THEY CALLED HIM Billy the Dip but never to his face, for they could see the dangerous curl of his lip at such a phrase. He saw himself as an artist, a fine wirer of the old school—he termed himself as a humble leatherworker whilst viewing himself as a fingersmith. Billy the Dip would have blanched at being labelled a common pickpocket; he picked people, not pockets.
His career had started early, and quite accidentally, by filching his mother’s purse as she bent over him to wipe his snotty nose. He had been five years old and, though he had spent the money (watching her cry as she hunted high and low) he had felt bad and vowed never to steal from her again. It was like stealing from himself, he reasoned, but the rest of feckless humanity was fair game.
He was in the town centre busking, that is to say strolling around the train station watching for marks who would dance to his tune, when he spotted an ideal candidate—a thin man wearing a fedora, on the phone over by the litter bins. Billy gave silent praise to the inventors of the smartphone; when people were on them, they turned into unfeeling, unseeing mannequins, their minds absolute elsewhere. You could practically frisk them and they wouldn’t notice.
With a practiced eye he could tell the guy kept his valuables in his pit, not his prat, his inside rather than his outside pocket. Billy grinned as he sauntered over, dipping in with the fluidity of an eel, skimming the wallet up his sleeve before his hand was back in daylight, taking a cigarette case with the other and feeling a frisson of almost erotic amazement at the level of his own skill.
Perhaps it was over-confidence, a momentary smug lapse, but as he lingered, the mark turned and looked directly at him as he carried on his conversation. Billy hurried off cursing himself for a green-nosed tiler, a damn rookie—he had let a mark clock his face (kissing the dog, they called it in the trade, and didn’t he feel like a mutt right now), a total amateur mistake; Billy had practically French kissed that hound.
He would be long gone before the guy in the fedora realised he’d been tiled—and he would not be able to provide an accurate description as he’d been blabbering on the phone—but Billy decided to take his wandering fingers to busk on a distant patch, nonetheless. He skimmed the poke behind the station, taking the money and discarding the wallet.
Billy the Dip? Billy the Dick more like.
As he checked the cigarette case, mentally calculating how much he could get for it from Pete the Pawn, he noticed something on the palm of his hand—a star-shaped mark that glowed so brightly he dropped the case to shield his eyes. He rubbed his palm furiously against his trousers, but the mark remained. It shone so fiercely he was surprised he felt no pain.
He removed gloves from his jacket pocket and quickly put them on; thankfully, the star was not bright enough to penetrate through the leather. He was suddenly worried that he had been stamped with the latest in unwashable dyes, that the man in the fedora had been a plant, and that he’d been set up. It didn’t matter he had been caught kissing the dog now that he had been branded as a luminous thief.
Maybe there was even some sort of tracker in the dye. They could do all sorts these days, especially if you believed Paranoid Paul down the pub. And that was straight where he went—he needed a stiff drink before he laid low.
Billy was on his fourth whiskey when Green Patrick burst into the bar full of self-righteous pomp because he had a story to tell. Green Pat waited until he had downed his own firewater before regaling the regulars with what he had witnessed on his way there.
‘I was just passing the train station,’ he said, a smug glint in his eye, ‘when this buck eejit in a big hat comes staggering out and nearly takes a nosedive into the bus lane. I thought he was pished, y’know? But then I clocked his dial—he was pale as a priest in a playground, white as a nun’s knickers—and I says to myself this guy’s on the septic stubs of his last legs, heart attack or something.’
Green Patrick waited until another whiskey was set up and knocked down before he continued. ‘Sure enough, he keeled over there and then, smack bang in the middle of the pigeons.’
‘Dead?’ Tam, the barkeep, ventured.
‘As disco, but there’s more. I went over for a gander, a wee bit of a look-see, and well,’ he handed his glass to Tam for a refill, ‘his face had all caved in, like it was made of plaster or something. I swear, there was fuck all beneath his fedora except a pile of dust.’
‘His fedora?’ Billy scratched anxiously at his palm through the glove.
‘Aye, that’s the detail to focus on,’ Tam shot him down, ‘his hat—you fucking clown!’
Billy hurried out to the toilets on a wave of sarcastic abuse, but he never heard a word. He locked himself in a cubicle and slowly peeled off his gloves. The glowing star was gone. Billy turned the gloves inside out to see if they were smeared, but they looked spotless. He sniffed his palm and then laughed.
The relief was enormous, though fleeting. Green Patrick’s yarn was still fresh in his mind—surely the guy in the fedora was the same chump he’d robbed, the same guy he had plucked the strange star from in the first place, and now that chump was dead. And if he had died in the same way that Green Patrick said he had, there would be some sort of investigation. The cops would be all over the station’s CCTV footage—what if he had kissed the dog with the cameras too?
