Robbers

(Warning: Sex Scenes and Mature Themes)

Lucinda sits alone in her kitchen. She has a big bottle of orange juice; she’s been going hard on it lately. It’s her little escape from the misery of her early twenties. With bills piling up like the bundle of nail clippings left behind by her useless partner, Jack, she is bereft of energy. She can’t put anything towards the Fiji trip or a home deposit. Even a few new wardrobe items are a carefully budgeted endeavour. Being an adult sucks, and Lucinda feels it like a parasitic infestation of the brain.

However, with a smash of the window, a wave of excitement washes over her. Could this be someone looking to relieve them of their goods? The idea of a potentially violent encounter with a crazed lunatic seems to excite the otherwise docile young lady.

With a rush of blood to the head, she grabs a knife and rushes towards the front door, ready to confront this ne’er-do-well. Will they get into a violent tussle that ends in bloodshed? The uncertainty intrigues and excites her; she’s ready.

However, her hopes for a bit of excitement are immediately crushed by the sight of her darling husband, Jack. He is dressed in all black, even his nails painted that way. Absolutely no confidence radiates from his pores. He has a knife, yet is holding it backwards.

With a voice modulator to his throat, he makes a very weak attempt to disguise himself.

‘Give me your money, uh.’

‘Cute try, mate, but I know it’s you.’ Lucinda stands with her arms crossed, unimpressed by her husband’s attempts at robbing her. He doesn’t know what to say. She does. ‘What are you even trying to do?’

‘I want to know what robbery feels like,’ he says, dropping the modulator away from his throat. ‘Like in the gangster rap songs.’ Lucinda is thoroughly amused by her partner’s inept attempts to rob her.

‘Mate, I could give you 50 cents if you’re lucky.’ She walks away from him, his hands paused like a weak statue against a soft breeze, slowly rocking. Ashamed.

He quickly puts his knife away and sits on the couch. Pressing his remote, he turns on the television. It flicks to the last thing he watched, How to Rob a Household. He has gotten halfway through the tape, host Rob Morasses explaining how to jimmy a lock. With the smooth, chocolatey voice made for radio, he explains,

‘Now, to jimmy a lock, you need to take your time so as not to alert nearby citizens.’

‘Damn it!’ Jack exclaims, running his hand through his thinning hair in frustration. ‘I didn’t think of that.’

The next morning, the two awaken next to each other in bed. Lucinda went to bed after her non-violent confrontation, Jack spending a little while up watching Bangladesh vs Sri Lanka play a particularly lackadaisical Test match. They are both tired; neither wants to go to work that day. Lucinda works in accounts, and Jack is a loan manager. Neither has a passion for their field. The bed seems like the only salvation from their life of banality.

Lucinda stumbles to the kitchen and puts the kettle on. She is still bleary-eyed, barely conscious, just the way she likes it. She goes to open the cupboard and fish out a bag of Earl Grey tea; not her preferred choice, but the choice Jack has decided is her favourite. She rolls her eyes as she fishes it out of the too-tiny container. The smell travels up her nose and causes a particularly strong reaction, almost like paint fumes, which could also be helped by the chipped paint on the sill.

She then turns to grab the milk out of the fridge. However, she notices something rather unusual: the fridge is missing. A note is on the table, plastered onto the pineapple chutney that Jack has gotten her for her birthday. He figures it is her favourite, forgetting the fact that she is allergic to pineapple. A quirky fact she seems to share with the robber, as she reads his note:

‘Sorry, you can keep the chutney, I hate it, aye?’ She is enraged, and so is Jack, who exclaims without the slightest hint of irony,

‘Someone stole my fridge!’ He falls to his knees, mortified. ‘I had so much food in there!’

Lucinda looks to her left into the lounge room, noticing the smashed window from Jack’s attempts to rob her the night before. She wanders over towards it; it looks exactly as he left it the night before. Unsurprising. She then looks towards the door. It is ajar, Jack’s keys still in the lock from when he left to ‘go to the shops’ the previous night.

At first, she is furious and storms to their room, shutting the door behind her. She wants to slap Jack upside the face but must find restraint. Unlike Jack, she locks the door behind her, containing her rage. She starts to perform breathing exercises, turning on a CD that her mother had given her a couple of years earlier. Having not heard of Spotify, her mother got her this disc to help her cope with her stress from work. She thinks it is a waste of time.

But then she starts thinking. She and Jack can ring the police, file their report and continue with their mundane lives, or they can get one back on society. She turns it over in her mind, and with the two in debt, fridgeless and frigging sick of it, she decides they can give this a proper shot. She knows she is competent enough to maintain a well-balanced account. She is reasonably athletic; she can be a robber herself.

