Before his encounter with Fize and his friends, he had experimented with cutting into a bag with a kitchen knife. The knife had been Auntie Ivy's and was one of several lying among forks and sharpeners, and what Uncle Gib called a fish slice, in a kitchen drawer. You had to work it in a crowded place. Lance had picked the tube – not the tube here really, the underground, for the trains from Edgware Road via Paddington to Hammersmith run along the oldest line in London, passing Uncle Gib's house almost too closely for comfort. Ladbroke Grove was the nearest station to the Portobello Road but Lance got on at Westbourne Park and in the rush hour. The train was loaded with commuters at 5.30 in the afternoon, hundreds of them standing and crushed together. He picked on girls with large bags slung over their shoulders on short straps. These were the most accessible. Aiming for the side of the bag and from the back as the train moved out of Ladbroke Grove, he managed to cut a slit in it about six inches long. The girl didn't feel a thing and no one noticed. The passengers were all too tired and jaded after a day's work.
Lance wasn't tired. He'd done nothing all day except buy junk food and eat it, and watch the telly. He slipped his hand inside the bag and brought out a leather something that felt like a wallet and another leather something, the kind of case people keep credit cards in. It took nerve to remain inside the train after that but he only had to stay until it pulled into Latimer Road. The girl got out when he did but she hadn't noticed anything wrong with her bag. It was an anticlimax and an unpleasant one when, trudging back to the Portobello, he looked at his haul and found the thing he'd thought a wallet was a pouch containing sunglasses and the case he'd thought was for credit cards a kind of make-up with a sponge inside its lid. He threw them away in disgust. Since then he hadn't tried the trick with the knife again. Truth to tell, he was a bit afraid of carrying a knife. Getting caught with a knife when you'd done nothing with it but split a handbag, when you didn't mean to do anything else with it, was a bit of a waste. His injured arm felt heavy and sore, although the plaster had come off, and his ribs ached.
The fat woman in red and her husband – Lance thought the thin guy must be her husband as no man would be seen dead with her unless he was chained too tightly to get away – were now seriously studying the wares on show at the jewellery stall. Lance knew the girl who ran it, although not her name, but he wasn't too pleased at her 'Hi, Lance', uttered loudly and drawing attention to him.
Still no one seemed to take any notice. He muttered 'Cheers', the term that served equally as a 'hello' and a 'thank you' with him, and edged closer to the woman in red. She was holding up a long string of black and white beads, which she suddenly put down and began rummaging in her bag. Lance thought she was reaching for a purse or wallet but no, she evidently left paying for things to her husband. Out came a pack of Benson and Hedges and a lighter. The strain of shopping was too much for her without the stimulus or sedative effect of a cigarette. Another one smoking those stinking things! Just wait till July first when they ban it for ever, he found himself muttering under his breath, you'll know what it's like to have the filth slap a hand on your shoulder then. But would she? Wasn't this an open space where they could kill themselves with the things as much as they liked?
She was putting the cigarettes and the lighter back in the bag now and, no-brain that she was, leaving the flap hanging open. She held up the black and white beads to the girl who'd spoken to him, said she'd have them. Lance slipped his hand inside the bag, drew out a large heavy wallet and shoved it into the pocket of his jeans. Just as he'd thought, the man was paying for the necklace, asking her if she'd like a pair of earrings to match. Lance stepped back, turned and stared into the window of the cheese shop, as if entranced by the Jarlsberg and Roquefort on offer. The heavy wallet made a grotesque bulge in his jeans like he'd got a hernia. One of Uncle Gib's religious pals had a hernia, which gave him a small belly on top of his large natural belly. Slowly, pausing to glance at stalls he'd seen a hundred times before, Lance walked up the Portobello until he could safely turn into Golborne Road away from spying eyes.
There, sitting on a wall in a street harmless now but once, long before his time, a notorious crime hotspot, he opened the wallet. No credit cards. She left that kind of thing to her husband. Three twenties and a fiver and, in the purse section where she'd almost broken the zip stuffing it with change, a lot of two-pound coins and one pound coins and fifty and twenty pences. She'd got too much of it to bother with the smaller stuff. He counted. With the notes it came to eighty-eight pounds all told. Not bad, might have been worse.
He wandered down Bevington Road, pausing first to drop the wallet into a bin and then to buy himself a Mars bar and a packet of crisps, finally getting on a bus, from which he was immediately ejected because it was the kind you had to have a ticket for before you got on. Lance felt aggrieved. He had fully intended to pay his fare out of Mrs Red Jacket's change but they hadn't given him the chance. There was no justice.
Ever since his bag-snatching he had been moving away from Uncle Gib's with no apparent purpose. But of course he had a purpose. A moth drawn to a flame, he was making for Gemma's place, for the flats with their balconies and black railings, their gardens full now of red flowers and purple flowers, and the graffiti-scrawled yellow walls that bounded them. After her visit to the hospital he no longer had that hopeless feeling that she would utterly reject him, clutch Abelard to her bosom as if he were one of those paedos, turn from him and slam the balcony door. Was it possible she would have him back? Give that Fize his marching orders and have him back? He'd have to make her believe he'd never smack her again, which was true, he never would. He'd tie his hands behind him, sit on his hands, before he'd touch her.
He was outside the flat now, looking up at her balcony. She must have seen him for she came out. Overflowing with love, he gazed ardently at her. She put one finger to her lips, then mouthed silently, 'I'll come and see you,' and was gone. Back the way she had come, the door closed carefully behind her.
Reuben Perkins and his wife Maybelle were paying a rare visit to Uncle Gib and being served tea in the front room. The two of them were the only people Uncle Gib ever made tea for. Even the Children of Zebulun, attending a prayer meeting, were given orange squash. Mr and Mrs Perkins were provided with tea and Garibaldi biscuits – they had to bring their own cigarettes – because Reuben was Uncle Gib's best friend and now no longer the Assistant Shepherd but the Head Shepherd himself. He and Uncle Gib were remarkably alike and could have been taken for brothers. Both were tall and thin, although Uncle Gib was taller and thinner, both had skull-like faces and a hungry deprived look, thin-lipped, their eyes suspicious and their noses sensitive. Perhaps they had started off looking quite different from each other but prison, the prison diet and each other's frequent company had brought about this similarity. Maybelle Perkins wasn't at all like Auntie Ivy who had been a handsome woman, but squat and round with a square face and frizzy ginger hair.