The Blueprint (4 page)

‘Because it
was a departure, however benign, from the established order. It’s
the same reason that you get a giddy thrill from urinating in
public, yet you get so weirdly offended when you see someone you
don’t know doing it. We, as a species, have an unspoken agreement
to not break any of these harmless little taboos, because doing so
gives us permission to break the big ones, like, say, robbing a
bank with a fleet of Mini Coopers. Maybe neither is wrong, from a
moral standpoint; maybe it’s just that us not doing them is
necessary to ensure that society continues to run like the
well-oiled, grossly unfair machine that it is.’

‘You know how
you said to never use words when a grand gesture will do?’

‘Yeah?’

‘How come I
got stuck with both the gesture and the fucking lecture?’

‘Is that a
“no”, then?’

‘To what?’

‘Robbing a
bank?’

‘Less of a
“no”, than a “shut up and clean the fucking window, you
moron.”’

‘Come on, man!
I’ve spent more time researching heist tactics than I’ve put into
this semester’s coursework; by this point, if we don’t put it to
any use I’ll be no better than someone who does a physics degree
and then goes into accounting.’

I decide that
the time has come for me to roll my eyes again. Charlie gazes back
at me with a kind of mania lurking in his own.

‘In six years’
time, you’ll be sat on a sofa that cost more than you spend on food
in a year, watching reruns of reality TV with a bird you’ve
convinced yourself you didn’t propose to avoid being the old guy in
the club on a Friday night, talking about whether you should have
chicken or fish when Keith and Sandra come round for dinner next
weekend, and you’re going to think:
Shit
,
I wish I’d
listened to my old friend Charlie, and exercised my God-given
liberty before I had all these tedious possessions to lose,
’ he
says, with the bleary-eyed certainty of a drunken, homeless
prophet.

‘I’ll tell you
what,’ I reply, wearily. ‘If I sign up, will you
shut
up and
watch the rest of the movie in silence?’

‘Sounds like a
deal to me.’

‘Then count me
in,’ I say, safe in the knowledge that within ten minutes he’ll get
distracted by something shiny on the floor and forget all about
it.

THE TARGET

Northumberland
Street in Newcastle upon Tyne is a street with schizophrenia. I
must confess at this point that I’m not entirely sure what
schizophrenia is - I got most of my knowledge of psychiatric
disorders from horror movies - so in my mind the term roughly
translates as a split personality, wherein one of those
personalities is a serial killer. Whether the serial killer version
of Northumberland Street is the daytime one or the one that comes
out at night depends on your viewpoint, I guess. The daylight one I
could imagine being Freddy’s equivalent of a bad acid trip, what
with the looming behemoths of capitalism flanking either side,
screaming at the shambling zombie masses to come in and
BUY!
BUY! BUY!
or, as he puts it, to ‘come in, and hand over your
soul in exchange for a beef burger where “beef” is a very loose
translation and some shoes from a corporation whose marketing
strategy is a whispered, “We starved our infant labour force to
make these, and we’re passing the savings on to
YOU!
”’ I
don’t necessarily agree with this assessment, firstly because
MacDonald’s changing their recipe is one of the few things that
would get me to join a student protest, and secondly because the
people working at the aforementioned clothes stores come across as
too apathetic to be the minions of Satan, which I’d assume to be a
pretty interesting career.

The nighttime
version is the one that I find far more terrifying. Since
Northumberland Street is one of the few places in town - probably
even the country - where one can purchase a soul-crushing
cheeseburger at four in the morning, in the last couple hours of
twilight it suddenly fills up, becoming the site of a kind of
pissheads’ pride parade full of indecipherable screaming and
shouting, people wearing less clothes the colder it gets - as
though they think the weather has called them a pussy and this is
the best way to square-up to an abstract concept - and mating
rituals dredged up from the shadows of our cave-dwelling past.
Between the rush to get a Big Mac or a taxi and people’s panicked
last attempts to ensure they don’t go another week without sex, it
feels as though the normal rules of society somehow get waived.
That notion gets the better of me, I’ll admit. All the more on a
Friday night, since it’s the one occasion where the city’s native
and student populations come into contact. Even Charlie’s
insistence that he’s seen more fights on Mondays than Fridays and
that this is all paranoia on my part doesn’t make the terror any
less potent.