Picking herself up, she exits her room and walks back to the kitchen. Seeing her partner clutching the pineapple chutney, she declares,

‘Jack, bud, we’re gonna become robbers.’

‘…Really?’

A few days later, the couple sit in their car. They are outside a random house, a few streets from where they live. Gangster rap plays on the radio, Jack nebbishly raps along,

‘Blood on the bonnet runs white like a sonnet.’ Lucinda bursts into laughter, Jack nervously hushing her like he has been caught choking the chicken, something that has become a regular occurrence in their relationship.

She repeats the line, ‘White like a sonnet? Who writes that?’ Lucinda often laughs at her dad’s derisive attitude towards all modern music that isn’t Tate McRae. However, in her older years and with a little more nihilism towards modern life, she is starting to see his perspective.

‘The house belongs to Dorothy, a geriatric old bag that Mum does in-house care for.’ Lucinda peers through a set of binoculars, staking out different areas of the place. ‘She’s an easy target. Grab what you can and get out.’ She hands him a duffel bag; he takes it but appears reluctant. She notices his nervousness.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asks, taking herself away from her binoculars. She notices him sweating, rubbing his palms together, making a fwiping noise. He goes to speak, but is choked up.

‘Spit it out, Jack.’

‘I don’t know if this plan’s gonna work Lucy. Rob Morasses says that elderly people have more security than most people.’

‘What would he know? He’s a failed actor. I’ve planned; did you read it?’

‘I mean, yes, but there are flaws in this plan. I don’t think Rob would like this.’ Lucinda groans, unimpressed by her partner’s feeble attitude. She snaps back firmly.

‘Mate, I’m the one keeping our heads above water while you waste your money on those stupid Yu-Gi-Oh cards.’ He backs down, as she then presents an ultimatum. ‘You follow my plan, or I’ll be content with not replacing the fridge. Ok?’ The thought of this horrifies Jack, and he nods in agreement.

With a sigh from Lucinda, they exit the car and approach the house. No one is in sight; the path is clear. They sneak over the back fence, Jack falling flat on his bum on landing. He groans in pain, but Lucinda covers his mouth so as not to alert neighbours. She has thought this through. She briefly considered making him tape his mouth shut to avoid alerting people. However, realising his nose was slightly blocked, she figured his untimely death wouldn’t help her plan.

She jimmies the lock on the back door as Jack rubs his rear end. She slips in with relative ease, her YouTube-led research proving successful. The two enter, Jack with a little more hesitation than Lucinda. Quickly, they begin rummaging through the kitchen. She is looking for something, something her mum had told her about in an offhand conversation a few months earlier. Jack is just looking for some Panadol.

However, as they rustle through drawers, a light flicks on. Dorothy appears. Her blue scraggly hair makes her stand out like a nice piece of art at a postmodern art festival. She wheels out a spiral hypnodisk, Lucinda and Jack making the fatal mistake of looking directly into it. Dorothy has them under her command.

‘You are now under my command, wicked children. I’ll make a cup of tea, and we’ll get to the bottom of why you’re doing this.’

A few minutes later, the two wannabe robbers are seated on the couch in a semi-fugue state. Boiling cups of tea have been placed in front of them, and Dorothy is having a banal conversation about a phone call she’d had several days earlier.

‘I was speaking to Edwina the other day; she’s such a delight.’ The two are locked in, unable to respond, unable to even sip their tea. The hypnodisk remains spinning, the two aspiring robbers remaining fixated on it like a boomer watching Sky News. Dorothy takes a seat. The couch is garishly maroon, leather, stiff like a board.

‘So, what leads a friendly young couple to alleviate me of my earthly wares?’ The two resist attempting to respond, but with a lucid clarity, Lucinda drones,

‘Financial destitution.’ Her gaze remains fixed on the hypnodisk, stripped of personality like a dodgy car job. There is nothing behind the eyes; a common feeling these days.

‘A deep-seated yearning to live a gangster lifestyle,’ Jack follows, his eye flickering, fighting the hypnosis. Dorothy is intrigued as to what led them to this moment. Sipping her tea, she posits a theory,

‘Loves, I wonder if you’ve both been robbed before and are trying to enter a career in goods alleviation to compensate for some issues in your personal lives. I was talking to Edwina about…’ As Dorothy begins droning on, Jack suddenly snaps out of his stupor, reverting to a sudden skittishness about his actions.

‘I, I don’t know what you did to me, lady, I didn’t want anything to do with this, I wanted no part of this, I…’

‘Don’t be such a fucking wimp, you limp excuse of a human being,’ Lucinda says with the tenor of a droning air conditioning unit. She is fully hypnotised; susceptible to whatever Dorothy wants her to do in that moment. Dorothy has suddenly slipped her socks off. Despite her state, Lucinda’s brain is fearing the worst: a firm, clot-loosening foot rub.

