Theft

by Luke Brown

  ‘Property, property, property,’ she muttered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Amy.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Just remember that it’s property investors who are killing this city.’

  ‘If you were listening,’ said Amy, ‘we were talking about a plan to use the small amount of money we’ll get from our mother’s house as a deposit to buy somewhere for Paul to live. This money from a house which she paid for by working as a teacher for her entire adult life.’

  ‘Then why do you keep going on about what a great investment it is?’

  ‘Am I right that you live… with your mother, I think Paul mentioned?’

  ‘Yes. Because I can’t afford to buy somewhere because of all the speculators and buy-to-letters.’

  ‘I sympathise. London townhouses are so expensive these days. You might as well live at your mother’s until you can inherit it. But, you know? I’m currently seeing a therapist so I don’t stress my unborn baby out, so I definitely will go now and catch up with Paul later on the phone.’

  Sophie looked down and carried on reading, as if she hadn’t heard her. Perhaps she was embarrassed.

  When I had seen Amy down the fire escape and come back, Sophie said, ‘She doesn’t like me.’

  ‘Well. She’ll come round.’

  ‘I don’t care. All that property talk is so boring. And immoral. You’d agree with me if she weren’t your sister.’

  ‘And she’d probably like you more if you didn’t act like such a superior cunt to her.’

  *

  After that argument finished we went out for dinner and when we came back we continued to avoid talking about what had happened with Antonio by having a debate in bed about gender, inspired by a Facebook thread I was reading over her shoulder which discussed an article about ‘Books No Woman Should Read’. It was nothing to get annoyed about, dashed off in response to a dull compilation of ‘great novels’ by men published in Esquire magazine that didn’t include the words ‘by men’, and the tone of the article that everyone was discussing seemed intentionally glib, in keeping with the hack work it was attacking and parodying, though the people commenting on it took it as literal, the law. Eager men who were keen to demonstrate they did not hate all women joined in the conversation to announce that they would never read a book by Saul Bellow or John Updike, not never again, but never at all.

  I made the mistake of wondering out loud to Sophie whether one of the great damages men might have done to women was to make it natural for them to believe anything bad that is said about men. All the arrogant explaining which many of us have been guilty of, the complacent interruptions, the forceful articulation of our perspective on things – the existence of this recognised to the extent that it is impossible to disagree about an overstatement of the case without seeming to prove the overstated case itself.

  ‘And this aspect of gender inequality is most pressing, is it?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘I knew you were going to say that!’ I said. ‘It’s rhetorical brilliance. Now I feel like I’m deeply sexist for mentioning it. So all I can do is shut up.’

  ‘Why don’t you? Or you could read the whole book by her instead of getting annoyed by what some idiots say on Facebook about one article? Practise what you preach?’

  ‘Fine!’ I said. I took the book off her shelf, made a show of finding a pencil, lay down next to her and started reading.

  *

  Wandering around a gallery on a day off I mooched along behind a woman pushing a buggy, thinking of how similar she looked to Monica from behind. I felt so thirsty looking at her, not only for Monica and the woman who resembled her but also for the melancholic feelings she flooded me with, for those memories that were delicious in their painfulness, memories that became harder and harder to reach and which I didn’t want to drift away from more than I had already. I don’t know what I expected to gain from this doomed internal record-keeping. Numbness and forgetting should be coveted. But I still tried to remember as vividly as I could what her skin had felt like next to mine. I wished we had made pornographic videos together; we had not been early adopters of smartphones, or digital cameras. How foolish and smug we had been about avoiding the fads of technology and now I could not summon a picture of her naked in bed. Nothing about the sheets we slept in, the underwear she put on in the morning. I remembered her voice very well, the way it veered from a drawl to the singing brightness of a good student in a good school explaining something she’d learned. We used to speak a lot on the phone. I knew what her voice sounded like in bed, in separate beds, across a line. I could make it speak to me even now.

  The woman stopped to lean over the buggy and I sidestepped, and—

  ‘Monica?’

  A miracle. My saviour.

  No. It wasn’t her. It never would be.

  ‌

  ‌Seventeen

  ‘Let’s try this again,’ you say. ‘Can you give me some examples of when you don’t feel in control of your anger? You don’t need to say why, just when. Take all the time you need.’

  Arguing with Amy, of course. I go from disagreeing with her about something trivial and specific – the exact definition of homeopathy, for instance – to letting her know about everything she does that I think is stupid, pointing out every detail I can think of that might confirm her anxieties about herself. She does this to me too, by the way. And it’s she who starts it.

  Then there’re cars. Fucking drivers. Having to chase cars down who’ve driven too close or beeped at me, and bang on their windows at traffic lights and demand an apology. It’s dangerous. Shouting at them on the Kingsland Road, holding up the traffic, reaching into my pockets for my keys to threaten to gouge a chunk out of their paintwork. Not just cars, bikes too. Cyclists who say something, try to hurry me on. Punching one of them once, twice, punching two cyclists once, the last more of a push, a shoulder shove, it was meant to be. Inventing a dead friend. They take your anger more seriously if they think it comes from grief. It jump-starts their deadened imagination.

