One Night Out Stealing (21 page)

You trying to be clever? Playing the smart-arse? Huh? Huh? You think you gotta couple a druggie desperadoes on your hands, that what you’re thinking? Huh? No. No, I am not thinking that. I’m only wishing this would end. That you’d accept we no longer have money in the house, and you anyway have stolen from us as it is.

Hahaha! What, you want us to feel sorry for you? No. No, I don’t want you to feel sorry for us, just have some decency, some sense of wrong of what you are doing, and leave now before your actions get you deeper in trouble.

Deeper? How do ya mean, deeper?

Well I’m sure a court will take a very dim view of terrorising a woman in her own home. Terrorising? Who’s terrorising? Have I terrorised you, Lady Muck? Well you’ve hardly – Oh you know what you’re doing. But how much do you
want
from us for God’s sake?

HAHAHAHAHA! That a loaded question? And Sonny just caught the undertone in Jube’s tone. As if some little shift had taken place. No, it isn’t a loaded question. Look, I can withdraw money on my bank card. I have a – now what’s my credit limit? – two thousand. I have a credit limit of – So how much does your husband make in a week? A week? A week, lady. He’s a solicitor, they don’t get paid by the week, she in an almost haughty tone to Sonny’s ears, as if it was something everyone knew. A month then? Oh, about – I don’t know. You do know. Look, he’s a partner in a firm. It varies from year to year. So how much did he make last year? I – she clamped shut. And for the first time Sonny thought she lost honesty. A glaze had come over her eyes.

How much?

But she shook her head. And her eyes were more on the floor. None of your business, it came quietly from her. So she didn’t see Jube ease off the desk, step across to her. Only felt his gloved hand jerk her head up by the chin. How-fucking-much? And still she shook her head. You’d interpret it wrongly, she said. Would I? Yes. How much? She shook her head.
HOW
MUCH!

Three hundred thousand.

Jube looked up at Sonny. And his eyes said what a million words would not. And his words said, ever so quietly, I think we’ll take a look downstairs. Three hundred … three hundred she says. And she shook her head in despair. I knew you’d read it wrongly. And Sonny knowing a further shift had taken place. As well that old feeling of no return, that here was the moment of no return. And thinking he could walk out. Right now. Yet he couldn’t. Wondering, but why he couldn’t. (Cos I’ll be alone then. And so will she.) So he followed. Them. Jube and her; being marched in her own house a captive.

(I seen a movie like this) at Jube from the rear, holding the woman by the scruff of the neck at the end of her bed; hearing the words coming out through clenched teeth but that had gaps in them, of punched and kicked out space:
Ya
like
em,
doncha!
Jerking her forward then back.
Doncha!
At the pictures he’d spread out over the bed. The ones from the brown envelope Sonny had found. Swapped (oh God forbid),
exchanged
for photographs of her, this woman, this very terrorised woman, in the nude. (But my intentions weren’t filth. I didn’t want it to demean you, lady …)

Come on. Which pose do ya like? Hmmm? Jube’s voice calm, but only for the moment, then he jolted her head forward. (And me, standing here staring. Watching. The observer. This man’s flatmate, I been his cellmate, of a thousand nights of his reckoning and my counting, and they’re the same. They add up the same. His
thousand
and my thousand are the same. We’re one. We’ve always been one. But he’s swallowed me.)
Which
fucking
one!

–
OOOHHHHHH!
that
one!
Alright?
Her shrieking a terrible wail reaching into a man. Reaching in and tearing at his
everywhere
. That one? That your favourite? Hmm? No –
YES!!
You
just
TOLD
me!
Tell me again. His voice from quiet to that incredible intensity that wasn’t so much shouting as it was a kind of controlled screaming. (Like it comes from his rotten, festering insides.)

Three
hundred
fucking
grand
a
year
huh?
HUH,
I SAID! Yes. Oh God, but what am I supposed to say?

(Me, I’m standing here watching this. I’m standing here
watching
this like the guy waiting for the bus that ain’t coming. So I’m standing here waiting for something to come that ain’t gonna come …) Everything churned up inside Sonny’s mind. Words. The sight of Jube what he was doing to that woman. The picture of the
woman herself. Here. In her own bedroom. With sexual pictures spread out before her forcibly held eyes as if some indictment, some court indictment of her and her husband’s guilt. (I’m waiting for something that’ll never happen. I know this now.)

So standing there. Almost detached. Except for his breathing, which was going rapidly in and out in and out. Except for his eyes, which had sting in them from tears wanting to break forth, except what was the point. And brain going over and over with words and wording and sight and sights and now snatches of music, the over and over and (sweet) over of music stolen from her over there, hardly visible, hidden by the broad of her captor’s back. And the bedroom in the same peculiar light of curtains drawn and bedside lamp on and splashes of curtain and bedspread cover somehow leaping up and merging with the light. Film, that’s what it was. Olden-day film with that grainy look to it. (Or was it a dream? A bad dream.) At Jube slowly forcing the woman’s head right down so her face must be touching the photographed drawing of her
nominating.
That one? I said: That one?

