The Gift (12 page)

“Who are they?” said Penny. “Where do they come from?”

“I don't know. Don't look at me like that! It's not my fault, it's part of Trevor's system. The less we know about each other the better—I don't even know their surnames.”

“But Mr. Black Hat knows yours.”

“Well, of course, he had to. It's all right, kids—Trev won't split.”

Davy could see he no longer believed this. Perhaps he never really had, but now ugly-smelling bubbles of doubt were floating up through his mind.

“Well,” said Penny, “what's their plan?”

“Knock the bank over, Friday before Christmas, catch the double wage packets.”

“Yes, but how?”

“I don't
know
!” shouted Dad. They stared at him.

“That's Trev's system, too,” he muttered. “The less we all know about each other's part, the less chance of information leaks. It makes sense.”

“It makes sense as a way of keeping you in the dark,” said Penny. “It shows they don't trust you. But even so you know enough to tell the police, when it's going to happen, some of the men in it. You've got their names on file at the office, haven't you?”

“Not their real names … but look, kids, I don't like to tell you this, but I
can't
split to the cops. Trev's got me by the short hairs.”

“What do you mean?” said Davy.

“Oh, hell … well, it wasn't really my fault, but you know I got that car a bit cheap? It was a couple of hundred quid below market price, so perhaps I ought to have guessed it was a stolen job. Wait a bit—I didn't
know
it was stolen, but I wasn't going to ask any questions. I mean … well … I got it from a friend of Trev's, anyway. So when Trev came up, smiling all over, a couple of weeks later and asked how the car was going, and let on that it was hot … well, then I practically was forced to go along with him, wasn't I?”

“No,” said Penny.

“You don't understand,” said Dad. “He'd only got to drop a line to the cops, anonymous, and they'd come and take it away. No compensation even if I managed to persuade 'em I never suspected. No car. Bang. We've got to have a car, haven't we?”

He made it sound as though he believed this to be a perfectly reasonable argument. Perhaps he did. After all it was the first car he'd ever owned that didn't rattle and smell.

“We can manage without a car,” said Penny. “Mum doesn't drive and you only use it for going to the office and taking her out in the evening. But we can't manage without a house, and you and Mum at home, and you doing a job. Listen, Mum's got friends here—real friends, not just the people you talk to in the launderette. And I don't know if you know, but Mum's bloke—the one she goes off on her holidays with—he sent her a message a couple of weeks back saying what about Minorca, and this time she said no. And I'm getting friends, Dad, too—I've never had any before. We won't have that on your island, only other people who can never go home because of something they've done.”

“What the hell do you know about it?” shouted Dad. Davy had seen that face before, seen it in Granny's mind, younger, shouting in her doorway.

“She didn't mean that, Dad,” he said gently. “She wasn't talking about the farm.”

Dad, half out of his chair, subsided and looked at Davy. His eyes said, “I'm trapped, I'm trapped. My son can see into my mind.” He shook his head slowly.

“You've got it wrong,” he said. “Things don't work that way. I mean, suppose I split, then maybe I can do a deal with the cops and stay out of the dock—but it'll all have to come out, what I've done, won't it? The firm's not going to like that. Bang goes my job. Bang goes this house. Bang goes school. We'll be back like we were before we came here.”

He spoke with weariness, a man who had made a superhuman effort to clamber with his family on his back out of some hideous pit and was now being cruelly pushed back into its depths.

“That's all right,” said Penny. “It doesn't have to be
this
house. It doesn't have to be
that
job. You'll be okay—people like you—you'll find something. But I want us to stop running and running and settle down to being ordinary people, people who know who we are. I want us to belong in one place, that's what. And if you get caught in this—even if you don't get caught—we'll never have a chance. You'll run for the rest of your life, and I'll go away and find out who I am somewhere else. I've got to.”

He shook his head again.

“Listen, Dad,” whispered Penny, “I like you. I'll stick by you, whatever happens, whatever anyone else thinks. I mean that, too.”

