Theft

by Luke Brown

‘I thought so too.’

  ‘Well, I did too. I think we were wrong.’

  I made us both a cup of tea and added one sugar to each, an emergency measure. Nathan had never made a move, she told me. They would share a bed sometimes and she could feel how he wanted her, and how much she liked knowing that, and how she would have responded if he’d touched her, but she wasn’t in a hurry for him to touch her. ‘I wasn’t totally sure I wanted him until I realised I couldn’t have him. I thought we could take things easy until something happened. I wanted to be free for a bit longer.’

  We had forgotten that freedom was more important as a means than an end. Sophie didn’t call but during the three hours I stayed up talking to Mary I tried not to think about her, only suffering the occasional juddering vision of what might be happening. I was too embarrassed to tell Mary about the invitation I had turned down.

  ‘I saw Jonathan with his wife earlier,’ she said, and then she told me what I had suspected; that she had slept with Jonathan on the night he was thrown out of the Serpentine party for forcibly kissing his wife’s new boyfriend, and that Mary had spent some time before and after imagining what it might be like to be his girlfriend.

  ‘So they’re definitely back on?’ she asked me.

  ‘Looks like it. He’s not been back here for days now.’

  I made us some more tea and she played me some of the new music she was promoting for her record label. We lay side by side on the sofa, her facing away from me. I had my head in her hair and my arms round her.

  ‘Are you sad about selling your mum’s house?’ she asked me at one point.

  ‘Desperately,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what you have to do though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was she like, your mum?’

  ‘She was nice. What about yours?’

  ‘Stop deflecting me. You never talk about her. What was she like?’

  ‘I don’t know how to start. She was decent and self-sacrificing. That’s not interesting, is it? If she was uptight it was only about the unimportant things. The little worries. She was open-minded. Thought for herself. Didn’t perform the expected emotions. Forgiving. Anti-establishment. When I was fifteen and on study leave for my GCSEs we all went round to a mate’s house for a party while his parents were at work, and I put on one of his dad’s suits to go to the off-licence and buy booze for us all. You know, seventeen cans of Stella, five cans of cider, three bottles of Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty kiwi flavour – a standard office party. The police picked me up on the way back and I got suspended. The policeman came over that night to see Mum. I don’t know where my dad was. The policeman started to lecture me. “You know what you’ve done,” he said. “You’ve destroyed the trust between you and your mother.” “No, he hasn’t,” Mum said. “Let’s keep things in perspective.” She was loyal to me and Amy. He’d brought the carrier bags of booze over with him. “Would you like me to destroy these?” he asked. “ No,” she said. “We’ll do that for you.” The look on his face. You don’t realise what it’s like to have someone who’s always on your side until you don’t any more…’

  I spoke about her for a while and then Mary told me about her friend who had died in the cycle accident. She showed me Instagram photos of them riding mopeds around a Greek island, and I pretended I hadn’t already looked at them. I was touched by the way they publicly adored each other. Mary’s last post on Facebook was the funeral arrangements for her friend, in a church in a village in Norfolk.

  ‘I lied about my friend dying,’ I said to her. ‘When we first met. I didn’t have a friend who died.’

  Her head was on my shoulder and I was stroking her hair. She looked up at me, confused. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  We must have fallen asleep then. I woke up in the night with my arms around Mary and didn’t know who she was at first. Then I woke up in the morning and she was gone.

  ‌

  ‌Nineteen

  We talk about my mother. We talk about my father. The tissue box stays unused. I know I’m being a poor sport here.

  ‘How would people describe you, do you think?’ you ask.

  ‘It depends which people,’ I say.

  ‘Colleagues, friends, family.’

  ‘They’d… I’d hope they’d say I was kind, sympathetic, honest.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because you seem to relish telling me about your slippery behaviour with Emily and Andrew.’

  ‘I don’t relish it at all. Do I? Maybe I’ve read too many old novels.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The duplicitous hero, rising from the bottom to the top. It’s a consoling fantasy.’

  ‘But you don’t really aspire to that, do you? To being a liar who tricks people to get on?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘In an earlier session you said you hate good people, good guys.’

  ‘See: progress! You’re curing me. I’ll be sending out tweets about important issues soon.’

  ‘It’s good to joke but do you believe in anything enough to do that?’

  ‘To tweet? Do I believe in anything enough to tweet about it?’

  ‘Do you believe in anything enough to make a statement about it?’

  ‘I believe… people should be kind— Jesus, I sound like a tweet.’

  ‘You don’t believe people should be kind?’

  ‘Of course! Of fucking course! What is the likelihood of it? We’d have to give up too much. The people tweeting about kindness would have to give up more than anyone. It’s utterly meaningless. It should be hard to state what you believe in, shouldn’t it? That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? To try to do it truthfully?’

  ‘So let’s try!’ you say, slapping your hands on the desk. ‘Let’s keep on trying.’

