‘True, but the
amount of people taking part in this is starting to stack up,’ says
Charlie. ‘I don’t know about you two, but if we need many more I
don’t know if I have enough friends to rope in.’ I agree with
him.
‘Well, to be
honest, I’d prefer we had six,’ Freddy replies, ‘but at a push, the
CCTV guy and one of the crowd control guys can take care of any of
the backroom staff, assuming the backstage area isn’t much bigger
than I give it credit for. We definitely need five, though, if
we’re going to empty out the safe and the tills fast enough and
still keep on top of anyone in the crowd who thinks they’re
Batman.’
‘Okay, so that
leaves us with a few questions,’ I say.
‘Indeed it
does, number one being, “Where do white, middle-class British
people buy guns?” Because I can’t imagine we’re gonna keep a shop
full of angry Geordies in line with just raised voices and menacing
stares,’ Charlie interjects.
‘That, I’ll
admit, is a puzzler,’ Freddy concedes.
‘Leave it for
now, I say,’ I say. ‘First let’s go through where we’re gonna get
the more easily obtainable stuff. I’m liking the whole matching
uniforms thing, but I can barely afford food at the moment, let
alone a new wardrobe.’
‘I think
solving problems like that is Charlie’s area of expertise,’ Freddy
smirks. ‘We’ll need gloves as well,’ he adds to Charlie.
‘There’s a
difference between swiping the occasional DVD and nicking five
separate burglar outfits,’ Charlie argues. ‘How the fuck am I
supposed to slip a coat inside my coat?’
‘I thought you
wanted a chance to get creative?’ I return. ‘So that’s the outfits
sorted; what’s the next problem?’
‘Person number
five,’ Freddy says. ‘Anyone got a suitable maniac in mind?’
The sound of
Johnny puking echoes down to the living room. I glance at Charlie.
Charlie glances at Freddy.
‘Worth asking
him, I suppose,’ Freddy shrugs.
‘Be subtle
about it though, for God’s sake,’ I groan. ‘I’ve told you enough
times already about keeping this quiet, Charlie.’
‘Actually,
there’s another point in there,’ says Freddy. ‘If we’re serious
about doing this, we don’t want to be drawing any unnecessary
attention to ourselves. That means no suspicious behaviour; we’ve
all got to keep going to lectures as normal.’
‘“Normal” for
me is not going to lectures at all,’ Charlie reminds him.
‘Okay, so the
dog can keep eating your homework. What I’m saying, though, is that
an alibi works better if you haven’t been acting out of the
ordinary. Just play it like you’re having an affair and you don’t
want your wife to find out, except that everyone else in the world
is your wife.’
‘So I’m
basically using Liz as my canary down the mine; if she doesn’t
suspect anything, I’m safe in assuming the police don’t either?’ I
ask.
‘Unless you
think she’ll be up for taking the final place in the team?’ Freddy
suggests.
‘Not a fucking
chance. She’s not been in the best of moods with me lately anyway;
I reckon finding out about this would be the anvil that broke the
camel’s back.’
‘I
might
have an idea about the fifth person, actually,’
Charlie pipes up. ‘I need to give it some thought before I formally
submit it, though.’
‘Intriguing.
So we’ve at least got some avenues to explore for this one?’
‘Yep,’ I
reply. ‘So what’s question three?’
‘This is a big
one. How do we get the fuck out of Dodge when we’re done clearing
the place out? ’
‘Fuck getting
out
of Dodge; how do we even get
into
Dodge? We can’t
just waltz down Northumbria Street wearing balaclavas and carrying
shotguns, can we now? Plus we’ll get flashed by CCTV a thousand
times before we even get within a mile of the place.’
‘We’re gonna
need to get a map with the location of every CCTV camera that’s
anywhere near Eldon Square on it,’ Freddy ponders out-loud.
‘I checked
that already,’ I say. ‘They don’t publish the locations. I guess
idiots like us are probably the reason why.’
‘For someone
who claims they don’t want to go through with this, you’ve put a
hell of a lot of research into it,’ Charlie observes.
‘I think
that’s just the OCD at work,’ I shrug.
‘And OCD is
exactly the kind of mental illness that would benefit someone
trying to make their own map of the area between Haymarket and
Monument,’ Freddy smiles. ‘So we’ll call that your job, shall
we?’
