In the Bag (6 page)

Joe

When I get back to the car Kate’s already there, leaning against the door, reading a book that she’s bought this morning. She looks up at me as I walk towards her and almost instinctively, I hold the bag with my trainers in it behind my back.

‘
All right, loser?’ I say to her.

She sticks her fingers up at me and then goes back to her book. And I think, good, she didn’t notice the bag.

Until she opens her mouth and says, ‘What did you buy?’

‘What?’ I say. I feel panicked. ‘Nothing.’ Which is just about the stupidest thing I have ever said, as I obviously bought something.

‘Yes you did,’ Kate says, still without looking up. ‘You’ve got a bag.’

I look down as though I’m noticing the bag for the first time. ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Just bought some trainers.’

Kate looks up immediately. ‘Trainers? Where’d you get the money for them? Did Mum and Dad give you the money?’

I shrug. I prepared my story as I was walking through town because I knew Kate would ask this kind of question. But right now the lie I’ve made up doesn’t seem all that believable. ‘Kind of,’ I say. ‘I saved up my pocket money for a while.’

Kate raises an eyebrow, like she doesn’t believe me.

‘Where else do you think I’d get the money?’

She shrugs and goes back to her book.

And we don’t speak again. A couple of minutes later, Mum and Dad turn up. Dad’s carrying all the shopping bags.

‘I hope the credit card company’s got enough money to pay for this little lot!’ he says.

The car unlocks with an electrical
clunk
and Dad starts putting the bags into the boot.

‘What have you bought?’ Mum says to me.

I don’t say anything right away. I was hoping she wasn’t going to notice.

‘He’s bought some trainers,’ Kate says.

I sigh. Trust Kate. She can be a right pain in the arse sometimes.

‘Did you?’ Mum says, getting in the passenger seat.

I get in the back. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I saved up. I needed some. Mine are falling apart.’

Mum nods her head. ‘Fair enough,’ she says.

I smile. How easy was that? I’ve got away with it. Maybe keeping the money will be all right. Maybe I can keep it a secret from everyone. Just as long as I’m careful.

Ash

I’m sitting on my own on the bench at the rec, staring at my bike, looking at my new frame. Which, by the way, looks wicked. It feels good to ride as well.

I see Joe come in through the gate at the far end of the rec and then close it behind him. He cycles across the grass towards the bench.

‘Hi, Ash,’ he says as he puts his bike carefully on the ground and then comes and sits next to me.

‘
All right, J?’

Joe looks at my bike. I can sense what he’s thinking. I know what he’s gonna say even before he opens his mouth. ‘Is that a new bike?’

I shake my head. ‘Nah. New frame.’

‘Looks good,’ Joe says. ‘Did you buy it with . . . you know?’

I nod and smile. ‘Yeah.’

‘How much?’

I don’t answer right away. I’m not sure how Joe’d react if I told him how much it really cost. Time for a white lie, I think. ‘Two hundred,’ I say.

Joe raises his eyebrows. ‘Two hundred?’ He whistles, like that’s a lot of money. Which I guess it is. Although not if you’ve just found a bag with twenty grand in it.

I nod. And I can tell that he’s a little bit pissed off with me, just from the tone of his voice. He doesn’t say it in so many words, though. He just looks down at his trainers. And so do I.

I smile.
‘
Are they new?’

He nods and goes slightly red. And I know, even without asking him, that he spent some of the money from the bag today as well.

‘Nice,’ I say. ‘They’re cool.’

Joe mumbles something that I think is ‘Thanks’.

We’re both quiet for a while. I watch some kids who are having a kickabout, using their bikes as goalposts. One of the kids gets hacked to the ground and starts rolling around as though he’s been shot or something. He gets up as soon as he’s awarded a penalty.

‘I guess this means we should keep the money,’ Joe says after a while. ‘Now that we’ve spent some of it. We can’t exactly take the bag to the police with some of the money missing.’

I look at him and nod. I smile. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right,’ I say.