Jack is enraged, but with a certain trepidation, he politely scolds her, ‘Darling dear, I do not appreciate that you mock me so frequently; you’ve robbed me of my dignity.’

‘I’ve robbed you of nothing; you’ve robbed me of my dreams.’ Dorothy chuckles to herself. She finds this quite amusing. Her family don’t visit her anymore, mainly because she’ll pull tricks like this. This is her entertainment, hitting the spot more than any.

Lucinda continues her rant. ‘I’ve been deprived of a good chunk of my twenties thanks to your reckless financial decisions.’

‘That’s preposterous, darling.’

‘And this is just lovely, hoho, I wish Edwina were here to see this.’ Dorothy has placed her feet on the edge of her couch. It is a revolting sight. All her toenails are ingrown, her feet are filled with fungus. ‘Young Lucinda, will you be a dear and give an old girl a foot rub?’

Jack catches a glimpse of her feet but looks away in disgust. Lucinda, still in her stupor, stands up and begins walking towards the foot. Internally, she is screaming; her last bit of dignity dissipating within the deep crevasses of this lady’s wrinkly feet.

‘Help me, you poor excuse of a man,’ she whirrs, the most life she’s displayed in the last five minutes. Jack goes to help her but retracts. He is hurt by everything she’s said. She may’ve been under suggestion, but her lack of manners hits a sore spot. Is their relationship just a façade? Does she really find the Yu-Gi-Oh collection stupid?

That question will need to be answered later, as a crash is heard from the back door. A robust, handsome man has made his way through the kitchen. Jack dives behind the maroon couch, and Lucinda is kicked in the face as Dorothy is startled by the sight.

She lets out a yelp, ‘What the blimey, oh.’ She recognises the precisely trimmed jawline of this paragon of satirical resplendence. So too does Jack, but he is too scared to say anything. The man steps forth, removing his eye mask to reveal:

‘Oh, sorry, ma’am, I am TV’s Rob Morasses, and I was hoping to alleviate you of your goods.’

‘Oh dear.’ Dorothy is a bit scared, but also a bit attracted. She bites her lip ever so slightly. She hasn’t felt this way since her teenage years. A euphoric rush of blood to the head, a different liquid to her knickers. She is swept up. ‘I, I’ve seen you on the telly.’

Swaggering up to the elderly lass, Rob lays on a pickup line with the thickness of hardened cement. ‘I may not be a photographer, but I could certainly picture it together, ma’am.’ Dorothy giggles. Jack is thoroughly creeped out by these two weirdos. His hesitations about committing an actual robbery seem very well placed.

‘Well, haha, handsome, I was hoping you could rob me of something.’

‘And what could Rob Morasses rob you of, my dear?’

‘My virginity.’ Dorothy proceeds to rip her top off, exposing her breasts to the man. He rips his top off, revealing a biologically mystifying nine-pack, before scooping the woman up and carrying her to the bedroom. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

But Jack isn’t concerned about that. He is concerned about Lucinda. Racing out from behind the couch, he scoops her up and begins carrying her outside. He is serenaded by the sound of Rob and Dorothy’s vigorous moans, a visceral sound that could’ve emanated from the bowels of hell itself.

As he reaches the kitchen, he notices the fridge has been unplugged. Rob is getting a start on his mission. Seeing this as an opportunity to see what a life of crime is like, Jack decides to make his move. Throwing the knocked-out Lucinda on top, he starts manoeuvring the fridge outside. The movement, while loud and clunky, is drowned out by the moans of Dorothy and the self-aggrandisement of Rob, who is bizarrely stating facts about his penis during the coital engagement, many appearing to be complete fabrications.

The morning rolls around. Despite everything, they’ve pulled off a successful robbery. They sit in their dining area, exhausted from the previous night’s events. Jack looks rather pleased with himself, while Lucinda is only just waking from her stupor.

Despite all logic suggesting the opposite, Jack decides to spit a few bars of gangster:

‘From the ghetto to the meadow, drinking mead in the weeds, I be capping them homies every day of the week.’ Jack has gotten to live out his criminalistic fantasies, even under dubious circumstances. Lucinda isn’t impressed but is glad to have the fridge back.

‘I need a juice,’ she slurs, stumbling towards the fridge. As she opens it, Jack says,

‘No hard feelings about everything I said last night?’

‘What did I say?’ Lucinda has plenty of hard feelings, so did Jack. He is hurt by what she said. He doesn’t think he’s a wimp; he’s just committed robbery. He hopes this proves his toughness. However, he isn’t keen to rock the boat. If she didn’t remember, he decided to say nothing. As Lucinda opened the fridge, she was met by a most horrific site. ‘Pineapple chutney, FUCK…’

Jack quickly left the kitchen. He was glad to be a wimp.

The End.