One Night Out Stealing (8 page)

He turned, went back and stood in the doorway, immediately struck again by the spectacular dimensions of house interior, its angles, off-white walls and timber bits and pieces everywhere, and Jube over there standing staring down at a piece of paper in his hand shaking his head, whistling a one-note expel of apparent disbelief. Jube, we gotta go – Hold up, Son. Hold up. Jube, we have to – Listen to this, Son. Jube turning to Sonny. His face grotesque in its disbelief, as it was in any expression with his swollen wounds and cuts and general puffiness.

But Sonny with the urgencies, so rushing over to Jube – even as he began reading out loud from the note – tugging at his T-shirt exposed bare arm, Please, Jube. Let’s go wait it out. Ten minutes, man, that’s all I ask. But Jube going, No, no, listen to this. As Sonny pulled at him.

Outside, the pair of them. Jube complaining it was all panic shit this coming outside to give it time, see what developed from a might-be suspicious neighbour. The fucking note, you wankah, it said there was
money
left for some Oliver dude. It’ll keep, Jube. It’ll keep. It’ll keep, Jube. It’ll keep, Jube in sarcastic repeat. It’ll keep says the country’s most panicky burglar. Well, it
won’t
fucking keep. And it don’t, Son, then I’m gonna take it out on your black hide I swear.

Waiting down by the fence, in its shadow, Jube with enough sense to hush his mouth for a few minutes as they scanned the neighbourhood – what was visible through the trees right around the property – for lights suddenly gone on. Ears anticipating the approach, the silent approach as they called it, of cops coming to the scene. Then Jube starting up that he knew it was a waste of time, but Sonny saying, Wait on, please, mate, just wait a few more minutes. My mind’s juss one big picture of a cell, man, I’m tellin ya. I’m freaked out. Wanked out more like it, Jube unsympathetic.

They gave it maybe twenty minutes. Of watching that house with the lights left on like a decoy. Then back they went, up the
slope. Running this time. And Jube giggling and guessing on how much bread there’d be the note said was under the pillow of someone called Ants, of all things; pillow because, so said the strange note, she liked playing Santa Claus where her big brother was concerned.

Inside again and which way to go where the bedrooms’d be? Down them stairs. Jube raced off and slid down the handrails, spiralling his giggling shape down out of Sonny’s sight. A light banging on as Jube must have whacked a switch.

Sonny following down a passageway that didn’t last long before it curved off to God knows where. No time to take in much except the irregular shape and the pictures along the walls. Jube’s head going this way and the other way, he took off up where the passage curved. So Sonny went the other way where it curved again, and there was a door, to his right. He opened it. Wow. What a bedroom. Timber ceilings, the same stark white walls, windows with floral patterned curtains drawn across, two single beds with covers that kind of matched, but not exactly, the curtains, pillowcases the same. Pictures on the walls. A dressing table. Couple of chests of drawers, antique-looking, went well with the timber ceiling. The timber frames of windows. Bits and pieces that said it was a kid’s room, maybe a teenager’s.

Sonny walked over and lifted the pillow on the first bed, then the next. Nothing. He was halfway out when he heard Jube’s whoop. He went after the sound. Found Jube jumping up and down and notes – money – flying all over the place. Sonny grabbed one. A fifty. And lots of them. This couldn’t be true.

But Jube was jumping and his eyes, swollen from the beating, were near normal in their gleeful wideness, and then he was grabbing Sonny in a bearhug, lifted him up and swung him round, wouldn’t let go even when Sonny said, Easy, man. Spun him a couple of times more then flung him onto a double bed on his back and stood over him laughing and clutching a handful of notes.

We’re rich!

