Theft

by Luke Brown

  ‘But this text you sent me doesn’t exist,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you get in touch when you didn’t hear from me?’

  ‘I thought you were pissed off with me. I sent you a text from my new phone.’

  ‘I thought you’d disowned me. The way you ran off like that. I thought you were dead or you’d disowned me. Jesus, I’m so pleased to see you.’

  ‘You don’t seem pleased.’

  ‘I’m furiously pleased. How long have you been here?’

  ‘Two days.’

  I was looking at her profile while she stared straight ahead. She was doing her best to seem nonchalant, but I could see something else shaking beneath her straight face.

  ‘And have you quit your job? I called them too. They said you weren’t working for them any more.’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘I just— I just swore at my boss and stormed out of the office and haven’t been back.’

  I looked at her and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘You’re just as bad as me.’

  ‘I’ve had the same job for the last ten years.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said.

  *

  It had been stupid of her to burn her bridges there. The job had been administrative, it had been stupefying and enraging whenever there was an away-day, or a lecture addressed as if to children on digital innovation, but there were many more boring and more difficult jobs she could have done – and thank God the organisation existed. Nowhere that had to employ people was perfect. She looked after the public-funding relationships with a few art galleries, advised artists who were looking for money for their next projects. It was silly to wish she was sitting on the other side of the table, when she had happily retired from creating ‘art’. What nonsense it was to waste time thinking about the galleries, when you could just make things and sell them on the street, when any idiot with enough working capital could make fifty thousand pounds a go in exchange for a few intense weeks’ work doing up and selling a decrepit flat to some lazy twenty-something whose parents were buying it for them. That was satire, that was art.

  Admittedly, not all the people who came to look round the properties she bought and sold were very privileged. It was harder to enjoy the performance when it was an anxious couple trying to find somewhere their savings would stretch to a deposit. She feared then that she was part of the problem, not the resistance, but there was no solution that could be effected by her on her own. She had to take what she needed while she could get it.

  As a single woman she could only get her buy-to-flip mortgages with a regular salary to show the lenders. Her job had been perfect for the way she made real money: no one kept track of where she was; she worked from home whenever she could, answering the occasional email but mostly pursuing her own schemes, scouring through the estate-agent sites for promising properties in east and south-east London. She wasn’t going to keep on with the property-renovating forever, just until she had enough money for a little house of her own with a garden, just until the money wasn’t there begging. It was better that she picked up the profits than someone who had been to private school. Mum was gone, and with the brother she had she couldn’t rely on anyone else to look after her if things went wrong.

  Which was why the argument at work had been so shaming and stupid.

  Not all her colleagues were awful, just the ones who made the most noise and did the least work. She had liked her manager, Hannah, who had looked after the art team, which was made mostly of people doing exactly the same job as Amy while claiming expertise in a certain niche (with less plausibility, the louder they were). When Hannah announced she was leaving she had taken Amy aside and said, ‘You’d be good at this. You should apply.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Amy. ‘Are you pleased not to be doing it any more?’

  ‘Um…’ her boss said.

  ‘Yeah, I thought so,’ said Amy.

  But she thought about it, and about working under the colleagues who did want the job, and she decided that she would apply, even if she’d have to work harder and care more about what she was doing. Perhaps she did care, after all.

  The interview was with a panel of three people: a senior manager, the new CEO, and an HR manager. It went well. She knew what she was talking about. When they asked the diversity question she knew they were going to ask she made the standard sensible points and then spoke about coming from a place without much ethnic diversity, which was 98 per cent white and with hardly any art funding, and how important she thought it was to include these places, to remember that there were lots of places that weren’t at all diverse in the way people in London used the word because no one who hadn’t been planted there for generations would ever want to go there. The CEO had nodded along, and Amy had decided that was more promising than the slight worry that crossed the HR manager’s face.

  It was very difficult to decide, said the HR manager the next morning, but I’m afraid we’ve gone with Matthew. He was just that little bit stronger than you on certain questions.

  ‘Which questions?’

  ‘Well, say, the diversity question.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He stuck to our priorities. We worried you weren’t quite as familiar with them.’

  ‘Was it because I said that thing about there being places where white isn’t really anything like a synonym for privilege?’

  ‘Of course not, of course not. An interesting nuance but of course class isn’t a protected characteristic and so it’s a much more difficult metric to assess.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I am sorry, Amy.’

  Matthew wasn’t a bad man, probably. A little man from Hertfordshire, he enjoyed his job, and the conferences, and saying ‘strategic’ in meetings. He kept a neat beard, wore black turtlenecks, and looked fifteen years older than her but was two months younger. The argument came at the end of a team meeting. Matthew asked her to stay behind, because of certain things she was saying that weren’t in tune with agreed priorities, and because she was making her points in meetings too aggressively.

  ‘I care about this,’ she said.

  ‘Now, Amy. It’s great that you care. I just wonder… We’ve never spoken about the fact you went for the job I’m doing.’