  *

  On my penultimate shift I waited for Emily on a park bench. The sun had gone in as I sat down and the afternoon was turning gloomy. I saw her enter the square on the north side and come towards me wearing a trench coat. I thought of a spy handling her source and stood up to meet her as the rain began to come down. She put up an umbrella.

  ‘It’s been ages,’ I said.

  We didn’t hug.

  ‘I know. Come on. Come under here. Let’s get inside.’

  We went to the pub opposite the museum where the tourists were consuming their all-season meat-and-gravy dinners. I got her a lime soda and myself a pint.

  ‘I was glad you texted,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure whether we might have decided to drift away. I had quite a fractious conversation with Andrew.’

  ‘I know. I thought about ringing you when he told me.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘He worried he was a bit heavy-handed and pissed you off. He said he was surprised by how much you seemed to hate him.’

  ‘That’s a bit melodramatic. I don’t hate him. I just objected to being lectured to like I was one of his fucking servants.’

  ‘He doesn’t actually have any servants, you know. Unless you count me.’

  ‘You’re not his servant.’

  ‘I am not his fucking servant. I’m glad we agree.’

  I looked up and across the pub but when I found nothing to distract me I turned back to her. ‘He accused me of — I don’t know what he accused me of. Using his daughter as part of some baroque plan to steal his fiancée.’

  She smiled. ‘Really? How funny.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It’s understandable that he’s protective of Sophie. She has a habit of doing stupid things.’

  ‘Which I’m one of. Though isn’t he just keen to keep the riff-raff away from her?’

  ‘You’re imagining that. You’re quite good enough for her.’

  ‘For her?’

  ‘Well.’ She looked out of the window. ‘She seems to have developed into a Marxist sex columnist. What’s going
on there? That recent piece was quite something.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it. I’ve tried to keep away from the internet recently.’

  I had deleted all my social media accounts to avoid accidentally seeing what Sophie had been up to, and to make me feel less antagonistic with the culture, less at risk of turning right-wing out of contrariness. I could change my mind within thirty days, but I was very close to this now, and in a day or two I might lose forever the ability to broadcast pictures of haircuts with witty captions to my seven thousand followers, which would be a problem if I hadn’t vowed to never talk to Stev’n again.

  ‘Her life is quite an adventure if any of it’s true,’ she said.

  ‘Really? Am I in there?’

  ‘I don’t know, Paul. Are you in there?’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t say. I’m too shy.’

  ‘I bet you’re not.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, read the column for yourself.’

  She had me worried now and I reached for my phone.

  ‘Oh, no. Look when I’m gone. Please. I don’t want to know if it’s true.’

  I looked back down at my phone and put it away. ‘Is Andrew actually pissed off about me and Sophie? Or was it that I provided you with a place to hide away from him for so long?’

  ‘After you’d accused him of going to a hotel with his student.’

  ‘A hotel bar.’

  ‘You didn’t say “hotel bar” at first. You said “hotel”.’

  ‘Did I? So you think I was stirring things up too?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe I was, unintentionally on purpose.’

  ‘Or on purpose, pretending to be unintentionally on purpose.’

  ‘Does he know you’re meeting with me now?’

  ‘He does. He’s fine with it.’

  ‘Is he?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘And so why did you stay there so long?’ I asked.

  She looked down and spoke to the table. ‘I was working. I got a lot done.’ Then she met my eyes. ‘And I did wonder what it would be like to be away from him. I wanted to remember what it was like to be on my own.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Strange. Though that might have been the particular circumstances. But thank you for letting me stay there. Here, I’ve got the keys for you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I wish you could go back there again.’

  She grinned. ‘Well. I’m not sure I’m in such a big hurry to go back.’

  ‘Did you see our friends from the pub again?’

  ‘No. I stayed right away.’

  ‘Did you go to the discount retail park?’

  ‘Eventually, actually, I did,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry to hear that. I’ll miss the place though. The town, not the retail park. Some nice things happened there as well as the awful ones.’

  ‘Um, yeah.’ She folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘Amy and I’ll have to go back soon to start to pack the place up.’

  ‘Have you got a new place sorted?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s too boring to talk about. Something in the pipeline. Literally in the pipeline. A pied-à-terre in the sewers.’

  ‘Underground is the new above ground,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly. Perpetual darkness is the new sunlight.’

  She unfolded her arms and spread her fingers across the table and looked at them.

  ‘Do you still want me as a witness at the wedding?’ I asked. ‘The man who wants to split you up?’

  ‘You don’t want to, do you?’

  I looked at her and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Not as a witness,’ she said. ‘That was Andrew being silly. But you’re still welcome. Do you want to come?’

  ‘Andrew wants me to come?’

  ‘Yes. If we’re going to be friends.’

  ‘If? I’d like to be.’

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d… Oh, let’s not be too dull.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could come with Sophie. She’s decided her diary permits her attendance.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Aren’t you…?’

  ‘We were never really…’

  ‘Really what?’

  ‘Serious.’ This sounded untrue, suddenly.

