Grey's Journal:
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When satisfied that lesson would do, I dressed, packed my stuff and headed out the door of my flat and down the staircase of the house. As I descended, I did my routine of patting down my pockets to make sure my daily-use possessions were with me: journal, London A-Z, water bottle, travel card, PDA, cell phone, pens, wallet, small note pad and keys. No keys. Uh-oh. Not for the first time, I thought that I should perform my self-check before I step in the hallway and close the door. Now, all I could do was I hope that Zornitsa would be home when I returned this evening to let me in. I went down the three flights of stairs to go out the front door but, when I opened the top lock and pulled, the door wouldn't open. The front door to our house has one lock that can be opened without a key from the inside and also a dead bolt lock that needs a large key on the inside. I automatically reached into my pocket (no keys!) before stupidly pulling on the door again, expecting it to open although I had done nothing to withdraw the bolt. My thoughts bounced back and forth through my head `I'll just get my keys from upstairs' (no keys!) `Well I'll just leave then' (dead bolt lock) `Well I'll just get my keys...' until reality sunk in. I had locked myself inside of my house. 
Zornitsa stays up late at night, much unlike myself who, once eight thirty rolls around, thinks it's a reasonable time to go to bed. When she doesn't have to go to work, as was the case today, we often miss each other in the morning by an hour or less, with her going to bed at 5 AM and me getting up at 6 AM. I wasn't sure how Zornitsa would react to being woken at 6:45 on her day off, but I suspected it would be like poking a sleeping tiger in the eye to ask a favor. As the dead bolt was an old style lock without any tricky anti-picking devices such as pins I thought I might be able to outsmart it. All I had to do was rotate a gear in the middle of the wooden door. Five minutes and a broken pen later, I was still no closer to opening the door. I couldn't generate enough torque to withdraw the bolt and I was afraid that further meddling would break the lock, trapping everyone inside and leaving me unpopular with the neighbors. I had no options left but to wake Zornitsa. I climbed the staircase slowly, reluctantly and losing courage at every step, so that when I got to the top, I knocked on the door softly, so as not to be heard. ``Zornitsa?'' I whispered. ``I'm locked out. Can you let me in?'' I hoped, irrationally, that she would just happen to be awake at that moment and passing the door to hear my soft entreaties. I gave another soft knock before running away, fearing what would happen should I actually wake her. I was seriously debating the possibility of lowering myself out of the second floor stairwell window when I noticed that the light under the second floor flat door was on. The mother-daughter pair who lived below us moved into their flat shortly after Zornitsa and I moved into ours. All I knew of the neighbors was what I learned from Zornitsa. She keeps tabs on everyone she can observe from our window. Her rational being that if people are going to do something in front of their windows or outside they have no problem with other people watching. While I'm uncomfortable with her notions of privacy, it doesn't stop me from joining her when something interesting is going on. We had watched the two women this summer bring out a big lawn mower box and assemble the mass of parts in the back yard. Their first attempt didn't work, so they unscrewed things, took bits apart, added oil and reassembled it again only to find that it still didn't work, before finally resorting to that most human of instincts, hitting it. We watched them disassemble and reassemble that lawn mower many times over that week in the summer, trying and consistently failing to get the recalcitrant machine to work. I wanted to go down there and play the hero/introduce myself but two things stopped me: 1) I don't have the slightest idea how lawn mowers work. 2) New people make me nervous and self-conscious and thus are best avoided. The closest I came to interacting with these neighbors was when I signed for the delivery of their new lawn mower. Now that I was trapped inside our building, a face-to-face interaction was unavoidable. I stood outside their flat and listened as quietly as I could, deathly afraid that whoever was inside would open the door, see me lurking outside, and start screaming. When I heard movement behind the door, I knocked. The rusting behind the door stopped instantly and all was quiet in the early morning. After long moments of feeling the presence of someone else on the other side of the door also waiting, I decided to introduce myself. ``Ummm... hello? Sorry to bother you so early in the morning -- this is the guy who lives upstairs, by the way -- but I've locked myself out of my flat and the front door is also locked so... well... I'm sort of trapped in the hallway.'' Still nothing from inside. ``So... I was hoping you could unlock the front door and let me out... please?'' Still nothing for a long time. Then the shuffling behind the door continued, without acknowledging me. Not sure what else to do, I knocked again. ``I'm really sorry--'' ``Hello? Who is it?'' asked a startled female voice from inside. She had not heard me. Apparently I had explained my plight to their cat and I now felt twice as embarrassed as before. I told what happened a second time through the door, but now with added stumbling and stuttering. The door opened and I only got a glimpse of the person before looking away. She was the blonde daughter who seemed rather attractive and had the kind of British accent I melt for. This didn't help my feelings of stupidity and embarrassment and I reached the final phase where I could feel my face and ears go hot with a sudden flush of blood though them. The next clear memory I have is of standing outside the house, reliving every stupid word I said to the daughter on the way down the stairs as she let me out. I spent the rest of the day telling everyone about my embarrassment, trying to rid myself of the feeling by bleeding it out. Telling everyone I know, save one. When I came home in the evening, I rang our flat and a grumpy-looking Zornitsa came to the door. She was working on her dissertation and in no mood for such human failings. ``Hi! I locked myself out,'' I said with a big smile. ``One day, Grey, you will lock yourself out and the bottom door won't open and then you will see.'' I smiled and agreed with her, happy to be back inside. |
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Copyright © 2005 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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