Another thought struck Billy as he went back into the bar—what if the cat in the hat had some contagious disease and the shining star on the palm was the first symptom?
It was time to blow town, move to pastures new for a while. He walked straight out of the bar and caught a bus (the train station was out of bounds for the foreseeable future) for a town four stops over. The world was full of mugs. He could plie his trade anywhere.
It was a long ride and Billy the Dip bored easy. When a passenger got on outside the hospital, leaning over as he placed his rucksack in the overhead bin, Billy couldn’t resist. The truth was he never even thought about it—it was a case of pure instinct, muscle memory, fucking static cling. Before the guy had even sat down he was a wallet, a phone and a pack of breath mints lighter.
Billy cursed his own reflection as the bus pulled off. What was he thinking of, lifting leather in this environment? He had been clocked by every other passenger, and he had nowhere to go—if the mark checked his pockets even once on the journey, he would be in trouble. He had no place to dispose of the merchandise—if they searched him he would be caught and then...
He calmed down a little when he realised the window opened a fraction; he could dump the gear onto the roadside and he’d be free and easy. He had to learn to curtail his instincts for the time being; he was making too many mistakes. As he furtively slipped the wallet through the gap at the top of the window, he saw a flash of light. Pulling his hand back down into his lap, he saw that his palm was glowing again, brighter than before. Oh Christ, he thought, wallet or not, I’m gonna be caught star-handed.
He sat on his hand and began to sweat. What was happening—was it a return of what he had caught from the mark in the fedora? A ridiculous, terrible thought occurred to him then—What if I’m allergic to stealing?
He tried to laugh the notion off over the next ten miles, but found it only grew stronger. His mind spiralled down into ever deeper conspiracies, his feverish ponderings only broken when the guy he’d stolen from started coughing. Coughing was a polite description—what began as a few mild barks soon descended into a succession of thunderous rattles that drowned out the chugging engine of the bus as the man hawked up a tsunami of phlegm. The other passengers moved as far away as possible from the man who seemed intent on hacking up his lungs.
So loud and so persistent was the attack the driver pulled over to the side of the road, straightened his cap, and made his way down the aisle to investigate the source of the racket.
‘Hey fella,’ the driver said, holding onto the headrests on each side of him as though about to launch himself down a luge. ‘you feeling okay?’
It was a fairly redundant question by this stage—the colour of the man’s face, a tourniquet blue, was, excluding the aural, evidence enough that he was several stops away and a long hitch-hike from okay.
‘I think he might be choking,’ the driver announced to no-one in particular. ‘Is there a doctor on board?’
Before anyone could reply or deny responsibility, the coughing ceased abruptly. In the heavy silence that followed, the afflicted man seemed to be at peace, his skin tone paling, a small smile on his wet-lipped mouth. There was a general sigh of relief and the driver, now emboldened that the worst had passed, gave the man’s shoulders a gentle shake.
‘You had us all scared there for a minute, mate, we all thought you...’
A scream ripped through the bus. At the driver’s touch, the man’s head wobbled alarmingly; his face cracked like old porcelain, falling away in a soundless explosion of dust. The driver, his face covered in ashy spores, fell over in his haste to get away from the desiccated corpse. People leant over their seats with their phones out, filming rather than helping. Billy saw it was time to leave—it was one thing to kiss the dog, but it was something else entirely to wind up on social media.
As he hurried down the aisle, he put his hand up to shield his identity like some A-list actor (or serial killer) surrounded by paps. ‘Look at his hand,’ he heard someone yell out; ‘What the fuck is wrong with his hand!’ All the cameras spun onto him. He ducked his head and slipped his paw into his pocket (too late, too late) as he jiggled the door release with the other and fled out into the cold anonymous night.
He ran into the woods and kept on running until he could no longer see the light of the stranded bus. He had no fear of tripping in the dark—even with his hand clenched into a fist, the glow spilled through his fingers and illuminated his way.
It also illuminated a crazy idea that was forming in his head—the idea that he was responsible, that he had stolen more than just leather and lucre from those men, that he had stolen their lives, and that the star that shone on his palm was their essence, their very soul, without which they just crumbled into dust.
Ridiculous, of course, but... there was a way to test the theory. One more chump could prove it either way; third time’s a charm and all that. He would find someone repulsive, someone morally suspect to hook from though, just in case. By the time Billy had made his way out of the weeds, the light from his hand had disappeared.
