Something Wicked Page 5

  “SIM cards cost about fifteen quid,” he commented.

  This was true and I was silent. I knew Ritchie had just given me twenty pounds, but it was my mum’s money. She still expected me to buy shoes with it, and I told Ritchie that.

  We sat quietly for a while, watching the shoppers walk by us. Then Ritchie commented, out of the blue, “I never expected you to do this. I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” I said teasingly. “I’m a good girl – no one will suspect a thing. I’ve never been in trouble in my life.”

  “Yeah, but stay that way, Anna. You don’t want to end up like me if you can help it.”

  I wanted to say, “I do!” But that would have sounded so childish. And I didn’t like the way Ritchie was drawing a line in the sand, so to speak, between me and him. I’d come over to his side now, and I wanted to explain that to him.

  “No, listen. I was thinking about a lot of the stuff you said yesterday, and I reckon, you’re right. This isn’t a fair world we’re living in. Loads of people with money don’t deserve it, and people who do deserve it, don’t have any. Taking Julia’s phone was only like redistributing wealth. Like taxing. And you – nicking money off that drunk bloke – well, he shouldn’t be drinking so much in the first place. You’ve taught him a lesson. If he was sober, he would have kept his cash. Maybe when he woke up this morning and realised what happened, he decided never to drink again. And you changed his life for the better. I know it sounds crazy, but it might be true!”

  I could tell Ritchie was accepting what I was saying. I was pleased. But the truth was, I was kind of making it up as I went along. I was desperate to keep Ritchie, to align myself with him and no one else. Then I began to think that maybe what I was saying was true after all. Stealing wasn’t always a crime, depending on who you stole from and what you did with the things you stole. It stood to reason. And coming up with this justification felt good. I could see it made Ritchie feel good too. I was excited now, and carried on.

  “It’s like Robin Hood – taking from the rich to give to the poor. And he was a hero, wasn’t he?”

  “But you’re not poor,” Ritchie said.

  “Yes, but I can still be on the side of the poor,” I argued. “And because I don’t look like a thief, I’m more likely to get away with it, you see. I think I’d make a brilliant Robin Hood.” I was half messing, half serious.

  “No,” he said. “I’m Robin Hood. You’re Maid Marian.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “But I don’t see why I can’t be Robin Hood too.” It was like we were kids, squabbling over who was going to be who in a make-believe game. Because that was exactly what it felt like to me at that point – a make-believe game teetering on the edge of reality.

  “Because I’ve had more experience than you, Maid Marian.”

  That riled me. It sounded kind of sexist, if you can see what I mean. I knew I had to prove myself. I had an idea.

  “I know how we can get the money for your SIM card.”

  “How?” Ritchie challenged.

  “The money you gave me – it was for shoes. So I need to go home with a pair of shoes – then we can keep the money. I’m going to go into Shoe World opposite and nick a pair. Then we’ll get the SIM card for the phone.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Good! I’d succeeded in surprising him. “I’m not joking. It’ll be a cinch.”

  I could feel the same terror and excitement coursing through me as I did when I nicked Julia’s phone. It was hard to breathe. I tried to steady my breathing and clear my head so I could think how I was going to do it. Then Ritchie spoke. “It’ll be easier if we do it together. And plan it out beforehand.”

  “But Ritchie, if you come in with me, people will suspect us at once. I don’t want to be mean or anything, but …”

  The fact was, he looked like a criminal. With his hoodie and trackie bottoms and shaved head, the security guards would be on him as soon as he walked in the shop.

  “That’s my point. I’ll be the decoy. While everyone’s watching me, you can do the business,” he said.

  He was right. And I liked the fact there was some moral justice in that. If all Ritchie had to do was walk into a shop and people were going to suspect him just because of the way he looked, then they deserved to be hoodwinked. The nice girl examining the black trainers would really be the thief, and they wouldn’t even notice. Serve them right. And Shoe World could stand the money. They were a chain that had outlets in all the shopping centres round here. And their shoes were pretty rubbishy anyway. Poor shoes for poor people.

