Limmy Limmy - That’s Your Lot

He was about to tell Linda what had happened, but he hadn’t yet checked to see if the keys were still there. There was no point in owning up to making such a stupid mistake if nothing bad had come from it. They had a spare key for the back door, so maybe it wasn’t all bad. But it was. She’d know that somebody out there had the other key. Even if they didn’t, even if the keys were still there, she’d know he left the back door unlocked overnight.

He’d check first. There was no point in sticking himself in it when he didn’t need to.

He picked up the bottles in the house and put them in a bag, then carried them out to the gate. He could see that the gate was open, and he looked behind to see if Linda saw it as well. There would be questions if she saw that. But she wasn’t looking.

From a distance, it looked like the keys were no longer in the padlock. That was a sight that he did not want to see, so he looked away until he got closer, hoping that when he got to the padlock, he’d see that the keys were there.

But the keys were gone.

He felt his heart begin to thump.

He was about to search the ground to see if the keys had dropped down, maybe with the wind blowing the padlock during the night, but first he had another look towards the house to see if Linda was looking. And thank fuck she wasn’t.

He put down the bag of bottles and looked around in the pebbles that made up the path to the gate. While he was pushing the pebbles around, he was pushing the thought out of his head that somebody had stolen the keys. Somebody had stolen the keys from the padlock, which included the key to the back door. The back door to their fucking house.

He pushed the pebbles around some more, then looked in the same place over and over. He stood up and looked at the padlock. It was a pointless thing to do, and he knew it.

He took in a deep breath. He could feel his pulse in his temples.

This was bad. Seriously bad.

He remembered that he was supposed to be putting bottles in the bin, and he was certain that if Linda didn’t hear the sound of bottles crashing on top of bottles, she’d be wondering why. So he picked up the bag and emptied out the bottles. Then he had another look for the keys.

He looked at the grass in the lane, to see if the keys were there. He knew that he himself didn’t drop them there, he definitely left the keys in the padlock, but maybe the person who took them from the padlock then dropped them in the lane accidentally. It was possible.

He got down on all fours, then looked at the lane from down low, hoping to see the shiny keys sticking up from the grass. But he couldn’t see them.

He was going to have to tell Linda. He was actually going to have to tell her.

His throat tightened and his heart beat faster. He had to tell Linda that somebody had the key to their back door.

But he didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to.

It wouldn’t just be a case of getting the lock in the door changed, because it wasn’t as simple as that. The back door wasn’t a normal door like that. They had fancy patio doors that they’d spent a fortune on, and the lock was part of the door. You couldn’t just unscrew the lock and then put in a new one. If you replaced the lock then you’d probably have to replace the door as well, and that would cost a fortune. And he just did not want to tell Linda that. So he kept his mouth shut. He knew he was putting the security of their home at risk, but it was a risk worth taking for now, until he worked out what to do.

For now, he would just keep a lookout.

He spent the next few days looking out the window of the room that faced the back garden. The toilet window also faced the back garden, and after every visit to the toilet, he’d look out it, towards the gate and the lane behind.

One day he forgot to lock the toilet door. It was shut, but he had forgotten to lock it. After he washed and dried his hands, he had a look out the window. To do so was always an effort, because the window was high, and in order to look out it he had to step into the bath, and go on his tiptoes.

Linda walked in and saw him peering through the window, and asked him what he was doing.

He nearly fell in the bath. He said he wasn’t doing anything, just looking out the window. He couldn’t think of what else to say.

She looked through the window, and asked him if he was looking at their neighbour, Teresa.

He told her that Teresa wasn’t there, but when he looked out, there she was, lying in her garden, reading a magazine.

When he pictured how it looked through Linda’s eyes, it looked bad. He looked like an old-school pervert.

Linda walked away, and Gary was about to call her back to say that it wasn’t what she thought. But he knew that if she asked what it was he was looking at, he’d probably have to tell her that he left the keys in the padlock and now they were gone. Maybe he would have owned up if she kept at it, but because she walked away, he just left it.

A week passed, with no break-ins. It surprised Gary, especially considering that they’d left the house unoccupied for a few hours here and there at various times of the day.

There was even a time when they went through to Linda’s mum and dad’s for the night, and they’d made it quite obvious that they weren’t home. Gary tried hard to not make it so obvious, by leaving all the lights on and turning on the radio. Linda asked him why he was doing that, considering he didn’t usually. He told her that there was no right or wrong time to start being conscious of burglars. But she said that she doubted that anybody would be able to break in, not with all the locks they had. There were locks on the windows, and there were the special locks on the front and back doors. Multipoint locks. Burglars couldn’t kick their way past those.

‘But somebody could pick them,’ said Gary.

Gary wasn’t sure if it was a clever move to continue with the talk of burglars, or a stupid one. It would be a stupid move if the burglars chose that night to break in, on the day that Gary coincidentally became conscious of burglars. She would have asked him if he was psychic, especially because he also seemed to predict that the burglars got into the house by apparently picking the lock. Then she’d maybe wonder if they had a key. Then she’d ask Gary where the keys were, and she’d see that one of them was missing. And she’d see the look on his face. And he’d have to tell her how long he’d known for. And she’d know he let her think that he was perving on Teresa, rather than just owning up to the truth.

‘Och, forget it,’ said Gary, switching off the lights. ‘You’re right.’

He switched off every light in the house. He didn’t even close the curtains. He’d rather that the house looked unoccupied and ripe for the picking, than face the music. He’d rather jeopardise their telly, their computers and anything else worth stealing. He’d rather do that and take all the hassle that it would cause, all the phone calls and changing of passwords and proving who he was, than face the music. He could face it eventually, but he wanted some more time to try and work it all out and make things right.

They left the house, and Gary spent the night thinking about what they’d be returning to the next day.

But when they returned, everything was intact.

Gary looked around the house at all the things worth knocking. The telly, the computers, even the food in the fridge. Linda watched him as he looked at it all.

He saw her watching and said, ‘Ah, good to be back. It’s just good to be back.’

After that night, Gary told himself that if burglars were going to break in, if they truly had their eyes on the house, they would have broken in then. And because they didn’t, then maybe there weren’t any burglars. Maybe the keys weren’t really in the hands of a thief, and they were lying out there in the pebbles after all.