Since me and
Liz seem to have run out of things to say to one another already,
once we arrive at Marks & Spencer I leave her to her shopping
and go off on my own in search of a toilet. The two litres of Dr
Pepper I drank this afternoon in an attempt to keep my hangover at
arm’s length has finished working its way through my kidneys and is
now demanding its freedom. I see a blue door and I push through it
without bothering to read the sign. A blank corridor is waiting
behind. I glance back at the slowly closing door and see that the
outward-facing sign says ‘Staff Only’. A strange, childish impulse
– the type which I imagine Charlie has spent his entire life giving
into - suddenly gets the better of me; I push the door completely
shut and steal off up the stairs, hoping nobody has seen me do
it.
Every time I
round a corner, I feel that same quickening of the heart that I
usually associate with Charlie’s shoplifting, expecting there to be
someone wearing one of those dull green uniforms waiting to
interrogate me. It’s also not helping that I narrowly avoid wetting
myself every time I lift up my leg, as my bulging bladder gets
squeezed. At the very top of the staircase – which I’d guess must
be the floor directly above the shop proper – I come to a
T-junction. I can hear voices coming from the right, so I opt for
the left hand path. This level has a very different vibe to it than
the shop floor; none of the trademark green, just white walls dyed
sickly yellow by the fluorescent lighting - the human battery farm
look that corporate interior designers seem to have a sadistic
hard-on for.
‘Excuse me!’ I
hear a shrill voice say, in a slightly confused fashion. I turn to
see a pudgy, middle-aged woman sitting behind reinforced glass,
with one of those steel troughs for the exchange of valuables
underneath it. This must be the cash office. Yep, there’s the safe,
partially blocked from view by her rotund figure. I notice a keypad
lock on the door into the office. With a sense of relief that
quiets my heartbeat but also leaves behind a strangely disappointed
aftertaste, I realise that Charlie’s plan will never be anything
more than an academic exercise. They probably have the same set-up
at John Lewis. With bulletproof glass and what I assume to be a
pretty sturdy locked door between us and their old woman manning
the cash office, even with guns, how would we ever get at the safe
- let alone inside it?
‘Oh, hi!’ I
say to her, in a cheery but meek tone of voice. ‘I’m sorry; I came
up here looking for the toilet and I’ve ended up getting a bit
lost.’ She looks at me like I’m not quite all there. ‘Yes. I
am
just that stupid,’ I add. Since I’d drafted that speech
while I was on my way up the stairs, in case I ran into somebody, I
had no trouble delivering it as long as I didn’t look directly into
her eyes.
She
laughs.
‘You could
have tried following the signs, rather than just wandering through
the first door you saw,’ she replies.
‘At least I’ve
learned a lesson today. Do you know which signs I follow to get
back into the actual shop? I’m scared someone might ask me to do
some work if I keep wandering around here for much longer.’ I
drafted that joke, too.
‘Go back down
the way you came; don’t follow the corridor to the end or you’ll
end up in the staff room. The staff toilets are on your left as you
come back onto the ground floor,’ she replies.
‘Thanks,’ I
smile.
‘You’re very
welcome. Try not to get lost again.’ She says it in a kind,
motherly sort of tone. I feel a twinge of guilt about having just
considered the logistics of threatening to shoot her if she didn’t
comply.
I shake the
thought out of my head and set off in search of the toilet. It
won’t come to that. We’ve already discovered four or five hurdles
that will make doing this nearly impossible, and more are bound to
pop up as we get closer to January. It’s only a matter of time
before Charlie and Freddy give up on this fool’s errand and go back
to shoplifting and proselytising, respectively. A small part of me
hopes that Charlie will get busted stealing the gloves or trench
coats - nothing that’ll get him taken to court or kicked off his
course, just a slap on the wrist or a caution - and he’ll start to
see sense. He’s never been caught before; maybe a short, sharp
shock is what he needs.