  We sat watching Shoe World for a while, casing the joint, and making some plans. Ritchie said it was important to be observant and not to rush it. Timing was everything. He said there were some shops that were walkovers, others that were harder to tackle. He didn’t know about Shoe World, but it was worth taking the risk.

  The longer we sat there, the more sick I felt. But talking through our plans helped. Once you visualise it all happening, all you have to do is walk through it. Ritchie said that most people are pretty stupid when it comes to preventing theft. People who worked in shops were most often not the owners but poorly paid part-time sales assistants, and it was no skin off their noses if the stock was depleted. I told him about a lesson we’d had at school last year about where trainers were made – nearly all of them, both branded trainers and cheap ones, came from the Third World, and the kids who put them together were paid the barest minimum, and worked fourteen hours a day sometimes.

  Ritchie said, “We’d better get on with it. If we leave it much later, the shop will be empty.”

  First I tidied myself up. I put my school blazer back on, took my hair out of its ponytail, brushed it, and tied it neatly back. I checked my prefect’s badge was straight. I looked every bit the product of St Thomas’s R.C. school, a pillar of the community. Meanwhile Ritchie threw his hood over his head.

  I left the statue first. I spent a little time looking in the window of Shoe World, then I entered. Shoe World was one of those discount-type shoe stores. It consisted of rows and rows of shoes sorted into men’s, women’s and children’s, then into smart and casual, and then size order. It was like a library of shoes. There were about nine or ten people milling around, looking at the shoes. There was one girl at the till and two male assistants keeping an eye on things, though they couldn’t see everywhere because the racks of shoes were so high. There was that rubbery smell you associate with shoe shops.

  I made my way over to the trainers and began to scrutinise them. I decided it would be best to pick a pair around the twenty quid mark so my mum wouldn’t suspect anything. In a normal shoe shop, you only get one shoe of the pair out on display to deter thieves. But that requires more staff to go and hunt out the other shoe, so shops like Shoe World took the risk of having both shoes in the pair on display so they could cut staff costs.

  Now when I smell shoes, I always think of that Monday afternoon in Shoe World. I selected a pair of slip-on black trainers with a small loop on the back. I held the shoes in my hand and looked at them. Then slowly and deliberately I made my way to a stool where I could sit down to try them on. I checked that my school bag was unzipped. It was. I left my old shoes by my school bag, walked over to a mirror propped on the floor against the wall, and examined the look of the new shoes on my feet. Actually the trainers weren’t all that bad. They were neutral, nothingy. They would do for my new life.

  I knew as soon as Ritchie walked into the store. The sales assistant nearest me had been staring aimlessly, but now focused his gaze on the new arrival. I looked up briefly to check it was Ritchie, then carried on inspecting the trainers I was wearing. I even smiled at a woman nearby me, to establish my right to be there. Luckily she moved off shortly afterwards. That was a risky thing to have done. I saw the sales assistant moving closer to Ritchie and making eye contact with his colleague, as if suggesting he should also be keeping an eye on the villain who’d ju
st walked into the shop. Ritchie walked over to the men’s trainers, keeping his face well hidden in his hood. I wouldn’t have trusted him either, looking like that. The two sales assistants closed in on him.

  Then, all of a sudden, Ritchie shouted, “What are you staring at me for?”

  Everyone in the shop turned to look at him.

  “What am I doing wrong, eh? Ever since I come in here, you’ve been giving me the eye. You got it in for me, haven’t you?” And there was more. His voice got louder. He swore a bit. One of the sales assistants tried to get him out of the shop.

  Then, in a deliberate movement, I put my old shoes in my school bag and strolled out of the shop in the new ones. I even stopped outside the shop to watch the disturbance with Ritchie, saw one of the sales assistants arm-lock him and pull him towards the door while the other one attempted rather pathetically to frisk him. What did they think he could have stolen in that time? Were they complete airheads, or what?

  I walked off in the direction of McDonalds and stood outside. Time was suspended for me. I couldn’t say we’d been successful until Ritchie escaped. Each second dragged interminably. My mind was blank. Then Ritchie arrived beside me.

  “Like your shoes,” he said.

  In reply, I kicked him in the shin.