‘Rather do
that than go shoplifting, I suppose.’
‘Good,’ Freddy
says with a clap. ‘So that just leaves one last role for us to
fill, then Charlie can bang his gavel again and we can all go to
the pub.’
‘One sec -
this conversation doesn’t apply to me anymore, does it? I’ve
already got a job,’ Charlie interrupts.
‘I guess
not.’
‘Sweet. I’m
going for a fag,’ he says, and wanders off towards the front
door.
‘If he leaves
that open I’m locking it behind him,’ Freddy says to me. ‘It put an
extra fifty quid on our heating bill last month.’
A breeze
whistles through the corridor.
‘That boy will
be the death of me,’ he mutters. ‘Well, either that or he’ll get me
thrown in jail,’ he adds, with a smirk, standing up and going to
close the front door after Charlie.
‘So what’s
this last thing, then?’ I ask, when he returns.
‘We’ve got to
sit around and see what time the security van pulls up to come
collect the money from the safe. It’ll be just our luck that we
bust in there and there’s only forty quid in the whole fucking
shop.’
‘They wouldn’t
be stupid enough to do the same time-slot every day, would they?
Surely?’
‘Not exactly,
but you can never underestimate just how much the human brain hates
spontaneity. There’ll be a routine there, I guarantee it; it might
just mean we have to spend a lot of time sitting around and waiting
for it to emerge.’
‘
You
have to spend a lot of time sitting around. I’m already on
cartographer duty, remember?’
‘Fucking hell.
Can we not leave this heist thing ‘til summer? I might die of
pneumonia before I even find out which entrance the mother fucker
uses; it’s polar out there.’
A series of
bangs crash through the house. It sounds like Charlie’s just
realised that the door’s locked.
‘Apparently
so,’ I remark. Freddy gets off the sofa and stretches.
‘Well, if
that’s everything, I’m gonna go hit the shower.’
‘Cool man, I’m
gonna give Liz a bell, ask her how long my sentence in the dog
house is,’ I reply. I head up to my bedroom, because down here I
won’t be able to hear her over Charlie’s banging.
Rather than
going to the pub as Freddy suggested, we decided to get straight to
work. Except Charlie, of course; when we eventually let him back in
he said he was going to bed to plan a horrible revenge for me and
Freddy, but, when he got the feeling back in his toes, he might
consider sounding out Johnny about the possibility of joining our
gang. He was at least gracious enough to agree to phone Phoebe, to
make sure she was still keen on the idea of sticking a gun in an
innocent civilian’s face and screaming
‘
Gimmeallyourfuckingmoney
!!!’
Twenty minutes
later, Charlie came to use the bathroom whilst I was brushing my
teeth, and I asked what Phoebe’s answer had been. It turned out
that he’d spent the intervening time trying unsuccessfully to
locate his phone. This was not exactly a rare occurrence; Drunk
Charlie has such a prolific habit of hiding or losing Sober
Charlie’s possessions that two phones ago I decided to add his
number to my Find my iPhone app, so he’d at least be able to find
out whether this one was under his bed or in the MacDonald’s’
toilet. Last night, thankfully, Drunk Charlie only wanted to play
hide-and-seek with his morning-after counterpart, and the GPS dot
on my screen eventually led us to the bin in the kitchen.
When he had
finished wiping the grime off his screen and he finally managed to
get an answer from Phoebe, a loud, shrieking voice erupted out of
the speaker, causing Charlie to pull the phone away from his ear in
confusion. It was only at this point that I remembered the
conversation I overheard outside the club. I kept this information
to myself, however, and instead suggested that he attempt to
contact her via Facebook. Charlie replied that she didn’t appear to
be on it. I congratulated him for being so bad in bed that she’d
blocked him already.
Eventually
Freddy admitted defeat, put on his jacket and his best hard-done-by
face and trudged off in the direction of Northumbria Street. I’d
decided to try and make lemonade out of lemons, convincing Liz to
meet me in town when I’m meant to be doing my CCTV mapping. Of
course I’m not going to actually
tell
her that’s what I’m
doing, that would be silly, but I figure seeing her today might
give me a chance to level out the downward trajectory our
relationship’s been taking of late.
