Bad Boy
The man downstairs stole newspapers. He took them from tables when somebody went to the toilet. He folded them under his arm and walked out. He bought his own cigarettes, his own coffee, his own little cakes in cellophane. It was the newspaper he objected to paying for.
“They charge you to find out what they’ve done to you,” he said.
He had several explanations. That was the one he used on me. His mother got a different one. People left the papers behind because they had finished reading them. He was tidying up.
“You bad boy,” she said.
He was past sixty. She said it without looking up from the television. He put the paper on the arm of her chair and went to make tea.
I liked him better for stealing newspapers than he deserved. I had once left half a story on a café table while I went to piss, and nobody had stolen it. They hadn’t even turned it over. There it was when I came back, a whole page of me, available without charge.
He lived in the rooms below mine with his mother. She had the bedroom. His bed was in the room with the television, and he folded the blanket away every morning as if somebody might come to inspect it. When I went down there he would stand beside the armchair rather than sit on his own bed. He was particular about things I would not have bothered with.
I have been thinking about his mother’s two words because some phone keyboards are selective about helping you write them. Bad boy. Swipe across the letters and the assistance can fail; the prediction you want may not arrive. You can still tap the letters individually. The phrase takes the long way in.
There are only six letters. I counted them on my fingers, which felt like a poor use of the equipment. Nothing in those letters suggests a technical challenge. Two words a small child could know. Two words I can hear without seeing them printed. His mother had a way of drawing out boy until it was mostly breath.
I want that cheap little phrase. I don’t want a more exact description of him. I could call him a petty thief, and he was one, but that makes me sound as if I have come to collect something. Rogue is no good. Rogue owns a velvet jacket. Rascal belongs on a birthday card with a bear holding a pint. Bad boy can stand in a kitchen in his socks while an old woman tells him where the clean spoons are.
I know what a writing teacher would do to it. Circle it. Ask for something fresh. I have done worse myself, sitting over a sentence until every ordinary word had been replaced by something that needed a little chair and a spotlight. Then I would read it back and find that nobody I knew could get into it.
Bad boy doesn’t require a good writer. That’s part of what I like. It has been worn nearly flat by people who never expected to be paid for a sentence. You can say it to a dog, a grown man, a child with jam on his shirt. It can be affectionate or tiresome or insulting. Sometimes the man saying it about himself is the most tiresome thing in the room.
The man downstairs never called himself that. He had been a mechanic. When he talked about work, he named the parts, not the people. He could spend twenty minutes explaining why a car had made a noise. At the end I would still not understand the noise, but I would understand that somebody had paid for a new part when the old one could have been repaired. This offended him. The newspaper didn’t.
He took the racing pages out before giving the rest to his mother.
Once I asked him for a tip. I had enough money to make a small mistake and wanted company in it. He spread a paper on the kitchen table. There were circles and lines all over it. His finger went from one horse to another, stopping at each as if the animal had been called into an office.
“Don’t give him one,” his mother said from the other room.
“He asked.”
“Then tell him no.”
He gave me the name anyway. She turned up the television. The horse finished nowhere useful, and afterward he explained the race to me with the same patient anger he gave to engines. I had paid for an afternoon of his conversation. It wasn’t the worst purchase I’d made.
She could be a difficult woman. She disliked visitors and would tell me, while I was visiting, that she disliked visitors. I went down there because I liked her son and because my room was sometimes worse than being unwelcome. If I wrote about him, she would have to be there too, taking up most of the room.
His mother read the papers more carefully than he did. She read small stories about places neither of them had been. She checked the prices in the advertisements. Once she found a notice offering a reward for a lost dog and told him to keep an eye out.
“How would I know it?”
“There’s a picture.”
He leaned over her chair. She held the paper still for him.
“That could be any dog.”
“Then look for any dog.”
He put on his shoes. I went with him. We agreed to split the reward. For three streets we examined dogs, some attached to people, some behind fences, all of them plainly occupied. At one gate he took the notice out again. He held the paper level and waited for the animal to turn its head.