All that glitters

There is no such thing as a nearly perfect crime.

You either go to your grave at a ripe old age having gotten away with it, or you don’t and you might as well have tried nick the pen from the duty desk in a police station for all the good your planning did you.

Kemp had done everything conceivable to make this one perfect. The job was simple, elegant, classic. The preparation had been rigorous, the execution meticulous.

They were going to steal gold bullion from one of the vaults of the London Bullion Market Association. Defences were light because secrecy was its security. Everyone knows you keep gold in a bank vault. Which is why they kept gold in unmarked boxes in cellars across the City.

They had cut into the cellar from the sewers: the beginning of the job, but the end of five years of preparation. Five years in which they’d gone to every conceivable length to account for every possible complication, sweeping up every grain of incriminating evidence behind them, taking care of every ramification and every ramification of every ramification. It wasn’t just picking up the paper trail behind them; it was making sure they weren’t then caught dumping the bin bags.

Investors around the world bought and sold the gold in these cellars. They bought and sold the future value of the gold. Ownership moved but the bullion itself stayed in the cellars, unchanging, unmoving. Abstract values arbitrarily tied to lumps of metal by pieces of paper. A pyramidal house of cards of speculation – but a house built on foundations of gold.

Kemp pulled down his goggles and shone his torch around the cellar.

But they wouldn’t be keeping the gold. Trying to dispose of gold was where most people’s problems began. No, their plan was to remove some and effectively hold it hostage. There was only a finite amount of gold on the planet. Each bar had a serial number so every ingot in the world was accounted for. You couldn’t just magic up replacements or move bullion around to hide its absence, like some giant game of find the lady. If the news got out that gold had been taken, the whole system would collapse.

So all they would demand was a few million to buy their silence, secretly wired to some offshore accounts. After all, who better to hide money away than the Square Mile’s finest?

Kemp stepped gently into the cellar.

There was just one complication.

Where was all the fucking gold?

Glazomanic

Clem kept coming back to the same phrase over and over again: Many a true word spoken in jest.

She remembered how they’d pissed themselves that night in the pub. She’d only just started her new job and had sort of gravitated towards Sarah. She was confident, opinionated and about the funniest person she’d ever met. A session with her in the pub was like two hours of stand-up.

“You must have a death list!” Sarah had said. “I thought everyone did! A list of all those miserable sods, bitches, bastards, arseholes, tossbags, ball sacks and weirdos you’d like to give a little bit of a gentle nudge along to when it comes to their shuffling off this mortal coil.”

Clem confessed she didn’t have one.

“Oh come on! Seriously, it feels so good just writing it down. And then when it’s written down, it doesn’t niggle away to you anymore.”

So between them they scribbled down the list on the back of napkin. Everyone who had wronged her; everyone who had lied to her or stolen from her; everyone who had hurt her. Everyone who had just, you know, really got on her tits.

Nathan in accounts. Bloody Louise. Gaby for stealing Gavin. Gavin for being stolen. Marie at school. Donna at university. That dick on the Tube who’d knocked her over that morning.

It had felt good. Cathartic. She was purged.

And then she’d had to attend Nathan’s funeral. And Louise’s. And suddenly it wasn’t so funny.

Picky

Jimmy had been picking his scabs again.

His mother had told him not to but it had driven him mad all that morning. It was a great scab. It was the shape of a heart, the colour of rust and the texture of tree. And it was in the middle of his knee. The best place for a scab. It would be wrong of him not to pick it. Plus, it was so itchy and he’d really wanted to see what was beneath it.

He’d gone out to the curb as soon as he’d finished his lunch and started winkling away at it. He’d finally got his thumb nail under the rim and prised it up a few millimetres. It had hurt a bit but in a good sort of way, like a wobbly tooth.

It reminded him of when he’d helped his dad lift up the flags in the back garden and they’d seen all the weird white spiders and millipedes underneath it. Or when he and Dave had prised up that grid and looked down into the storm drain. He’d wanted to go down but Dave was too scared (but Jimmy was secretly a bit pleased that Dave had been too scared).

