4.3

 

This time of the morning, when the evening traffic had dispersed and the last ejection from the pubs had fallen into oblivion in homes, police cells and bus shelters, there were so few people about she could have been walking street in the post-apocalypse, but for the profusion of fast food wrappers, take-away carrier bags and neatly tied bags that didn't proclaim what the contained, but you knew it was excrement of one kind or another. Dog owners had finally been trained well enough to bag up after their dog, but not yet to dispose of the bag afterward. Quite how they would feel if the council subjected them to the same treatment in their own homes was plainly observed by the outcry when water treatment centres discharged their waste directly into rivers and coastlines. Roisin had once enjoyed wild swimming in the River Laver, but when Southern Water got into financial difficulties, she just found herself going through the motions.

The trick to stealing, she had found until the unfortunate journey home in the back of a panda car, was to look entitled to whatever it was you were stealing. Rather than give her nefarious actions away by hastening between shadows and cover, she removed the sign itself, since she had no use for it other than wall art, and she was long past the age where she thought road signs were good bedroom décor, and balanced the frame on her shoulders, walking with a determined pace back to Dunstall Road, except once where she stood behind a parked lorry while a police cruiser drove past, flashing all the lights like his dinner was already on the table. It wasn't the fast police vehicles you had to be wary of; they had somewhere they were supposed to be. It was the slow ones to look out for; the officers who were at the bottom of the monthly figures and were looking for someone easy to arrest; traffic violations, drunk and disorderly, old people protesting the government, and artists trying to make a living. The most important tip she'd ever been given about theft of any kind, from lifting a packet of sweets from the local newsagents to an internationally renowned jewel heist from the Louvre Museum, was (a) don't get caught red-handed and (b) look like a middle-aged white bloke who went to the football match on Saturdays. The number of cameras and recorders about now would put Sherlock Holme's street urchins to shame. Who hasn't seen the grainy image of a granny-basher on the television screen and though he looked familiar. Of course they look familiar. They're everywhere.

Rather than risk taking the sign stand through the front door, where all the Ring cameras on the street would take note, she turned into Austin Street to the rented garages and left it outside one that wasn't Steve's.

She went back through the streets to the front of the house, in through the front door, out through the kitchen, down the fire exit and through the garden to the garden door. She felt slightly guilty about leaving footprints that glistened from the streetlights reflected in the dewy grass, but they'd be gone before anyone sent a camera drone over the area in daylight.

She unlocked the gate and went through to the garage lot, pulling the stand from where she'd stashed it behind a van advertising 'Janu's Tyres' and carrying it through the reverse journey to the kitchen, and thence to her room.

As easels went, it was probably on the bottom end of the pyramid; far below the heavy studio easel she'd used when she was a student but not as far down as the one her mum had ordered for her off Temu, the low-quality knock-off shop on the internet. That had taken her an hour to put together, and the struts were so thin they'd split when she'd screwed in the supplied hardware. If she had a proper studio, she'd invest in a matched pair of handyman ladders and some garage hooks. This sign stand would serve her well enough for now, as long as she didn't try to hang anything too large or heavy on its tubular steel. Certainly, the plywood boards would be fine to start with.. She'd just have to ask Paul if he had an electric drill she could borrow to attach some canvas pegs onto the legs.

She propped the tiny sketch of the bus stop on the cross beam and stood back, trying to envision it in a greater size. It was a start.