Work, 2015-2025

The block went up in the early sixties, two storeys of red brick with sixteen flats and a front wall that faces north. Set into that wall at about hip height were sixteen brass letter slots, each with a hinged flap, and sixty years of hands had polished every one of them to the colour of a good trumpet. Behind each slot sat a timber box that a determined twelve-year-old could have opened, and one night in 2019 somebody more determined than that went along the row with a flat bar.

The committee asked around. Most of the advice was to brick up the slots and stand a steel bank on a post by the gate. The committee turned that down before the sentence was finished, because the brass was the face of the building and half the residents had been posting their own letters through it for decades.

So Hamish took the brass off. Each front was held by four slotted screws that had not turned since the street was sealed, and every one came out by hand, was cleaned, numbered in pencil on the back and laid on a blanket in the order it left the wall. Behind each opening he cut out the old timber box and fitted a new locking steel body into the wall cavity, galvanised, with a five-wafer cam lock and a rear door that residents open from the hallway. Then the brass went back on the street side, on its own screws, in its own hole, the flap swinging exactly the way it always had.

From the footpath nothing changed at all. The mail goes through the same brass slot it always did. It just lands in steel now, behind a lock, instead of in a box anyone with a flat bar could open.

It took three days instead of one. Hamish still walks past it whenever he is in Grey Lynn, which is more often than the work strictly requires, and he still checks that the flap on number 9 sits straight. It does.