Theft

by Luke Brown

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘I stole it,’ said Mary. ‘By accident. From a party last night. I don’t remember putting it in my bag. Nathan’s been getting aggressive texts all day from the girl whose party it was, accusing him of stealing it. He didn’t know I had it. I didn’t know I had it until I opened my handbag. When it’s late, we’re going to sneak around there and try to put it back without them noticing. Reverse burgling.’

  ‘Perverse gurgling,’ said Nathan, and he fell over to the side and started laughing silently.

  ‘He’s just done a balloon,’ explained Mary.

  I picked a pile of neatly folded washing off a wooden chair and sat down on it. ‘Was that the noise? I thought you were sex-strangling him.’

  Nathan sat back up and raised his eyebrows at her.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Do you want a balloon, Paul?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m a traditional man. Whisky and heroin. I’m going to sit downstairs and have a beer. You know it’s not Jonathan’s bedroom, don’t you? He’s not paying any rent yet.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Nathan doesn’t like the way he looks at him, though.’

  ‘Who does? Come down, will you?’ I asked. ‘I can’t cope with him tonight on my own.’

  ‘Maybe in a bit. We’re going to have a couple more balloons first.’

  ‘Fucking millennials,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Mary. ‘Go and listen to your Oasis and Blur records downstairs.’

  Though we were born either end of the same decade, there is a difference in kind rather than in degree between us and Mary’s age-appropriate male friends. We grow old, we grow old, while they, an inch or two taller than us, wear their trousers rolled much higher than we would feel comfortable doing. This superficial difference distracts from their superior ethics. Mary’s friends are more earnest, passionate socialists, vegans – what else could you be if you’d ever read a book or used your imagination?

  ‘So why was your day so shit?’ I called through to Jonathan from the kitchen.

  He shambled through into the room and looked at me. He had a tight white shirt on to set off the Christmas tan he’d acquired on whatever sex tour of South East Asia they’d embarked on before she threw him out. He’s a handsome man, with golden hair and a strong jaw he keeps clean-shaven.

  ‘Money,’ he said.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Not my money. Magazine money. There isn’t enough of it. Advertising’s down. Which is your fault.’

  ‘My fault!’

  ‘Editorial’s fault. Stev’n’s fault, really. The brand’s not as edgy as it used to be. We’re losing clients.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We were discussing again whether we should bin your book column and replace it with a legal highs column.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  He looked at me and I saw him make some calculations. ‘Yeah, I’m joking.’

  ‘You didn’t sound like you were joking.’

  ‘We’ll have to assess all the regular features, Paul, work out what’s working and what isn’t.’

  ‘So you’re not joking.’

  ‘Course I’m joking. What’s going on upstairs then?’

  ‘They’re inhaling nitrous oxide.’

  ‘Fucking millennials.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘I’m going to go and ask them for some.’

  ‘Yes, do. Nathan would love to see you.’

  He gave me a hungry grin and disappeared.

  *

  Two hours later we were all watching Question Time in the living room. Nigel Farage was shouting about small businesses spending half of their working week complying with EU regulations. Trade will continue with Europe whether or not we’re part of the EU.

  ‘Turn him off,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Turn him off,’ said Nathan.

  ‘No, I’m interested,’ said Mary. ‘I want to see how convincing he is.’

  ‘He’s not convincing at all,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Not to men like you, but other men exist.’

  ‘And they wouldn’t like you, Nathan,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘I don’t expect they’d like you either,’ said Mary.

  The crowd cheered, or half of it did.

  ‘Where did you two meet again?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘My band were supporting Mary’s,’ said Nathan.

  ‘What’s your band like?’ I asked.

  He looked at Mary. ‘Er…’

  ‘Sort of bouncy Steely Dan post-feminist pop rock,’ she said.

  ‘Post-feminist?’

  ‘Yeah, we do songs about not cheating on our girlfriends, imagining things from her perspective, that sort of thing,’ he said.

