Theft

by Luke Brown

  *

  The cake was eaten, even the marzipan hair straighteners. Twenty-four bottles of Prosecco had been poured. Two hundred and eighty-eight units of alcohol, I told people, proud of my long multiplication. Sophie was going to let her dad buy her dinner and Emily had opted out. The gang were dragging me towards a bar with a dance floor on Hanway Street.

  ‘Coming?’ I asked Emily.

  ‘Tempting, but I should get back. I’ve drunk enough already.’

  ‘Come on. You’re getting married next weekend. Call this your hen do.’

  ‘I’ve been to Blackpool already.’

  ‘You can’t have a hen do on your own. Except, I suppose…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I haven’t danced in about five years.’

  ‘Well, that’s far too long, obviously. You have to come. I insist.’

  She relented and ten of us staggered down the road, passing round the few bottles of Prosecco we had discovered scattered around the bookshop which still had some wine left in them. We binned them at Tottenham Court Road and made our way up into the little bar we always went to if a party in the shop had taken life. It has a dance floor the size of a living room which encourages physical intimacy and conversational shouting. The DJ was playing Motown. We all just bopped along. I shook my invisible maracas. Emily danced around her handbag, like an old woman trying to edge her way into a bad-mannered bus queue. Tequilas were passed around, bottles of lager. We practised our Spanish on tourists who practised their English on us. It was great. The time went by in what seemed like ten minutes, and then the place was closing.

  *

  ‘Please don’t walk me home,’ Emily said, as I walked her along Oxford Street.

  ‘Get a taxi then, or the bus.’

  ‘I need to walk to sober myself up a bit.’

  ‘I’ll leave you alone, but only if you insist. I like hanging out with you.’

  ‘I’m putting you out.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘Why’s my bag so heavy? There was hardly anything in it before.’ She pulled out a copy of Leo’s limited-edition hardback proof. ‘Oh,’ she said, and posted it into a litter bin.

  ‘You could never put me out,’ I said.

  ‘It’s totally safe, you know.’

  ‘Yes, the edge of a dark park. Totally safe. What could possibly go wrong there?’

  ‘Please don’t make me scared of the way I walk home.’

  ‘It’s not normally so late and you’re not normally so drunk. Let me put you in a taxi.’

  ‘Maybe in a bit. Let’s just walk for a bit. I want to do karaoke. Do you know where there’s a karaoke bar?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ she said, getting out her phone.

  ‘You don’t like karaoke.’

  ‘I love karaoke. Don’t you?’

  ‘I like singing.’

  ‘In which case you like karaoke.’

  *

  We found a place in Soho. The smallest booths were for four people so we had to pay for two ghosts as well as both of us. Emily paid for the room hire on her card: ‘That’s the advance gone.’ I ordered her a Coke and me a beer. She demanded vodka in her Coke. She was quite unsteady on her feet now. ‘What song are you going to open with?’ I asked and she forgot about the vodka.

  Our heads were still filled with old soul tunes.

  This old heart of mine…

  A thousand times…

  Let me go.

  She had a clear, high voice that didn’t sound drunk at all when she was singing. I thought of the Diana Ross I could not separate from northern indie discos, lasses in heels queuing in the wind and drizzle, dance floors blue with fag smoke.

  I joined in on the chorus, leaning into the same mic. I love you! I love you! We sang as loud as we could, bashing our hips together in time to the piano riff and collapsing into each other’s arms as we reached the song’s crescendo. I kissed her on the lips and she let me for a while before the song finished and she twisted away.

  ‘This is my favourite thing. I’m having so much fun.’ She leaned over the console and began to type into it.

  ‘Is this what you and Andrew do together?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I didn’t really imagine this. Who do you do this with?’

  ‘Oh, my friend Richard, when I was back in Leeds.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and as the song started I turned away.

  ‘Paul?’ she said, touching me on my neck and I turned around and saw her notice something in my face before I hid it from her.

  *

  We stayed until the place shut. We were too busy singing and dancing to drink much more, and as we sobered up with each song I realised that there had been a chance of something happening which had now nearly slipped away, again. We were back in Soho, in central London, three miles away from the flat she shared with the man she was marrying.

  ‘Time to go, then,’ she said. The disco lights turned her face blue yellow red. I moved my head closer to hers and we assessed each other.

  ‘You are the best karaoke partner,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know this could be fun.’

  ‘Like I said: I’m a veteran.’

  ‘With that lad from the launch.’

  ‘With that lad. You sound annoyed about it.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You look annoyed too. Wait, did you say something earlier about my time at your mum’s? You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘Did you have… cameras? Spying on me?’

  ‘How drunk are you? Cameras?’

  ‘OK. You didn’t have cameras.’

  ‘What would I have seen in these fucking cameras?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like nothing. Cameras?’

  ‘Right. Sorry.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oh, everything.’

  The strobe above us spun petals of light across her face and body.

  ‘I’ll have my own flat soon. You could come and live with me.’

  ‘Oh, Paul. Shut up.’

  ‘Seriously. You could.’

  ‘Shut up. I mean it. You’re not serious. We’ve established that.’

  ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘I like you because you’re not serious.’

  I put my hand on her shoulder. I put my hands in her hair and she took them in hers and brought them down to where I could have held her hips if she decided to let them go.

  I waited to see what she’d decide.

  ‌

  ‌Twenty-One

  ‘Do you think she might ever write about you? Would you read it if she did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How would you feel?’

  ‘Naked. Humiliated.’

  ‘You wouldn’t feel proud that you made an impact on her life?’

  ‘I think her portrayal would do enough to remove any sense of pride. She’d destroy me.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t read it if she does.’

  ‘Oh, I know I shouldn’t. I would, though, if she does, and the awful thing is I’ll be more offended if she doesn’t. It’s not every day two people crash into each other’s lives like that. I think I’ve got at least a year or two until she eviscerates me, if she’s going to. I want to put some distance between her portrait of me and whoever I’ve become by then. If I can see what she writes as a historical document that applies to a historical person? That would be the best thing, if I can do that.’

  ‘You sound like you might actually want her to punish you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather be punished than forgotten?’

  *

  When Sophie arrived at the pub before the ceremony, she confessed to me that she would have made it out of the house in a denim skirt, vest top and Adidas trainers, all ready to make the point that this was not a significant occasion for her, except that her mother had looked at her a
nd inclined her head slightly, and so Sophie had gone back upstairs to change into a dress and heels. Now she sought reassurance from me. ‘I don’t look like I’ve made much of an effort, do I?’

  It was a cool autumn morning, one of those I had begun to enjoy more than its equivalent in spring. The soft sun, and brushed percussion of the leaves like the music playing in the morning at the end of the party. Time to let go of summer’s hunger.

  We were on the corner of the King’s Road close to the registry office, under another of those grand porticos that my new friends kept bringing me to. We drank our beers and discussed where we were going to go together afterwards, at what point we would escape. I was still willing to take my happiness one night at a time; if willing is the right word for it.

  *

  Susannah was smoking outside the registry office with a man I recognised from somewhere.

  ‘My new colleague!’ she said, as we approached. ‘I knew you’d impress us.’

  I had neither impressed nor unimpressed anyone yet. I hadn’t seen Susannah once, who worked on a completely different floor to me, but it was good of her to communicate the impression to Sophie that I was not useless. Sophie was not listening in any case, as she was being squeezed by Andrew’s best man, whom I had recognised by now: a journalist and essayist whose books I liked.

  ‘I’ve barely started yet,’ I said to Susannah.

  ‘I bet you haven’t!’

  ‘No: I mean I—’

  ‘We know what you mean, darling. You’ve scrubbed up well today.’

  *

  And it was true that I was wearing more expensive clothes than usual. I owned a couple of suits, but after scrutinising the impression we presented together to the mirror I decided the occasion demanded something more elegant, and so I detoured to borrow something from Jonathan. He was back living at Julia’s, the place I used to think of as their place, but now we all knew whose place it was. Julia kissed me on both cheeks, but made no attempt to apologise or look even faintly rueful about her part in the marital pause that had forced me to live with her husband for the last few months. I had wondered if I might get a thank you, but understood her tactic: pretend it had never happened; reverse to the fork where they went wrong and take the other way. Jonathan was in a kitchen with a high glass wall and roof that had not been there the last time I had been round a few years ago; it looked like the foyer of a brand-new contemporary art gallery. He was wearing an apron and slicing shallots while people on Radio 4 were arguing about a theatre production.

  He took me up to the bedroom where he rifled through a rack of twenty-odd suits; after some negotiation I picked out a tight black number I could probably get a thousand pounds for on eBay.

  ‘Who did you steal this off?’ I asked.

  ‘We photoed some crack-fiend musician in it. He was angling to steal it himself so I ran off with it when he was tooting up in the toilets and blamed him.’

  I could just get the trousers to fasten.

  ‘That’s snug,’ I said.

  ‘And I had them loosened last year too,’ he admitted. ‘I hope she’s impressed. You look all right. For you, you look all right. Go on: you can keep it if you like.’

  I looked at him in his apron. ‘How did you fix things with Julia, then?’

  ‘Oh, you know. We’ve decided to try for a baby.’

  ‘That’s good?’

  ‘Yeah. I hope so. I can’t do a worse job than my parents, anyway. How’s Mary?’

  ‘She’s all right. She’s moving out. She thinks you’re an arsehole.’

  ‘Good for her. I am an arsehole. First rule of Arseholes Anonymous, isn’t it? Declare yourself. Admit you can’t help it. Avoid situations where you might be an arsehole.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Almost any in which one talks to members of the opposite sex.’

  I looked at myself in the mirror again and straightened my tie. ‘That’s too far for me. I’ll have to try to be a functioning arsehole.’

  *

  ‘And how are you?’ said Susannah to Sophie. ‘You’re becoming such a star these days. Paul – do you know Gary?’

