The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 7

Types of theft: mugging, pickpocketing, smash-and-grab, autotheft, burglary, the long con, the quick graft, forgery, identity theft, shoplifting, fencing, embezzlement, larceny, looting, stealing, filching.

Actus reus: guilty act.

Mens reus: guilty mind.

An innocent woman may perform actus reus when she picks up another woman’s handbag by mistake. A guilty woman has mens reus when she does so deliberately. One may be a civil liability; only with both does the matter come before a criminal court.

I didn’t want to be a thief.

My dad was a copper; he met me a few times down the station. Most people were there for things done while drunk, high or desperate. One, a drug dealer, grinned as they took his fingerprints, and laughed at the sergeant and called him “mate” and said, “It won’t go nowhere, you’ll see!” and he was right, and waved as he left the station, “Better luck next time, mate,” gold link necklace around his throat, grubby sneakers on his feet.

The only thief I saw was seventeen years old, and even though I was just fourteen, he looked young to me. He was pale as a pillow, skinny as a stick, and he swung between inaction and violence like a weathervane in a tornado.

Now: still, shoulders down, knees bent, feet turned inwards.

Now: struggling, kicking, twisting, dropping onto the floor, trying to bash his own head out against the counter.

And now: still, silent.

And now: screaming, screaming, fucking, fucking, screaming, no words just fucking, fucking, screaming.

And now: utterly calm. Utterly silent. Staring at a locked door.

That day, my dad was supposed to take me to see a film, but he had to go back in to help apply restraints to the kid in the cell. They left him wrapped up like a carpet for twenty minutes, released him to avoid risk of suffocation, and Dad finally took me to the cinema, but the film had already begun, and the next night the kid was taken to hospital after smashing his skull on the cell wall.

“Sometimes people say it’s easy,” mused my dad, as he drove me home from our failed outing, a desultory, apologetic pile of half-eaten chips on my lap. “Easier to steal than to work; easier to lie, to get away with it. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes — too much — the system just isn’t geared for the ones who have nothing better. The dropouts and the addicts; the ones with nowhere to go. Sometimes it’s easier to cheat, because life is hard. But you gotta have your mates and your family and people around you who love you and give a damn, and you gotta have hope, big hopes for the future, ideas about what you want, because if you’ve got all of that, then living becomes easier — not easy, just a bit easier — and you can see that cheating is desperate, and desperate is hard.”

I said nothing, still fuming at my dad for having again been a victim of too much work, too many broken promises.

He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive, and didn’t turn the radio on.