A different
thought, however, strikes me as I’m standing at the urinal: I
haven’t seen a single CCTV camera in here. This thought drags
another immediately behind it: Of
course
there wouldn’t be
any; I’ve been so stuck in the world Hollywood heist movies that
I’d expected every shop in Newcastle to be jacked-up with as much
security as a mob-run casino. The amount that places like this
stand to save by preventing shoplifting is fuck-all compared to how
much it would be to put the systems in here in the first place, not
to mention the running costs. I can’t believe that anyone, from the
checkout boys to the CEO, has even considered the notion that some
gun-toting maniacs might suddenly walk through the doors and hold
up an M&S. Why would they? You’d have to be mad and stupid in
equal measure to want to do something like that.
A sudden burst
of excitement causes flecks of piss to ricochet back off the urinal
and smatter my t-shirt. I glance upwards at the metal tunnels of
the air conditioning system and in my mind I’m suddenly crawling
through them like one of the stealthy, tactical characters I tend
to opt for when I’m playing videogames. I shake off and zip up and
slowly wander over to the sink. All the time my thoughts are
warring between the cathartic fantasy of doing something and the
terrible prospect of kicking it over the line and into reality. I
spend a long time examining my face in the mirror as I’m washing my
hands.
When I
re-emerge onto the shop floor I wander up and down the rows of
shelves in a methodical fashion, attempting to spot Liz without
accidentally catching the eye of any of the massed strangers
shopping around me. Since there aren’t too many aisles in this
place I find her rather quickly, on my second pass of the meat,
fish and poultry section.
‘Jesus,
they’ve already got the Christmas tree up,’ I remark. The huge
tinsel and bauble-draped evergreen, stretching halfway up the
ceiling, sitting in its big porcelain pot dead in the centre of the
shop floor, didn’t really irritate me, but it was the only thing I
spotted whilst I was doing circuits that provided me with a means
of saying hello which wasn’t merely ‘hello’.
‘Don’t be such
a Grinch,’ Liz shrugs. She’s bent over at the waist, examining the
items in the refrigerator, and doesn’t look up to greet me. ‘So,
I’ve decided to let you earn my forgiveness for last night by
cooking me dinner. And, in my infinite generosity, I’ll even let
you decide what you’re cooking. Which would you rather; chicken or
fish?’ she asks.
A smile creeps
up one side of my cheek.
‘That’s a
tough decision,’ I reply.
SECOND AMENDMENT
It’s December
the eleventh. The original date we had pegged for the robbery. The
best part of a month of hard reconnaissance, or hard shoplifting in
Charlie’s case, is starting to pay dividends. We’ve now got a
meticulously drawn bird’s eye view of Eldon Square and all its
surrounding areas lying on our coffee table, with all the CCTV
coverage highlighted in red crayon and the most camera-free paths
to the target sketched in blue ink. Lying next to it is a pile of
timetables with what time the security van showed up on each day
highlighted, plus one extra one that shows the general range of
times that we can expect him to turn up on any given day. Freddy
has also marked the security man’s most common pick-up times for
not just the target building, but every shop in the Haymarket area.
When he asked why he needed to bother with this – and he did so
repeatedly – I replied that it’s always better to be over-informed
than under-informed, and also to shut the fuck up. Upstairs,
stuffed into Charlie’s wardrobe, there are three complete burglar’s
outfits, plus another two with just the gloves and balaclavas
missing. He’s been averaging two shoplifting sessions a week, and
half an outfit per session. He reckons he’s developed a whole new
technique for stealing large items, such as trench coats and bags,
which he plans to use to steal himself a new games console when all
of this is over.
‘Why don’t you
just buy the console out of the money you get from the robbery?’ I
asked him when he mentioned this idea.
‘Oh, yeah - I
forgot we’re getting money out of this. I’d started thinking we
were just doing it as a hobby,’ Charlie replied. It was
conversations like this which had kept me feeling pretty confident
that the wheels were going to fall off the whole enterprise by the
time we went home for the Christmas holidays.
Until this
morning, at least. That was when Charlie finally saw fit to tell us
about his idea for a fifth person to add to the crew. Me, him and
Phoebe were sitting around having a half-arsed kind of meeting, and
using the other half of our arses to watch TV. It being his
sister’s birthday, Freddy’s gone back home for the weekend, and
without him to chair them our meetings have become ‘meetings’ in
only the most literal sense of the word. After Phoebe got here I
was roped into making everyone a mug of tea, then we decided to
send Charlie out to get biscuits, but by the time he got back the
tea was either finished or cold, so Phoebe was then dispatched to
the kitchen to make a second round, but by the time she’d brought
it in me and Charlie had polished-off all the biscuits, and…you get
the idea.
