Breaktime

by Aidan Chambers

  I had felt this before only in one kind of place: when looking down a deep, steep drop, like a precipice or over the edge of a high tower.

  *

  I needed to urinate. Urgently.

  *

  ‘This is it,’ said Robby, drawing the other two of us close to him, his arms gripping our shoulders. ‘This is the window. It’s pretty narrow, and high up. But I reckon if Jack bends down and you, kiddo, stand on his back you’ll just be able to reach your arm through the ventilator window, open the catch of the window itself, get in, and then open the back door for us.’

  [And now, for the first time Oliver, well-nigh mad with grief and terror, saw that housebreaking and robbery, if not murder, were the objects of the expedition. He clasped his hands together, and involuntarily uttered a subdued exclamation of horror. A mist came before his eyes; the cold sweat stood upon his ashy face; his limbs failed him; and he sank upon his knees.

  ‘Get up!’ murmured Sikes, trembling with rage, and drawing the pistol from his pocket; ‘Get up, or I’ll strew your brains upon the grass.’

  ‘O! for God’s sake let me go!’ cried Oliver; ‘let me run away and die in the fields. I will never come near London; never, never! O! pray have mercy on me, and do not make me steal. For the love of all bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!’

  The man to whom this appeal was made, swore a dreadful oath, and had cocked his pistol, when Toby, striking it from his grasp, placed his hand upon the boy’s mouth, and dragged him to the house.

  ‘Hush!’ cried the man; ‘it won’t answer here. Say another word, and I’ll do your business myself with a crack on the head. That makes no noise, and is quite as certain, and more genteel. Here, Bill, wrench the shutter open. He’s game enough now, I’ll engage. I’ve seen older hands of his age took the same way, for a minute or two, on a cold night.’

  Sikes, invoking terrific imprecations upon Fagin’s head for sending Oliver on such an errand, plied the crowbar vigorously, but with little noise.]

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘You mean, I’ve got to go in first?’ I said.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Now look, Robby,’ Jack said.

  ‘Knock it off!’ Robby snapped. A threat, no doubt of it. Then, temperate, ‘He’ll manage. Won’t you, kiddo? All experience, eh?’

  ‘I’m out of my tiny mind,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t everybody?’ Robby said.

  *

  Q. What did the burglar give his wife for Christmas?

  A. A stole.

  *

  ‘Why don’t you go first? You said you’d looked the place over.’

  ‘Know it like the back of my hand. But I can’t reach the window catch. My arm isn’t long enough. There’s a door just to the left of the window. Open it. One bolt and a Yale. All you do is slip them quietly and we’re in.’

  ‘I won’t be able to see a damn thing in there. What if I knock over something in the dark? What if there’s a dog?’

  ‘There’s no dog, and I’ve got a torch. Just by chance! Here.’

  *

  There was a poore man on a tyme, the whiche vnto theues, that brake into his house on nyght, he sayde on this wyse: syrs, I maruayle, that ye thynke to fynde any thyng here by nyght: for I ensure you I can fynd nothing, whan it is brode day.

  By this tale appereth playnly

  That pouerte is a welthy mysery.

  *

  Other people’s houses exude their own smell. House odour. This one smelt of my own armpit fear. My entrance into it was a violation.

  *

  ‘The stuff we want is through here,’ Robby said, taking the torch from me as he came through the door, and leading the way with alarming lack of caution.

  *

  A comfortable room. Thick-pile carpet. Big, enfolding chairs. High-polished dark oak antique furniture. A wall of books. Ornaments, knick-knacks, many, the kind you do not touch without feeling the depth of your ignorance and the shallowness of your pocket.

  I wanted more than anything to cry out, to shout, ‘You are being done!’

  *

  ‘Grab this,’ said Robby, plunging into my involuntary hands a book, leather bound.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘Fool. What book?’

  ‘Das Kapital.’

  ‘Karl Marx.’

  ‘Educated creep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘English edition, 1887. Rare. Worth nearly two hundred quid. Maybe more. Not traceable to present owner. Savvy?’

