(1994) The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

Author:Ian McEwan [McEwan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General
ISBN: 9780385498050
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1994-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

chapter five

The Burglar

ALL THE NEIGHBOURS WERE TALKING ABOUT the burglar. Months ago he had broken into a house at the bottom of the street. He had wriggled in through a back window in the full light of a sunny mid-afternoon when the house was empty. He had made off with knives and forks and a painting. Now he was working his way up the street, a house on one side, then a house on the other.

What a nerve! people kept saying. He’s bound to get caught. Last night he did number eight, next week it will be number nine.

But no, he would wait for three weeks, or four, and he would leapfrog to number eleven. Then he would come the very next day and rob number twelve. He stole televisions, video machines, computers, statues, jewels. He knew how to pick locks, scale up drainpipes, silence burglar alarms, slide back window catches, make friends with the angry dogs, and how to stroll away with his loot in the middle of the day without being seen. He was a magician, a maestro of theft. He was invisible, silent and weightless. He left no footprints in the garden beds, or fingerprints on door handles.

The police were baffled. Two plain-clothes men were sent to watch over the street in an unmarked car. Everyone knew who they were. They sat doing crosswords and eating sandwiches until they were called away to more important work. Half an hour later, the burglar struck again, and carried off a box of expensive perfumed soap and a silver-topped walking-stick from the home of Mrs. Goodgame, a rich old lady with protruding yellow teeth who lived alone. The stick had belonged to her great-grandfather, a famously fierce missionary. He used it to beat African children when they didn’t study their Bible lessons.

“It was of great sentimental value!” Mrs. Goodgame wailed when she came round to tell the news to Peter’s mother. “It travelled round the world three times in the nineteenth century. And my soap, my precious soap!”

“I’m glad he took that stinking stick,” Peter said to Kate after Mrs. Goodgame had left. “I hope that burglar breaks it over his knee.”

Kate nodded fiercely. “I wish he had taken her teeth!” The fact was that Mrs. Goodgame, even though she had a name that made her sound fun, was not liked by the children in the street. She was one of those rare unhappy grown-ups who are profoundly irritated by the fact that children exist. When they played out, she shouted at them from her front window for “gathering outside my house.” She believed that all the litter that blew on to her patch was put there by mischievous children. If a ball or a toy landed in her garden, she darted out and confiscated it. She was always in a bad mood, and things were made worse for her because the children teased her. Making her angry was something of a sport. Peter’s parents said she was a little mad and deserved pity.

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