the teller believes him and hands over an envelope bursting with dollars.
I’m no George Clooney, but, like Clooney, I’m able to walk and talk, most of the time anyway, and that’s all it took for Clooney’s character to rob the bank.
FYI Clooney eventually gets caught. How? His getaway car has a flat battery. As Mr Stones, the coach of the U13 football team used to say: ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ Mr Stones didn’t say much else, apart from ‘It’s the taking part that counts.’
Ensure Your Target Ticks All the Boxes
Location, location, location. The fewer associations you have with your target, the better. Unlike George Clooney, I couldn’t drive. And my parents would notice if I were off catching planes and trains. So, like at school, my geography was limited.
I went on Google Maps, centred my location, and searched for ‘post office’, thinking that a post office would possess less security than a bank. You normally get a Perspex screen and Google says there’s usually a panic button under the counter but what you don’t get are armed guards and drooling Rottweilers. What I had in mind was a Postman Pat-style set-up, with an elderly woman who sits next to a container of lollipops and knits all day. She’d call me ‘sonny’ and offer no physical objection to the robbery. I’d simply be another example of the rotten state of modern youth. Like Al Pacino says in Dog Day Afternoon, these places have insurance. Nobody would be losing out. Granny would have a new story for her bingo friends. Broken Britain. Who cares?
Outside, the rain fell without break from low clouds the colour of failure. Bad weather is a constant during school holidays. When we grow up and get jobs, we’ll be sitting in our offices and it’ll be sweltering outside, guaranteed. Global warming.
Dad was on the sofa watching a Western and scratching himself. He was meant to be unblocking the drain of a house belonging to the parents of a rich kid in the year above, but he couldn’t do much when it was raining. He said this whenever there was the slightest suggestion of moisture in the air, whether the job was inside or out. Either way, it was a pretty lame excuse when you’re a plumber and getting wet was pretty much first on the list of things you’d expect to happen during the working day.
‘Want to join me?’ he said, patting the cushions with the hand that had recently been down his jogging bottoms. ‘It’s only just started. Mum won’t be back for ages. How’s the job search going?’
After my half-hearted application to McDonald’s, Mum and Dad had got it into their heads I was actually applying for jobs, and not only this but having a part-time summer job was, like, the best idea ever.
The edges of my mouth curled downwards. Crazy sounds like someone was breaking up furniture with a pig came from the TV. In a darkened bedroom, a man was hugging a woman. He was wearing a cowboy hat.
‘We can fast-forward the rude bits,’ Dad said, his hands searching for the remote controls as the cowboy grunted. ‘It’s violent and sweary. You’d like it. It’s not all cuddles.’ He paused. ‘Like life really.’
Upstairs, Rita’s movements rolled through the house like teenage thunder. And even though you could hear the rain drumming on the roof, I told Dad I had to go out.
‘To do what?’
‘Homework,’ I said. I looked to the TV. ‘With a girl. And then jobs. You know.’
The naughty cowboy meant I could leave without feeling guilty. Because I was only a kid. The film would corrupt my morals.
The front door was open as I shouted through to Dad, ‘It’s holiday coursework.’
‘Wear a jacket,’ said Dad, defeated by the c-word.
So, with the pre-prepared threatening note in my back pocket, I took a bus to the target, Krazy Prices. I found the old Arsenal shirt Nan had bought me for Xmas. At the time, Dad had said her confusion was a warning sign of dementia, but I honestly think she didn’t know the difference between Palace and Arsenal.
‘They both play in London, don’t they?’ she’d said, biting her false teeth into a mince pie. ‘Don’t be such a fusspot.’
They have CCTV on buses. They have CCTV everywhere, but they have it particularly on buses. If you’re lucky, you might sit on one with its own display and get to stare at people without looking weird. They use these bus images for missing kids: Charlton teenager last seen on the 53. And there’s a grainy black-and-white screen grab that could be anyone with a face, but looks like a ghost, which it kind of is.
My thinking – if the police were to bother searching the bus CCTV for the ballsy teenager who’d emptied a local post office of all its cash, they’d see a kid with an Arsenal shirt and a baseball cap, two things I never wear.
It took three goes with my Oyster but the driver had the Daily Mail open on her lap and didn’t turn her head when I stepped on. The bus smelt of fried chicken. The bottom deck was full of mums with prams and grannies with wheeled shopping baskets, so I climbed upstairs.
I took a seat in the middle. Screwed into the ceiling above the front window was a black hemisphere. Through its glass you could just about make out a camera. I pulled down my cap and dug my chin into my chest. I thought about the post office. About the note. As long as I believed all would be fine, all would be fine.
Rain smudged the windows, bending the vague shapes of the outside world out of focus. I stared at nothing and tried to think positive thoughts.
The rain’s intensity faded as the bus dropped me off only a few metres away from the post office. Krazy Prices looked to be a counter at the back of a corner shop. The Guardian sponsored its awning: a middle-class neighbourhood. I checked for the note in my back pocket, the key to today’s successful robbery. After confirming it was there, I took a deep breath, which tightened my chest even more, and stepped forward to push through the entrance.
Anything That Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong
An old-fashioned bell rang and the door almost hit an old man waiting at the back of a queue that ran for six bodies to the counter. Alongside a Perspex-protected screen was the unprotected newsagent’s counter, at which nobody queued. A woman in a sari sat on a stool and watched a tiny television playing loudly.
The line for the post desk stood tightly between a greeting cards stand and a magazine display. Close enough to the old man’s cream jacket to smell his Old Spice, my eyes darted around the space, searching for a camera. I couldn’t see one, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Like God. And farts.
Water dripped from my cap’s brim. The bright red of the Arsenal shirt had turned burgundy. With my empty stomach rumbling, I wondered whether I shouldn’t give it up and go home for food. I had 8p in my pocket. Maybe the bored-looking woman would pity me and sell a single boiled sweet for a stack of coppers?
The queue moved forward. A man with a huge beard walked through to the door, saying ‘Excuse me’ over and over as he left. What would happen when the note was read? The question didn’t make my chest feel less tight, but it did force my hand to my back pocket.
I hadn’t printed my message because I knew they could trace printers. Instead I’d written it left-handed. It had taken