  ‘Very symbolic!’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Stop arsing about,’ Jack said. ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘The trouble with you, Jack,’ said Robby, ‘is that you’ve no imagination.’

  *

  Robby’s hand, cadaverous in the torchlight, reached for a luxury china vase, splendid on the high oak mantel of the fireplace, picked it up. Held it.

  slipped/dropped

  on to the stone flags of the firehearth

  like chippings on a grave

  A blaze of shiversound.

  *

  ‘You dropped that flaming thing on purpose!’ Jack said out of the shock.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Robby said.

  There was a scuffle-movement: Jack and Robby together.

  The torch dived to the floor. Extinguished.

  ‘You want to be caught! That’s it, isn’t it!’

  ‘Sod off!’

  Jack said, ‘Where are you, kid?’

  ‘Here,’ I said, the word all but choked.

  Jack said, ‘We’re getting out, quick.’

  Stumbling, furniture-blocked steps towards the door.

  When the door opened.

  Room lights arrested us.

  He stood, framed in the doorway, the sittingstanding talking man. At once, sober now, I knew why I had felt I had seen him before.

  !! Zap !!

  We were burgling Robby’s own father.

  We were burgling Robby’s home.

  I’d been a fool.

  Again.

  And fooled.

  Meet the twentieth century’s Olympic champion dumdum. The world’s prize turniphead.

  The light dawned. Pow!

  Too late.

  GazZamWamZap.

  Pappatalk

  ‘And what, may I ask, have we here?’ Mr Hode said. ‘What little party game is this? May I join in?’

  We none of us replied, but stood like small boys caught scrumping. As we were. Robby’s mouth was bleeding at a corner. Had Jack hit him?

  Hode looked at each of us in turn. Robby. Jack. Myself. His eyes brooked no brazen stare. He came to me. Took the book from my unresisting hands, examined it as if for damage.

  ‘Herr Marx,’ he said. ‘More talked about than read. What was your intention, young man?’

  He gave me no time to answer, even had I been able to find my voice.

  ‘Never mind. The question is purely rhetorical since you cannot stay.’

  I glanced at Jack, who nodded peremptorily towards the door.

  Robby was still unmoving, his face an agony of anger frustrated by filial embarrassment. I recognized that look at once, I had felt it so often myself. But was this really how one appeared at such times? So peevishly crushed, so lacking in control? So ugly? Just as I recognized the look on Robby’s face, the whole gripped-in stance of his tense body, so I knew too that inside he was a seething confusion of feelings and thoughts: resentment and self-pity and a desperate but ineffective desire to hurt, yet, at the calm centre of his being, also wishing that none of this were so. Wanting, longing even, for it to end. Regretful that his father and himself had come to such a pass. Had Jack been right? Had the accident with the vase been a Freudian slip, or a deliberate act? Whichever, it had a necessary purpose: to get Robby (and us too?) caught.

  All along Robby had known how this would end, had willed it to end this way, no matter how he might try to c
onvince himself, as he would, that it had not been so. I knew because I had done the same, and had now to admit it to myself. Standing there in the sullen silence of that unfamiliar room I could admit it to myself, if yet to no one else. Looking at the tortured figure by the cold fireplace made any further self-deception impossible . . . Undesirable.

  (It might seem strange to you, reading this, that these thoughts should strike me at that moment. It seems strange to me now too, writing them down. But they did, though as a flash of insight rather than in the linear logic of printed words in neat procession across a page.)

  All day I had felt drawn to Robby. I had not been able to resist that underskin of violent energy, that blush of fanatic charm. But in this same instant of insight, fascination vanished as mysteriously and as rapidly as it had seized me. In that second Robby had shown me myself.

  Was it cruel selfishness, an ugly weakness in me (another?!) that at this same second I lost all interest in him? Whether it was so or not, I must confess that I did. I knew him, you see, what he was and why he was. All sorts of jigsaw moments from our day together fell now into place, and I knew him. Besides, too much of what I now understood spoke to me about myself, reflected me as if I were looking in a mirror. Perhaps my abrupt loss of interest was an act of self-defence as much as of selfishness? I acted to save myself while there was still time; I could not help but sense that Robby was already lost.