He looks across the rec and nods. ‘Yeah,’ he says. He pauses. ‘Did anyone ask you any questions about where you got the money from?’

I shake my head. It’s easiest to lie. ‘Not at all. You?’

He sighs. ‘Kind of,’ he says. ‘My sister did. She asked where I got the money for the trainers. I told her I saved my pocket money.’

I nod. ‘Good thinking. Did she buy the excuse?’

Joe looks at me. He smiles. ‘Yeah.’

I smile back at him. ‘Nice one,’ I say. ‘We just have to be careful, that’s all. Just make sure we don’t let anyone suspect us of anything. And then we’re loaded!’

‘It made me think, though,’ he says, ‘that we should probably try and ration the money.’

I look at him.

‘So we don’t draw attention to ourselves,’ he goes on. ‘My sister got suspicious enough just cos I spent forty quid.’

I nod. Maybe he has a point. ‘OK. How much do you reckon, then? Hundred quid a week?’

He shakes his head. ‘Too much.’

‘
A hundred’s not too much,’ I say. ‘No one in a shop’s gonna get suspicious about that.’

Joe shakes his head, though. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It should be less than that. Kate and my parents would get suspicious if I started spending that much every week.’

‘My mum and dad wouldn’t,’ I say. ‘They couldn’t give a toss. They hardly even notice I’m there anyway. How about fifty quid, then? No one’ll notice that.’

Joe shakes his head again. ‘Thirty.’

‘Forty.’

Joe thinks about it for a second. ‘Thirty-five,’ he says after a bit.

‘Deal,’ I say. Thirty-five quid is nothing, but I know I can get away with spending more than that a week. This way, I let Joe think he’s in charge.

We shake on it.

We fall silent and look out across the rec at the little kids playing football. And as we do, I wonder whether I should tell him that I sold some of the weed to Jack. But something stops me from saying anything. So I sit quietly and I stare at the football without really following the game.

‘Do you believe in fate?’ Joe says eventually.

I look at him, wondering what the hell he’s talking about. He stares straight back at me. I shrug. ‘I s’pose. Why?’

Joe looks away from me, across the rec. ‘I was just thinking, maybe we were meant to find the money,’ he says. ‘Maybe it was fate. Maybe someone up there wanted us to find it.’

‘What do you mean? God?’

Joe shakes his head. ‘Not like that. I just mean, like, what if we found it so that we can do some good with it?’

‘We’ve done that already, haven’t we?’ I say. ‘My bike looks wicked with the new frame. And your trainers aren’t too bad, either.’

Joe turns back to me again. ‘You know what I mean,’ he says. ‘Look, we both know that this money isn’t just someone’s life savings that they lost by accident. No normal person carries that much cash and a big bag of weed on them, do they? It must have belonged to someone dodgy.’

‘Right. So?’

Joe sighs. ‘I can’t explain . . .’ he says. ‘We got lucky when we found it, but maybe we should use it to do some good instead, not just spend it all on ourselves. Do you see what I mean?’

I nod slowly. I think I see what he’s getting at. Although, to be honest, I’d rather spend the money on myself.

‘You know what karma is, don’t you?’ Joe says.

I nod. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘If something good happens to you, you should go and do something good in return. And if you do that, more good things will happen. But if you do something bad, then bad things will happen to you.’

I nod. But I don’t believe in it. ‘We’re already doing more good with it than whoever had it in the first place,’ I say. ‘It’s not like we’re gonna use it to fund a criminal empire or anything. We’re not gonna do bad things with the money.’

Joe looks at me, his right eyebrow raised. ‘Don’t you see what I’m saying?’

I sigh. ‘You want us to give the money to charity or something,’ I say.

Joe shrugs. ‘Not necessarily,’ he says. ‘But I think we should think carefully about what we use it for. We shouldn’t just use it to buy loads of stuff we don’t need.’

I nod. ‘OK,’ I say. Even though I fully intend to spend the money on things I don’t need.