  ‘Ironically or in earnest?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of a joke, an antidote to all the clichéd rock bullshit. But it’s not just a joke: we don’t cheat on our girlfriends. I mean, I wouldn’t cheat on my girlfriend if I had one.’

  He turned to look at Mary.

  ‘How do you know you wouldn’t cheat on your girlfriend if you don’t have one?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I just think she’d be enough for me.’

  ‘How conventional,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Jonathan,’ said Mary. ‘Paul.’

  ‘I mean, you might not cheat on your girlfriend,’ I said, ‘but it might be a bit complacent to assume a monogamous happy ever after. Have neither of you read that book about how women are naturally far less monogamous than men? This myth that men have higher sex drives derives from the counter-fact that women are so quickly bored by just one partner that sex in a traditional one-to-one relationship becomes almost immediately a chore to them.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Wow,’ said Jonathan. ‘Did Monica write this book, Paul?’

  I ignored this remark and continued. ‘Women find chimps desirable in tests. Men don’t find chimps desirable, not in the main. We’re really boring like that – it’s no wonder women stop fancying us.’

  ‘And that’s what you think, Paul? That I desire chimps?’ said Mary.

  ‘I think you desire chimps,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘I don’t care what you think.’

  ‘It’s a hypothesis,’ I said. ‘Women are wilder, sexually, than men. Men are very conventional. I’ve no idea whether it’s accurate or not. You might be atypical. Of course no one’s saying you want to fuck chimps.’

  ‘I’m saying she wants to fuck chimps,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘See. He’s saying I want to fuck chimps,’ she said.

  ‘That’s called projection,’ I said. ‘He wants to fuck chimps so he can’t stop saying you want to fuck chimps.’

  ‘Do you think that’s it?’ said Jonathan. ‘Where do I find a chimp to fuck?’

  ‘I’ll lend you the book, Mary.’

  ‘I don’t want to read the book,’ said Mary.

  ‘All of this doesn’t really correspond with my observation of life, Paul,’ said Nathan.

  Jonathan turned to him and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Nathan, I thought like you when I was your age. But the things you believe when you’re young and in love, they’re romantic. Like, if you were going to be a real feminist, perhaps your songs should be more about how your girlfriend sleeps around all the time and you don’t mind, because you know it’s what she wants and needs – and deserves! – and you know you personally can’t satisfy her on your own.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Nathan.’

  ‘It’s quite a good idea for a song, though,’ said Nathan.

  ‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘Don’t listen to Jonathan. He doesn’t know anything about love.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Fuck you. And don’t fucking joke about Monica, all right? No wonder your wife threw you out.’

  ‘Don’t take out your failures on me,’ said Jonathan, calmly, looking away from me. Mary
was looking at me with an expression that wasn’t quite pity, or without tenderness.

  ‘I’m going to go and get some beers,’ I said. I didn’t want any beers but I headed out down the fire escape and bought some from the corner shop. When I came back in I didn’t open one but just walked straight up to my room and lay on my bed.

  I woke up alone. From the window came the rolling traffic of Kingsland Road, a car horn, a muffled shout. It was half one in the morning. There might have been somewhere still open where I could have gone to have a conversation with a stranger, to buy a beer and perhaps get offered a bit of something and an invite to carry on drinking back at someone else’s, the opportunity to wake up next to whoever this was. This had once felt like research, like a cartography project, a search for something that I would only recognise when I saw it. I wanted to be in constant motion, constant communication, until I received my vision. Or perhaps I just meant person. Somewhere close by there was someone I would love even more than Monica.

  I went downstairs and filled a pint glass full of water. The living-room door was shut and the lights were off. Back upstairs, I noticed Mary’s door was still open. I looked through to where her bed was lit by a street light shining through a crack in the curtain. She wasn’t there. I walked in and stood there for a second, looking at the shapes around me and smelling the smell that was her in this house: fabric softener, perfume, damp and exhausts. Things are all right, I told myself. I have books on the shelves, food in the fridge, a roof over my head and clothes to wear, and in Mary’s room there were those memories I avoided, Monica crying on a mattress, my hand on her stomach, my face against her hair doing my best to calm her down. Dark nights when she filled the room with her heat, when I felt mad and afraid of her, afraid she would go, afraid she would stay, afraid there was no going back.