  ‘Are you ever serious?’

  I reached over and put my hands over hers. ‘Of course I’m serious.’ The couple eating pie and chips at the next table looked up at us. I let go of her hands and focused on her face, though I wanted to turn away from what she was seeing about me.

  ‘It would be easier sometimes to take you seriously if you said what you mean and stopped joking about everything. You’re difficult to work out.’

  ‘Well, how about this? I don’t like your fiancé. Don’t marry him.’

  Emily put her hands under the table. ‘I’m going to marry him.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘Oh, Paul…’

  ‘So let’s not be serious.’

  She nodded, squinting at me as if what she was seeing wasn’t in focus.

  ‘Let’s be frivolous. I have not taken my decision to be frivolous without some serious fucking thought involved.’

  ‘OK.’ She breathed out. ‘We need another drink. I need a proper one.’

  ‘Yes. Me too.’

  *

  She left her phone on the table while she was at the bar and it buzzed. Richard, said the screen.

  When she returned and read her message, she held her phone upright, so I couldn’t see the screen, and she began to smile in the unhindered way that had once given me hope.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Just an old mate.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘You sound a bit like my jealous fiancé.’

  I held my hands up in surrender.

  ‘I need to use the toilet,’ she said. And she took her phone with her.

  But forty-five minutes later, when she went to the toilet again, she left the phone in her bag, at the top where I could see it. I have an eye for a certain detail. She unlocked her phone by drawing a Z across the screen.

  I drew the Z and held the phone under the table. Today’s exchange went:

  I’m going to be in London on Wednesday next week.

  On your own?

  Yes. Are you free?

  I can be, in the afternoon, early evening.

  Great. I’ve missed you. Just let me know where you want me.

  I scrolled up further, looking at the dates and stopping when I saw the following exchange in the week after I’d left her in the north.

  Can I come and see you?

  I’m working.

  That wasn’t a no. Say no.

  No.

  No meaning no, or no, you won’t say no?

  Emily?

  I was deliberating. No: I won’t say no.

  I’ll get into Blackpool North tomorrow arriving at 1503.

  OK. I’ll see you there.

  Great. XXX

  Two days later.

  I can smell you on me. I can breathe you in. I had such a good time.

  Yuck. I had a good time too though.

  I can remember everything. It’s like your skin is still pressed against mine.

  What happened to the sardonic Yorkshireman I fell in love with? Who is this heavy breather who has stolen his phone?

  In love?

  Figure of speech. Fell into bed with.

  I should leave her. I love you. Tell me to leave her.

  We’ve done this before. Don’t leave her. That was enough. That was perfect. Listen to yourself. You’re in some kind of mania.

  You’re cold.

  I’m not replying any more.

  I’m sorry. You’re not cold.

  Emily?

  Emily?

  Come on, Emily.

  There was more. I took three screenshots quickly and opened up her email app, attaching them and
sending them to myself. When I looked up there was no sign of Emily but the barmaid was staring at me. I smiled at her then deleted the email I had just sent from Emily’s sent items, followed by the screenshots from her gallery, and I got the phone into her bag just as she came back up the stairs.

  My phone buzzed as she sat down.

  ‘You look guilty,’ she said. ‘Is that Sophie? You haven’t read her column, have you?’

  ‘I haven’t. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  When we got up to leave the barmaid watched me all the way to the door.*

  THREE IS AN ODD NUMBER

  Sophie Lancaster

  How many of you out there have had a threesome? No, I don’t really want to know. OK: I’m not uninterested. What I really want to know (and forgive me that I’m talking in this case to women who have sex with men) is with whom you have had your threesomes. No, not their names! I mean: was it with a man and a woman, or with two men?

  I was out with the current squeeze at a music festival the other weekend. Let’s call him Peter. The rock of cocaine on which Jesus built his church. He was not rock-like at all that day. We lost each other on the way in after Peter attracted the attention of Shelley, an English springer spaniel currently employed by the London Met. It is perilous to work for a style magazine if you don’t believe in washing denim. As a result of the ensuing strip search, we spent much of the festival apart, and when we found each other we were both with new friends, who happened to be very tall members of the opposite sex.

  Released without charge, somehow, Peter didn’t seem angry when he found me in the arms of his temporary replacement. Our tall people took something of a shine to each other, so everything felt serendipitous and Midsummer Night’s Dreamy. Peter and I are generous enough to allow each other the right to be a bit selfish, to enjoy a little freedom. But are we equally generous, equally selfish, equally free?

  At an afterparty at Peter’s boss’s house, my beau found himself helping the tall woman’s friend be sick into a bin bag for a long time. Very compassionate of him, but I wasn’t needed, or wanted, and nor was he, really, as the tall woman was also helping out.

  Which left the tall man unattended again, and we got talking, sitting on the bed of the spare room, and etc., with the bedroom door shut, until we were interrupted by Peter looking for me. He left in a hurry, knowing I’d chase him, and of course I did.