Thieves in the Night

By Brendan Ball

Two young outsiders - Bron, a jaded musician unworldly and luckless, and Dan, a semi-reformed criminal secretive and haunted - are brought together by a chance encounter and drawn by kinship of character, desperation and music into each other’s worlds. Between them on Dan’s council estate comes the beautiful but troubled Cal, to Bron a songbird and daydream but to Dan a byword for all that he knows comes with her. On their horizon gleams the mirage of being something and someone, but ever closer behind is Dan’s past, inventive in its nemeses and indiscriminate in its prey.

‘An accomplished novel replete with deft writing, memorable characters, sharp dialogue, humour, wisdom and evocative observation... Original, rewarding and moving.’
Matthew Branton (novelist), TLC.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
• Release date: Jul 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783014972

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THIEVES IN THE NIGHT

Brendan Ball

Copyright 2014 Brendan Ball

All rights reserved.

To Ivan

PART I

‘When it thunders the thief becomes honest.’

George Herbert.

1

(London, 1999)

Up there on stage in the slow grim fury of a cringing spotlight they droned out their vision of three chords and the truth.

"Me trousers they were brown, yeah babe,

Like your stairs I’d fallen down, yeah babe..."

The singer’s head was a shaven trellis of blue veins but for twin front locks hooked one around each ear, a diseased lightbulb splinted by Kitchener’s moustache. He rocked back and forth with the made-for-TV gesture of trauma or psychosis - feeling it, he meant to say, and I was feeling it too, a cold gnawing dread that this was all there was.

"The ceiling it was yellow-o

And I couldn’t even bellow-o..."

I tore up their advertisement from the throwaway weekly with my note meet bar after set.

The side door was kept ajar through that summer of the false millennium, and sick at heart I pushed out into the alley’s slanted moonlight.

Refugee punters lined the shadowsoft cement like extras from The Waste Land, moontinged into statues, down to where it ended in scaffolding and a skip. Midges fried themselves on the light bulb above the door to the sound of argument from the street end.

I lit a cigarette and a lone lean figure stepped out from the shadow of the scaffolding. He came through the cobwebbed moonslant dressed up for the end of the world, shoulders back, eyes wide, dark, staring down some adversary only he could see.

Got a light?

I held it out.

Mate, he said, I’ve had better times on bad acid.

He frowned as the smoke wisped starward.

My friend’s on in a bit so I came with her - told me it was ladies’ night so I thought there’d be action...

With that much humour she must be better than this.

He considered.

She ain’t really my cup of tea, but you can listen to her more than thirty seconds without wanting to wring her neck.

The band finished inside to a spatter of applause from their half-dozen guests.

I said, Then she’s special.

He shot me the glance, quick and involuntary, of a man in a foreign country hearing a snatch of his own language, but a thirsty flotsam drifted inbound then between us. The argument out by the bouncers grew louder.

...eighty quid in mine, and all me cards...

...didn’t have it when I got here, I couldn’er paid to get in, could I?

He sucked down and cast away the cigarette; his eyes darted to the dead end of the alley, back toward the street and up and down what remained of the drainpipe; with mumbled thanks he slipped back in on the tail of the crowd.

The bar was off limits a while but I had a ritual for that alley. It started at the drainpipe, symbol of my exit from the straight world, and the skip stood for defeat and ruin. I still believed but there was a limit to everything, in this case about a dozen steps.

Step one, three years back: in a temple of learning where a main gaineth the whole of literature and reduceth it into -isms, I fail to see the use; the pederastic don of -isms, realising he has more chance of doing unto Lord Lucan than unto me, denounces me to the elders; I return south with an accomplice and songs, but when the world is not won in six weeks the would-be revolutionary takes a job at his father’s office as assistant sharpener of pencils.

Step two, as I finished the cigarette and moved on through the stragglers: Mervyn the Mad Welshman, found busking at Victoria station, has music in him to knock a tune from a dead cat and no fear of work, but then the dragon in him breaks out; he forswears the sinful dust for the higher path of Taoism and heads east in search of three purities.

Step three, into thickening grime: I chance upon two likely lads possessing time and equipment, fair ability and half the drive of a broken tricycle. But they are staying put parent-supported in their commuter village so I persevere, and into this mix comes a Dracula-like drummer whose father owns castles in Transylvania and Texas and who subsists on fiery goulash and amphetamines. His pater calls him west, though, and without His Excellency’s chemical vindaloulash there is no way to ignite the other two. Again I move on.

