By the time
we’ve filtered out the hostages, Bronstein has made it up the
stairs to the cash office. The plan is for him to have a gun
pointed at the nice lady behind the bulletproof glass before she
figures out that something’s gone horribly wrong with her day. In
the digital dry run, this plan goes to plan. Standing behind
bulletproof glass tends to make a gun seem underwhelming, however,
so I was forced to invent a grimly elegant solution to this
predicament. As Freddy previously mentioned, when he’d finished
defending the free world from Hitler and co. his granddad managed
to sneak a grenade-shaped souvenir back from France. At my behest,
when he’d finished cleaning up the sick from his sister’s
seventeenth birthday party Freddy managed to sneak it, along with a
now sawn-off shotgun, back to Newcastle. He can therefore threaten
to pull the pin and send it through the money drawer of the cash
office, unless the nice lady decides to open the door and let him
into the safe.
Back on the
shop floor, Dave, Cuntmonkey and myself have now gathered twenty
or-so hostages and barricaded the front doors. We part ways, with
the other two escorting the hostages upstairs to the staff break
room whilst me and the thermite go to burn our way through the
floor of the supermarket and into the basement floor of the
six-story car park below, where - assuming we haven’t gone over the
time-limit - Butch will be waiting with the getaway vehicle. While
we’re collecting the money and rounding up the innocents, he will
be skulking around the car park, looking for something with a good
engine and bad locks; preferably a car whose parking ticket
suggests that the owners are going to be absent for a long while.
We all agreed that if there’s anyone suited to grand theft auto
amongst our number, it’s him. Once he’s got his hands on a suitable
automobile, he’ll outfit the boot with our fake bomb.
We’re not the
ones who’ll be driving the getaway vehicle, however; the fake
explosives are there to convince three lucky hostages that pulling
on balaclavas, getting in the car and speeding off into the
horizon, potentially with police cars in pursuit, is a preferable
option to pulling over and handing themselves in to the
authorities. We’ve already agreed that the best candidates for such
a task would be young and female. It’s a shame for an enlightened
man like myself to fall back on such lazy gender stereotypes, but
common sense and screenwriting 101 suggest that they’ll be most
likely to believe we’ve rigged the bomb to go off if they drop
below sixty miles an hour. The diversion that their ‘getaway’
provides should give us real criminals a window of opportunity to
each slink out, unnoticed and unmolested, through one of the many
escape routes that the car park has to offer. From there, we’ll
blend in with the crowds, go for coffee, grab a movie, whatever,
until it’s our turn to make our way back home to count the
takings.
That’s how the
virtual rehearsal says it should go, anyway.
‘Do you want
bullets?’ asks Sid’s friend. He’s drawn the curtains - oddly the
only item of furniture in the place - which only serves to make the
whole endeavour feel more shady. I wonder if the pun was
intended.
‘Why wouldn’t
we?’ Sid returns, his face quizzical.
‘If you
weren’t planning on killing anybody.’
The silence
hangs over us.
‘We want
bullets,’ Sid admits, finally.
‘How
many?’
‘How many have
you got?’
‘Twelve for
the handguns; five for the magnum.’
Sid
frowns.
‘That’s not
very much.’
‘Depends what
you’re doing with them.’
‘It’s enough,’
I mutter, then go back to coaxing the dog over with one of the
smoky bacon crisps I bought for my breakfast. The arms dealer gives
me a weirdly offended look, and says:
‘Dogs die if
they eat crisps.’
‘You’re
thinking of chocolate,’ I reply, crossing my legs in the Godfather
way – something which doesn’t project quite the same air of
authority when one is sat on the floor as it does when one is sat
on a chair - and gingerly scratching his scary dog behind the
ears.
‘Just don’t do
it,’ he replies, in a stern and ominous tone. I’m struck by the
notion that, though I doubt he’s killed anyone himself, he probably
knows someone that has. I know that, rationally speaking, no one
would throw away nearly a grand’s-worth of business for the sake of
something so petty, but this guy doesn’t quite strike me as a
rational agent.
‘Sorry,’ I
concede, albeit sarcastically. ‘Your house, your rules.’
‘Fucking
right,’ he sneers. He doesn’t even have a TV to watch, to take my
mind off of the ensuing awkward silence. With nothing better to do,
I decide to break that silence.