The note was addressed to an Oliver. Jube walked around wearing a huge grin as he read from it: Dear Oliver, Sorry we’re not home to welcome you but your father was in need of a well-earned break – What from, Jube breaking off, ripping off the poor? Fuck the cunt. Back to the note: You have the Sounds number – Hey, where’s the Sounds? Sonny shrugging he didn’t know. Maybe it
means music sounds, Sonny half joking. Head still reeling with the cash find – but here it is again in case you’ve forgotten it or misplaced it. Oh, aren’t they just so fucking
nice
these richies, uh Sonny? In case he’s forgotten or mis
placed
it. Aren’t they the fucking pits, man? Jube resumed from the note: Your father says to remind you the money is repayable – Ya get that, man? Repayable. His own fucking flesh and blood and he wants his bread back. Jube sweeping an arm around the room, quite different from the one Sonny had been in and yet sorta the same in theme, or something about it. With a pad like this and he wants his own son to pay him back. Jube clicking his tongue in disgust. Sonny wondering about that himself. Oh well, least he’s got the bread to give his son.
Had,
Sonny.
Had.
Jube with a grin. Back to the note: We’re back on Sunday week, so of course make yourself at home, darling – Oh, darling, is it? The guy’s a man and they call him darling? Man, it’s his mother, ain’t it? Can’t she call her own son darling? Well of course,
darling
Sonny. And are you quite comfy over there on the bed? Could I get you a cushion,
darling
?
Ya wankah, you’re worse’n this bitch, tapping the note. Jube finishing it with emphasis on the words
Love,
Mum.

He clapped his hands together, time for a beer. To Sonny counting out the money into two separate piles that came to exactly five hundred apiece. Best they’d done in cash in quite a few years. And we ain’t even started yet, Jube in that tone of being onto a sure thing, and Sonny still not sure, not till they were out of here. What if this Oliver dude shows while we’re here? What, at – Jube glancing at his watch – ten to three in the morning? Anyway, I’ll punch his lights out minute he walks in. Now come on, I’m dying a thirst.

Up the stairs into the kitchen, fridge with plenty of beer, but nothing familiar, only these fancy bottles that Jube was having trouble reading the label of, handed a bottle to Sonny. You read it, you’re the bookworm knows all the fancy words. Sonny read
Altenmun-
ster. Shrugged. Funny top too, how does it work? at the metal piece holding down what looked like a china cap. Sonny pulled at the wire and the cap came off. He tasted it. Mmm, not bad. But Jube shook his head, Nope. It’s shit. Nothing like a Lion Red. As Sonny held the green-tinted bottle up to the light and marvelled at the quality seemingly radiating off it.

With the note giving reassurance, and the beers helping in Sonny’s case, they quickly relaxed. Jube started walking around the
place inspecting this and that. No hurry, Son, no hurry at all. We got all fucking night, bro. Breezy, arrogant in his newly moneyed state.

Pictures must be worth a fortune on their own. Nah, no market for em, Son. But is for these Persians, Jube at the rugs spread out everywhere in the living area on polished timber floor. Man, I ain’t seen any of these before, Sonny in immediate appreciation of their intricate patterns and subtle shadings of colour and tone. The surrounds more and more dawning on him, as they also were to Jube, but from his own rough perspective as he stopped before a painting, mostly modern squiggly stuff in bright colours, and sneered at it and tried to pick out the cunts on the vaguely female figures he saw.

Sonny was seeing how everything of this vast living area fitted, achieved a kind of balance that his instincts saw but his mind could not confirm. Not in words. It just felt a kind of perfection. An accomplishment of some great social force, of the people whose taste and eye and selection of architect it was, their force, their membership of some exclusive club – no, class, or maybe they are of an exclusive club that gets together in each other’s posh homes and talks about the different styles and all that. So far removed from the son of a boozing railway worker and an equally booze-addicted mother; so far from the chattering, jabbering, face- and
arm-tattooed
, beer-swilling seethe of the Tavi bar world; so far distant from two thieves entered forcefully into it – and yet they were here, with a start of the cash spoils in grubby-jeans pockets. They were masters inspecting what next spoils to take as they drank their no doubt expensive beer that the label said came from Germany, itself another far-off concept but now being taken, in drinking form, as they were – or Sonny was – drinking in this habitat they had busted into.

Recesses here and there, each with an object in it. And when Sonny hit the main switch for the living room, the place transformed to different shadings of light, not least the recesses where might be a vase, a bowl, a statue figure in wood, in stone, a floral arrangement in a stunningly coloured vase, but with angles of shadow in the recess of each object’s standing. Man alive.

Jube sat himself down at the piano and grinningly plunked out a few unrelated notes. (To Sonny, it felt like a worse violation than actually being here in the first place; with that face-beaten,
ugly-smiling
criminal dude with his boob dots and a star tattooed under his eyes, spiderweb around his throat, all over his arms from
ink-black
fingers to curls and twisty tats of red splotch and green over predominant blue. And here he had the cheek, the effrontery, to plonk himself down at that magnificent piece of musical furniture and run his tattooed hands over the ivories. So Sonny said, Hey, you’re spoiling it. Watched with secret pleasure Jube’s puzzled frown. Spoiling what, man? How could I spoil anything with what we already found and what’s still waiting for us? Chuckling. Plunking out a few more notes and breaking out lalala-lalala-
lahlah
ending in a giggle.