  I felt like I already knew Gary a bit from his articles and books, and from a friend’s account of going to bed with him a few years ago, when she had invited him to speak at a festival. He was Andrew’s best friend from Oxford, and though they were both energetic men nearing sixty it would never have occurred to me they were contemporaries. Not for Gary the gradual smartening and professionalism of the distinguished late male. His hair had silvered but it had not gone, and it was cut short, clipped cheaply like a raver’s, a five-quid job, maybe even a DIY-clippers number; he wore the minimum requirements of a suit like a slouching schoolboy, a black blazer and white shirt with a floppy collar, tie hanging low beneath an open top button, and below this a pair of black jeans in the loose fit he would have worn in his late twenties, early thirties, the period in a man’s life when he must make his choices and stick with them, or risk looking vain and foolish. It had been the 1980s such a very short time ago to Gary, who unlike Andrew had stayed interested in new cultural movements, in club culture, and never had kids or worked a nine-to-five. I did not mention to him that I knew someone he knew; I wouldn’t have even if his partner hadn’t shown up while we were talking. I liked him and didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. He was irritable and droll and quick to laugh. He was a hero of mine, really, I wanted to live his life or have him as a friend.

  In spite of this, there will come a point when we will be persuaded that we should kill all men like him, as much as we might like them on an individual basis. We will be encouraged not to respond to their charm. They have what the young want and they won’t let go of it.

  I don’t think I could go along with that, though perhaps I could. You never know what kind of thrust you can support when you only see the handle of the knife and not the tip.

  It’s obvious why the next generation are hardening their morality, their stringency of expression, why they are turning away from irony, the grey area, why we are all black-and-whitening the world. Why wouldn’t they look for reasons to fail you, or me, to find us wanting? Why shouldn’t they judge and convict the enemies? There is no kindness due to those in the way of justice, to those who won’t surrender. They are readying for war.

  *

  I tried not to notice when Susannah and Sophie looked across at me at the same time – a problem they may have been discussing a solution to.

  *

  Andrew and Emily walked together down the aisle, past all three rows of seats, on the thick blue carpet dotted with yellow flowers, to the sound of a string quartet on a portable CD player operated by Gary.

  In the twenty or so seconds between Gary turning the CD on and off again I managed to open my phone and shazam the track: ‘Beethoven, No. 12 in E-Flat Major—’ ‘Be quiet,’ said Sophie, when I whispered this to her, showing her my phone screen. She slapped my wrist. Put it away. She was, instinctually, a good girl, a model student, who achieved her rebelliousness with the same diligent work with which she had achieved her double first. She was protective of her father as well as critical; it was not OK for me to point out what remained of the gauche young man, the Leonard Bast who had risen from the provinces, the mistakes of style his daughter would not inherit. The secular wedding was a great temptation towards such mistakes, with its invocation to pick your significant songs and poems, as long as they didn’t mention God. It was too close to the projection of a carefully created social media profile. For those of us who once believed in God, the problem with atheism, that reasonable position, is exactly its reasonableness, its marriage officials, its humanist funeral people. This special occasion. This very special day that means a great deal. They are so breezy, so chirpy, so comfortable with sentiment; they smile too much, they seem to like their job, and people, and saying the word ‘human’; do they think humans are a good thing? Have they not learned how to suffer? That there is a style to it?<
br />
  ‘You’re all very quiet in here,’ she boomed. She had the flat South London accent of the recently resigned England football manager.

  I raised my eyebrows at Sophie, who looked away from me.

  ‘Are you all all right?’ she bellowed.

  We nodded back at her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and then pointed out the fire exits and told us to turn off our mobile phones. ‘What a happy day for Andrew and Emily,’ she said, and explained what a civil ceremony was and the role we had to play in it. Minimal, in theory, except I had in my pocket two sealed envelopes containing cards I had bought on the Kings Road, elegant cards in thick cream envelopes, addressed individually to Emily and Andrew.

  In each of the three rows, there were two chairs on either side of the aisle, twelve chairs in all. The marriage official was facing Emily and Andrew from across a vase of flowers in the centre of a desk at the front of the room. A row ahead of us to our right was Gary and his partner, Angela, who was a documentary film-maker, and who looked a bit younger than him, perhaps by a whole decade, but certainly not by two decades and five years.

  Susannah was sitting in front of us with her son Felix, an affable young man about to start university. He had been inside reading when I met his mother and Gary smoking outside.

  Apart from the minister, Emily and Andrew, there were just us six guests. Emily hadn’t invited anyone but me, not, she told me, because she had no friends, but because she didn’t think it would be particularly fun for them. There were no people she had to worry about offending by not inviting. Her mother was three years dead. Her father: he would make a scene. Her sister – well, maybe, but she lived in Canada now; she couldn’t bring her all the way over the Atlantic for this. So her sister didn’t even know that Emily was getting married.

  The small number of people in the room was only obvious at the points when we were invited to offer applause. There were just enough of us to make clapping plausible but not enough of us to make the spread of noise that one needed to feel like applause was occurring. This was through no fault of mine or Felix’s; we both slapped our hands together as hard as we could while the official at the front fluttered hers together without her palms ever touching. Sophie glared at me. Susannah put her hand on her son’s shoulder. The documentary film-maker had a camera and took a couple of shots, without using a flash, as requested earlier by the minster.