The whisper was one of effort, but not of shame. Penny was a secret person, keeping her loves and fears and troubles shut away, never letting the world guess them. It must have been hard for her to say that, but she had done it. She had only one threat and one promise to make, to blot Dad out of her life or to go on loving him, so she had made them, direct and clear. That was Penny, too.

Dad stopped shaking his head and sat silent, gazing at the unlit bars of the electric fire.

“There's one thing,” said Davy. “I've been bothered by the way Mr. Black Hat let you all meet at The Painted Lady like that. I'd have thought crooks kept separate, at least in public, when they'd got a job lined up. I wondered if he was keeping an eye on you, sort of, to see if you might be beginning to crack or slip. So if you go to the police now …”

Mysteriously, this challenge to Dad's powers of deception was what made up his mind for him. He chuckled.

“Don't you worry about that,” he said. “You've got most of it right, but you've got one thing wrong. These blokes aren't professionals. You say Dick's been in jail, but Trev's only a small-time operator who's managed to stay out of trouble. He's got away with a few little jobs and that's persuaded him he's some sort of Napoleon of Crime. He gets us down to The Painted Lady so as he can stand us a few drinks and flash his wallet around and be admired. He's always on about stopwatch timing and maps and diagrams and contingency plans, only he never lets on about details. Honestly, it's pathetic. He sits there puffing himself up and Dick watches him all the time like a dog and we say, ‘Great, Trev, great.' I don't know why I got mixed up with him in the first place, except for the car. He's so self-absorbed that if you took a police whistle and blew it in his ear, he wouldn't hardly notice.”

This was a new Dad, bitchy and resentful. Perhaps he recognized Mr. Black Hat as being the same type of dreamer as himself, and was jealous of how much closer he had come to making his dreams real.

“You've got to watch out for Wolf—I mean Dick,” said Davy. “Okay, he's pretty dumb, but he's dangerous. And if anything happens to Mr. Black Hat …”

“Poor old Dick,” said Dad.

“All right,” said Penny. “When are you going?”

She made the question casual but inescapable.

“It's going to be a bit tricky,” said Dad. “We've got the hell of a load of work down at the office, and …”

“Let's go now,” said Penny. “Let's get it over.”

Dad started on a dismissive laugh, but realized Penny's mood and became in an instant a decent citizen doing his public duty at considerable personal inconvenience, such as changing out of his bedroom slippers and getting the car out.

“You coming, too?” he said. “I don't know how long this will take.”

“Mum won't be back for a couple of hours,” said Penny. “We'll drive down with you and bus back. We'll be okay.”

She sounded as brisk and cheerful as a hospital nurse. Dad must have known she didn't trust him not to pass some pub on the way, drop off for a couple of drinks, and change his mind. But it would have hurt his self-esteem to suggest it, and he was going to need all that. Penny cut him a couple of sandwiches. He hummed some old tune from
South Pacific
all the way down to the town center.

Penny and Davy sat in silence on the bus until it dropped them at their stop in the gusty, moist night. There were few people about. Davy's left sole squeaked. The wind buffeted about but couldn't cause one ripple in the river of light where the streetlamps wound between the houses.

“I might have guessed there was something odd about that car,” said Penny.

“I never gave it a thought,” said Davy. “It was just another thing that seemed to be going all right. D'you think he'll tell them everything?”

“He'll try not to, but they'll get it out of him. Oh, hell, why does he have to be so crazy? You know, I was thinking, when he's got us into a mess it's always been a crazy mess. I mean, he's not stupid, but some of the things he's done! It's as if he were doing it on purpose.”

“He says he's never had any luck.”

“What he
says
doesn't mean anything. Look, this time he's gone and got mixed up in something absolutely impossible—far crazier than ever before—it couldn't possibly have worked. D'you think it's just
because
we were getting settled and happy that he had to smash it all up? There are people like that, aren't there? They've got this yen to pull the roof down on themselves.”

“I suppose so.”

