I've known the boy for years. I've watched him grow from a watchful innocent into a beseeching doorstep hustler and then an opportunist thief. The day he stole my wife's camera from the shelf in our hall was a day I suppose I'd begun to expect; a day when he'd reached a point in his life when his height almost matched mine but his behaviour fell short of any hopes I'd had that being kind to him now and then would help divert him from an adolescence of petty crime and automatic lies.
When he was smaller he used to come round and ask me to fix his badly knackered Nintendo DS. I'd do my best. Then he began asking if he could clean my car. For a time he even had his own bucket and sponge. I used to pay him a fiver, though only after he'd washed down the many filthy bits of bodywork he'd missed. I'd felt uncomfortably like some Victorian improver, but hoped I was helping him to up his game: if he learned to do the job really well, he'd get a lot more custom and grasp the business concept of good service generating good rewards.
But the car-washing had stopped, and for some time I'd been keeping a careful eye on him on those odd occasions I let him into the house to pick a spanner from my tool box to fix his bicycle. His manner, always evasive, had been become more shifty. His stories about why he needed to borrow a pound from me had been losing their last, faint traces of plausibility. The spanners were returned but, despite his volunteered promises, never the pounds. On a few of those occasions I'd answered his knock to find him dressed in the uniform of the sea cadets, complete with ribbed jumper and tilted beret. Could he have a pound for the bus? "Yes, yes, OK," I'd say. "I know you'll pay me back one day." I knew he never would.
He lives very close by, but I resisted intermittent urges to ask him why nobody at his home had a spare pound. I think I feared that his answers would be so transparently false that they'd embarrass both of us. The truth might have been there there was no one at home, or that someone was but wouldn't give the boy a pound, or else that he was simply fleecing me. I wondered, if the latter was the case, what use a pound would really be to him. There's not much that a pound can buy. Maybe he was fleecing other people too, in which case where were all the pounds going?
Another reason why I didn't ask about his home was that I don't really know who else lives there, apart from one senior citizen. I did, though, once get a glimpse into his family life while shopping at Palm 2. He arrived with an adult male: quite young, and radiating angry and aggression.
"Get the fucking rice," he say to the boy.
The boy half-ran, cowering, down the aisle towards me. I said hello, quietly. He mumbled, mostly to himself, and rooted flusteringly through the contents of a shelf. He found some rice and took it over to the man.
"That's the wrong one, you fucking idiot. You're fucking useless. Fucking useless."
This was loud and right in front of everyone. I don't know who the man was, but only a family member was likely to have spoken to him in that way. I, like other customers, tried not to stare. Any desire to intervene, to act upon the conviction that shouting at the boy in that way was terrible and vindictive and could only make him worse, shrank instantly on contact with the violent aura of the man. Perhaps we all calculated that the merest, glancing eye-contact with the man could have deeply unpleasant consequences.
I didn't see the boy take my wife's camera, but I know it was him. She'd left it on the shelf, he'd knocked at the door wanting a pound. I'd gone into a room to find one, "lent" it to him, said goodbye, and half an hour later my wife asked if I'd moved the camera from the shelf. We've never seen it since. He'd seen his chance and seized it. Later, in the street, my wife and a neighbour asked him if he'd happened to see the camera when he'd come round. No, no, he'd said. His display of innocence had been so mannered and insistent it could only have completely false.
The neighbour said the boy had recently paid him a visit too, one notable for the dusting of white powder around his nostrils. I phoned the boy's school (which isn't one of those near Clapton Pond.) I told a teacher about the camera and the dust around the nose. Her telephone manner was defensive: was I expecting her to get the camera back?; was I demanding that the boy be discplined? It took me longer than it should have to convince the teacher that I was calling only to alert the school to the boy's delinquencies, which I had thought they ought to know about and pass on to any relevant agencies.
The teacher asked me why I didn't report the theft to the police. I explained, remembering the man with the violent manner in Palm 2, that I had no wish to become involved in some potentially nasty neighbourhood feud and, amyway, we were talking about a child. Surely it was better to keep him out of the crimnial justice system if possible, given that exposure to it sometimes has the effect of making them worse. This liberal notion was met with a crushing silence. Then the teacher indicated that the school had pretty much given up on the boy. She said she'd pass my information on to a senior colleague, who would get back to me soon. The call never came.
Since the stealing of the camera, the boy has never once knocked on my door. I see him now and again, sometimes out riding his bike, sometimes in conspiratorial conversation with a friend, and never in the rig out of a sea cadet. If he sees me he nods then looks away. I do the same, keeping the nod deliberately curt - a small and probably completely futile signal that I haven't forgotten what he did. I'm guessing that he hasn't forgotten either - hence the dearth of requests for a pound. I'm also guessing he's decided that I've given up on him too.
Comments