Theft

by Luke Brown

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Do you know if Andrew Lancaster has checked in yet?’

  He looked down at his screen. ‘What’s your relationship to him?’

  ‘I’m just meeting him for a drink and he’s late.’

  He looked again. ‘No one of that name has checked in,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, and left.

  ‌

  ‌Five

  Carl and I had grown up at different ends of the same street. The houses were a bit smaller at his end. Instead of gardens they had yards with back gates through to the alley where we played football together. I would call for him every morning, where I’d stand in the hall while his mum and he tried to dress his younger sister Leia and two little brothers before we shepherded them along the road to school. Before Carl’s dad lost the fingers on his right hand he would have been away working on a rig, or still in bed if he was home. Sometimes he would take us sea-fishing when the tide was up, showing us how to whip the line out into the churning waves while the wind drilled into our ears. We preferred playing Subbuteo on my kitchen table but it was hard to tell Carl’s dad that. Carl would often knock on my door. It was quieter in our house – if my parents weren’t fighting. When we got older we didn’t want quiet. Carl’s parents didn’t find anything strange about us drinking at fifteen and so we began our nights in the living room with his mum, slurping cans, shouting at soap operas, singing along to Abba and Queen with her if there was nothing on TV, pestering Leia to bring her friends out to the beach with her later.

  Now Carl was dead, Leia wrote in a Facebook post, from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

  This analysis began to be disputed.

  What drugs? asked Tracey.

  Accidental? wrote Lee.

  And then, from Wozza, who had once held me upside down to shake the change from my school trousers: I’m not being funny but everyone knows that family likes their smack.

  *

  I hadn’t gone for a drink with Carl for years now, over a decade. He’d worked in the big supermarket that Mum went to every day. Perhaps I felt guilty that he saw my mother more than I did.

  ‘Some of us have more ambition, you know, Mum?’ I said once, when she’d told me again how polite and friendly he always was.

  ‘More ambition than to be polite?’ she asked. ‘Grow up, Paul.’

  I’d run into him there, wearing his bright green shirt, and we’d talk for a minute or two, as he looked around as if he were about to be told off for skiving, or was looking for a good excuse to leave, even though, as Mum had told me several times, he was an assistant manager by then.

  ‘What’s it like down there now?’ he’d ask.

  Carl had visited me just once in London, at the end of my first year. We went to a house party in Deptford and when we were scoring he asked for five Es, so he could take some home with him. I left him talking to a girl on the sofa, came back and heard him talking about being the manager of the fish-processing factory where he worked, how the money was really good, how they might be sending him to work in the head office in New York. I handed him a beer without contradicting him. The woman got up and left the room and didn’t come back. Half an hour later Carl was staggering from room to room, white-faced and gurning. I dragged him out. Propped him up as we walked back to get the train into town. He was apologising. He’d taken all his drugs. His comedown was going to be awful. He could barely respond to a question the next day. He had a specific ticket booked for the day after but said he had to go home early. Said he’d be all right on the train, hide from the conductor, feign ignorance. I let him go, didn’t argue hard that he should stay. The next evening I forced myself to call him, to reassure him that the visit had not been a disaster. He told me that the train conductor threw him off in Milton Keynes when he couldn’t afford to buy himself a new ticket. There he went to the pub where he was befriended by a beautiful woman who then took him back to her house for a party with her twin sister, with whom he had a epic threesome. When they woke up he was able to get on the train for which he had a valid ticket. Great, I’d said. That’s brilliant. I’m glad everything worked out for you.

  What was London like now? he’d ask, in the supermarket. I’d say, oh, busy, expensive, dirty. It didn’t occur to me to try to describe the place accurately to him, how it had changed me, how I had loved being changed, how I knew there might come a point when I would not be able to afford to live here but could not imagine how to live back there. The supermarket we were standing in sometimes felt like the only place left in the town with any bustle to it. Each time I came home another pub was boarded up, another shop on the high street. They had recently found a huge cannabis farm above the old Woolworths, with thirty million pounds’ worth of plants maintained by two Vietnamese slaves who had never set foot outside in the town, who had never even known for sure if they were in England. I didn’t want to talk about my life as if I were bragging to him, even this fabulous life I lived in my crumbling flat on one of London’s most polluted roads. ‘Sorry. Better get off.’ ‘Sorry. Say hello to your mum.’ ‘Yeah. Say hello to yours too. Ta-ra.’

  *

  Don’t stick your nose in when you don’t know shit! wrote Leia. Carl was never into that. Me? That was TEN fucking years ago! We’re fucking GRIEVING here you prick.