So there we
were, watching
X Factor
repeats for the giddy thrill of it -
we’re not allowed to watch it when Freddy’s around, a rule that
he’s very strict about policing - drinking tea, munching custard
creams, and, very occasionally, throwing in a token mention of one
of the problems we’re ostensibly using these meetings to discuss
solutions for.
‘Getting in?’
I suggested, at least trying to pay lip-service to the agenda.
‘Fuck knows,’
Charlie replied.
‘Getting
out?’
‘Fuck knows,’
Phoebe echoed.
‘Getting into
the cash office?’
‘Fuck knows!’
they both shouted in unison.
‘Can’t say I
didn’t try,’ I sighed, and went back to watching some
sixteen-year-old explaining how her cat died and why that means she
deserves a multi-million pound recording contract. I suddenly
noticed that Charlie was staring at me, looking annoyed.
‘It’s typical
that you’d stop asking before we get to the questions I actually
have answers to,’ he said.
‘Why, have you
finally convinced Johnny to get on board?’
‘Nah. I tried
to do the whole “subtle hinting” thing to him, but he just thought
I was trying to come on to him. But I
have
succeeded in
finding someone who’s both stupid and greedy enough to take part in
this. And someone who’s already buried in enough criminality that
he might even know someone who can sell us a pistol or two, at
that.’
‘I’m petrified
of this guy already,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’
‘Sid.’
‘Your
guitarist?’
‘That’s the
one.’
‘You don’t get
along all that well with him, though, do you?’
‘Nah. I hate
the prick, to be honest - hence me leaving it this long to make the
suggestion. But I’m pretty certain he’s our best bet - shit, he’s
our
only
bet - for getting some guns, and if we don’t get
any of those we’ve basically wasted the last three weeks of our
lives playing make-believe. And since no-one’s come up with a
better idea for a fifth person yet, I figure we might as well kill
the two birds with one cunt.’
‘Are you going
to be able to keep yourself from calling him that when we’re on the
heist?’ I asked. ‘Because if the two of you start having a fist
fight and I get arrested, I’m not going to feel guilty about
snitching you into a life sentence.’
‘I’ve been in
a band with him for over a year and we’ve only come to blows twice,
so I think the odds are on our side.’
‘I think the
more pertinent question is, “What makes you so sure he can get us
guns?”’ Phoebe suggested.
‘Because his
day job is drug dealing,’ Charlie replied. ‘And if movies have
taught me anything, it’s that where there’s drug dealing, people
who like shooting people won’t be too far behind.’
‘Well that all
depends what you mean by “drug dealing”. If he’s selling you and
your drummer half an ounce of weed a month, then the guns will be
pretty fucking far out of his reach,’ Phoebe pointed out.
‘Ye of little
faith,’ Charlie smirked. ‘After all we’ve been through, do you
still not trust me?’
‘If your
performances in bed are anything to go by, I’d say you were the
kind of guy who might occasionally promise a bit more than he can
deliver.’
‘Fucking hell,
woman: just because
you’re
a sociopath doesn’t mean the rest
of us don’t have feelings,’ Charlie replied. There was still the
old fencer’s glint in his eye as he said it, but the gaiety was
more forced than usual. Phoebe raised her arms and eyebrows
slightly. I wondered if that was her guilty face.
‘And you call
yourself a heartless criminal,’ she smiled. ‘Prove me wrong, then;
what makes you think this guitarist of yours can get his hands on
guns?’
‘Because he’s
pretty far from a small-time weed dealer,’ Charlie said, aiming his
words at Phoebe, almost as though he’d forgotten I was in the room
at all. If I didn’t know Charlie better, I’d have thought this was
a lovers’ tiff.
Maybe he really likes her,
I thought to
myself. ‘In fact, I might even go as far as to call him a “shady
mother fucker”. I reckon his coke-related outgoings alone are about
as much as the lot of us pay for this place in rent. That’s got to
put him a couple of levels below the murderous drug dealers, at
most,’ Charlie added.