Gypsy Bandit- short story

There was no tension. There was no electricity. She was as serene and as composed a night-bandit could be, as she strolled though the backyard and into the house through the patio door. The moon, poised over a chimney two houses down, lit her up like she was framed on stage facing an unreceptive audience that censured her every move. Her nearly translucent skirt swirled in an arc as she swung the door open, with no effort to be noiseless. Minutes before, she had watched furtively, as the boy in the house left raucously with his friends, after playing video games on the large LED screen. She smiled to herself as she entered the house. She felt quite comfortable and confident, as she made this satisfying home invasion.
She had a silky scarf wrapped around her head, a cotton blouse that fitted snugly around her neck and a long floral skirt that swirled on its own around her ankles from the weight of the little beads that had been sowed on to the hem. The light from the yellow moon cut through a half-open venetian blind above the sink and splashed on to the floor with matching flamboyance. Through the diaphanous skirt, her nimble and muscular legs could be seen flipping over each other like those of a burglar with a ballerina gene. She stopped around the kitchen table and picked up a handful of grapes that had been left behind in a bowl. The red juice from the seedless grape dripped from her lips onto the white linoleum floor. A mop stood on the corner, next to the fridge, ready to be used, she knew. She could, if she cared to, wipe all traces of this intrusion. But she could ignore it as well. Though the television had been switched off, it remained warm and static chatter projected out of it in a one hundred and eighty degree sweep.
She had walked in, as they had walked out. This place was known to her inside out, as she had entered and left several times now. She looked in carefully at the room adjacent to the living room. It was the room with the books in neatly assigned shelves. The pale wooden furniture and the red Persian rug thrown over the main couch was a poor choice, no doubt. It was all very ordinary. There was a bored, disenchanted housewife quality to the interior layout that she found quite distasteful. If she had her way she would change things around. She would create more space, get some low level furniture in darker hues, change the coffee table and throw some dark cushions over a corner rug. She looked around carefully. There was no one there. She made sure. She popped another grape in her mouth. A table lamp was on and the shade, a faded crimson, was tilted to the side. She went to the lamp and steadied the shade and made it symmetric to the floor. A stream of dust trickled down to the hand-sown doily placed below it. Then she turned the light off and looked at the shelf that held all the books along one wall. She pulled out a LED flash light from her pocket and started looking at the books on the shelves. The blue from the flash light was intense but focussed and showed up the fine cobweb that stretched from one of the books to the corner of the shelf. Somebody had not been cleaning up, that was for sure. While she was not interested in any specific book, she could be distracted, while looking through the titles. Time was on her hands. She always looked at the titles, over and over. She knew her way around, as if she had lived here all along. That is the way she felt every time she came here through the kitchen door.
The neighbour’s porch had its lights on in a watchful manner. The chair on the porch was not rocking gently, as she had timorously expected it to. She looked at it again. It looked back at her in a sideways glance, as if it had been watching her all along. The arms of the chair had embossed leather work done on them. They resembled the arms of a noble biker, with tattoos, silver bracelets and an air of experience and confidence, sitting there and watching over the neighbourhood. She stared at the chair intently for a while and then looked away and lit her LED lamp again.
She did not remember the shelf she had left it on. She moved a book that was bound in red and gold and had no title. She reached behind it, there was nothing there. She picked the book next to it and still there was nothing behind it. She went through several books, one after the other. One of them was a collection of stories by Victor Hugo. Another was a similarly bound copy of Jules Verne’s classics. The grapes in her mouth felt as if they needed to be burst open ever so gently with her sharp white teeth. The storm door in the kitchen was latched open and was creaking against the stop.
The sound of the static on the TV had died down by now. She removed a few more books. She could not find what she was looking for. It was the seventeenth of April, 1984, a calendar announced on the wall. Exactly to the date, sixteen years ago.
In the shadow of the lobby a grandfather clock stood gauntly making a faint ticking sound. She looked away from it and looked back at the rocking chair in the porch across. It remained steady, immobile, watching her intensely. She took some more books down, some Joseph Conrad, some Jane Austen, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet lay flat on its side, having been read recently perhaps. She was beginning to wonder if her memory had been ravaged that much. Was she who she thought she was? It was exactly sixteen years ago, she remembered again.
She remembered clearly the night, the incident, the shelf on which she had left it and yet there seemed no trace of it now. It was safely hidden away—behind the fifth book on the fourth shelf, from the left hand side. Or, was it the fourth book on the fifth shelf? She paused for a second, her lips pursed. She looked out at the neighbour’s porch again. The rocking chair remained stolid, immobile in anticipation. Then she took out the fifth and sixth books, a series of Ayn Rand novels that had been used as college text, dog-eared and forgotten, except to groom an entire generation with that special brand of righteousness that makes one feel that only the chosen ones can survive and be saved. She remembered the courses and the teacher, a certain Prof. Levin who insisted that Anthem and Fountainhead were supreme efforts in upholding the towering strength of the human spirit to remain free. Nothing beyond that.
It was just then, that she noticed that there was someone walking around in the lawn quietly. She looked back, turned around and clearly saw it was a cop with a flashlight. And her hand scraped against the last book on the fourth shelf and it fell down on the floor with a thud.
“A heavy book no doubt, ” said the sergeant with contemptuous cool, focussing the flashlight first on her face and then her form entirely from top to bottom.
“I am sorry, what are you doing here?” she demanded unfazed.
The sergeant was some what taken a back. “And do you live here?”
“Of course I do! What a question!” she shot back.
“I..I was not sure,” he said. “I was passing by and saw the back door open. I had to check. I used to live in this neighbourhood, several years ago,” he added.
“Ah! Did you? And what makes you think you can barge in to my house, at 2 am, through the kitchen door?” she demanded fiercely, as she noticed he had already started wilting and looking a bit confused.
“I grew up in that house next door. There!” And he pointed to the porch next door. “That was years ago. And there was a lady who lived in this house and would sleep walk. And now, when I was driving around, I noticed your form, moving around like a shadow first outside in the yard and then inside and I was reminded. I used to sit on that porch there and watched her then. And she would be searching all night for things she could not find. And in the morning she would fall asleep. ” As he said this, the rocking chair started nodding in the breeze. Its graceful arms relaxed and shining in the moonlight. “I never found out about her. I left for the Police Academy, always wandering what happened to that lady. Now, I am posted back here after sixteen years. I could not resist. Are you not that same lady?”
“Nope! I am not that lady. But I remember, a man walked into my kitchen one evening, wanting to borrow the moonlight I stood on and I said it was not available unless he gave me something in return and the man said yes, and gave me this bracelet that was on his arm and here it is still there after sixteen years. Are you that man? It was exactly sixteen years ago, today.”
“It is. Is it not? Sixteen years ago, today.” And it was then that the boy walked in through the front door and stormed into the kitchen.
“Mum! Yuh still up? Whach you doin’ in the kitchen? Why is the dude here? Have you been walking around again? Oh! Officer! Whaz happenin’ ?”
“Jamie, say hi to the officer! He is your….. ” and the words froze inside her. And she rushed to the door, as the Officer put his hat back on. The chair in the porch was nodding away vigorously as the moon swept through the lawn and climbed up the white clabber board along the chimney wall. The Gypsy thief was seen running across the lawn with the bracelet firmly held in her wrist and her skirt billowing in the night. The heavy book lay on the ground.
“Mum! Come back inside. It’s late.” The boy said that without conviction, as the Officer turned his flashlight off, looked at the buy furtively and then walked towards his patrol car.
In the distance, she bounded over neighbour’s yards, over stiles and into the rolling hillocks in the distance.