Hey, come look at our Mummy in the photo. Jube held up a frame. Leering at it, for some reason when why’d a woman have a photo of herself on top of a piano that’d make someone, even a Jube, leer? Sonny went over. Man, she’s some woman, expelling a whistle. Colour photo of a woman seated at maybe this very piano with these kids either side of her, a teenage girl and an older teenage boy. Whole fuckin lot ofem are good-looking. Ya reckon?

Jube shaking his head. She’s alright, I like the daughter. Bit young, though, but then again when it’s got hair on it, it’s old enough – Yeah yeah, no need to get smutty. Ooo, my my my, who’s talking? Sonny’s talking, that’s who, and Sonny ain’t into little girls. She ain’t little, she’d be all of what, fifteen, sixteen? Don’t tell me you ain’t had a young one in your time? Yeah, when I was young, but not at thirty-four. Oh well, Sonny, each to his own. Ya might prefer darling boy here, uh? Hahahaha. Jube walked away. Left Sonny to stare at the photograph, the woman, her not so much beauty as it was a presence; of self-assurance. And a certain and definite air of contentedness to her. The kids, hard to tell, they were just kids, if a little on the precious-looking side. The girl was beautiful, her dark-haired brother pretty cool-looking too. But it was the woman, the mother, held Sonny the thief’s attention.

Jube came back with another bottle of beer. I’m gonna check out the main bedroom. Jewels, my man, that’s what I’m reckoning on finding. Oh, and other things too, adding with a chuckle. Sonny followed him downstairs, but not without a parting look at the woman with the high cheekbones and sloping eyes that could be
green or maybe blue, hard to say even with a colour photograph. But it was her smile. He went down the stairs with the song ‘Mona Lisa’ sprung up in his mind, though the woman didn’t look like pictures Sonny’d seen of the Mona Lisa painting. Nor was the song in original form of Nat King Cole repeating in his mind’s ear. Was Natalie, the daughter, doing the next generation’s version of it. He could hear her as if she was following him.

Took three doors of Jube’s trying before they found what must be the main bedroom. Inside it was another door, which led into a big bathroom done out in marble stuff and shining hard surfaces of interesting texture and pattern, floor, walls and vanity units. A large step-up bath, a separate shower, plants hanging here and there, and a large clear pane of glass that looked out into a cluster of trees and shrubs packed tight, intimate. Even the towels looked worth a mint. And everything about the place was perfectly neat and ordered: soaps in different places, bottles of stuff. Then the two men’s reflections in the wide mirror showing complete and utter strangers come in from the dark; incongruous intruders, Sonny in a black jersey with a few little holes in it and grubby jeans still spotted with his own blood from the beating. Jube different only because he wore a T-shirt, and the blood stains on his jeans were larger, and his tattoos on white exposed arm highlighting their different colours. So did their hair colouring contrast: Jube’s brown with ginger streaks in its wild straggle, Sonny’s black and wavy. Hey, we sure look chalk and cheese, bro, Jube laughing at the reflection. And check out this bathroom, man, it’s bigger’n our fucking flat.

No bedroom in this house could possibly be compared to anything either knew, each having its own distinctive identity and feel. Yet Jube went straight over to the dresser had the mirrors and grabbed up what looked like a jewellery box, flipped the lid and looked in. Sonny waited, holding his breath. But the other just shaking his head, I don’t see no Crown Jewels in this lot. He tossed the box through the air at Sonny, you see what you can find out of that lot.

Left Sonny fingering through the items as he went through the dresser, Sonny asking, What’re you specting to find in a drawer? Jube not answering, if his giggle didn’t count. Sonny shook his head, went back to the jewel box, not knowing value of pieces and never had taken an interest over the years. Market was limited any rate; Sonny’d seen dudes come into Tavistocks and sell for the price
of a few jugs of beer jewellery that the paper next day said was worth twenty, thirty grand. So wasn’t long of inspection before Sonny put the box back in its place.