Step four, into shadow: a managed band and minibus tour await until the bassist’s sister tries to impale said manager with a pregnancy test; he packs up his troubles with a few sick bags and heads north in the magic bus.

And so it went on, step after step and tale after tale, until the skip was close enough to touch. A length of cable tray protruded from the front like the gun of an abandoned tank, trained on Tottenham Court Road.  I had never thought to come so near.

The door burst open and a hollering oik was frogmarched out; gargoyle-faces peered from the repopulated gloom.

...go of me right fucking now or I’ll -

Move.

He was back.

...no idea who you’re fu- aaaagh!

A carroty head with burning red ears writhed and butted air, a loose arm whirred and flailed, and down the alley bouncerwards through the ochre moongleams was manoeuvred the rodeo lawnmower.

They met at the corner.

What the -

Untwist your knickers and cancel Sherlock, it’s Santa’s reindeer. Say ho ho ho, you horrible bastard.

Urrrnngaaaagh!

But who the -

And you shall all go to the ball.

That’s my phone!

My wallet!

He left them to it and homed to the shadows of the alley. By the door he stopped, shrinking I thought from the acclaim of the gargoyles, and came back to me.

You got another smoke?

He was the type women like, bold and faithlessly handsome, though I sensed even then he had no love for mirrors. I gave it and waited.

Know his kind when I see it - clocked him the minute I walked in. He stared up hard into my face. Don’t need the show full of Old Bill mate. I got a sort of an allergy.

He ran his hand inside his pristine collar.

No cure I found yet, he said, and drew something from his sleeve. But he had a tenner of his own and there ain’t a bar where he’s off to. What you drinking?

The two-floor Mojo had a mezzanine stage that left a standing performer with the partition across his face.  Down below nodded the metalheads in a ponytailed herd, chained from their studded belts and branded, in cartoon blood, Dragönfylth and Helmetpayn.  There too were the baroque Scandinavians - Lonely Planet Boys I called them after an old song - in velvet and neckscarves and eyeshadow and bracelets. Beyond in counterculture finery loitered girls with the lines of pillar boxes and, watered by the bar, a shrubbery of wilted flower children left by time for compost.

He elbowed through, and reaching the corner turned about and nodded at the stage.

A fluid energy half woman half daydream was climbing the flaked steps, her dark hair long and loose and silvered in the low beam.

Is that your friend?

She had a curved overfullness at the heart beneath eyes blacklisted from fairyland, and if she was not his cup of tea then that was fine because I was hearing calypsos.

Unh, he said, and pushed off to the bar.

"She hoisted up her petticoats a bit above the knee..."

The male part of the crowd awoke. It was a voice for which I would have done anything.

"So nimbly she’d run o’er the ground..."

‘Friend’ and the insouciance were too much to believe, and when he came back with the bottles I looked again at the fortunate man with the shadows around his eyes.

Song ain’t hers, he muttered, and scowled down at bitten fingernails as the voice soared.

"He took her by her milk-white hand

And by her grass-green sleeve,

He pulled her down at the foot of a bush

And never once asked her leave..."

The heat rose and the air clotted; condensation sweated from the ceiling onto the bodies in the pit; on the swanky upper deck the executives daytripping to bohemia shut up about gym memberships and car insurance.

In the last song two blonde shampoo advertisements squeezed past us and the eyes of my companion, mystery that he was, tracked them like security cameras.

"Oh love is gentle, love is kind,

Bright as a jewel when first it’s new..."

They weaved through towards the alley door, and the mystery craned his neck to the last.

"But love grows old and waxes cold

And fades away like morning dew..."

She came off to rattling applause, wolf-whistles and a few marriage proposals. The mystery held up his empty bottle.

Your turn - see you outside. He winked. I can’t breathe in here.

I went and waited for the resident barman, a prancing anthology of Latino cliché.

"Oo’s a-next?  Bella signorina!"

The descended signorina floated through a coterie of regulars.

Thanks very much...glad you enjoyed yourselves...Is that right?

I had somehow expected more but then across the beerguts and banalities her eyes met mine and she smiled, in stealth and only at me, reproaching without malice. She had been adopted as pilot-fish by a sweating human lobster with seedy eyes and a parting that began at his armpit.

So Keith Richards goes to me he goes, ‘Alan, you are a nutter...’

She escaped him and glided into the corner beside me.

"Bella signorina!"

A double Gordon’s dry enough to sleep in, and two beers.

I could not imagine her wanting for company but any worthwhile company would have bought for her. She laid a note on the bar and turned to me.

A friend of mine doesn’t care to introduce us.