His name was Christy, or at least that was the one he gave Billy. They had been sitting together behind the Fire Station for over an hour, shooting the boozy breeze (a foul wind, given Christy’s breath) over a bottle of cheap wine that managed to keep out the chill if not dampen the anxiety. Surely he is a terrible man, Billy reasoned, as he regarded the decrepit old drunk at his side; his sins were written all over his face. You could smell the sin on him—no-one who was innocent could bear such a stench, such a judgement.
It wasn’t even pickpocketing as such; there was no skill involved or needed. Billy could have dipped right in front of those rheumy eyes, and Christy would have been none the wiser. You couldn’t kiss the dog when the dog was blind drunk. Not that there was much to steal. Christy’s most prized possessions were his bad habits and what he owned, a bottle of Thunderbird he had given freely.
Still, Billy dipped regardless. He felt a small round object nestled in the torn lining and pulled it out, holding it up to the dying day as Christy coughed obliviously beside him. It was a pocket watch, a keepsake of solid silver, engraved amid the scratches from a once loving daughter. Billy slipped the watch into his jacket and when his hand returned, it lit up the weed strewn yard like a spotlight.
‘What the hell you got there?’ Christy’s dead eyes suddenly sparked to life.
‘I think,’ Billy said, his voice trembling, ‘it might be your soul.’
‘My soul?’ Christy laughed; ‘My arsehole more like.’
But his laughter died on the ruins of his teeth as a paroxysm of phlegm shook his lungs. Billy got to his feet, holding his hand in the old drunk’s face to see his final moments better. Christy went quieter than the man on the bus. He was already half decayed, Billy reasoned, as he watched the ragged clothes slump down and the remains of Christy blow away on the breeze like sand from some long deserted city.
I’m cursed, Billy thought as he fled, even as another voice crowed triumphantly, No, you’re blessed.
He felt both terrified and elated; his chosen career had taken on an added dimension that would require some serious thought. And, like all men who find themselves in trouble, frightened and alone, he ran back to mother. It would be a perfect hidey-hole until he formulated his mission (and it was a mission—he had been picked like a juicy purse to carry out His will) or at least until he got his head around things.
‘You’re thin as a rake,’ his mother said. ‘You haven’t been looking after yourself.’ And she made it her mission to remedy that; fattening him up, spoiling him, catering to his every whim with a gusto that rendered him the five-year-old boy she so obviously thought him.
Billy the Dip savoured this treatment. He deserved it after all, for was he not a king of sorts, chosen by some higher power? Was he not (tell it like it is) a veritable Angel of Death?
But a King without a treasury is but a pampered pauper and Billy soon grew restless, hemmed in by four walls. He needed to go out, to live it up, but for that he required money—but he was as loathe now to dip as he was to find honest work.
The answer hit him as he sat in the kitchen, browsing through the paper. As he got up to silence the interminable Country and Western he knocked over the coffee jar as he swiped for the radio. The decorative jar fell on the floor, spilling out entirely different beans than he expected.
A large wad of notes lay on the tiles, just begging to be spent. He could hear his mother vacuuming upstairs, still singing along even though the radio was now silent. He grinned—the universe had just spread its legs for him, would give him anything he desired. He slipped the money into his pocket with a whistle on his lips, a whistle that petered out when his hand emerged from his jeans, beaming like a lighthouse at the very edge of the world.
No! He hadn’t taken it from his mum’s pocket, he hadn’t dipped her! This was all wrong, this was...
He ran upstairs, two, three at a time, calling out her name, but there was no answer. Maybe she couldn’t hear him over the sound of the Hoover (his shining light suggested otherwise), maybe she was already...
‘Mum!’ he burst into her bedroom, out of breath and coughing. She looked up startled, clutching her chest in fright but, as she toed off the vacuum she let forth her familiar gentle laugh.
‘You scared the bejaysus out of me, William.’
‘You okay?’ Billy spluttered; ‘You feel alright?’
‘Of course I do... What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’
Billy swiftly hid his hand behind his back but was soon forced to bring it back up to his mouth as he was wracked with another fit of coughing. His hand lit up the interior of his mouth like he was spewing up lightning.
‘Oh dear,’ his mother said, dropping the vacuum nozzle and shuffling over, ‘you don’t look so good yourself, William; perhaps you should lie down awhile.’
His coughing ramped up at his mother’s approach, exacerbated by the concern, now turning to fear, in her eyes. She was saying something but he couldn’t make it out—all he could hear was an inner voice telling him that to steal from your mother was to steal from yourself over and over again.
His mother reached out her hand to touch him and Billy knew that when it did, his mother was going to have a lot more vacuuming to do.
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