Turquoiselle by Tanith Lee

did not know, perhaps Heavy preferred Heavy to it.
    An dy turned
suddenly. He planted himself and glared straight into Heavy’s bulbous eyes.
    “ What do you want ?”
    “Oh,
just,” said Heavy, and smiled. He was like the specialised Idiot you sometimes saw
in old films too, Charlie Laughton swinging on a bell, or someone.
    “Fuck
off,” said Andy.
    Heavy
did not grimace or grin. Did not cringe or brace himself. Did nothing let alone
go.
    “You
are a fucking cretin,” said Andy.
    At
that moment a big ginger cat leapt up on the wall, and Heavy immediately
transferred all his attention to it.
    Andy
should have taken the opportunity to move on, but something odd arrested him.
It was Heavy’s look , his way of
reaching out and touching the cat – abruptly and weirdly graceful, lavish, full
of – of intelligent concentration and a type of – what? What was it? Kindness. .?
    Andy
stared, knowing he should go at once.
    But
when Heavy moved back round again, smiling and still half watching the cat, as
if it were the most fascinating s ight for miles, Andy did not go. And when
the cat began to wash itself, Andy remarked, “See, even the cat can’t fucking
stick you. It wants to wash you off it.”
    “Oh, no,” said Heavy’s
soft turgid somehow browsing voice, “no, they do that when they do like you.
To get your scent in their mouvfs and over them, and taste you and be
remembering.”
    “You’ve
got shit for brains,” said Andy. “Who told that shit?”
    “My
moth–er.” He mispronounced some things, Heavy, curious ways. And he said ‘mother’
as if she were a flying insect: moth- ah.
    “Your
mother’s a cunt.”
    Heavy
looked back at him. He was still quietly smiling, unphased, happy. “She isn’t a cund. But she’s got a cund. All women
do. Like we have pricks.”
    “Go
to hell,” said Andy, lamely, he thought. And took off up the road at a rate of
knots, leaving Heavy far behind – if he had even reckoned to follow – just as
if Heavy were the bully and Andy the weak misfitted coward.
    But
he had the stuff from Woolworths. And he had the X–film. And Cox had perhaps
lost a tooth. Not too bad for an hour’s work.
    As
a rule a film could not be on the cards. But his mother would be out late
tonight. She was cleaning the big Kirkpatrick house, six in the evening until
about 11 p.m., while the happy owners were off getting rat-arsed. So he could easily
watch the film before she returned. He had taken it the usual way. He had a
modus operandi, (he knew the term for it), for each and all his thefts. All
were slightly, or very, different. His technique here too had never let him
down. Part of the secret was, he had found, in casualness. He could act casualness, as
he could act quite a few states of mind and body, had learned this, perhaps, as
he had how to fight dirtily and to effect, watching others.
    When
he reached home, a small flat which had been provided for Sara and himself over
an electrical shop, once they had got away, he climbed up the iron staircase
and let himself in. There was a front room and kitchenette facing the street, a
kit chenette-sized
bathroom and two rabbit-hutch bedrooms that looked out the other way across
garages to some strips of rear garden, and the rear-ends of houses, and a
church sometimes known locally as St Crudes. Andy opened the bedside cabinet in
his bedroom. It was his private storage area, and as such Sara respected it.
She believed everyone needed secret places, apart from those locked up in their
brains.
    A
deep shadow by now was filling the tiny back rooms, which fac ed north. Inside
the cupboard was darkness, but to Andy a vague glow seemed to open there, the
longer he gazed in. The upper shelf and the lower, boxlike area, seemed to shine with the heaps of booty he had accumulated. Some liquid soap from a cafe
toilet, two library books he had taken unseen and not returned, a glass from some
other café, and a general litter that included a knife and fork