He can’t get
enough of that sort of thing, though. Charlie thrives on
unpredictability and booze-fuelled chaos, to the point where I
sometimes think he’s counting down the days until civilisation
collapses in on itself, burying those few scraps of the social
contract he hasn’t yet thrown into the fire. I’d imagine it’s this
aspect of his personality that leaves him unable to resist the
allure of shoplifting every time we go into town together. While
we’re looking around HMV, in my peripheries I notice him using one
hand to bring one DVD up to his eyes for closer inspection, whilst
using the other to surreptitiously slip a different one inside his
coat. I tut, mostly to convince myself that I disapprove, but
secretly I’m wondering whether I should ask him to nab me the
Gilmore Girls
box set while he’s at it.

I go back to
browsing through the cavalcade of entertainments that I’ll never
have the spare cash to take over to the till. When I first noticed
Charlie’s kleptomania I couldn’t go into a shop in his company
without my blood pressure ratcheting up several notches, but I’ve
since cottoned-on to the fact that he’s got a cape of Karmic
invulnerability. Not just when it comes to shoplifting, either;
I’ve literally never seen him suffer any sort of consequences for
his laziness, his utter lack of shame or his general lack of
respect for the law; he was born with the luck of the Irish, the
bastard, without getting lumbered with the traditional alcoholism
and unintelligible accent. Well, without the accent, anyway.
Whatever Liz says, I guarantee that he’ll end up graduating with a
2:1 and a decent paying job – you mark my words.

‘Is it
coffee-date time yet?’ he asks, ambling over to me. I mime checking
my watch.

‘Looks that
way.’

Charlie’s been
calling our little mid-afternoon meet-ups ‘dates’ ever since he
found out the term sends Liz mental. About twice a week we’ll join
up in town after lectures have finished - mine, not his; he’ll meet
me when he’s woken up - to spend more money than we can afford on
caffeine-based potions or fast food, and sit there for a couple of
hours solving the world’s various problems. On occasion, Charlie
might invite one of the homeless people he’s made friends with to
join us: partly to get a third perspective on things; partly to
boost his public image after all the shoplifting, and partly
because it amuses the hell out of him to see how awkward it makes
me when the other people in Starbucks stare at us.

‘What did you
get, then?’ I ask, once we’re a safe distance down the street. He
opens his coat. I can’t help laughing at him.

‘If you’re
going to steal, at least steal something that we don’t already
own.’

He looks
crestfallen.

‘You’re
fucking kidding me.’

‘Nope. We
watched it last week.’

He bends his
neck to look inside his jacket.

‘Oh,
fuck!
’ he exclaims. ‘I thought I got the second one!’

He drops the
DVD into a passing bin.

‘We might have
to pop back in on our way home; I won’t have many more chances to
bulk up my DVD collection before Netflix hammers the last nail in
that particular coffin.’

‘I can’t
imagine you’re helping them, there,’ I reply. Charlie shrugs.

‘If they
didn’t want me to steal from them, they should install CCTV.’

‘They
do
have CCTV.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Don’t act
that surprised; there’s one up there watching us, now.’

He looks
up.

‘And there,
and there, and there:’ I add, pointing out the rest. ‘We’re the
most watched nation on Earth, mate. Which kind-of begs the
question: “
How the fuck have you never been caught?
”’

‘I don’t know,
but in hindsight can we say I haven’t been doing it for personal
gain, but to protest the fact that Britain’s turning into
1984
?’

‘Have you ever
noticed that you always play the Orwell card when someone’s trying
to stop you from committing crime?’ I ask. ‘People who voluntarily
put naked pictures of themselves up on Facebook, such as yourself,
have no right to complain about invasion of privacy when they’re
caught doing something wrong.’

‘Aha, but
therein lies the rub,’ he says, twiddling a finger at me. ‘Who gets
to decide what’s wrong and what’s right?’

