She must have been encouraging Grant’s tormentors to introduce him to the water. In a moment fingers caught his ankles and overbalanced him. His frantic instinctive response was to hurl himself away from them, into the open sea. Drowning seemed the most attractive prospect left to him.
The taste expanded through him, ousting the chill of the water with a sensation he was afraid to name. When he realised it was the experience of floating, he let out a howl that merely cleared his mouth of water. Too many pallid shapes for him to count were heaving themselves over the wall to surround him. He flailed his limbs and then tried holding them still, desperate to find a way of making himself sink. There was none. “Don’t worry,” Fiona shouted as she sloshed across the bay towards him, “you’ll soon get used to our new member of the family,” and, in what felt like the last of his sanity, Grant wondered if she was addressing his captors or Tom.
FAIR EXCHANGE
by
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
WE WERE IN some bloke’s house the other night, nicking his stuff, and Bazza calls me over. We’ve been there twenty minutes already and if it was anyone else I’d tell them to shut up and get on with it, but Baz and I’ve been thieving together for years and I know he’s not going to be wasting my time. So I put the telly by the back door with the rest of the gear (nice little telly, last-minute find up in the smaller bedroom) and head back to the front room. I been in there already, of course. First place you look. DVD player, CDs, stereo if it’s any good, which isn’t often. You’d be amazed how many people have crap stereos. Especially birds—still got some shit plastic midi-system their dad bought them down the High Street in 1987. (Still got LPs, too, half of them. No fucking use to me, are they? I’m not having it away with an armful of things that weigh a ton and aren’t as good as CDs: where’s the fucking point in that?)
I make my way to Baz’s shadow against the curtains, and I see he’s going through the drawers in the bureau. Sound tactic if you’ve got a minute. People always seem to think you won’t look in a drawer— Doh!—and so in go the cheque books, cash, personal organiser, old mobile phone. Spare set of keys, if you’re lucky: which case you bide your time, hope they won’t remember the keys were in there, then come back and make it a double feature when the insurance has put back everything you took. They’ve made it easy for you, haven’t they. Pillocks. Anyway, I come up next to Baz, and he presents the drawers. They’re empty. Completely and utterly devoid of stuff. No curry menus, no bent-up party photos, no balls of string or rubber bands, no knackered batteries for the telly remote. No dust, even. It’s like someone opened the two drawers and sucked everything out with a Hoover.
“Baz, there’s nothing there.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
It’s not that exciting, don’t see Jerry Bruckheimer making a film of it or nothing, but it’s odd. I’ll grant him that. It’s not like the rest of the house is spick and span. There’s stuff spilling out of cupboards, kitchen cabinets, old books sitting in piles on the floor. The carpet on the landing upstairs looks like something got spilt there and never cleared up, and the whole place is dusty and smells of mildew or something. And yet these two drawers, perfect for storing stuff— could even have been designed for the purpose, ha ha ha—are completely empty. Why? You’ll never know. It’s just some private thing. That’s one of the weird bits about burglary. It’s intimate. It’s like being able to see what colour pants everyone is wearing. Actually you could do that too, if you wanted, but that’s not what I meant. Not my cup of tea. Not professional, either.
“There was nothing in there at all?”
“Just this,” Baz says, and holds something up so I can see it. “It was right at the back.”
I took it from him. It’s small, about the size and shape of the end of your thumb. Smooth, cold to the touch. “What is it?”
“Dunno,” he shrugs. “Marble?”
“Fucking shit marble, Baz. It’s not even fucking round.”
Baz shrugs again and I say “Weird” and then it’s time to go. You don’t want to be hanging around any longer than necessary. Don’t want to be in a burning hurry, either—that’s when you can get careless or make too much noise or forget to look both ways as you slip out—but once you’ve found what you came for, you might as well be somewhere else.
So we go via the kitchen, grab the bin bag full of gear and slip out the back way. Stand outside the door a second, make sure no one’s passing by, then walk out onto the street, calm as you like. Van’s just around the corner. We stroll along the pavement, chatting normally, looking like we live in one of the other houses and walk this way every night. Get in the van—big white fucker, naturally, virtually invisible in London—and off we go.
It’s fucking magic, that moment.
The one where you turn the van into the next street and suddenly you’re just part of the evening traffic, and you know it’s done and you’re away and bar a fuck-up with the distribution of the goods it’s like it never happened. I always light a fag right then, crack open the window, smell the London air coming in the van. Warm, cold, it’s London. Best air in the world.
* * *
Weird thing, though. Even though it’s not that big a deal, the business with the drawers was still niggling me a few hours later. You do see the odd thing or two in my business—stuff that don’t quite make sense. Couple of months ago we’re doing over a big old house, over Tufnell Park way, and either side of the mantelpiece there’s a painting. Two little paintings, obviously done by the same bloke. Signed the same, for a start. Now, there’s huge photos all over the mantelpiece, including some wedding ones, and it don’t take a genius to work out that these two paintings are of the owners: one of the bloke, and the other of his missus. What’s that about? For a start, you’ve already got all the photos. And why get two paintings, one of each of you? If you’re going to get a painting done, surely you have the two of you together, looking all lovey-dovey and like you’ll never, ever get divorced and stand screaming at each other in some brief’s office arguing about bits of furniture you only bought in the first place because they was there and you had the cash burning a hole in your pocket. Maybe that’s it—you have the paintings done separate so you can split them when you break up. But if you’re already thinking about that, then... Whatever. People are just weird. Baz wanted to draw moustaches on the paintings, but I wouldn’t let him. They can’t have been cheap. So we just did one on the wife.
Anyway, couple of hours in the Junction and everything’s peachy. Already shifted most of the electrical goods to blokes we know are either keeping them for themselves or can be trusted to punt them on over the other side of town. Baz and I done a deal and he’s going to keep the little telly for his sister’s birthday. Couple bits of jewellery Baz found will go to Mr. Pzlowsky, a pro fence I use over in Bow. He don’t talk to no one—can barely understand what the old fucker’s saying, anyway—and can be trusted to only rob us short-sighted, not actually blind.
So the only thing left is the little thing I’ve got in my pocket. I get it out, look at it. Funny thing is, I don’t really remember slipping it in there. Like I said, it’s small, and it looks like it must be made of glass. It’s so shiny, and transparent in parts, that it can’t be anything else. But it’s got colours and textures in it too—kind of pinks and salmon, and some threads of dark green. And it feels... it feels almost wet, even though it had been in my pocket for ages. I suppose it’s just some special kind of glass or stone or something.