  ‘You can find your own way out, I take it?’ said Mr Hode. He turned to Jack. ‘I think you too had better leave, Jack. I’m sure you would not want to overstay your welcome. Do call and pick up your things another day, if you’d rather.’

  ‘Turn him out and I go as well. For good,’ said Robby, clench-mouthed and still unmoving.

  His father did not take his eyes from Jack. ‘I think Robby and I ought to discuss matters in private, if you wouldn’t mind, Jack.’

  ‘You heard me,’ said Robby.

  There was a moment’s silence. Tense. A fulcrum. Whatever was to be done had to be done now. Afterwards would be too late. A private war and a private peace turned on this point in time.

  Jack sighed. ‘I’m going, Robby,’ he said. ‘It’s best. There’s nowt now, you know that.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re being sensible,’ said Hode.

  ‘Sensible!’ shouted Robby. ‘O, Christ!’ He turned and sat, hunched, in a chair that flanked the fire, dabbing a hand at his bleeding mouth.

  ‘Well?’ said Hode to Jack and myself.

  Our final cue to leave. But despite my loss of interest in Robby, I felt a twinge of guilt at leaving him to such defeat. Not he himself, but he anyone.

  ‘Perhaps we should talk all this over together?’ I said with pale conviction.

  Hode rounded on me. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘I do not know who you are, nor why you are here. But I saw the trouble you helped cause tonight, and that is enough for me. As far as I am concerned you have no business in this house, nor is there anything I wish to discuss with you. You may leave now, or I shall call the police and have you charged with breaking and entering. Which shall it be?’

  One of the worst things about being our age is the way an adult like Hode can beat you down with words—or me anyway; I expect you, Morgan, would have withstood him. Your only answer—mine anyway—is either to stand there flabbergasted or to lash out in uncontrolled anger and make an idiot of yourself. This time I was reduced to an angry flabbergast. From which Jack rescued me.

  ‘How-way, kiddo,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Nightcap

  Outside the night was frosty. I realized I was lathed in sweat, was flushed.

  We paused in the road, the moon shining through the leaves of overhanging trees, brindling the surface.

  ‘What now?’ I said, feeling suddenly lost. Abandoned. Empty. Shock, I suppose, after the excitements.

  ‘I’m going to doss down in the shed at work,’ Jack said. ‘It’s just down the road a bit. There’s some sacks and we could brew up on the stove. Want to come?’

  I had heard him; but my mind was still catching up.

  ‘What gets me,’ I said sullensick, ‘is that all the time he was just using me.’

  Jack laughed, a sound like the call of a preying night bird. ‘O, aye?’ he said.

  ‘Well, wasn’t he?’ I said, defiant.

  ‘Aye, I suppose he was.’

  ‘You know he was. He was planning it with you all along, from when we were in the pub at lunch time.’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know all the details. But I knew the kind of thing it was likely to be.’

  ‘And you didn’t warn me.’

  Jack said nothing; gazed at me in the moongloom.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘so he was your mate.’

  ‘And you were like a rabbit spelled by a fox. Even if I’d told you, you’d still have done what he wanted.’

  He was right, I knew.

  ‘Maybe. But it was the way he used me that gets my gut.’

  ‘So he used you, Sunshine. What were you doing?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘He used you, sure. But you must have been using him. And me an’all.’

  Experience. It’s all experience.

  ‘How do you know what I was doing?’

  That bird of prey laugh again.

  ‘Because everybody is using everybody else all the time, kiddo. We’re all users. That’s what people are.’

  Why did I laugh? For I did. And felt myself again. Almost refreshed, even if tired. Very tired.

  ‘You’re a cynic, Jack, you know that?’

  ‘I know I’m nowt of the sort. Now are you coming with me or not?’

  It would have been another experience; but I could not. It was too much. Like everything else, it seems, you can have too much experience for one day.

  ‘No thanks, Jack, not tonight.’

  ‘I can promise you a good time.’