‘I think even
you
realise that shoplifting’s wrong, deep down.’ I look up
and see the mischievous grin stretching across his chops. ‘Way
down, I mean.’

‘Freddy would
have something to say about that,’ he returns. I can’t argue with
him, there. Freddy doesn’t believe in the concept of ownership.
Quite how he expects the world to function without it I’m not sure,
but that is, nonetheless, what he claims to believe. One upside of
having a roommate with Freddy’s, shall we say, blinkered idealism,
is that it gives me and Charlie a watertight defence for the times
when we come in at 4AM and steal all his food. And since Freddy’s
dad is a member of one of the social classes Freddy himself claims
to despise, his food is usually a great deal more interesting than
our own.

‘He
did
tell me an interesting fact the other day,’ Charlie remembers.

‘Hmm?’

‘He reckons
that the average office worker in the UK spends more on coffee a
month than the people who produce it earn in a year.’

‘I neither
know whether that’s true nor care enough to find out,’ I reply.

‘Pretty
shocking, assuming he isn’t lying,’ Charlie remarks quietly, as we
pull up outside Starbucks.

‘You want to
take our money elsewhere, then?’ I ask him.

‘Nah, fuck
that; I’m not doing any more fucking walking,’ he says, bowling
through the big glass doors. Not having any beliefs of his own
allows Charlie to pick and choose where he finds it convenient to
agree with Freddy and where he doesn’t.

‘What are you
doing?’ I ask him. He pushed forward in the queue and got his
beverage before I did, and, true to form, went upstairs to look for
a seat without hanging around for me afterward. I eventually
followed, hot chocolate in hand, and found him hidden over in the
corner. He’s not drinking his coffee; instead he’s got the cup on
the table in front of him and he’s sitting, motionless, staring at
it. Apparently he hasn’t heard my question.

I pull out the
chair opposite and ease down onto it. Charlie doesn’t look up. He
hasn’t moved since I came up here, actually.

‘Are you
having a stroke?’ I ask. ‘And, if so, can I have your coffee?’

He still
doesn’t react, so I reach forward to grab his mug.

‘No, no, wait.
I think I’ve almost done it,’ he murmurs.

‘Done
what?’

‘I’m trying to
turn my coffee into wine.’

‘We’ve been
through this before, Charlie. You’re not Jesus. He was less of an
arsehole than you are.’

‘I don’t think
I’m Jesus. Well, not when I’m sober, anyway. I don’t need God to do
this; I’ve got it all worked out.’

‘You
have
been a fountain of great ideas lately, I’ll give you
that.’

He flicks his
eyes up and shoots me his idea gaze.

‘Do you
believe in free will?’

‘Can’t we just
we just have a normal conversation for once?’

Charlie cranes
his neck around and looks out of the window.

‘Nice weather
we’re having. Do you believe in free will?’

I lean back
and try to give an exasperated sigh, but it comes out as a laugh
instead.

‘Yes, Charlie,
like everyone else on the planet, I believe in free will.’

‘Me too. See?
Like
this,
me and you.’ He waggles his finger in the space
between our foreheads. ‘Now, do you believe that human beings are
built out of the same atoms as everything else?’

‘Ye-’

I haven’t even
finished the syllable when he slams his fist against the table and
exclaims:

‘Me
too
! And, last of all, do you think that atoms have free
will? Of course you don’t!’

He puts his
chin on his hand and stares at me in the same way he was staring at
his cup of coffee.

‘You figured
out the implication yet?’

I stay silent,
because I know he’s planning on answering his own question.

‘If we’re
built out of brainless, helpless matter, then one of two things
must be true. Either we’re the same as all the dead, stupid atoms
in my coffee, being kicked towards the heat death of the universe
by the laws of physics, or free will exists, and the laws of
physics are my bitch. If it’s the second one then I should be able
to turn this coffee into wine, or at the very least into some
questionable vodka.’

Finally, he
picks up his cup and takes a sip.

‘Taste like
alcohol?’ I ask.

‘Nope.’

‘Must be the
first one, then.’

‘Looks that
way. Hey, do you reckon pleading determinism will hold up in
court?’