Her voice had the tone colour of a Karas zither.

Ten years a bodyguard, came despairing over the babble from about five feet off the floor. I been shot, stabbed...disembowelled...

She raised the glass and drank through unparted lips, smoky eyes teasing over the rim and behind them assurance like a mountain, serene and as easily ruffled.

I said, Maybe he doesn’t find me introductive.

Oh, he seems to like you, and he doesn’t like many.  Her gaze rolled down me, gamine and unabashed.  There must be something about you - you don’t look like one of his friends.

What do his friends look like?

Well... Do you watch fantasy films?

No, why?

Who are the big ugly lunks who sit in caves chewing bones? Is that trolls or orcs?

"Trolls, I think.  Lord of the Rings is all I can go on, and I was a kid then."

"You’re not much more now.  Books weren’t invented when I was a kid.  Not where I lived.  Someone mentioned Lord of the Rings to my dad once and he thought it was gay porn...  Anyway, trolls.  That’s who they look like."

She took a step away from the bar, off back to whoever she was with.

I said, Where do they get the bones?

Her smile clouded over.

You’ll find out. She began to move away but again turned back. Be careful, whoever you are, with him.

A moment more and she was into the crowd.

Oo’s a-next?  Yes-a-mate?

I found the beer bottles still on the bar. They were for the mystery and me.

In the alley the shampoo girls across a visible language barrier watched him like street theatre.

Switzerland, is it? He saw me and beckoned, a magician introducing the stooge set to vanish or be sawn in half. My young friend...

Jeers and a hollered obscenity erupted from the street. A furrowed effigy of the early 70’s rounded the corner in chagrin and pixie boots, straightened a fedora with the end of a cane, cleared his throat and stepped into the light.

Savages, he said, tapping his way like an old ham playing Long John Silver as he came at us across the cement. Can’t tell a rock star from a homosexual.

He picked me out on account of the long hair - they had a way of doing that - and stopped before us with tattered red bunting in his Royal Variety eyes.

Johnny Guitar, he said, as though in awe of himself; the girls assumed he was part of the act. The name and the game are the one and the same.

"Quoi?"

He bowed to them and put out his hand to me.

And you are, sir?

Bron.

And you, sir?

Dan.

Their hands closed and the pixie toecaps curled from the ground.

Musicians both - Johnny sees. He tested his fingers. You sing, Bron?

I’ve tried.

He closed his eyes and shuddered.

Ah, Johnny knows, boy... But the scary fellow with the hoodlum eyebrows and the iron hand? A guitar player like Johnny, I believe.

The mystery glared him over unreplying, indignant at the suggestion of likeness.

The force is strong around you, friends - Johnny knows. Where might he see you gentlemen perform?

Actually -

Here, a voice cut me off, invisibly snarling the threads of our lives.  Four weeks.

The girls it was supposed to impress did not even understand.  The effigy doffed his hat and knighted us with the cane.

Johnny shall come whate’er betide him; Johnny shall come for the force shall guide him.

The door opened and gathered him in. The girls turned to the mystery.

I’m - from - Lon - don.

He looked behind for the famous skyline but found only the scaffolding and the skip.  They stared past him, and the stooge rebelled: I explained that mon ami le facteur, my friend the builder, was wondering, se demandait, if the young mesdemoiselles would like to see his collection de ciment.  He might also, I said, show them le methode de préparation.

Their smiles held but their eyes rounded and they swallowed hard.

Your gaff’s right sorted and all, mind. He rubbed his thumb on his fingers. Readies.

I explained that a ciment de qualité required that le poudre be très très fine.

With a wink he added, Rolex.

"Je presente, I said, le roi de ciment. Le ciment, c’est lui."

They smiled and waved and backed away till they reached cover. The unwitting king of cement stood confounded.

What got into those two? Women...

Mmm.

We were alone, silent together for the first time in the beginnings of awkwardness as the mosquitoes came down. The lights of an aeroplane flashed overhead, red and green, and passed on into the ether.

I could take you to meet Cal.

Who?

My friend.

The easy ruthlessness of his reversion to Plan B crowbarred a certain respect. But I could go and wait in line for polite introduction or I could carry away the voice and the look to the crowded underground and the single bed.

I should leave if I want to make the tube.

His shoulders dropped. And that was how it started, there in the moonslant with the hum of traffic beyond the walls, he granite-frowning by the cracked drainpipe and I struck by his aloneness inside his air of menace and his ironed cuffs, not a man I would have chosen as a friend but for maladjustment’s patriotism. His amatory speculations were done, and remorse tugged at me for turning his coach to a pumpkin when he and the songbird were no concern of mine.