  But I am grieving? Well, maybe.

  It was impossible to argue with my dad after he left. He’d just sigh and put the phone down. Impossible not to argue with my mum. About anything. She was always asking questions about him. I didn’t want to even think about him. She’d keep asking. She didn’t have to ask for my loyalty, she knew we were loyal, never asked us to take sides. But because we couldn’t argue with him we argued with her. We all tore into each other. About anything. Literally anything. The reasonable volume of the music I was playing. The corruption of one’s finer being through the endless perusal and discussion of online property listings. The treatment of women. The treatment of people.

  The empty skies. The money gone. The going home. The blank account, the bruised fist. The swept glass. The sudden bangs and shouts in the night. The pain of others. The powerlessness to stop their pain. The stopping the starting the stopping. The man beeping his horn behind her. The fucker beeping his horn and thinking you wouldn’t do anything about it. I really feel sometimes like I could hit someone. I really feel sometimes like I could kill someone.

  There should be some kind of justice. Don’t you think there should?

  ‘Take all the time you need,’ you say.

  *

  It had been a couple of years since I had helped Amy decorate a place. She had to be pretty desperate to ask me to lend a hand; her days as an art student had made her far more skilled in painting and decorating, in knocking stuff together out of MDF. Every time she asked me to help I remembered how badly we had fought on the last occasion, and determined that this time would be different. It was a generous thing for a brother to do, a brother who often felt in need of ennobling himself, and on those mornings I would skip off to meet her. But when I arrived, my envy that she had found a way to buy and live in these places would provoke me into saying something about the need for legislation to prevent people making all this mone
y out of buying and selling and renting property, on the pressing need to redistribute wealth.

  ‘Well, thank God we have people like you, willing to redistribute your wealth to landlords and the Albanian mafia,’ Amy would say. ‘When there are such scumbags out there, saving their money and trying to pull themselves up.’

  Then I might point out that she was just lucky to get her timing right, and she’d say I was born two years before her, and I might say I was busy thinking of things more important than money, and she’d say nightclubs? haircuts? ecstasy? and ask me where that had got me, and I’d say – well, and where has all the money you saved and earned got you?

  Calmer and better decorating would be done if I absented myself. We would eventually agree this, but not calmly.

  *

  But I felt optimistic as I biked across the park to her new flat, a couple of miles from the one she’d just sold for nearly three times the price she’d paid for it ten years ago. I was becoming more and more aware how ordinary my aspirations were, how I admired wealth in those depths of the heart that are immune to convictions. I believed, like Sophie, that no one should own their own house, except for all the beautiful young parents chasing their children round the playground on the top of the hill, those mothers caught in the golden light of a catalogue’s autumn range, these bearded fathers with slight tummies over Japanese jeans, a bright advert for the urban dream, a Brooklyn here on earth. I wanted to be one of them, to circumscribe my life with bricks and money and the proximity of green space.

  Amy’s new place was the bottom floor of a big detached house facing the park. I saw the man who must have been Ben the acupuncturist through the window, on a stepladder, painting the ceiling with a roller.

  *

  He was a small guy, shaven-headed, with a calm demeanour that would be reassuring for people who were going to let him put pins in them. You wouldn’t want me to put pins in you, I’m sure you’ve already come to that conclusion. When Ben shook my hand his black T-shirt and baggy trousers made me think of martial arts pyjamas.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ I said.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Thank you for helping Amy decorate.’

  He watched me warily as I held his hand.

  ‘Is there another roller?’ I said. ‘Do you want a hand?’

  Amy had only got into the place yesterday and it was a mess, with peeling wallpaper in the process of being ripped down, and stained carpets being ripped up. Amy was not interested in buying places which she could not immediately improve the value of through sudden intervention. An old woman had been living in it with her dog for years. The garden was full of vicious brambles and burst bin bags. The ceilings were the colour of the inside of a teapot. All easy to solve with a bit of hard work, so she said. There was a skip outside and I set about pulling up the carpets in the bedrooms.

  As we worked Amy explained to me about testing the market, about making low offers for houses you weren’t sure you wanted to move into.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ I said.

  Amy stared at me.

  ‘We’ll discuss things after I’ve seen the places,’ I said. I was going to jump on my bike and look round some flats that afternoon.

  Her bump had really grown in the last few weeks.

  ‘I’m not sure you should be doing this,’ I said, after we had got the last of the carpet up. ‘Can’t you get some help?’

  ‘You and Ben are helping.’

  ‘Paid help.’

  ‘I don’t have the money.’

  I bet she had the money. It was her thinking that she didn’t have the money that meant she did have the money and it was me thinking I had the money that meant I didn’t have the money. It was unlikely we’d ever reconcile our different valuations of the rewards of being prudent.

  ‘We’ll get through it in no time,’ she said.