“But
why?
”

“I don't know. Sometimes I think it must all go back to his quarrel with Granny.”

“You mean he wants to be there, really—and if he can't have that, he doesn't want anything?”

“Something like that.”

“So if we could find out what the quarrel was about …”

“I don't know. I bet the gift came into it somewhere, though.”

“Don't you ever think about anything else?” snapped Penny. Davy didn't mind her crossness. He knew she must be absolutely drained by her effort with Dad.

“Did you see his face when I told him about having it?” he said.

“No. But I heard his voice. He went all Welsh for a bit.”

“I didn't notice.”

When they got home, they made hot chocolate and went straight to bed, leaving a note for Mum on the kitchen table saying that Dad would be home late. Davy spent a restless night, waking and tossing and dozing his way through fuzzy, hurried dreams. He heard Dad get home at about three o'clock in the morning. A man's voice said good night to him at the gate.

8

MR. VENN

Christmas fell on a Thursday. Term ended the Monday before. Most of the projects were finished, but Davy and Sonia had spun theirs out on purpose. For Sonia it meant one more morning in the company of beautiful Mr. Venn. Her passion had lasted a record time, over six weeks, and for that last morning she brought her father's camera, pretending it was to take photographs for the project, but really in the hope that she'd be able to sneak a snapshot of her adored one.

Davy was glad to be there only because it would have been agony to be anywhere else. He was shivery with nerves. He couldn't stop sweating in spite of a morning so cold that the rutted mud around the site was a series of iron-hard ridges with white ice in the hollows; and then the steamy warmth inside the office made him sure that he was really going to be sick, instead of just feeling sick. Mr. Venn had a bottle of whiskey open on his desk and sent his wan little secretary out to buy Cokes.

“You won't see much happening this morning, kids,” he said. “Holiday slack-off beginning already. Soon as they've got their wages, half my work force will be on the road for Dublin. Cheers.”

Sonia blushed. Davy could see even her shins go pinker under her tights. He drank a little festive Coke, which made him feel sicker than ever, and wiped the window clean. He knew there'd be nothing to see this side—the bank was behind the office and there was no conceivable reason for asking Mr. Venn to let him spend the morning standing on the office stool and peering through the tiny roof-level windows in that wall. Sonia giggled beside him.

“Can you set this for me, Davy?” she whispered. “Dad showed me how, but I couldn't listen.”

Davy stared at the big blue lens with numbers and symbols and little levers arranged around it in concentric rings. Normally he'd have been able to work it out, he thought, but not this morning. He shook his head.

“Camera trouble?” said Mr. Venn. “Bring it over and I'll have a look. Ah, that's a nice job, Jap of course. Lovely morning for it, too. You won't need anything within thirty foot, so we'll set it for infinity. Eff sixteen at a hundredth. Don't try to take anything at an angle to the glass or you'll get a reflection. There. Now all you've got to do is aim through this little window here, hold it steady, and press this knob. Make sure you haven't got your fingers over the lens and wind on each picture with this lever here. Got it?”

“Thank you ever so,” said Sonia, who had been listening to her heart's lord with her mouth open and her mind shut, quite lost in adoration. As soon as they were back at the window, she whispered, “You'll have to do it. I can't hold it still. I shiver when I look at him.”

This gave Davy an excuse to wipe the window even more thoroughly. Outside, it was indeed a lovely morning for photography, more like January than December, the town glittering with frost and the clear sky pale as watercolor. The saplings in the far road had lost their leaves, and so had the two tall ash trees that must once have been rooted in some hedgerow and now stood like lost giants among the raw new houses. But if there wasn't much green about there was plenty of other color, with the fresh concrete of the foundations providing a background like pale canvas for the brilliant reds and yellows of the cranes and hoists and diggers and little dump trucks, and the pinky orange of Mr. Palozzi's network of girders. In fact it all looked almost as bright as one of the pictures Wolf saw in his mind, except that these colors were clearer, more wholesome, less menacing.