And this is
where I am now, standing around, waiting for Liz to show up, and
hoping she’s not just taking some petty form of revenge for me
sacking her off last night. Deep down, though, I know she’s far too
nice for that sort of thing, and after a none-too-strenuous period
of tapping my foot against the floor like Sonic the Hedgehog she
appears in the distance. I walk up to meet her. I can’t think of
anything interesting to say, so I just say:
‘Hey.’
‘Hey,’ she
replies, sullenly. ‘You have a good time last night?’
I shrug my
shoulders.
‘I’ve had
better. Had worse too, though, I guess.’ Changing the subject a
quickly as possible, I ask: ‘Is there anywhere in particular you
wanted to go today?’
‘I was
thinking about getting my Christmas shopping out of the way,’ she
sighs, ‘but then I checked my bank balance. It’s looking like I’ll
have to throw away all my interesting gift ideas and go for the
standard perfume or chocolate for the girls, and aftershave or
alcohol for the boys. I’m on a low budget, this year.’
I chuckle.
‘You and I
have very different definitions of the phrase “low budget”.’
‘Why, what are
you getting people for Christmas?’
‘I reckon it’s
going to be a hand-made card with an IOU taped inside, pretty much
across the board.’
‘I’ll be
cutting
your
gift budget in half, then,’ she replies.
‘Don’t worry,
you’re above the board,’ I smirk back. ‘If it’s material
possessions you desire, my dear, then it’s material possessions you
shall have. I just think it defeats the point of the holiday to buy
my dad’s present with money I borrowed from my mum, and my mum’s
present with the money I borrowed from my dad.’
‘Have you
never heard the saying, “it’s the thought that counts”?’
‘Nope, but
I’ve seen
Batman Begins
thirty-seven times, and there’s a
line in that which goes, “It’s not who I am, but what I
do
that defines me.” I guess that could be paraphrased as, “It’s not
what you
want
to buy, but what you actually
spend
,
that shows you really care about someone.’
‘Slightly
cynical there,’ she replies. I shrug.
‘Freddy and
Charlie must be rubbing off on me.’
We set off
into Eldon Square, chatting about something or other. I’m staring
at the walls and the ceiling, looking for security cameras, placing
them into the map I’m building inside my head. There can’t possibly
be enough of them in here to keep you on screen the whole time
you’re inside - it would cost a fortune to maintain them all, and
in ninety-nine cases of petty theft and anti-social behaviour, just
a general idea would be enough to keep track of somebody. A cursory
scan of the main lower south side lobby supports this hypothesis.
That’s a start
, I think to myself. Now it’s just a case of
working out how to be one of the one per cent.
‘Isn’t it kind
of strange how things work out?’ Liz is saying. ‘Last year you were
complaining about just having to live in the same
house
as
Charlie; now I have to compete with him to spend any time with
you.’
‘Everything I
was complaining about is still true about him,’ I return. ‘But
being interesting helps to paper over a surprising number of
personality flaws.’
‘How do you
mean?’
‘I think the
way he put it was, “If you’re not boring, you don’t have to be
nice.”’
She goes quiet
for a few moments, as though part of her wants to say something,
but another part is holding her back. I return to looking at
cameras. The way I see it, we’d have to get the stuff stashed in
Eldon Square before we get here - the guns, the trench coats, the
lot of it. There are obviously some zones where the cameras can’t
see you, but without an invisibility cloak it would be nigh on
impossible for us to get from Haymarket to the target without being
snapped at least three times. We’re going to have to admit the fact
that we were in here when the robbery was happening, and hope
there’s not enough evidence to prove that it was us in the
balaclavas waving pistols around. Pull the old Clark Kent trick.
The crowds should help out on that front.
‘So which am
I?’ Liz asks.
‘Which of
what?’
‘Nice, or
interesting?’
I put my
daydream on pause, and try to quickly think of a ‘get out of jail’
kind of an answer.
‘You’re the
exception that proves the rule.’
I’ve never
fully understood what that saying meant, to be honest.
I’m trying to
surreptitiously steer Liz towards John Lewis, but she’s decided
that she might be able to squeeze the edible and intoxicating
presents into this month’s budget and that we should therefore go
to the Marks & Spencer mini-market which lies outside of the
shopping centre, on the road which plays the role of the DMZ
between the university campus and the city proper. I point out that
her wanting to go to M&S is yet more evidence that we define
being ‘broke’ in very different ways.