  ‌

  ‌Four

  Andrew Lancaster came into the shop the other day. By now I had googled him extensively. I looked hard at his face on book flaps, trying to work out which photo was the most honest, the most recent, which was the oldest man and how much older he might have become since the photo was taken. I watched videos of him calling out audience members at book festivals: ‘Stand up and call me a racist! Have the courage and decency to call me a racist, if you think you can justify it!’; that kind of thing. One of his recurring targets in recent interviews was ‘the infantilised metropolitan Left’ who saw everything in terms of good and evil, and were far too confident of their own virtue. He denied vehemently that he was just an ageing man getting comfy. ‘Have I travelled to the right? No. Have many of the Left travelled towards the stupid, away from the critical, away from nuance and the thorny and the difficult? Certainly.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were so interested in politics and history,’ said Helen, as I put through a pile of books for me on my discount, which included an old book by Lancaster in which he justified the invasion of Iraq. ‘I hope this new political consciousness isn’t a sign that you’re going to go alt-right on us.’

  I resented this comment. And so the next day I didn’t use my staff discount to purchase Lancaster’s quick history of the Russian Revolution, but simply transferred it from the shelves to my bag.

  And the next day, there he was, in a beige detective’s trench coat, as if he had got wind of the crime and arrived to investigate. I watched him dart a glance towards the history section, where a gap remained that would not be filled automatically, since no record of the book’s sale existed. I noticed him notice and tried not to give myself away by smiling too hard.

  Frustratingly, he looked younger if anything IRL than in the photos. He was a broad-shouldered man, shorter than me, but then I am six foot two; he might have been six foot himself, and he walked tall, pushing his shoulders back and rolling them as he browsed the fiction table, as though he was working out the knots in his back from a hard morning’s word-processing. I had already picked up that he was a good-looking man from my trawl through his headshots. A touch of the dandy too – a pink shirt and suede boots. Light-brown hair that might have been dyed, I suppose, but looked natural, thick enough to be swept back in a floppy parting. There was a sighing brutality to him; he held up a book and seemed to look through it into some disgraceful scene from his past; he grimaced and I thought he might tear the thing in two; but he placed it back on the pile and glanced around the shop, as though he was looking for someone.

  I was distracted from him then by a customer who couldn’t find the philosophy section downstairs. When I came back up Andrew was embracing his daughter. I knew it was his daughter, illogically, because she looked a little like Emily, with the same straight dark hair and pale cheeks. She was so blemishless that you could have described her as plain, not that there was anything unattractive about her face; it was fresh out of the box, unmarked. She may have had the same blue eyes as he did, I don’t know, because I was only concentrating on how she put her hands on his shoulders and reached up to kiss his cheek, like well-bred girls did to Daddy to thank him for what his money did for them. I looked at her quite arrogantly, I suppose, confident of my ability to see the transparency of things, as though the soul was something that could be peered at through a closed window, like a puppy in a back seat waiting for its owner to come back.

  *

  Helen came to relieve me for my lunch break. I was reluctant to stop observing Andrew and daughter, so I took my time leaving until Andrew went to pay for a book by the till. While he was doing that I left the shop through the front door, stopping to smile at his daughter, who was flicking through the magazine section. Out on the street I crossed the road and leaned against a shop front, lighting a cigarette I didn’t want. After a couple of minutes they came out together. They didn’t spot me. I was typical, a poseur, an extra, who started to follow them as they walked together down the road. Andrew leaned down to say something right by her ear and she moved her head so it brushed against his chin, and when she did this he put his hand on the back of her head and ran it down between her shoulders towards her waist.