  I am a real voyeur of this type of conflict, which flares up all the time between Facebook friends from my old school. The cars they have failed to protect adequately. The construction machinery they haven’t locked up ‘when you know what pikey scum are like’. The husbands who have left their wives because their wives drink and eat too much and have got ugly, aren’t raising their kids proper. These things were pointed out. It looked malicious but it wasn’t just cruelty. We wanted disaster to be our own fault. To believe that catastrophe was preventable. A matter of right choices enforced with vigilant criticism. You had to be cruel to be kind. The alternative was bleaker.

  Carl’s dad Mike lost three fingers from his right hand after catching them in a chain that wasn’t supposed to be moving. ‘You can barely hear each other out there,’ he told me and Carl. ‘The twat who turned it on said he’d shouted to me. I don’t think he did, but it’s fucking windy out there and the noise of the machines… You two need to pay attention at school, right?’ By the time the helicopter dropped him on the mainland it was too late. His colleagues had had to get straight back to work. They’d seen similar injuries before.

  Mike must have been about my age now when he had his accident. I suppose he got compensation. He’d walk the little ones to school when we went to high school, smoking Superkings, singing songs, the Bee Gees, Phil Collins; we’d watch him from the bus stop. Something restless about his good humour, something I found awful.

  *

  Amy had deleted her Facebook account after our last argument. I wondered if she knew about Carl’s death; she was in Leia’s year at school and they’d kept in better touch than I had with Carl.

  I was glad to have this excuse to find Amy, something to say if she didn’t want to speak to me, to offer her beyond an apology, a subject to discuss that wasn’t our own disagreements; a tragedy, a dead body. Her disappearance from Facebook was nothing unusual: Amy’s always taking her profile down and putting it back up again, much busier than me in trying to fix her life through industry and decisive measures. She takes her profile offline when she disgusts herself with the time she wastes looking at pictures of ex-boyfriends plummeting into blue lagoons, surveying natural landscapes from on high, wanderers exploring Eastern temples with strong-jawed girls, the type you saw in Chelsea. We both have adventuring conquistadorial ambitions based on appealing to our betters – something we have only ever been good at realising briefly. Amy takes the failure of these liaisons more politically than me. ‘This country is still like a fucking Jane Austen novel. It’s not just that money marries money, but that these people think that this is the moral place for the story to end.’ I didn’t make the mistake of
pointing out that this is only really an accurate description of Emma. It’s unwise to quibble with Amy when she is regretting all those minutes she has wasted watching ex-lovers brag about their happiness when she could have been making something or reading a book or cleaning the flat or writing an application to the council for a lease on some disused public toilets that would make the perfect waffle café – all those hours viewing babies with Edwardian names, looking at weddings held in the homes of fading aristocrats, reading discussions in which friends referred to themselves in the third person as Mummy. Oh, she knew she was becoming bitter and that mummies needed to buy into the role they found themselves in, but when she had a child – and now she really meant if, she had to be realistic given her predicament, a single woman in a city that pitied single women in their thirties with the same abstract compassion with which they pitied the animals they ate on their Tinder dates, certified to have been treated kindly right up to the moment they were executed – if she had a child, she would not surrender her subjectivity to the omniscient god of a wipe-clean picture book about an elephant’s trip to an art museum. She would not be so guileless in posting her passive aggression towards the women who were still photographing cocktails on a regular basis, wearing bikinis under turquoise skies, proselytising for the single life, the childless life, heroic women who neglected to take selfies of themselves making the morning commute the wrong way round in smudged make-up and heels but should really have been proud to, and would have been if the world didn’t know men for what they were, which was big fucking pervert babies. One huge benefit of closing her Facebook profile was the way it stopped Tinder from working, and denied her addiction to shopping for men, for the worst men in the world, of whom there must have been hundreds of thousands still left for her to meet in this ugly safari of a city.

  *

  After work I jumped on my bike and headed over to see if I could find her at home. I got out of my saddle to pump my way over an overpass on to the Old Kent Road, a street like a Benson & Hedges lit from the end of a Lambert & Butler lit from a burning tub of paint – as English as it gets, with the megastores full of white goods, and the African churches with great names: Behold He Cometh!, the Everlasting Arms Ministry. A white van with a Millwall FC sticker on the back shaved my arm by a couple of centimetres and I swore at the driver as I overtook him a minute later when the traffic had stopped again. ‘Get out of the fucking road, you mug,’ he shouted, but I was way ahead of him. A bus blew a plume of carcinogens into my face. I held my breath and turned right to Peckham.

  In the ten years I’ve been working in the shop Amy has had so many jobs and engaged in so many money-making schemes it’s hard to keep count. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, having arrived in London three years after I did, after she spent an extra year at home doing an art foundation. I had suggested to her that from my own experience it might be more fun to do a degree in a regional city, where rent was less than half the price, where university campuses were leafy, tranquil spaces set away from huge traffic islands and exhaust-blackened concrete. She paid no attention, thinking as she always does, perhaps correctly, that I was patronising her.

