Breaking In
By Nick Boldock
It’s supposed to be dead simple. The ex and her sister, they tell me when they’re out, then I go round and get me stuff. They’re gonna leave me a key under the dustbin. I’m supposed to post it through the door once I’ve picked up me gear.
Trusting of them, really. Part of the problem – the big problem, the one that finds us in this situation in the first fuckin’ place – is that I can’t be trusted. I’m just not up to the job. I’m a good bloke, at heart (they’ll put that on my fuckin’ gravestone, I swear to God), but somewhere inside me there’s that little kid that keeps deciding to fuck everything up just for the hell of it. That kid – what a dickhead he is.
Anyway – I go round on the agreed night. My Mum’s bloke – Geoff – drives me around in his car, a big estate job. I only need my records and my stereo to play them on. That was all I was bothered about by then. They could burn everything else for all I cared.
I go down the little alleyway where the house is. Geoff parks up at the end and waits for me. I tell him I’ll not be long.
Down the path to the front door. I look under the bin. The front door key that they promised they’d leave me – it ain’t there. Damn. I scrabble around but it’s nowhere to be found. No key. No key means no entry. They’ve done it on purpose. I know that straight away.
I remember then that the lock on the door’s been wobbling like a good ‘un for months now. I reckon I can get into the house, pushing through the drop latch, and nobody will be any the wiser. I can get my things then fasten up the lock, close the door behind me... I’ll have my property, they’ll know I got in somehow... but so what? No damage, no problem.
I look around and check the neighbours aren’t twitching the curtains. It all seems to be quiet enough. I count one, two, three... then twat the door with my shoulder. Sure enough the knackered Yale lock gives way without so much as a whimper and the door flies open.
I’m in, straight through to the living room, and the stereo’s unplugged and out the door in seconds. “Okay?” asks Geoff as I arrive back at the car. I tell him everything’s fine, won’t be long. Three more trips at warp speed and the records are all out too – thank Christ for those bloody flight boxes she’d rowed with me about. Expensive? Yes they fuckin’ were, and what a good job I bought them, eh?
Quick sprint back into the house to tighten up the lock before I shut the door – but Houston, we have a problem. I’ve hit the bloody door too hard and I’ve stripped out the screw holes. Fuckin’ lock won’t tighten back up. I fiddle with it for a minute or too then decide, fuck it, it’s had it. I pull the door closed as best I can, the lock hanging off inside, and I’m away into Geoff’s car. Me and my record collection are out of there.
There’ll be blue murder when they get back and find the door lock shagged. Still, if they’d left the key like they’d promised then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? All the same... they’re gonna go fuckin’ mental.
And they do. A few hours later the mobile rings and my ears are filled with a volley of abuse, I’m a dead man, I’m scum, I’m a fuckin’ cunt, and they wish I was dead.
I try and tell them it was an accident and if they’d left the fuckin’ key it wouldn’t have happened. It doesn’t help. The pair of them are yelling at me down the phone like lunatics so in the end I just switch it off. Nothing to be gained from this. The phone hits the table and I stare at it. Fuck’s sake. I don’t even know how this happened. I never do.
I go and plug the stereo in. I’ve got my records if nothing else. Funny, but if I’d lost them then things would have been ten times worse. I love them records.
I go to slide one out of its sleeve and it falls out in two pieces, snapped clean in half. What the fuck? The next one, the same. One by one, I check all the records and they’re all busted clean in two, neatly broken and then slotted back into their sleeves with a patient care only a woman scorned could have mustered. Every single one has been done. Later, I’ll wryly smile at the cleverness of this, the poetic justice behind the irony of all these precious things, broken beyond repair.
For now though, I just wish I was someone else.
-END-
(c) Nick Boldock, 2011