He had been worked away steadily at his scab in the sun for he didn’t know how long when his knee suddenly shouted at him in pain. He looked down.

Jimmy wasn’t sure how long his mind had been wondering and wandering but there was a little hole in his knee. A real hole. Not a patch of fresh skin or a bit of blood but a hole. It seemed to go a long way down. A really long way down. He couldn’t see the bottom of it. That wasn’t right.

Jimmy pushed his finger down inside. It went in up to the knuckle.

That really wasn’t right.

Mr Bligh

"Come in, please."

There was a faint rustling sound at the back of his throat when he spoke, like ashes in a grate.

Short minute, after noon

Lucy was becoming increasingly concerned about her shadow. It was definitely fading.

She looked down at her feet. Even in the early afternoon’s bright winter sun, there was nothing to show but an indistinct, grey penumbra. Stretched out along the frozen ground from the gnomon of her legs, it looked like a silhouette drawn charcoal and then half erased.

When Lucy was younger she’d never had such problems.

At 13, her shadow had been as dark and cold as the bottom of the oceans.

At 16, it was black as pitch and distinct from everything around it, with sharp, precise edges. If she spent too long standing on her parents lawn, the grass beneath her shade would eventually die, leaving a shadow of her shadow.

At 18, it would draw things into it and she would never see them again – light, warmth, smoke, boys.

But now she was sure it grew fainter with every passing day. And she didn’t quite know what that meant.

Future Tense

Daniel Popper is about to have a very bad day.

It will begin when his girlfriend ends their relationship at 7.27am. It will worsen at 9.15am when he is made redundant. Having lost both his girlfriend and his job within 108 minutes of each other, Daniel will grow to hate the phrases “I’ve got to let you go” (girlfriend) and “It’s not you, it’s me” (employer).

Daniel will then attempt to drown his sorrows. However, he will find out that he is unable to withdraw any money from the nearest ATM, being deep in the financial impossibility that is being over his overdraft limit. He will come to the conclusion that, with minus minus money and without any income, he is effectively bankrupt. Daniel will then attempt to drown himself.

On the way to the canal, Daniel’s day will improve slightly when he runs into his best friend, Graham. Graham will buy him drinks.

His misery lubricated by alcohol, Daniel will lament that he has “Pissed his life up the wall.” He will then bitterly reflect that pissing up a wall, particularly a long way up a very high wall, would imply some sense of achievement. His day’s brief improvement will then end.

He will bewail that all he has to show for career earnings of around £100,000 are a very big television that is too large for his living room and a boxed set of The Wire. He will curse himself for living a champagne lifestyle on beer money. He will then correct himself and instead curse himself for living a premium continental lager lifestyle on Special Brew money. Daniel will then ruefully conclude that he will now be living a Special Brew lifestyle on no money.

Daniel will go on to bemoan the fact that his lack of job will no doubt perpetuate his lack of woman, as the first question any potential mate will ask is “What do you do?” However, Daniel will not know that it will be a good one year and 100 days before any member of the opposite sex will even think about asking this question. Nor will he know that the answer will not have changed in the meantime.

Graham will attempt to raise his friend’s spirits. He will observe that there are plenty more fish in the sea. Daniel will observe that he cannot “fucking fuck a fucking fish” and does not wish to become a fisherman. Graham will end his efforts there.

Upon leaving the pub six hours later, Daniel will be splashed by a car. He will not realise that he has left his wallet in the pub, from the contents of which his identity will be forged, eventually embroiling him in a highly improbable series of events involving international terrorism. He will also be unaware that his pet cat, Hodge, will have grown weary of his repeated absences and supermarket own brand cat food and adopted his neighbours instead.

But before all that, Daniel Popper will be awoken from a hitherto excellent dream about racing a rocket car across the Nevada salt flats by the sound of Celine Dion caterwauling her way through My Heart Will Go On.

Black Night

At first, they assumed that it must have been clouds that had made the sky so remorselessly black that night.

And then they realised the stars were gone.