Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

Quick as a flash Lou said to the biggest of the men, 'Out the back, over the wall.'

'What's in it for you?' the fellow hissed.

'Take the fags, leave the money. Go.'

And that's exactly what they did.

The Guards were furious. 'How did they know there was a back way?'

'They must have known the area,' Louis shrugged.

His father was very angry indeed. 'You let them away with it, you bloody let them away, the Guards could have had them in gaol if it hadn't been for you.'

'Get real, Da.' Lou always spoke like a gangster anyway. 'What's the point? The prisons are full, they'd get the Probation Act, and they'd come back and smash the place up. This way they owe us. It's like paying protection money.'

'Living in a bloody jungle,' his father said. But Lou was certain he had done the right thing, and secretly his mother agreed with him.

'No point in attracting trouble,' was her motto. Delivering aggressive thieves with sticks to the Guards would have been attracting trouble as far as she was concerned.

Six weeks later a man came in to buy cigarettes. About thirty, burly with a nearly shaved head. It was after school and Lou was serving.

'What's your name?' the man asked.

Lou recognised the voice as the one that had asked him what was in it for him. 'Lou,' he said.

'Do you know me, Lou?'

Lou looked him straight in the eye. 'Not from a bar of soap,' he said.

'Good lad, Lou, you'll be hearing from us.' And the man who had taken over fifty packets of cigarettes six weeks ago while waving a stick paid nice and politely for his packet. Not long after, the big man came in with a plastic bag. 'Leg of lamb for your mother, Lou,' he said and left.

'We won't say a thing to your father,' she said, and cooked it for their Sunday lunch.

Lou's father would have said that they would not appreciate someone distributing the contents of their shop around the neighbourhood like some modern day Robin Hood, and presumably the butcher's shop that had been done over felt the same.

Lou and his mother thought it easier not to go too far down that road. Lou thought of the big man as Robin Hood and when he saw him around the place he would just nod at him. 'Howaya.'

And the big man would laugh back at him and say, 'How's it going, Lou?'

In a way Lou hoped that Robin would get in touch again. He knew that the debt had been paid by the gift of the lamb. But he felt excited at the thought of being so close to the underworld. He wished Robin would give him some kind of task. He didn't want to do a smash and grab himself. And he couldn't drive a getaway car. But he did want to be involved in something exciting.

The call didn't come while he was at school. Lou was not a natural student, at sixteen he was out of the classroom and into the Job Centre without very much hope there either. One of the first people he saw was Robin studying the notices on the board.

'Howaya, Robin,' Lou said, forgetting that was only a made up name.

'What do you mean, Robin?' the man asked.

'I have to call you something. I don't know your name so that's what I call you.'

'Is it some kind of a poor joke?' The man looked very bad-tempered indeed.

'No, it's like Robin Hood, you know the fellow…' his voice trailed away. Lou didn't want to talk about Merry Men in case Robin thought he might be saying he was gay, he didn't want to say a band or a gang. Why had he ever said the name at all?

'As long as it's not a reference to people robbing things…'

'Oh God no , NO,' Lou said, as if such an idea was utterly repulsive.

'Well then,' Robin seemed mollified.

'What is your real name?'

'Robin will do fine, now that we know there's no misunderstanding.'

'None, none.'

'Good, well how are things, Lou?'

'Not great, I had a job in a warehouse but they had stupid rules about smoking.'

'I know, they're all the same.' Robin was sympathetic. He could read the story of a boy's first job ending after a week. It was probably his own.

'I'll tell you, there's a job here.' He pointed at an advertisement offering a cleaning job in a cinema.

'It's for girls, isn't it?'

'It doesn't say, you can't say nowadays.'

'But it would be a desperate job.' Lou was disappointed that Robin thought so little of him as to point him in such a lowly direction.

'It could have its compensations,' Robin said, looking vaguely into the distance.

'What would they be?'

'It could mean leaving doors open.'

'Every night? Wouldn't they cop on?'

'Not if the bolt was just pulled slightly back.'

'And then?'

'And then if other people, say, wanted to go in and out, they would have a week to do so.'

'And after that?'

'Well, whoever had that cleaning job could move on in a bit, not too quickly, but in a bit. And would find that people were very grateful to him.'

Lou was so excited he could hardly breathe. It was happening. Robin was including him in his gang. Without another word he went up to the counter and filled in the forms for the post as cleaner.

'Whatever made you take a job like that?' his father said.

'Someone's got to do it,' Lou shrugged.

He cleaned the seats and picked up the litter. He cleaned the lavatories and used scouring powder to get rid of the graffiti. Each evening he loosened the bolt on the big back door. Robin didn't even have to tell him which, it was quite obvious that this was the only way that people could get in.

The manager was a nervous, fussy little man. He told Lou that the world was a wicked place now, totally different from when he was growing up.

'True enough,' Lou said. He didn't engage in much conversation. He didn't want to be remembered one way or another after the event.

The event happened four days later. Thieves had got in, broken into the little covered-in cash desk and got away with the night's takings. They had sawn through a bolt, apparently. They must have been able to reach through a crack in the door. The Guards asked was there any way that the door could have been left unlocked but the nervous fussy manager, who was by this stage nearly hysterical and confirmed in his belief of the wickedness of the world, said that was ridiculous. He always checked at night and why would they have had all the sawing if they had got in an open door. Lou realised they organised that to protect him. Nobody could finger the new cleaner as being the inside contact.

He stayed on at the cinema, carefully locking the newly fitted bolt for two weeks to prove that he was in no way connected. Then he told the manager he had got a better position.

'You weren't the worst of them,' the manager said, and Lou felt slightly ashamed because he knew that in a way he was the worst of them. His predecessors hadn't opened the doors to admit the burglars. But there was no point whatsoever in feeling guilty about that now. What was done was done. It was a matter of waiting to see what happened next.

What happened next was that Robin came in to buy a pack of cigarettes and handed him an envelope. His father was in the shop so Lou took it quietly without comment. Only when he was alone did he open it. There were ten ten-pound notes. A hundred pounds for loosening a bolt four nights in succession. As Robin had promised, people were being grateful to him.

Lou never asked Robin for a job. He went about his own work, taking bits here and there. He felt sure that if he were needed he would be called on. But he longed to run into the big man again. He never saw Robin any more at the Job Centre.

He felt sure that Robin was involved in the job at the supermarket where they had got almost the entire contents of the off licence into a van and away within an hour of late closing. The security firm just couldn't believe it. There was no evidence of an inside job.