Home.
It was empty and echoing. The house felt – cold. But it was OK. I had plans to make, now I had Mum’s money. No, I would not be staying long.
Should I have felt guilty about using her debit card to book my ticket to New York? Of course I shouldn’t. She had left it there, in the usual place under the Jeff Koons clock, with the PIN number she was always forgetting. She used a credit card abroad – something about security, but she clearly hadn’t thought about security at home, which was her fault, really, it was ‘asking for trouble’, as she said to me when I took my iPod to school, and even more careless, she had let me know where she kept her emergency stash of cash. Yay! Twenty-five crisp twenty pound notes tucked inside the paperback of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.
‘Gerda could you listen to me for once? GERDA PUT THAT BOOK DOWN AT ONCE AND LISTEN!! I’M TELLING YOU THIS FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT,’ she had shouted, one hot June afternoon when I’d just got home, and then I put on my Special Listening Face, so she stopped shouting and did her Extra Meaningful Voice which she used for sad things, ‘just in case something happens to me and your father.’
Well something did happen. My parents split up, and sent me away to boarding school, bastards, and no-one was here to care about me, and so I was forced to take care of myself.
And yes, I felt weird about it, but so what? In lots of adventures people Actually Kill People. What I did was not even theft.
She said it was ‘for my benefit’. She meant me to do it. I took the money.