  I know you disapprove. You think that nicking those shoes was wrong, and the truth is I have to agree with you. Which is why I’m telling you all this. But at that time, the wrongness of what I did was what made it work for me. I felt as if I’d outsmarted everyone by not playing according to their stupid rules. Also, because it was wrong, it bound me to Ritchie. It was our secret. Nobody else knew what we were up to – at least, then. And besides, the very next day I had the glimmering of an idea how I could salve my conscience.

  But first I have to tell you what happened when I got into school on Wednesday.

  Paula came up to me with that look in her eyes, the one girls get when they’re getting ready for a good gossip. “I saw you down The Broadway yesterday afternoon,” she said.

  I went scarlet. I thought, She knows. She saw us in Shoe World. The whole thing’s over. Seen through Paula’s eyes, our escapade with the shoes seemed shoddy, cheap, worthless and common.

  “Go on, then,” Paula continued. “Spit it out. What were you doing with that new boy?”

  So she didn’t know. It was Ritchie and me together she saw, and she thought I was going out with him. By this time a little audience had assembled, consisting of Janette, Karen and Mandy. Mandy was chewing; every so often you could see a flash of white as she moved the gum around in her mouth. Janette was applying lip balm with her index finger.

  “What’s going on?” squealed Karen.

  “That Craig Ritchie is Anna’s new bloke,” Paula stated.

  I was surrounded. I could feel their combined curiosity tugging at my secret. But I played it cool. “He’s not my bloke exactly,” I said. “He’s a kind of mate.”

  “You’re a quick worker,” Paula said. “So why’s he not been in school? You got him hidden away somewhere? In a little love nest?” It was hard to tell with Paula whether she was being straight or sarky.

  “Yeah,” I parried. “Doing my every bidding.”

  All the girls laughed. I was glad. I’d said the right thing. Even though I’m a girl myself, girls in a group make me nervous.

  “Why hasn’t he been in school, Anna?” Karen continued.

  “He got fed up,” I said.

  “Can’t blame him,” Paula commented, losing interest.

  “But are you going out with him?” Karen nudged.

  I just smiled – enigmatically, I hoped. Because at that precise moment in time I wanted to think I was going out with Ritchie. It was probably pure vanity and a desire to impress the girls, mixed up together. But then, if I hadn’t fancied him, the sheer thought of us being an item would have disgusted me. Ritchie didn’t disgust me. The opposite, in fact. There was something hard and definite about him that made him more real to me than anyone else in my life.

  Then the teacher came in to take the register and the usual chaos ensued. I was left with a sort of glow. I was happy. The happiness persisted throughout registration, all along the corridor and up the stairs to the English room, and even during the lesson itself. It was still Macbeth. The bottom sets only saw the video and looked at a scene or two. We had to read the whole bloody thing. And discuss it with the teacher. The swots were getting into their stride.

  “But what I don’t understand,” Rachel said to Mrs Keane, “was why Macbeth never told Lady Macbeth he was going to get Banquo murdered. Because she would have approved. She was harder than him.”

  Rachel loved doing that – spotting stuff in the text that nobody else did. Mrs Keane enthused accordingly.

  “Absolutely! Another of those little puzzles that Shakespeare loves to leave us.”

  “She wasn’t just hard,” Elizabeth added. “I would say she was evil.”

  “Now where’s your evidence for that?” Mrs Keane asked. The three of them usually kept any discussion going all lesson. Elizabeth supplied the evidence, but I was feeling mutinous. I didn’t much like the swots and, anyway, I thought they were wrong about Lady M.

  “She isn’t evil,” I said. “She loved Macbeth, and she wanted what he wanted even more than he did.”

  “Interesting!” gushed Mrs Keane.

  But I wasn’t going to say any more. I understood only too well what was going on in Lady Macbeth’s mind. I recognised that denial – the way you pretend to yourself and the way you pretend to others. I guessed she also had that feeling of walking a tightrope, and not looking down for fear of losing your footing. Yeah, I could relate to Lady M – which was weird. I wasn’t evil, was I? Lady Macbeth was, because she said that gruesome stuff about killing her own babies if she had to. And also, she was ambitious. And selfish. No – I wasn’t like her. Me and Ritchie were different. Like we’d said, we weren’t the Macbeths. We were Robin Hoods. From now on, I vowed, we’d pick and choose our activities very, very carefully. And we wouldn’t benefit from them. We’d make sure others benefited. We’d operate outside the law, but for the right reasons. So I decided to text Ritchie at break now he’d got his phone working and ask him to meet me later. There were things I wanted to talk about and plans I wanted to make.