  ‘I’ll see you around, eh?’

  ‘I hope, bonny lad.’

  ‘What’ll you do now?’

  ‘Hang about Richmond for a day or two, just in case Robby . . . But he won’t. It’s done.’

  ‘And if it is?’

  ‘I’ll move on somewhere. Dunno where. Doesn’t matter. There’s always sommat wherever you go.’ That laugh again.

  ‘So long then.’

  ‘So long. Take care. Sunshine.’

  He turned and walked away up the moonspeckled road, a slight figure in that chequered light, despite his bulk. His feet made no sound. He might have been a ghost.

  When he was out of sight, I walked back down the lane towards the river and Robby’s car where I had left my pack. I thought of spending the night there, where we had sat earlier.

  As I turned to go, there came from the Hodes’ house the sound of voices raised in argument. I could not make out what was being said, only the hard, brutal clash of anger. Nor could I distinguish son’s voice from father’s. They were as one sound, one voice, like a man battling against himself.

  1 All right, all right, I admit it! I got this idea for telling my tale from At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (which I have been reading recently with, I might add, often puzzled pleasure). But then, to be fair, I expect he pinched it from somebody else. (Nothing is safe these days.) But from whom? James Joyce I’ll bet. I’ve discovered that almost all the interesting things contemporary writers do they get from his Ulysses. Which I have never managed to read beyond see here. (I’ve only tried twice, I confess. But Midge says everybody talks about Ulysses and how it is the greatest novel of the twentieth century but that few people have actually ever read it right through to the end. So I don’t feel that guilty. I’ve a few years left to try it again.) But working on the principle that there is nothing new in this world, where did Joyce get the idea from? I asked Midge. He said, ‘Good question. Probably from Duns Scotus, or one of those forgotten Jesuit theologians Joyce was brought up knowing about at his ghastly school. It sounds to me like the kind of way Jesu
its would argue. But go and find out for yourself, lad. Why expect me to know and do all your work?’ Typical Midge!

  THE LEAP

  HOW TO SET this down? How to describe it? It happened to me, but not me. I was him, but not him. Haven’t you, Morgan, ever been through a day when you were not yourself? When it was not you who experienced your events but some other you? This day was like that for me. So how to describe it and make you believe how it was, how it seemed? How to show you me-him this day?

  Begin at the beginning. As I-I. As eye.

  Slept solidly. A cuckoo woke me. Unexpectedly refreshed. Fit. Healthy. Happy, I suppose. (How do you ever know? What’s the proof?) Optimistic, certainly; full of energy. And hungry. Yet, as I say, not quite myself. Somehow other.

  A bright day. Crystal light glaze-blinking the tingle-crisp river, where I plunged myself, in-out, quickish. Naked. Like the day. Skin-sizzling afterwards.

  Yesterday seemed a shaggy dog story. Had it been? Why bother to wonder? Why consider? Consideration is for recollection in Wandsworth. (The day’s first terrible witticism. Apologies. The crazed light made my brain flippant.)

  Packed pack. On back. Strode into Richmond. There: breakfasted—bacon, egg, sausage, beans, toast, marmalade, tea, tea, tea, tea (I was bottomlessly thirsty), tea. At Johnny’s Cafe (truly!).

  ‘Why not just buy the urn, love,’ said the busty waitress, bodied as undulatory as the dales, at my sixth request. ‘Where you putting it all? Softens the brain, too much tannin.’

  ‘Not to mention its deleterious effects on other parts,’ I said.

  ‘Cheeky,’ she said, unflurried. ‘An early bird. Have you shaved yet?’

  ‘No, does it excite you?’

  She rubbed her hand, lascivious, down my jaw. ‘Know what I would do?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Put some milk on and let cat lick it off.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ I said. ‘You can’t win ’em all. Thought maybe you liked them young.’

  She put my bill down on the counter. ‘Chicken, I like them any age, but I’m busy just now.’

  A nymphomaniac waitress! A narrow escape!

  Time to make a quick getaway before she rips off her pinny and assaults me on the prepacked bacon in her storecupboard.1