  She had less fun on her degree than on her foundation; the teachers discouraged her from painting; she thought the theory animating many of her fellow students was bullshit. It was easy to anatomise the problems of capitalism when you had money; the first practical thing she needed to do was get some, so she learned how to use design software and made flyers for other students’ club nights, then she put on club nights with her friends in Peckham and New Cross. She printed T-shirts and sweaters to sell on stalls. She became interested in furniture design – wished she had done a more practical degree. She argued with her tutors, took rejection hard and dropped courses in retaliation. By the time she had her degree she had given up on the art world; it was fraudulent and childish, ‘rich people pretending to be revolutionary’.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not characterising it in the way that’s easiest to allow you to give up on it?’ I asked – and we had to avoid each other for a month or two after that argument.

  Amy’s flat – the one she lives in herself – is on a small street of Victorian terraces separated by floor into flats and rented (or sold off) by the council. I tried her doorbell: no answer, but Clive came to the window and peered at me.

  ‘Hey, Clive – it’s Paul, remember?’

  Clive is retired and lives as a council tenant in the flat underneath Amy’s. I had once answered the door to him when Amy was having a party. We were being quite civilised, in our opinion, but he was worried that the number of people we had in the living room was going to make the ceiling collapse. When Clive complained we moved everyone out to the pub. I hoped he remembered me fondly.

  ‘Paul? Yeah. I remember. Not so old I forget a face yet.’

  ‘Have you seen Amy?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me where she is. She’s got people staying upstairs again. Airbnb, what have you. She knows she’s not allowed to do that. Council regulation. I don’t know who these people are I see coming in through the front door. I get nervous. And they loud too. I understand if girl needs money. I understand that! But can you tell her to tell them girls to nah do so much clomping on the damn floor. Sounds like they stabling horses up there.’

  ‘I’ll tell her. Haven’t you seen her for a while?’

  ‘I don’t know. Two months ago, more?’

  ‘Was she all right then?’ I asked, thinking about what kind of a brother it was who allowed his sister to go missing for two whole months.

  ‘I don’t know. I asked her if she’d had a nice Christmas. She just shook her head. “I know that feeling,” I said to her. I never seen her again. She in trouble?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘What about her job?’

  ‘She doesn’t work there any more. They won’t tell me any more than that.’

  ‘Sounds like she ran away. Well, she’s still taking those bookings.’ He pointed down to a little key safe at the foot of the door. ‘Look at this thing! I’ve a good mind to take a hammer to it. You need to find her and get her to talk to those upstairs. Or I’ll have to call the council.’

  ‘I’ll find her,’ I told him. ‘I will.’

  ‌

  ‌Six

  The connecting train was cancelled and I got stuck in Preston, the nearest city to home, though it only won its city status in the years after I had moved to London. It was an exotic, cultured place to me as a teenager. There was a university a few of my older friends commuted to. The novelty of seeing Asians in large numbers. A place to watch bands in the union. The nearest bookshop. Dickens called the place Coketown. A rainy, Catholic cotton town – which now always made me melancholic, though that was not its fault but mine, my mood always coloured by the fact of travelling towards or away from my town.

  While I waited for the next train I wrote an email to Emily to ask if she would like to meet up when I got back to London.

  *

  Outside the wooden door I listened to the familiar rhythms of the prayers. The wind was up and the sky was washed-out cotton in all directions, so much of it, broken only by the church spire.

  Opposite was the church hall, my classroom for a year in primary school, where I accomplished my greatest ever achievement, the completion of the Italia 90 sticker book. And here, inside the church, through the door I opened carefully, was the cold stone basin for the holy water. In the name of the father. The first third of the church was filled up; I couldn’t see past to the family on the front bench. And of the son. Who probably hadn’t been inside the building for twenty years, but had been stamped with the sacraments same as me. He lay in a dark-wood coffin under Christ on the cross in his golden robes. And the holy spirit. The incense from the censer the Nigerian priest was swinging on his punishment posting. The lemon wood polish. The stained-glass Peter and Andrew, the fishers of men. I put my knee to the floor. Amen.

  None of the congregati
on noticed me come in, and I took a seat at the back, looking around to see if I could spot any old school friends, wondering what the girls I had fantasised about in school Masses now looked like. I could only see the back of people’s heads.

  When the congregation stood to leave, I stood on my tiptoes, and there she was, her hand on Leia’s shoulder. Thank God. A miracle. It was Amy.

  *

  The wake was in the Cons club down the road. We began the walk in a group but as the conversation went on Amy’s friends strode ahead.

  ‘Seriously, where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘Thailand. We’ve just established that. I told you.’

  It had only been two months since I last saw her, but there was something different about her. It wasn’t the tan, too natural-looking to fit in with the other tans in the room, but something in the way she stood up, in the measure of her words, and I feared this was a new distance between us – a declared dislike – which we would struggle to cross.