Breaktime (11 page)

You will have noticed, Morgan, that one of the difficulties of attempting to set down such an account as I am here engaged upon is to reveal simultaneous thoughts and feelings, with concurrent words and actions in such a way that you, dear reader, accept them as being at one, in the moment. Paralleling, as it were, the conversational exchange set down opposite I experienced an interior monologue of influential effect on my decision regarding Robby’s criminal suggestion. What he proposed touched, not my mind, but my emotions. My nerves not my thoughts. You know, Morgan, how often we have inveighed against the narrow restrictions of our education. How we have attacked, between ourselves and to our teachers, the false assumptions made about what we must do in life, how we shall—indeed
must
—live. How we have discussed the possible ways of breaking from that strait-jacket and of reforming it so that others who follow after are not subjected to similar pressures. (Robby was not alone in possessing hotly held ideals!)

I thought, at the same time, of my father, whose whole life has been lived by an honest regard for, a belief in the very system that makes it so that now he lies ill and has for two years suffered for simple want of the means of ease, want of the kind of attention that would alleviate him.

Solemn thoughts; telling emotions. But I have to admit that most persuasive of all was an irrational desire to chance my arm. I wanted to commit a dangerous act, wanted to know what excitements were to be had in crime, wanted for a night to play the outlaw. Had I not set out to take indiscriminately what life offered? Could I turn away because it offered something that might offend a delicate sensibility? Of course not. And I knew then what a ghastly tyranny both causes and logic can be.

I said, ‘Let’s get cracking.’

Jack said, ‘You’re mad, both of you.’

Robby said, ‘Who asked? And who cares whether you come or not?’

Jack said, ‘I’m coming, but just to see the kid gets into no trouble.’

Robby said, ‘How touching! Or have you yet?’

I said, ‘Look, pack it in, you two. If we’re going to do it let’s go now before I change my crazy mind.’

Robby said, ‘We’re about a quarter of a mile from the house. We’ll leave the car where it is and walk. All we pinch is a few things, valuable, small, resaleable and light. I know just the stuff and I know where it is, so leave the selection to me.’

Scenes From a Burglary

I need hardly remind you, Morgan, that I am not exactly accustomed to burgling houses. True, when climbing up and down my ladder during my Saturday stints of window-cleaning, I have sometimes imagined what burgling a house at night might be like, how I might do it, with what stealth and cunning I would execute the operation—never of course being caught or leaving behind one tell-tale clue to betray my identity. I would even vary my
modus operandi
, thereby foxing the police, whose routine minds would fruitlessly look for a pattern in case after unsolved case.

But such idle fantasy was no more than pastime speculation, self-hero daydreaming, a hedge against the boredom of polishing vertical glass hour on hour.

This was to be the real thing.

As we walked up the dark lane away from the river, sweat rashed my body.

I am a fool, I thought. What am I doing here?

Was this a dream? A sleeping fantasy too really felt? A nightmare? I had had a hard day, an unusual day; I was not myself; was sleeping without rest.

But I knew it was not so. I had felt similar symptoms before. While going to the dentist to have a broken tooth pulled. While walking to school for examinations. Most recent and vividly of all, while in the ambulance with my father.

Not a dream. Just fear.

I was scared.

My body did not move as it normally does. An act of will was required. I had to make myself walk. Had to monitor myself, as an engineer monitors a faulty engine, making certain I walked toward this unknown house with apparently normal ease, revealing none of my alarm to my accomplices.

But fear itself is a heady excitement.

*

When we reached the house, large glooming in the nightlight dark, solid (how much more solid than in daylight!), forbidding, Robby put up a hand to stop us in our stride as if he were a marine commando in some wartime raid behind enemy lines.

Fear is also a stimulating fantasist.

*

‘Round the back there is an unlocked window that lets into the kitchen,’ Robby whispered, we huddled head-to-head.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘I drummed the place today,’ Robby said.

‘O, god!’ Jack said, derisive, and muffled an unrepentant guffaw.

*

Gravel crunches like boiled sweets when you crush them in your mouth with senseless regard for your teeth. And the noise abraded a sleeping world.

‘Keep on the grass, fool!’ puled Robby.

*

A house about to be burgled is like an animal being hunted. As you stalk closer, you expect its eyes to open and discover your malign purpose and you, its mouth to growl a warning. You wait for it to stand up and charge away. Or, worse, to charge at you. That a house does none of these things makes it all the more menacing.

‘Bloody silly this is, kiddo,’ whispered Jack into my face as we stumbled into each other.

*

‘Nobody ever pinches me,’ said the burglar’s wife to her husband
.

*

We reached the cliff face of the house itself, fleas clinging against an elephant.

‘The window is to our left,’ Robby murmured. ‘Edge that way slowly.’

My feet trod soft soil.

‘We’re in a flowerbed,’ I said. ‘Leaving footprints!’

‘Shut it!’ Robby said. ‘Who cares?’

‘The police will care, that’s who.’

Jack’s mouth to my ear, lips tickling as he said, ‘There’ll be no police, Sunshine.’

‘Optimist,’ I whispered.

*

The soles of my feet were tingling in an electrically shocking way. My legs were freeze-dried jelly.

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 convince 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.)