  She was lying. It was going to take some time. Still, I had time, for now. After we’d finished painting the living room and stripped some more wallpaper from the hallway I got on my bike and set off to Downhill for the first of the viewings.

  *

  I rode through rows of Victorian terraces, then over the South Circular where things got shabbier and more modern. I traced the length of two long cemeteries, and then I was riding uphill to Downhill, wondering what that said about the optimism of the people who had named the place. Though of course, downhill is an easier journey than uphill. It’s not all negative connotations. Off a road of chicken shops and nail bars I climbed my way through an estate of small pebble-dashed houses much like the estates my school friends had lived in, one hundred and fifty shades of brown. It was as quiet as those estates too, the middle of the day. Concrete driveways and cars, tradesmen’s vans parked up, the occasional senior citizen pulling a two-wheel shopping trolley.

  I liked the last flat the estate agent showed me. It was on the ground floor of a council block, with a large living room, two bedrooms and a kitchen with a door leading out to a strip of grass. I walked to the end and turned around and a man smoking on the balcony above raised his hand in a greeting I returned. ‘Good afternoon!’ I shouted. ‘Good afternoon!’ he shouted back, in an Eastern European accent.

  ‘Is this is a nice place to live?’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Are you nice? I am nice.’

  ‘Great neighbours, see,’ said the estate agent. ‘Very friendly.’

  ‘I’m nice,’ I shouted back at him.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he shouted. ‘You don’t look nice.’ Then he grinned.

  A patch of grass to lie on, on a summer’s day. A neighbour to wave at. A lawnmower. That paint you put on fences. Raking up the leaves in autumn. Barbecues with friends. A woman to come home to. A child to take to the park on a Saturday morning. It was not entirely implausible. Or undesirable. Not entirely.

  *

  On my way back to Amy’s, I went by a park at the peak of the hill and stopped to look down at the city, at my life for the last fifteen years as a distant sparkle on the horizon beyond Canary Wharf. I typed the château’s postcode into Google Maps – twelve miles away as the crow flies. An hour and ten minutes’ cycle, an hour and twenty by public transport. If I moved here I would hardly ever go back again, and I wouldn’t meet the same sort of people when I went out, the earnestly cool people, the anxiously fashionable young who were as optimistic and decent and vain and self-obsessed as any other people and who I condescended to only out of my worst instincts. The people I talked to when I smoked outside bars, those who I liked much more than I disliked. How much older would I become without them around me? Amy’s theory was that exactly these people would move here, and open cafés and bars and bike shops, and we’d sell the flat to them for a decent profit, doing our little bit to make the city expensive for them and survivable for us. But when I looked at these interwar terraces squatting sullenly, I saw what a long-term project this might be, longer than my lifetime. The most sensible young people would abandon London for the west and the north, this country for Berlin and Lisbon and Athens, if they still could, long before they colonised this far. Start again. Declare the place finished. Even London could not be entirely gentrified. People in my position should have taken heart from this but we were conflicted. The wall had been low enough for us to look over at the enemy; a part of us wanted to climb over and forgive them if they promised not to set the dogs on us.

  *

  Amy was on her own when I got back.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ I said.

  ‘He’s gone to meet a friend for a couple of hours.’

  ‘You haven’t fallen out already, have you?’

  ‘No. He was always going to do that. There’s nothing romantic happening,’ she warned me.

  ‘Do you want there to be?’

  ‘In this state?’

  ‘Well, it is his baby. Doesn’t mean there can’t be romance.’

  ‘I’m not thinking any further than this.’ She
put her hands on her stomach. ‘Now tell me about the flats.’

  I told her about them. We looked again at the one I liked online, and then I rang the estate agent to make an offer, at a price dictated by Amy, who would go round and see the place for herself the next day. The estate agent said she’d get back to me.

  ‘So this is great,’ I said, looking around at her furniture covered in plastic sheeting, at paint and tools and unpacked boxes. ‘What do you do when you want to relax? Paint sitting down? Lie down to varnish the floorboards?’

  She put her head in her hands. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘What have I done?’

  Just what she always did. Inflicted something exhausting on herself. Deferred immediate comfort for future comfort. Tried to correct the balance, to even the score. Behaved responsibly.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t. There’s so much to do.’

  ‘Let me do it.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Just tell me what to do. I can do it.’

  With reluctance and some gratitude she went to bed and I carried on painting. The windows were open and the street was quiet outside, except for the rattle of a magpie. My painting arm grew heavy. After an hour the acupuncturist knocked on the glass.

  I let him in. ‘How was your friend?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘Where does he live?’ I said.

  ‘She,’ he said. ‘Lauren. Streatham.’

  ‘An old friend.’

  ‘An old friend, exactly.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘This is a bit weird,’ he said. ‘I feel like you’re a disapproving father I need to make like me.’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t disapprove. I’m just interested in you, in a suspicious way.’

  ‘Suspicious.’

  ‘Just in a brotherly way. Let’s put the radio on. Maybe I should get us a couple of beers to have while we work?’