Half Broken Things

and she had the idea Michael liked looking at her. Could it be he was old-fashioned, a proper gentleman who would never exact favours in return for bed and board? Or perhaps he was just gay. The filthy soup tins that she had cleared from the bedroom pointed to straight male slobbiness, but the cooking, the nearly becoming an actor, and the suspicious number of books in the flat suggested otherwise. Whichever it might turn out to be, Steph was grateful that Michael had neither asked her, nor shown any sign of wondering privately, when she might be moving on. In the dark she tapped a rhythm on her stomach with her fingertips, and whispered to her baby that everything would be all right.

***

I was under instructions to look through the post, bin the obvious junk mail, catalogues and so on, and leave anything else in the desk in the library. The owners had arranged matters, Shelley said. They had given their forwarding address to all the important people, banks and all that, so anything that came to the house could either be chucked out or could wait. I hadn’t given it a thought. I’ve done enough houses not to be curious about other people’s arrangements, but I began to think what a cheek to put me to that trouble. Why hadn’t they re-directed everything via Royal Mail? Or left a stack of printed labels with a forwarding address, so that I could simply stick them onto things and give them back to the postman, when I remembered? Actually, I thought, why don’t they correspond by the internet or e-mail or whatever they call it? It irritated me to have to think about them at all.

In fact the only reason I didn’t jam the entire post into the kitchen bin without looking at it was because I had begun to wait for my own letter. The post came early. I watched for the van before I was properly awake, and when I heard the bump and fluttering of envelopes coming through the door I would be down at once, still in my pyjamas, my hair in a dreadful mess. It was quite long now, and it took me a while to learn how to manage it. I frequently forgot to brush it and tie it back at night, and although I found clips for keeping it up in the daytime, they took some time to master. Still, there was nobody to see, not yet. Every day I scanned every envelope but my letter didn’t come and didn’t come. It was awful to wake each day with such excitement, feeling sure that it must be today, to pick up the post, to read envelope after envelope that was not mine, then to realise that I would have to spend another day waiting, another night hoping. With every day it didn’t come I got more convinced that it must come the next. And when it didn’t, I would wonder what I was going to do with all the rage and disappointment I felt, where would I put it? For it seemed like somebody’s fault, my letter failing to arrive.

But even on those bad days, by the time evening came I would be quite calm, because from the moment I had finished scanning envelopes for my name, the house would begin to quieten and soothe me. It was like breathing in a kind of incense, a faith that since the letter had not come today, the day when it would arrive was drawing closer. After dark, when I had settled in front of the fire with my tray and bottle- wine with supper, I had discovered, made proper cooking worthwhile- my mind and body seemed to be ticking. I ticked with an optimism that had been entering me little by little over the hours of the day, as if with each heartbeat. So the passing of the day turned into hope for the next; not yet, not yet, not yet, it ticked through me, but soon.

The money was running out. After the car battery, the electric, some rent, a bit towards his fines (not enough), gas and food, there was hardly anything left. Michael had bought and sold a couple of things and made a bit, but there wasn’t enough for the next deal. He told Steph this, over their toast one morning, with tears of apology in his eyes. But he did not look away from the fixed look in hers. Nor did he pull away when she suddenly got up and put her arms round his neck and drew his head onto her shoulder. Instead he put his arms round her, gently so as not to squash the baby but also because he was not sure if he had permission. He held on but he did not cry. He simply breathed in the scent of shampoo and female skin, the newness and privilege of closeness to her.

Drawing slowly away from him she said, ‘OK, then. So we got a problem. We need to do something about it then, don’t we?’

She sat down again. She was so tiny, really. Except for her stomach she was tiny, and he marvelled that so much courage seemed to fit in so small a container.

‘Okay then. We will, yes,’ he said, trying out what confidence sounded like.

It was Steph’s idea. It was something she’d thought up ages ago but never done, and she considered it far cleverer than Michael’s escapades with church treasures or his little deals among the stallholders in Walcot Market.

‘With your church stuff, you’ve got to sell it on, haven’t you? If you ask me,’ she said, ‘that’s where you fall down. My idea needs two of us, so it’d be you and me, in it together.’

Michael smiled.

‘What do we do?’ he asked, stabbing at the toast crumbs on his plate with one finger.

She smiled back, cleared a space on the table, brought over the backpack that was leaning against the wall under the shelves and sat down again.

‘You take the backpack, empty, right?’ She handed it to him. ‘So, you’ve got the backpack, I’ve got nothing. We go into a shop, but separately, right? A big shop, a department store or something, as long as there’s loads of people and more than one floor? So I go and get something off the rail, right, and I go and try it on, then I buy it and I pay for it-’

‘You pay for it? I thought you said-’

‘Listen. I pay for it, right? You’ve given me a bit of cash, right, and I go and pay, and they put it in a bag and I get a receipt and all that, okay?’

‘Yea-eh,’ Michael said uncertainly.

‘Then- I meet up with you somewhere in the shop, only miles away from the till and where I tried the thing on, on another floor or something, or in the cafй or somewhere, and I give you the thing I’ve bought and you get it in the backpack and then you leave, okay?’

Michael nodded. He would understand it in a minute. Probably.

‘Only I’ve still got the bag and everything, right? Then I go and get another exactly the same as what I’ve bought, I take it off the rail and I put that in the bag, right? I’ll pretend I’m trying something else on or something. So then I go to leave the shop with the second one in the shop’s own bag and- right- beep beep beep, off goes the alarm at the door. OK? So, then, I go all surprised, and show them the receipt, the receipt, right, from the one I bought that you’ve already gone off out the shop with, and they go oh sorry, we didn’t take off the security tag. So they take it off, and off I go, right?’

‘But then you’ve got two things you didn’t want, haven’t you? Shop stuff’s hard to get anything for, there’s a couple of pubs but it’s dodgy. I haven’t got the contacts. I specialise, see, I do old stuff. It’s hard. You wouldn’t believe.’

‘No, no, no-listen. First off, we only take stuff we do want. Like I need a tracksuit or something you need, a jumper. Doesn’t matter what it is as long as it fits in the backpack and we can get it in a big shop, like M & S, Jolly’s, Boots, whatever. And second, yeah we’ve got two, so next day I take one of them back and say it don’t fit, and I get a refund. See? We can get all the stuff we need plus we’ve got our money back.’

Michael frowned. ‘But you still paid. And what about food, and the gas, and the rent?’ His throat puckered with the effort of keeping down panicky tears. ‘There’s the fucking fines and all. And what if we got caught? I’d do time. Straight off, no questions. We need money, not stuff. How’re we going to get money?’

‘Look,’ Steph said, taking the backpack again and pulling out the two magazines from inside it. If Michael was unimpressed it must be that he had not quite grasped the brilliance of it. ‘Suppose I buy one of these, pay the cash and I got a receipt, okay? I shove it in here and you leave. Like this. Then I get another one off the shelf,’ she waved the second magazine at him, ‘and then I try and leave and the alarms go off. I just go, look, I’ve got the receipt. So they let me go with the magazine, and then next day I go in and say oh I don’t like this I’m returning it, can I have a refund. So then you’ve got, one, the thing you wanted, and two, you get your money back so you can go off and get something else you want, like for free. Now do you see?’

Michael shook his head. ‘They don’t put those tag things on magazines.’ There was a pause while Steph groaned. ‘And you can’t take a magazine back and say you don’t like it, neither.’

Steph sighed, and to stop herself saying something unkind, she opened the magazine in her hand. ‘What is