Yeeess!! Oh G – But she didn’t finish it as Jube snapped her head back up, and Sonny saw he held her by the hair. And Sonny in his state of still observing like it was truly and only film. That it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real or why would he, someone like him with a nature, like he had, be watching?

He just stood there. Even as he sort of registered that his right arm was grabbing at his balaclava from behind, pulling it up and over. He just stood there. Even as he heard Jube order the woman to strip. He just stood there. Even when he kind of half registered that Jube was removing his head garment too. Even when he next half saw Jube fiddling away down at his jeans, at fly level. Sonny just stood there.

He stood there and watched the woman, heard the woman sobbing as she began removing her clothes. He just stood there. And he saw with some clarity the contrast of tartan apron as it dropped to the carpeted floor, criss-crossed reds and blues and greens against a light earthen brown. Sonny stood there.

He drew in breath when he saw the arms go up and Mrs Harland’s head disappear for a seeming eternity of removing white blouse. And he held the same breath as she turned, on Jube’s softly grunted instructions to do so, not letting go till he heard her ask, Should I take off my brassiere?

He expelled it till the breath was no more and the woman’s breasts became exposed. Then he took gasping breath again. And just stood there.

Take a walk, bud, it came without so much as a glance over his jacket-stripped shoulder to Sonny. Repeated itself, Take a walk for a little bit, but he just stood there.

When the photograph reality became the flesh of no more garment cover and was briefly and forever exposed to a man, Sonny took quick takes of breath, and stirred. Stirred.

Of loin of loin of loin, but not so he couldn’t come forward, then change his mind, but not at the first glance in ages of Jube telling him to go. Not that. He just turned the other way and walked. As woman (Woman) sounded in his ears of short cry, just an O! Like the woman that night in the park had formed the totality of her horror in just a single letter of cry.

O!

No more. Just O!

He heard, lastly, the instruction, said on a chuckle itself half choked with the main meaning of Jube McCall of the
thousand-celled
days and nights knowing yet never knowing. Get your leg up on that bed … As Sonny turned into the passage and the instruction got shut off by curve of wall, sweep of passageway. He walked. But not too far away.

Then he halted. And he just stood there.

Sometime of the silence broken occasionally by moans, and muffled man voice cursing and control screaming through the gaps of broken, busted-out teeth, Sonny cocked his head to a something in his mind. A something reasonably simple. Arrival. That’s what it felt like.

Like the bus that wasn’t coming, was coming. And everything gonna be alright. That’s how it felt. And then it had voice, woman voice, but not of the weeping being muffled by the majestic curving sweep of her home construction. Jane. (It is you, Jane.)

Then the voice(s) grew stronger as the man approached, it could have been the coming of the bus that wasn’t sposed to be coming. Even though the separated sound of woman in cry was about the most awful Sonny’d heard, even in dream, he walked an unchanging, relatively calm walk back.

He stood there. In the doorway to the event going on in the private domain of this kind of funny-lighted half-dark, he stood, he
stood, he moved forward. He took up. Of object. Put aside object. Of him. His. Jube’s. His proud-owned Croc Dundee. He did not but look at it for longer than the perfectly stealthed moment of its taking. Nor did thought any clearer than a picture, a simple picture of instruction, a simple image of deed done before it was done, come to a man of raised arm bent at the elbow plunging downwards.

(The place meant to be her dreaming place, huh Jane? Of your daddy called to your dark but come with the darkness of him, him ruined, him utterly soiled of heart, of love, so entered into your dark, Jane, so to enter you.)

How quiet, too, was the thing, this man, this creature, his exit. And how of worst indignity as he jolted, as though in premature climax at the poor woman beneath him, then he stiffened and a hand reached behind him and it burst through the dams of fingers crimson of himself, his ruptured self, as another rupture burst into his side so he was driven by the force off that beneath him, rolled, then curled, like a foetus, like a tiny child returned to itself, and flopped with a surprising quiet onto the floor, the dyed colour of light earth imitated, except it was sprayed in red. Just as his single cry of O! was an imitation.

And his penis swelling died rapidly in time to the breath hissing as though from the bodily ruptures, or perhaps they hissed too with the last of air escaping him.

And he didn’t even look up, nor cry, Sonny, oh Sonny, but what have you done? Just stared unseeing eyes into the earth-like ground he was dying upon, took his unspoken brokenness of heart, his unspeakable misunderstandings turned sour then rotten then
festering
, he took his unloved, unloving definite daddy and not sure mummy into the last moment of him, and with no more than a single O! as last statement.

And the killer of him turned to her, to her huddled unto herself with drawn-up legs upon the bed of her own thousands of nights (and day surprise) lovings and makings, and could only say, Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry, Mrs Harland. Before he turned and fast strode from the house, this house, of one night out stealing. (And I thought, I really believed, Jane, so much, so
much
was being made of me from the takings of this house – (Do you think she’ll be alright, Jane, all alone in there with him, a corpse?)

