa leaves at six, pulling the door shut with her hip. She has put the batteries back in the remote. Lucía left earlier, with the key that fell on the floor and the watch in her pocket, and said nothing to anyone on the stairs. The new guests are sleeping somewhere else tonight. The bucket has gone. The mosaic is clean.
The bedroom shutters are up, and the window is open. On the terrace, in the cold, the glass bird turns a quarter on its red thread. Nobody has come out to see it.
At eight, through the wall, Don Paco starts to play. It is Thursday. It isn't a carol and it doesn't go flat on the fifth note.
At ten past seven tomorrow, as every morning, the bin lorry will go by. Now I'll hear the whole street. Somewhere in the pipes water is running, one minute exactly, and I don't ask whose tap it is.