  * * *

  “Helping people?” Ritchie’s voice was incredulous.

  “Why not?” I countered.

  It was raining and so, of all places, we’d ended up in the Launderette in Fairfield. There was a small parade of shops – chippie on the corner, newsagent’s, hairdresser’s, a boarded-up shop and the Launderette. The smell of washing powder pinched my nostrils. The machines clanged and clattered as we talked. Sheets and towels and pillowcases and T-shirts getting cleaner and cleaner by the second.

  “Like you’ve said, it’s unfair,” I explained. “Life’s unfair. But we’re good at what we do – the way we got those shoes yesterday. We could make things a bit more fair. Ritchie?”

  His face was unreadable and it made me uneasy. It reminded me how little I knew him. Funny how you can be obsessed with someone and think about them pretty much all the time, have the most important experiences of your life with them, and not know them. I’d picked up that Ritchie was a fairly private person. He’d told me hardly anything about his home life apart from those few, sparse facts in the park on Sunday afternoon. He lived alone with his mum; it sounded like he had a bit of contact with his dad, though they probably didn’t get on well. Maybe he was waiting to know me better before he told me more. This was reasonable. I had to be patient. Which was fine, really it was fine. Had he spilt everything out to me at the beginning, I would have valued him less. His reserve made him attractive to me.

  “You do fancy him!” teased an inner voice.

  “Well?” I persisted. I dug Ritchie in the side with my elbow.

  “Explain what you mean exactly,” he said.

  “Well, like, if we kne
w someone, someone who’d had a hard time, or who needed money. And we made things better for them, or found them some money. By maybe nicking something and giving it to them.”

  Ritchie looked thoughtful. “Taking it from someone who deserved to be ripped off. Some bastard.”

  “Yeah!”

  He laughed, and I felt I was getting somewhere. One of the washing machines banged repeatedly and then came to a halt. The silence seemed to expose us, and I found myself whispering.

  “Do you know anyone who needs a few quid, Ritch?”

  “Me. I need a few quid.”

  “Apart from you.”

  “Lemme think.”

  Two women came in then and gave us a suspicious once-over. So we got up. The rain had stopped anyway. We walked until we came to the main road and sat on a wall by the bus stop.

  “What I can’t stand,” Ritchie said, “are the bastards who nick stuff off old people. You know, the ones who pretend to be gasmen or plumbers and get inside their houses and take their benefit books. It’s like taking from your own. A few weeks ago this old lady near us let these blokes in who said they were council workers. They nicked loads off her. We know about it because she stops and tells everyone. We should get the bastards who conned her.”

  “That might not be possible, but couldn’t we get back some of her money?”

  This was more like it. Ritchie and I were thinking as one again. That was what I liked best. The traffic swished past us on the wet roads. I know I was prattling a bit, but I was excited.

  “We could go back and do another shop – not in Fairfield, somewhere else, in case we’re recognised. Just me and you. Maybe in town. But the problem is, we need money, and it’s not easy to steal money, is it? What can we do?”

  “To get money,” Ritchie said, “you need money. That’s how big business works. It’s how we could work. You know, I heard of this idea, once, only it’s pretty complicated.”

  “Spill,” I instructed him.

  This couple walked into the bookshop – you know the one – there’s a chain of them, there’s probably one where you live. But I’m not naming names, for obvious reasons. But this couple – they were obviously students. The bloke was wearing a black and white bandanna, tatty black sweater and jeans. The girl with him – his girlfriend? – had a rucksack slung over one shoulder, a copy of the Big Issue poking out of the top. She wore some black Bench trousers and a Kangol T-shirt. Her hair was in cutesy little bunches. The couple didn’t stop and look at the special offers and recommendations at the front of the shop, but made for the stairs and went to the first floor, where the non-fiction was.