‘So I’ll
assume you’ve got some more questions, otherwise you’d just sell us
the guns and get back to filling in your application for the Jeremy
Kyle Show,’ I say.
‘I’ve got more
questions,’ he replies. ‘What are you planning on doing with
them?
‘We’re
assassinating one of the royals,’ I interject, before Sid can get
any syllables out. ‘We just haven’t decided which one yet. What
does it matter, anyway? I’m guessing this isn’t literally your
house, considering there’s no furniture in here and a “for let”
sign outside; neither of us knows your name; I couldn’t get any
more specific with your description than “brown hair, none too
pretty” - Sherlock fucking Holmes couldn’t find you with just that
to go on.’
I watch his
rusty cogs clanking around in his head. After a minute or two, he
asks:
‘And have you
got the money?’
I pull the
wedge of twenties and tens, all wrapped up in an elastic band, out
of my pocket and hand it over to him. As he slowly counts it up, my
mind goes back to the conversation I had with the Barclays customer
service department earlier in the week. I asked them to extend my
overdraft by five-hundred pounds. Until recently, it had been a
point of pride that my bank balance had never gone lower than zero.
The woman on the other end asked what I wanted it for; I said that
I wanted books to revise from over Christmas. I heard her stifle a
derisive snort. I wondered if she thought I’d be spending it on
treble vodkas.
‘There’s only
nine-hundred here.’
Sid shoots me
a look. I shrug as if to say, ‘Don’t look at me; I don’t know’, but
really I’m thinking, ‘
For fuck’s sake Charlie
,’ and cursing
myself for not counting the money before I left the house this
morning.
‘Not a big fan
of haggling, I take it?’
His eyebrows
narrow. Taking this to be a ‘no’, I glance towards Sid, and
ask:
‘Got any money
on you?’
‘Couple of
twenties. You?’
‘Left my phone
and wallet at home,’ I reply. ‘I thought you would have as well,
considering how careful you’ve been lately.’
‘It’s a reflex
thing; I feel like I’m naked if my pockets are empty.’ I raise my
eyebrows, so he adds with a note of irritation: ‘I’m not going to
leave them lying about anywhere suspicious, am I? Grant me at least
some
intelligence.’
I’m about to
reply when our low-budget arms dealer makes his presence known
again.
‘If the next
words out of your mouth aren’t “I’ve just found a hundred quid in
my pocket”, I’m taking this,’ he waves the stack of notes about,
‘and I’m going home,’ he says.
‘Look, wait,’
I splutter. ‘We can work something out. Take half the bullets out.
I mean, we only need…’ I start going over the plan in my head,
counting out each shot on my fingers.
Click.
I look up, and
I see him pointing the gun at me.
‘I only need
one,’ he says, with a smirk. I can feel the blood curdle in my
veins. The heat seems to have got up and left the room, along with
the oxygen. I fight for breath, but I can’t find it anywhere. Sid
is flattened against the wall beside me, as though he’s trying to
push his way through it, and escape.
‘W-wait man,’
I plead. The words barely find their way out. ‘You’re not going to
murder us over nine hundred quid, surely?’
‘Nope,’ he
replies. He doesn’t lower the gun. ‘I’m going to murder
you
because you’re a cocky little prick. The nine-hundred and
forty
quid is just a bonus.’ The smirk crawls even wider up
his cheek. ‘Like you said, who the fuck’s gonna know?’
I can feel the
skin on my face beginning to sag, while tears build up behind my
eyes. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
‘Don’t,’ Sid
whispers. ‘Please. Don’t.’ It’s not a demand; it’s a feeble
request. I can’t believe I handed the better part of a grand to an
armed stranger and expected him not to just take it. And yet, right
now, I could happily admit to the others that I got up early to
attend my own mugging and still consider today a rousing success,
provided I don’t get murdered immediately afterward. My atheism is
busy falling apart, as I pray to God that the friends Sid knows
this guy through are close enough to make him reconsider shooting
me. That’s the only chance I’ve got, after all: I turned up here
without a soul knowing where I was off to, except Sid; there’s no
connection to be traced between me and my killer; we’re out in an
abandoned house in the middle of working-class nowhere. Basically,
it all comes down to his conscience or Sid’s friends. The long arm
of the law is well out of reach now. My fate is well out of my
hands.