  ‘Well… That’s not relevant. I wasn’t disappointed.’

  ‘OK. Fine. You weren’t disappointed.’ He nodded sagely, as if he understood her in ways she did not understand herself, and she recoiled at the way he half-shut his eyes.

  ‘Look, Matthew, this job isn’t my life. I know it’s your life and so it must be hard to imagine it isn’t everyone’s, it must be hard to have thoughts that haven’t arrived in a PowerPoint presentation, but I don’t care.’

  ‘Now, you’re being aggressive and rude now. Please lower your voice.’

  ‘I’m not being fucking aggressive, we’re having a conversation.’

  All of this time Matthew kept his voice in a soft mellifluous measure. ‘And please don’t swear like that. It’s totally unnecessary.’

  It’s one of the most enraging things a man can do to a woman, to place himself on the pedestal of logic and reason while refusing to listen to a word she’s saying.

  ‘We’re grown-ups, Matthew! We can talk like grown-ups!’

  ‘I am now going to warn you that I will be having a conversation with HR about your interpersonal skills, to seek advice about training that might be able to help you develop them.’

  ‘You know you look like you’re going to a fancy dress party dressed as a beatnik? Go and seek some fucking advice on that,’ she said. And she walked back through to the office to pick her bag up from her desk, and caught the lift downstairs to the basement where she kept her bike, and she rode it home and made her flat available on Airbnb and booked a flight to Thailand.

  *

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  We’d reached the Cons club by now and walked in through a
foyer I remembered from the long-ago weddings of school friends who’d married in their teens, in the summers I still spent at home.

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I changed my number when I lost my phone,’ she said. ‘I thought it would clear away the repercussions, get rid of some of the other rubbish in my life at the same time.’

  ‘Anyone else in particular?’

  She waved her hand. ‘Where to start?’

  I gave her a meaningful look.

  ‘Not you,’ she said.

  ‘Good. What do you want?’

  ‘Just a lime and soda, please.’

  ‘Very restrained for a funeral round here.’

  ‘I’m on a diet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Lime and soda, please.’

  I got myself a pint of Guinness, looking over at Carl’s parents, Mike and Janine, in the corner of the pub. People were coming over to hug Janine, while Mike studied the table surface in front of him.

  ‘Do you understand how he went?’ I whispered to Amy. She’d been to see Leia the night before.

  ‘Pills. Opiates. Not the kind of thing you usually get round here but someone had a big bag of them. Leia thinks he didn’t know how strong they were and did a handful, thinking they were just like Valium or something. Or that he stepped up a dose and got it wrong. That’s her theory. Not suicide, just an accident. She knew he’d been taking Xanax and Valium: that’s how he relaxed in the evening, how he slept. He got at least one of them on prescription. I’ve been wondering if it might have been something in-between. Let’s see what happens if I do this. You know: would it be so bad if I went all the way over?’

  ‘Right.’ I was thinking of the way he had necked all those pills on his one trip to see me in London. ‘Did she think he was unhappy?’

  ‘He was looking anxious,’ she said.

  ‘He always looked anxious.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘What about his girlfriend? Which one’s she?’

  ‘Her over there. The redhead.’

  I looked. A woman of about forty was sitting with another woman her age, and two teenage boys arguing over an iPad. She didn’t look devastated, but most people don’t look devastated at funerals. We’ve spent a long time hardening our faces for these occasions.

  ‘Poor woman,’ said Amy.

  *

  Mum had mentioned her when I last saw her. ‘Carl’s got a new girlfriend,’ she’d said. ‘Two grown boys of her own. Do you think they’ll want one together?’

  I don’t know what I said in reply but I suspect it was petulant. Mum was always bringing up the subject of children with us. She wanted the impetus to retire, to do so selflessly, so she could take long trips to London to see us and help us look after her grandchildren. She had discovered a love for London in her last years. As Amy got into her swing of renovating flats there were often places for her to stay for free on her half-term holidays, free if you count the implied painting-and-decorating labour that is the only real way to spend any time with Amy when she is the middle of one of these frenzies. It was a stressful, exhausting, lucrative hobby they did together.

  I’d provide the cultural tourism side of Mum’s holiday, taking her sightseeing while Amy was at work.

  ‘It must be great having all this on your doorstep,’ she said, the last time I saw her, as we were coming out of a gallery.

  ‘You forget it’s there. Forget to enjoy what the tourists come here for. I used to get dragged to all the exhibitions when Monica was here. She’d get us in everywhere for free.’

  ‘I don’t mind paying for you, Paul.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean that. I love being a tourist with you.’

  And I did. I liked standing with her there in front of the Thames, with new places I could take her to in all directions, an update on our old routine. When I visited her at home in the summer we would walk along the beach to watch the sunset go down, standing at the limit of things, the tide out and the sun aflame in the little puddles left in the sand. You could trick yourself there that endings were beautiful and reversible.