The football from the kids’ game rolls over towards us. Joe jumps down from the bench, runs over to the ball and kicks it back over to the kids. Except instead of going straight to them, it curls over to the right, so they end up having to chase after it. He comes and sits back down.

‘What you doing tonight, J?’ I say.

Joe’s shoulders kind of droop. ‘Family meal,’ he says.

‘Why don’t you come over to mine, then?’ I say. ‘My parents are gonna be away all night. I’m gonna invite Rabbit and Dylan too.’

Joe sighs. ‘Can’t,’ he says. ‘Mum says I have to look after my dumb cousins.’

‘Bring them round.’

He shakes his head. ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘You’d understand if you’d ever met my cousins.’

We go home the back way. Mainly cos I wanna check out the place where the car was last night. Joe took a little bit of persuading, but now we’re on our way through the woods. Because it’s Saturday afternoon, there are loads of people out for a stroll or walking their dogs. And it makes me think: if we hadn’t picked the bag up yesterday, there’s no doubt that someone else would have found it by now. And the chances are that they’d have kept the money for themselves, just like me and Joe.

We see the car up ahead, the silver Vauxhall Astra. Only we also see something we weren’t banking on. There’s a policeman there as well. We keep on cycling, trying not to stare too hard. We don’t look at each other, don’t say a thing to each other, just keep riding innocently as though we just happened to be cycling through that way.

It’s not until the crashed car and the policeman are out of sight behind us that we finally speak.

‘What were the police doing there?’ Joe says.

‘Dunno,’ I say. ‘Probably just checking out the car crash, I guess.’

‘I s’pose,’ Joe says. He doesn’t sound too convinced, though.

‘Probably just putting one of those Police Aware stickers on it.’

Joe nods. We cycle on for a bit, neither of us saying anything. We come out of the woods and out on to the main road.

‘You don’t think it had anything to do with the bag, do you?’ Joe says after a while. He sounds kind of anxious.

I shake my head. ‘Nah. Relax, Joe. Probably some old codger was taking his dog for a walk and found the car, called the cops and then they had to come and take a look at it. End of story.’

Joe kind of nods. ‘Yeah.’

‘Besides,’ I say, ‘the bag and the car probably didn’t have anything to do with each other. Just coincidence.’

Joe

I go into the kitchen, partly to see if there’s any food that I can scavenge but mainly to try and get away from Darren and Samantha, my annoying cousins. Mum’s in there, cooking and looking stressed.

‘Can I have some food?’ I say.

Mum doesn’t look at me. ‘No,’ she snaps.

I stand in the doorway, wondering whether I dare ask again. And as I think, I watch Mum go over to the fridge, look inside for a few seconds, take a pot of cream out and stare at it. Then she puts it back in the fridge and makes an angry kind of grunting sound.

‘
Are you OK?’ I say.

Mum sighs and pushes the fridge door closed. ‘I am slowly losing the will to live,’ she says through gritted teeth.

Mum always gets stressed when Edward and Sally come round and she has to cook. Mainly because my Aunt Sally, Mum’s sister-in-law, is always so sneery and competitive. Everything in their house is just so. Not like in our house, where everything is more ‘whatever’.

Mum comes over to the counter, grabs her purse and opens it. ‘I bought single cream instead of double, Joe. Take this and go to the shop for me.’

She holds out a five-pound note.

I stare at her and sigh. I’m about to protest when it dawns on me that if I go to the shop for Mum I’ll get away from Edward, Sally, Darren and Samantha for a bit. I grab the money. ‘Double cream, right?’

Mum nods. ‘Five hundred mills.’

I take the money and turn just as Sally walks into the kitchen and blocks my way.
‘
Anything I can help with, Beverley?’ she says.

Mum shakes her head. ‘No thanks, Sally,’ she says. ‘Everything’s under control. But I forgot the double cream. Joe’s just going to pop to the shops and get me some. Not much I can do till then.’