Bounding down the steps, the dark-paved steps from heaven to, he knew, hell. Yet not hell. (Not hell, is it, Jane, if it ain’t in your mind?)

Into the smudgy undercoat-grey-coated mean machine of the life he’d ended, Varoom Varoom, that’s what he woulda said. Varoom, varoom, and HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Hurtling along the road, machine like an immediately returned haunting of him who controlled it, this surging awful power of roaring (Jube-bellowing) engine afore him in ugly protruding snout with its head down and charging. Charging. And voiced: of her. And her. Them both. Sonny’s Tavi-scrubber Jane of more than imagination. And her, Lady Muck Penny of the finest house a thief could imagine. And oh look, my hands’re all covered in him, his leaked-out life. And soon Sonny was grinning. And it grew to something more. Something free. Of him – (of
him
!)
–
hahahaha! as the not-Jube-driven engine roared and tyres howled. And (oh?) was that sound of a siren in the distance?

HAHAHAHAHAHA!! Varoom! Varoom! Oh Jane. Oh Penny Mrs Harland. Oh, and Boris, and choir in cold world over there yet entered of this thief who was one night out stealing when. Oh the all of you, what becomes of us each? Varoom, varoom. (And I think that is a siren.)
Varoom!
Bedda get a hurry on, Sonny (my main lil man, hahaha.) So it must be something I done, Sonny in the
rear-vision
mirror. Nope. Can’t see nothin. Then at the speedo – Hey! VAROOM! VAROOM! at the needle flickering over the Jube-magic ton. Then a shuddering starting. Maybe it’s Jube already on the haunt? Hahaha, Sonny’s chuckle a little weak. But pressing further down on the gas pedal.

Outside lane –
tooot-toot!
swing into the inside, come on, bud, I’m in a hurry. Charging down centre lane, vehicles either side, a gap to the right and one further up to the right. Which one? Right. So he gunned it, and the car surged toward the gap. (There, how ya like that, Jube?) Blue sky and cloud rolls and hill-line green and
sea-blue
white-topped, and the gap.

Needle climbing steadily to the right, mean machine poised to swing right. For the gap. Into the gap. World turning a shuddering blur, though the gap still stood as just this dark spot a man was intent on and aimed for – (I think.)

World turned again. To this moment of utter silence and a sense of being lifted. Raised up. Suspended somewhere. In a somewhere that seemed forever but then it wasn’t. It was raining. And the rain tinkled. And it flashed before the eyes like snow falling. On screen. In far-off cold of some Russian winter of village trying to triumph over their mere mortality of being. Of being in a cold climate, and being ordinaries as ordinaries are the world over. Of trying to break free of their something hung over them, maybe it is everyone’s Something. And succeeding, yes succeeding, if only owed mostly to the big man leading em, Boris. Boris Kristoff of the voice pretending to be singing to God, cept he wasn’t, he was singing to the glory of his own God-given voice, to the notes he was able to reach, to the tone depths he was able to explore. The heart, the emotion, the mind even, he was able to strive for and reach.

Everything gonna be alright cos hell is only in ya mind. And this glass shattering all around of a man like snowflakes are snowflakes. Cos that’s what this man’s made of em.

And the ripping and churning tearing of metal and upholstery (with the holes picked in it by years of idle, unloved hands) that ain’t what ya think it is, not if ya don’t want it to be.

Nor the flesh being rolled up in its hurtlement nor the mind behind the eyes seeing the world in violent milli-moments of colour flash and movement sensation, as well body signals telling of ruptures to itself, nor did any of that be anything other than the meaning a man gave it.

And in the profound quiet of engine silenced and car body broken and silent wisps of smoke and heat offgivings, a man was not in his last moments of dying in incredible pain. Nor anguish. No. Jane. (Jane? Is that you?) Smiling up at her. Or what he perceived as her, and that was enough.

And when the all around became of yelling men and tear-eyed staring women, and shouted instructions and commands of lift and heave and just general effort of men helping man in his moment of mistake, of bad judgment, of bad luck, of bad (or good) birth, it didn’t seem to the man to be that bad. If only, that is, he kept his mind’s eye focused on the image of the woman who at last had grown clear features and wasn’t bad, she wasn’t too bad
considering
… You know, that your daddy did what he did in your dark meant to be your resting your dreaming place, poor Jane.

But it doesn’t madda, it don’t madda, does it Jane? You’re here. I’m here. So everything gonna be alright.

So when, eventually, he was taken from the wreckage (of Jube’s car but not Sonny’s life. No way. Not when them stolen experiences was making so much, so
much
of a man his inside) he took with him Jane. Tavi-scrubber Jane. And, too, women. Mum? Mummy? Oh Mamma, what’d I
do
? And thought he was putting his arms around the woman, his mother. But pulled away because she gave off the stench of her inadequacy. Oh Mum, poor Mum, what’d you do, what’d you do, what’d we both do? Please hold me, Jane. Hold me hold me hol’ me ho’me ho’me, Sonny’s coming home, I am come home …