  ‘How is Monica?’ she asked. ‘Do you ever hear from her?’

  ‘Oh. She’s – did you not read about it in the papers? She was the first person ever to give birth in an Uber cab.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here. Look.’ I pulled up the story on my phone, and handed it over to her. ‘Melbourne woman gives birth in an Uber. She’s not from Melbourne, she’s from Portsmouth.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry Paul. You weren’t still hoping…?’

  ‘I was. Stupid me. We’d always spoken of having kids ourselves. It just wasn’t the right time.’

  ‘It never is. You just work it out as you go along. I didn’t think I wanted to be pregnant with you but I couldn’t have been happier when you came along.’

  ‘You didn’t want to be pregnant with me?’

  I was joking but she took me seriously.

  ‘We were enjoying being young, living in Manchester, having friends. Teaching wasn’t so bad then, it was a challenge, it was getting easier, I thought it would get easier forever.’

  ‘I’m sorry I ruined that for you.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I’m glad. It wouldn’t have been you if we’d waited, it would have been someone else.’

  ‘I’m even more sorry about that. You might have given birth to a doctor or a lawyer.’

  ‘Stop it. I’m proud of you, Paul,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For everything.’

  ‘But specifically.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Well… you’re funny.’

  ‘That’s it? I’m funny? Jesus Christ.’

  She tutted. The Lord’s name in vain. It would have been cruel to upset her by letting her know that Monica had been pregnant with our child a few years ago. She was twenty-seven, I was twenty-eight; after years of being exploited as an assistant her career was just beginning to get moving.

  We were both very tentative and considerate; we would do what the other wanted. I like to think I would have been delighted if she’d said she wanted the baby. And now I always wonder if she would have been delighted if I’d said I wanted it, her, him. But we both shied away from that. We were living in the château and earning very little money. We had this idea that if we just waited three years, ‘three years’ was the magic number we had in our head, then we’d be in a position to give our child a proper home. The Tories had just got in; what eager bourgeois we were. I don’t blame us for our conventional desire for a place to live, but I wonder if it was cowardice that I’d dressed up as feminism: it was her body and I had not wanted the responsibility of voicing an opinion about her body, for being responsible for the way her body and our lives would change forever if she had decided differently. We were both relieved to use the other as our excuse to prolong our freedom and decadence for another few years.

  The first show she put on was a success and she was offered a job on a three-year project in Melbourne, though she’d be able to get out after two, she said. We discussed it and agreed she should go. There was no absolute reason not to, not if we believed in our magical three years. I think we were punishing ourselves for a decision that we couldn’t admit to each other we regretted. It was a penance. Or I used the idea of a penance to justify my baser instincts. Two years wasn’t that long. It was long enough that we shouldn’t kill ourselves over faithfulness in the strictest sense, but it wasn’t that long, it was survivable. We took a holiday from the weight of being in love, from its limitations, and we behaved like we had done in the years after we’d just met each other, when we’d been waiting for the inevitability of us coming together. We had joyful reunions, spaced far apart. We lived two lives. The halves grew unequal. We lived on Skype at different ends of the day. The Monica who loved me grew smaller. The bigger half of her is sitting exams for citizenship now, bringing up an infamous baby with a colleague from the gallery. The part of her that loves me, if it is anywhere, is still
there too, far too far from me to be of any use to either of us.

  ‘Well, at least I’m funny,’ I said to my mum, the last time I saw her.

  ‘You’re not that funny,’ she said. ‘You can work on your other qualities too.’

  *

  In the Conservative club I looked over again at Carl’s parents. Mike was sitting down now and staring through his pint, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. Janine was busier – talking to other mourners, giving Leia instructions to see about the sandwiches. Carl’s little brothers weren’t little any more – they came in for pints of lager and took them outside to smoke. One of them smiled at Amy and came over to say hello. Mike caught me looking at him and waved, so I walked over to sit next to him.

  We had stopped going fishing with him when we became teenagers but when we were drinking on the beach at night we’d see him sometimes, sitting silently on a camping stool at the tide’s edge, just visible in the dark, with his line cast out into the sea as it drifted out.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Silly bugger,’ he said. I felt the stubs of his fingers as they woke up to the handshake and began to squeeze my hand. ‘Are you working, Paul?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘In a shop.’

  ‘What kind of a shop?’

  ‘Bookshop.’

  ‘They still have them?’ He managed a little grin. ‘In a shop? You were top of the class. Still… work’s work.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Carl was doing all right, you know? People think you work in a supermarket you’re just a shelf-stacker or a till girl but there’s more to it than that. He was a shift manager.’

  ‘That’s what my mum used to tell me. He was great to her, always said hello, asked how she was. Mum thought I should be more like him. More settled, more realistic about things.’

  Mike snorted and looked away from me. ‘Realistic? I suppose she thought that were the best he could have got.’

  ‘She wasn’t saying that.’

  ‘And you too.’

  ‘You just said it was a good job.’