‘Don’t you see? We’re putting two and two together and making the proverbial. I mean… OK, Robbie has gone. And OK, some stuff has gone. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve gone to the same place.’
‘I’m sure they haven’t,’ I say. ‘I’m sure they’ve gone to different places. I’m sure the video camera has gone to the second-hand shop in Holloway Road and Robbie’s gone to the off-licence.’
David gives me a look that lets me know I am being unhelpful, but I don’t think that’s true. Wendy and Ed are actually being pretty good about this. They could have come round here and thrown David from an upstairs window, or sat on him until he burst, but they just seem bewildered and hurt. And now they are being told that their powers of deduction are faulty.
‘GoodNews is right,’ says David, with a wearying predictability. ‘We mustn’t stereotype these kids. That’s kind of how they got into this mess in the first place.’
Monkey comes into the kitchen, dressed in some of David’s cast-offs and yawning.
‘Do you know Robbie?’ I ask him. ‘The guy who was living with Ed and Wendy here?’
‘Yeah,’ says Monkey. ‘He’s a thieving little cunt. Pardon my language.’
‘How do you know?’ David asks.
‘How do I know he’s a thieving little cunt? ‘Cos he steals everything.’ Misjudging the mood somewhat, he laughs heartily at his own witticism.
‘He’s stolen some stuff from us and disappeared,’ says Ed.
‘Yeah, well, I could have told you that would happen. What’s he taken?’
Ed tells him what is missing.
‘Little fucker. Right.’ And Monkey disappears too.
We make Ed and Wendy a cup of tea. David puts his head in his hands and stares mournfully at the floor. ‘It was a high-risk strategy, I suppose. Thinking about it now.’ That last phrase I would have found particularly difficult to swallow, if I were Ed and Wendy. They might have hoped that the thought had been done beforehand.
‘You shouldn’t worry too much about it,’ GoodNews tells them cheerfully. ‘You did the right thing. No matter how much you’ve lost. He could have taken everything you own, every last penny you’ve got, and you could go to sleep tonight knowing that your conscience is clear. More than clear. It’s…’ GoodNews struggles for a moment to find a word that means ‘more than clear’, and then gives up and settles for a beaming smile that doesn’t seem to offer Ed and Wendy as much consolation as he might have anticipated.
Forty-five minutes later Monkey is back, with the camera, the bracelet, fifty of the seventy pounds, and Robbie, who is bleeding profusely from a cut above his right eye. David is angry, GoodNews anguished.
‘How did he get that?’ David asks.
Monkey laughs. ‘He walked into a door.’
‘Oh, man,’ says GoodNews. ‘This isn’t what we’re about.’
‘I can’t sanction violence,’ David says.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I don’t agree with it.’
‘Yeah, well,’ says Monkey. ‘I asked him nicely but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘I was going to come back with the stuff,’ wails Robbie. ‘There wasn’t any need for him to slap me around. I was only…’ Robbie tries and fails to come up with a convincing explanation for why he would need purely temporary use of a video camera and a bracelet, and trails off.
‘Is that true, Monkey?’ David asks. ‘Was he going to come back with the stuff?’
‘I’ll give you my honest opinion, David: No, it isn’t true. He wasn’t going to come back with the stuff. He was going to flog it.’ Monkey delivers the line for laughs, and gets them—from Ed and me, anyway. David and GoodNews aren’t laughing, though. They just look stricken.
I ask Monkey to take Robbie for a walk somewhere while we talk.
‘So now what?’ I ask. ‘Do you want to get the police in, you two?’
‘Ah, now, you really want to think hard about that,’ says GoodNews. ‘Because the police, you know… That’s quite heavy. If twenty pounds means so much to you, you know…’
Significantly, he trails off before completing the sentence in the way that sense and custom dictate. There will be no offers of recompense from this quarter, clearly.
‘What?’ I ask him.
‘It’s like, not much, is it, twenty quid? I mean, a young life has got to be worth more than that.’
‘So you’re saying that Ed and Wendy are mean. Callous.’
‘I’m just saying that if it were me that lost the money, you know…’
‘You’re not involved,’ I tell him. ‘It’s Ed and Wendy’s decision.’
‘If we get the police in,’ David says, ‘it’ll make it very difficult for Robbie to carry on where he is. He might feel that Ed and Wendy don’t want him.’
I don’t think even I had quite realized, up until this point, just what a limp grasp on reality David now has.
‘We don’t bloody want him,’ says Ed. ‘Little shit.’
GoodNews is staggered. ‘You don’t want him? Because of this? Come on, guys. We knew it was going to be a hard road. I didn’t think you two would fall at the first hurdle.’
‘You told us you’d vetted everybody,’ says Wendy.
‘We did,’ David says. ‘We got recommendations from a local hostel. But, you know. It must have been very tempting for him. There’s money lying around, and jewellery, and electronic goods, and…’
‘So it’s our fault?’ says Ed. ‘Is that what you’re telling us?’
‘Not your fault, exactly. But maybe we’re not quite seeing the… the extent of the cultural gap here.’
Ed and Wendy look at each other and walk out.
‘I’m very disappointed in them,’ says David, almost to himself. ‘I thought they were made of tougher stuff than that.’
I clean Robbie up and suggest to him that it might be politic to disappear. He’s not entirely happy with the suggestion—like David and GoodNews, he seems to believe that I am indulging in some unhelpful stereotyping, and that he hasn’t been given a chance. We have quite a lively debate about it all, as you can imagine, because my own feeling, a feeling that Robbie doesn’t share, is that he has been given a chance, and he hasn’t responded entirely positively to it.
He disagrees. ‘That camera thing was cheap Korean crap,’ he says. ‘And like GoodNews says, it was only twenty quid.’
This, I try to point out, is beside the point—indeed, it is a non sequitur—but I don’t make very much headway. After a much briefer conversation with Monkey he decides that Webster Road isn’t for him after all. We never see him again.
News of the misfortune spreads up and down the street, and we receive several visits during the course of the day. All the other four hosts want to talk to David and GoodNews, of course, but Ed and Wendy’s immediate neighbours—including Mike, whose ideological opposition to the project has predictably hardened overnight—are also unhappy. Mike pays us a visit.
‘This isn’t anything to do with you,’ says David.
‘What, when I’ve got a bloody tea-leaf living next door?’
‘You don’t know who you’ve got living next door,’ says David. ‘You’re judging someone before you’ve got to know them.’
‘You’re jumping,’ says GoodNews, pleased with his new verb. ‘And we’re not jumpers here.’
‘What, so I’ve got to wait until half my fucking stuff has gone before I’m allowed to complain?’
‘Why don’t we call a street meeting?’ says David.
‘What good will that do?’
‘I want to gauge the temperature. See how other people feel.’
‘I don’t give a fuck how other people feel.’
‘That’s not what living in a community is about, Mike.’
‘I don’t live in a fucking community. I live in my house. With my things. And I want to keep them.’
‘OK. So maybe you should be given the opportunity to express that. Meet the kids and tell them you don’t want them in your house.’
‘Tell them! Tell them! If they have to be told not to break in, they shouldn’t be here in the first place.’
‘And where should they be?’