It was extraordinary, I said, what you did earlier. Really.

He shrugged away into the shadow.

Time was I’d have followed him somewhere quiet and had the lot, but I reckon I’m getting soft.

Carry on like this and you’ll go to the ball yourself.

He gazed out into the concreted dark at that same invisible adversary, his slab of a profile a cenotaphic monument to all the destitute and the cheated and the unloved and the luckless who had ever bummed cigarettes from strangers, and he said, No mate, I won’t.

In another moment he was back inside and I alone under the midnight moon. As the music began again I thought of him brotherless in that sweatsteamy cavern, a mystery in need of a light, and against what anyone would have called my better judgement I turned and went back in.

2

(1995)

Wake up! An elbow chisels his ribs. This is it!

He throws his legs off the bed, eyes clamped shut, and reaches in the drawer for his starter.

Unh.

With the tiny airtight bag he crosses blind to the bathroom, stops, opens one eye. The lamppost across the street hits the mirror and shelf and he stands in refraction of ghostliquid warpaint, torso taut with its twenty-one years and huntergatherer bloodline.

The back of his hand planes once across the shelf; he tips out powder, takes from behind the toothbrushes his straw and razorblade; he chops, pulverises, draws a trail along the glass.  He closes the door without sound.

Quiet.

He pinpoints the straw end, hand on the light pull, closes the eye, draws silence into him.

Control.

He pulls, and behind his eyelids the Milky Way explodes through shooting-star oceans of blood. He sniffs till air flies up to his brain, then straightens and exhales.

The man in the mirror and the man before it open their eyes to each other.

Ignition.

They step back, limber their shoulders left-right-left, and flash right hooks an inch short of shattering the glass.

Throttle.

He opens the door.

Arse in gear girl, the star’s over Bethlehem. Thunderbirds are go.

Acceleration.

From dark windows the moribund Christmas lights bleed into the chill.  Cold can not touch him as he holds the rear door and she stoops groaning through their clouds of breath.  He climbs in behind the wheel.

He eases the key in - penetration - turns it a fraction, holds the engine on the verge, and lets it die.

That’s a bugger, girl, innit? he says.  Just when I let Pillbox pour me antifreeze in the punch...

At the scream he fires the ignition and stamps the throttle.  The engine roar drowns all but such and bastard, bastard on board as the sticker says, bastard detonating over him a seven-lettered firework heralding the launch of a gunboat or the climacteric naming of the last created animal.  He spins the good ship bastard on the hardening ice and floors the accelerator.  Window lights follow him awakened and outraged, the trail of a comet in the freezing December sky.

The white lines fly beneath; the tail-lights of goods lorries smoulder yellow and red in the mist. The frost-crackle of the guitar reaches out to him.

Oi! Why always the racket?

He thinks of the drivers up in the cabs under steel and glass, staring over their wheels like helmsmen on an arctic floe.

Yer don’t give a shit about me, do yer?

Tendrils of heartless and bastard and criminal clutch at him from aft, but he seals it all off behind the music and applies himself to the windscreen cascade of microcosmic dropletlights.

Aaaagh! Turn that off and support me!

He says, What?

Tell me it’ll be all right.

It’ll be all right.

You don’t mean it! Aaaaaagh!

He drives into the wind; festive litter swirls in gutters. The hospital pocks the dark with its lights that never go out. He is to be on the premises but not in the room when it happens.

Aaaagh, come on!

They roll into the car park and he anchors near the entrance.

The smallest space and you’re reversing in!

Quicker getting out, innit?

Women do not understand control.

Aaaaaaaagh!

He cuts the engine.  The lights spill across his dashboard, foul as a stain.

Thank God we’re here...

He does not reply.

Like chickens preparing an astronaut they gabble around her of contraction, dilation, respiration and sedation, and he tries as the drip stands sway before his vision not to think of Frankenstein. They rattle her down the corridor on a trolley - today’s main course, great white groaning emu.

Where did you meet? a nurse tries to distract her.

Through splayed legs she wails, In ‘Bonkers’...

No one would think it led to this.  The marvel of life: distinguished from death by threescore years and different-coloured arrows on the walls.

Breathe!

It is time to go. From his shoulder he heaves down the bag she has packed as though for emigration and reaches in the side for the pre-planted cigarettes. The procession jolts him, and his hand comes out for balance holding the cigarettes and some bag-bottom paperscraps. He shoves it all in his back pocket.