‘You done
pretending you’re a hard man?’ he asks me. I don’t need any
prompting from Sid to start nodding furiously.
‘Prove it,’
his continues. ‘Get on the floor and kiss my fucking feet.’
I try to turn
to Sid for advice, but I can’t take my eyes off the gun.
Three-quarters of my brain - the part that would rather keep my
skull intact than my ego - screams at me to collapse onto
all-fours. And yet, all the while, there’s another voice in my head
that tells me he’s bluffing.
‘Fucking do
it!’ Sid finally screeches, and it’s as though a giant hand is
pressing down on my shoulders. As my hands thump against the
carpet, the dealer lets his dog’s lead go slack, jabbing it in the
bollocks with his toe as he does it, and the slathering beast
explodes into action: it shoots forward, snapping its jaws; I bring
my elbows up to try to protect my face and its teeth clamp into my
forearm; I scream and scramble desperately backwards and clatter
the side of my head against the wall.
‘Who’s in
fucking charge here?’ the salesman bellows, his northern accent
becoming more prominent with the increase in volume. If he lets go
of the last half-a-foot of the dog’s leash, my throat gets detached
from my neck.
‘You!’ I
scream back. ‘Just get this fucking dog off me!’
‘And are you
gonna get me another five hundred by the end of the month?’
‘Yes!
Yes!’
At last the
fucking mutt is yanked away, but I don’t uncurl from the foetal
position. I hear him tell Sid to send to send the extra money
through Ray, whoever the fuck Ray is, and that he’s taking half of
the handgun bullets to teach me a lesson in manners. Something
falls onto the floor with a
thunk
a few steps from me, then
I hear the arms dealer’s feet trampling the stairs.
I peek out
from behind my torn sleeves and watch Sid sliding down the wall.
He’s whiter than teeth in Los Angeles.
‘You alright?’
he whispers.
‘Think my
jumper took the worst of it,’ I stammer back.
‘At least he
left the guns.’
I look at the
bag the salesman dropped.
‘At least
we’re still alive.’
Sid gives a
bad impression of a chuckle.
‘Yeah,’ he
replies. ‘Hopefully we can still say that this time next week.’
I sit up.
Despite myself, and despite the fact that Sid plainly wasn’t
joking, I smirk. The smirk becomes a grin; the grin becomes a
chortle. Suddenly my head rolls back, involuntarily, and I erupt
into adrenaline-fuelled laughter. Through the rolls of psychotic
mirth, I squeeze out:
‘If you tell
anyone about what just happened, you might not even make it till
then!’
Phoebe has
already slipped Stephen’s wallet out of his pocket, swiped the
student card and replaced the wallet again in the time it took me
and Charlie to get back downstairs. She deftly hands it off to me
as I walk by, distracting the others with the bottle of vodka, and
Charlie provides our cover by announcing that he’s going out for a
fag. As I follow him, I hear Johnny ask Fred when I started
smoking.
We designed
our costumes to be taken on and off with relative ease, so within
twenty seconds of getting out of the door me and Charlie are
striding down the street in black jeans and T-shirts, and all the
more garish parts of our outfits, save for the make-up, are stored
in a nearby wheelie bin.
‘So - think
Johnny’s gonna rat me out to Liz for smoking?’ I ask, since we’ve
walked eight of the ten minutes it takes to get to the lab and
Charlie hasn’t said a word yet. The trick is usually in getting him
to shut the fuck up.
‘Didn’t know
you were even seeing her anymore,’ he mutters.
‘What?
Why?’
‘When was the
last time you saw her?’
‘Uhm, well
there was… uhh…’ It suddenly hits me that I haven’t been with Liz
since we went Christmas shopping three weeks ago. I’ve spoken to
her on the phone a couple of times, maybe, read a couple of the
texts she’s sent me, but I haven’t cast my eyes on her in the best
part of a month - I’ve not even checked her Facebook profile to see
whether she’s still down as ‘in a relationship’.
‘Just because
I haven’t seen her, doesn’t mean I’m not
seeing
her,’ I tell
him, in a dismissive tone.
‘I think she’d
be more worried about you and Phoebe than you smoking, anyway.’