  Incest! I thought, and then worried I had been too harsh, for the daughters of the intelligentsia raised in London are so European they may as well be French and they grow up used to kissing their parents, kissing strangers, dealing with propositions from adults on buses. Andrew turned around and scanned the street, looking past me, before he rested his hand on her shoulder for a second, put it back by his side, and carried on walking down the road. It was possible, I realised then, that they were not father and daughter.

  When they reached the Hoxton Hotel, she held his arm and pointed towards the door. He shrugged, and they went in. I waited a minute, then followed.

  *

  Inside I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. They had taken a booth at the quiet end of the long bar room, sitting side by side and facing me. She pulled out a laptop and opened it, but they only looked at each other and after five minutes she pushed the lid shut. From my stool at the bar I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but it meant I could stare in their direction without it seeming like I was singling them out. The way they talked seemed intimate to me, weary, as though they’d exhausted all their best anecdotes already. Did I detect accurately that he was managing her in some way, meeting her more to prove that he cared for her than for the pleasure of her company? A situation which could just as easily have applied to daughter as to lover. As a lecturer he would have to forge close professional relationships with young people every year. Of course these relationships would mean more to the students than they did to him. Of course they would want as much as they could get from him. If they were ambitious they would have to. There was something sorrowful in his face. Whoever she was, he seemed to care for her and be pained by her presence. She was inconvenient. She had a woman-sized body: all its movement, all its weight. He had to care so that she didn’t destroy him. I was running away with my own fictions at the bar.

  Perhaps I had been staring too intently in their direction;
I realised Andrew Lancaster was returning my interest. I looked down at my book; prompted by Helen’s comment, I was reading a biography of George Eliot to find out if there were really any ways in which I resembled her, and so far it was not at all obvious. When I looked up again he was striding towards me. I looked down at my book again as he leaned into the bar next to me.

  ‘Good book?’ he asked.

  I showed him the cover.

  ‘Ah, the little moralistic female, as Nietzsche called her – stupidly, in that instance, of course. What excellent taste you have… I knew you weren’t stupid, just by looking at you. Do I know you from somewhere? I thought I saw you looking quite intensely at me before. I haven’t annoyed you? Given you a bad mark? My memory isn’t what it was.’

  ‘No, no. I recognised you, that’s all. I’ve read your short history of the Russian Revolution. And your book about how the Left betrayed its principles.’

  ‘Ah, I see – well, thank you. Or is it that book that’s annoyed you? Everyone younger than me hates that book.’

  ‘I’m not annoyed. Honestly.’

  ‘I must be paranoid. I was worried I’d wronged you somehow. Or that you knew my companion and she’d wronged you instead.’

  ‘No, sorry, I was just looking over. I was wondering if she was your daughter, actually.’

  ‘God, no – what makes you say that?’

  ‘Oh, I thought I caught a resemblance.’

  We both turned and stared at her. She looked quizzical and turned away from our scrutiny.

  ‘She’s not my daughter, but you’re accurate in one sense: it’s a relationship of formal obligation. I’m her PhD supervisor. What are you having?’

  He got me a pint, himself a half and a bowl of nuts, and then he shook my hand and wished me luck. When he returned to the booth he sat opposite her this time, so I could only see her face. His exchange with me seemed to have annoyed her. She was frowning and kept looking up at me, and I was forced to become a better spy, to pay less attention to them. I caught him shaking his head at her at one point. She looked at him incredulously and then seemed to change character completely. She pulled her laptop back in front of her, a barrier between them, and looked down at the screen every time she spoke to him. I couldn’t see his face to ascertain what his reaction was. Eventually, she stopped asking him questions and stayed quiet for a while, studying the surface of the table. This lasted for a few more minutes until he stood up. She got up too, and they made their way back through the bar together, both smiling at me when I glanced up at them. I had half of my pint left so couldn’t leap up and follow them without being obvious. Nevertheless, I downed it quickly and looked to see if they walked past the window back in the direction they’d come from. When they didn’t, I hopped down from my stool and headed out. I couldn’t see them in any direction. I looked back into the reception for the hotel and wandered over to the receptionist.