They park her in the delivery bay. He dumps the bag and hovers at the door. ‘See you later’ is trite; ‘good luck’ sounds discouraging; maybe, ‘Have a good one’?

Sir, will you please get out of the way?

A Star Wars head barges past and he imagines cleaving it with a light-sabre.  Man ought to learn some control.

The corridors lead nowhere much but serve as a catwalk for the nurses: Becky from Cheam wears the Winter ’95 three-button cardigan by Marks and Sparks; Louise from Mitcham wears the NHS one-piece in brilliant white with shoes by Dolcis; two porters from a side passage wear the season’s ensemble of security blue - and spoil the game.

One is long and streaky with a matching blue chin, the other a miscast Friar Tuck.

Blue Chin says, You coming for a fag?

The Friar says, Does der bear shit in der woods?

He follows them down past the -ologies and -otomies to an airlock between inner and outer doors, and puffs away a few paces from them.

Der nights is good if you want to stay off der beer like, the Friar reflects; he holds his cigarette like a dart, grinning. You can stay up and have one at lunchtime sure, but you want your kip after dat.

Blue Chin straightens himself in his creases.

But we have to be alert and responsible. He senses himself observed and turns, biro pinned to his sleeve in lieu of stripes or chevrons. Is there something I can help you with?

The heartless-bastard-criminal restricts himself to words.

Mate, I fucking doubt it.

He walks towards the door.

Excuse me, a voice means the opposite. You dropped something.

He turns. Blue Chin points at a paperscrap on the floor.

There is a bin.

He sees her handwriting and picks it up, irritated at the top of his vision by a pair of polished toecaps.

That’s better, says the voice.

He considers, but never will he hear the end if he goes away in handcuffs. He takes the torn shreds out of his pocket and sprinkles them before the toecaps. Blue Chin gasps.

Litter is a health issue.

Lucky you’re here then, innit? Alert and responsible.

Onto the pile he tosses the cigarette, turns and heads back inside.

His starter is wearing off. He gets from a shop a ditchwater coffee, takes it to a seating area and plants himself where people look most tired and least contagious. In seconds he is bored enough to pull out the paper, hoping there was no camera in the airlock.

It is a list of phone numbers: the first ‘Mum n dad’, of the house where she grew up - and in her family she is the brains; the second ‘Lee’, her brother, with his name in big letters on the arse of his jeans; the third ‘Nicole’, her best friend, who one night a few months back, after a party and a tequila too many, screamed delight in the back of his car; at the bottom a fourth, nameless.  He has never seen it - he remembers numbers like faces, by the character of the lines and curves.  This one leers.

His watch says almost six but he is a man of action: it is happy hour somewhere, probably Australia, and approaching the payphones past the disabled toilets and flower stands he pictures the sunset over red rock deserts.

It rings then goes to the answerphone.

Greetingth, says a voice.  Thith ith Mike Morrith.  I can’t take your call now tho pleathe leave a methage af-

Hello...?

Hello Mike, he says. Morning. Vicky there?

No, of courth she’th - Mike realises the lapse - a prizewinner, could well be a relation. Who ith thith?

Sylvester. About them sausages.

Thylvethter? Thauthageth? What the fu-

He hangs up. For a while he paces the floor, scouring the dregs of his memory. The name blares in his mind brash and impersonal like an American sports presenter or rhyming slang for something filthy. He has heard it somewhere.

The starter has expired. Nausea swells in the airlessness of the foyer and he imagines germs, unseen germs, malignant germs, germinating around his head. He fastens his jacket, pulls the collar over his mouth and walks out into the freezing car park.

It is the darkest hour. The sky is starless flint, the tarmac glazed with frost. He sinks his hands in his pockets and breathes hard into the collar.

Someone behind him is crying. A woman, not young, sobs in a raincoat too thin for the weather, repeating again and again that he is gone: he is gone while her husband between pity and embarrassment tries to straighten her; he is gone as they stumble through the overflow of sickly light; he is gone as they inch along the entranceway; in the cold shine of the colonnade and the gaudy paint of the pillars he is gone, he is gone, he is gone.

He begins walking to the car but he is destined not to make it.  The woman breaks into a long low moan, and with his eyes on the car and the abandonment in his ears the memory splinters inside: perfume, sweat, danger; crimped hair, knotted limbs in the back seat; the red mouth half-smiling, still trembling in the flickering lights from the overpass, Vicky’s gone up in the world all right and wouldn’t get that from Mike Morris.

Jealousy is a weakness: a woman leaves, you get another. He thought no more of it.

But he thinks of it now, of the