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Unlockable Content
When I saw Reservoir Dogs I was awstruck by the whole thing, but one item came back to niggle me and eventually I too had a large bowl that I filled with spare change, keys and rings, nails and even a dozen empty ten millimetre shell casings. The bowl fills up, and fills up with coins that are poured out of pockets on a regular basis, a few pennies at a time, but as Greenspan once said; "A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you can't find your keys anymore and you get locked in your own house and have to eat the carpet for sustenance, befriending small animals and beetles to get news from the outside world and eventually you die but Disney options the rights to your life story and they give it all a happy ending."
I might be paraphrasing somewhat there.
Anyway, aside from the £61 in cash and the €20 and the $16 and a few Swedish kroner there were lots and lots of keys. Some were obvious keys, for small suitcase padlocks and bike locks. Others were what looked like old Secret Garden style black iron keys with very basic shapes and teeth. The sort of key you would expect an old wrinkled and withered man to have on a large iron ring he keeps on a hook underneath the stairs that he only sees each time he opens the door to throw the toys the neighbor's children have carelessly knocked over his fence down into the dank basement below, where he also keeps the children careless enough to try and retrieve said toys.
One I recognised as the key to the fireproof box I keep all my important documents in. I opened the box and found bank statements, employment contracts, refusal letters from publishers (they were important publishers) and stock options for companies that started up before 1999 and have "e-" at the beginning of their names. Meanwhile all the photos of me as a child, the ponytail I had cut from my head for my first job, the naughty polaroids of an ex, the hand-cut ransom-note style birthday cards and carbon sheet from my first and only arrest are all in a cardboard box under the stairs. I should really switch those things around.
There were keys for front doors to houses I don't live in anymore and I sat wondering if they'd ever changed the locks. What if they hadn't? What is the etiquette for walking in and saying "oh, look you moved the kitchen around, you should have left the fridge over by that wall to cover the brown stains we made when we played teabag baseball and is that my old TV?" And then I got to thinking about how many keys there are out there that would unlock places I thought were inviolate, maybe in bowls just like mine, on people's dressers or on their keyrings or on key hooks under the stairs...
The final question though becomes, what does one do with unidentifiable keys? Is it possible that I have a lock-up somewhere in North London that I've completely forgotten about? Maybe there's a padlock somewhere holding a gate together that I needed kept closed once upon a time and that now forces school children to take the long way round. Maybe... and then I remembered that there are things called bolt cutters and I tossed the keys away.
May. 6.2007