CHAPTER FIVE - ALEC
In one of the great ironies of our lives, it was actually Christine who brought Eliza and her brothers into our world. Danny, Christine, and I were on a tour of the Tower of London during one of Christine’s final winter breaks before we just gave up on school for her entirely, and upon exiting the building where they house the Crown Jewels, she started ruminating, not quietly, about how one might go about pilfering St. Edward’s Crown. It wasn’t a serious consideration (I don’t think—one never can tell with Christine), but she wouldn’t let it go.
She kept talking about it and talking about it. For hours she went on about how one might infiltrate the tower. How one might overpower the guards and make off with the jewels. How one would scale the walls. How one could get away clean. Danny and I just let her talk. Both amused, I think, by what animates her.
And later that evening, at a nightclub in Soho, Danny and I lost track of her. One minute we were all dancing together and the next, she was gone. I recall that the club was packed. We weren’t worried, per se. There’s never been a need to worry about Christine. But her being there one second and the next second gone was a jarring feeling that I don’t think Danny nor I were expecting.
We searched through the throng of people for her and when we finally found her, she was outside, sitting on the curb, having a smoke with a gorgeous, leggy blonde who looked to be about two or three years Christine’s senior. (Turns out she’s four years older. Same age as me and Danny. Despite how different we all are from one another, on some deep, atomic level, Christine clearly has a “type.”) Christine and the blonde, whose name we would learn was Eliza Watson, were continuing the conversation about the Crown Jewels. Apparently, Eliza was taking Christine’s enthusiasm on the matter much more to heart than either Danny or I.
“That’s not what would be hard,” the blonde called Eliza was saying as she blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke. “What would be hard would be figuring out how to do it without anyone knowing it had been done.” I remember her accent sounded posh. Very stick-in-the-ass upper crust. But there was something hard undercutting it. Something that belied the authenticity of its provenance.
“What do you mean?” Christine asked.
“I mean,” she said, “you wouldn’t want to pull off something like that only to be hunted for the rest of your bloody life. First things first, you’d need to have replicas made. And having forgeries like those made… well… that’s quite a task indeed.”
“What are you kids jabbering about? Hi, I’m Danny,” Danny had said, extending his hand to Eliza. Danny was always the nervous one when it came to talking about our, um, lifestyle with people we didn’t yet know. Or I thought it was nervousness. I came to realize it’s just that Danny’s far more naturally gifted at keeping his secrets secret than either me or Christine.
It is something that we would all come to be much, much better about over the years. Frequently, and unfortunately, to the detriment of the three of us.
Eliza shook Danny’s hand, but never took her eyes off me. I pretended not to notice because I’d gotten very good in my life at pretending not to notice people staring at me. But the intensity of her glare is something that I could have felt even if she was on the other side of the room.
Inevitably, the question of, “So what kind of work do you do?” came up. I don’t remember who asked it first. I just know it wasn’t me. I’ll admit that I tend to forget most people in the world have to “do” something. Typically, the unspoken conclusion to that question is, “for money.” What kind of work do you do… for money? That’s what’s being asked. Whereas for me, Christine, and Danny the work we did was just for the thrill of the doing. Or it was for me at least.
Regardless, when it was asked by whoever did the asking, the energy on the sidewalk outside that nightclub in London shifted dramatically. Eventually, after some shuffling of feet and pretending to check watches, Eliza said, “Do you know what parkour is?” I did know. So, I said so. “My brothers and I… we have a… parkour business.”
“Oh. Like a gym?” Christine had asked.
More shuffling of feet. More glancing at watches. More smoking of cigarettes.
Finally, employing one of my various superpowers—in this case, knowing how to read the fokken room—I took the cigarette from Eliza’s lips, put it in my own mouth, took a drag, and handed it back, saying, “I buy, sell, and steal diamonds, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not. These two are my associates. We travel around the world, getting into whatever adventure the particular moment carries us toward, and occasionally we’ve been known to kill people. Though usually only fokken kakky naaiers who deserve it, so don’t worry about them. My name is Alec van den Berg, and that’s who the fok I am. So. Eliza Watson. Tell us a little about you.”
I’ll never forget the looks on Danny and Christine’s faces. Makes me fokken laugh every time I remember. Saucer-eyed shock. Never saw it before, probably won’t ever see it again. God, I love them so much.
After enduring the requisite ‘how full of shit are you’ queries that Eliza had in the wake of my admission (and quite a bit more dissembling than was likely necessary at that point) we finally got her to come clean about who she and her brothers are and what they do…
They were born in Purfleet, Essex. Their mother was a seamstress, their father was a drunk, and at this point it began to sound to me as though they were fokken Dickens characters come to life. Two older brothers. Two younger. Eliza, the girl in the middle. (At the time, I couldn’t have predicted the symbolism that would eventually carry.) The two younger were born just fifteen months after Eliza and were an accident. An accident that was supposed to have only been one at worst, but lo and behold, Mrs. Watson popped out twins that no one was expecting. And that was the point at which the elder Mr. Watson up and left them all alone.
The two older Watson boys, one just about a teenager and the other only slightly younger, realizing they had to do something to bring in money to pay for young Eliza’s dance classes and, you know, baby formula and that type of shit, turned to the aid of a Jamaican drug lord who took the lads in and gave them jobs as runners. After the oldest of the bunch, Russell, was very nearly caught by the police, the benevolent Jamaican drug lord introduced the boys to his cousin who had been a champion sprinter and was into an emerging athletic scene which would many years later come to be known as parkour, and which blended martial arts, tumbling, and free-running into acts of physical achievement virtually custom-built for committing acts of second-story crime…
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and they lived happily ever after.
A regular goddamn Tale of Two Cities.
In any case, in the years that followed, the family was able to move to slightly more desirable environs and no one asked any questions. That is until curious little Eliza was about six and began inquiring after what her brothers did all day. Now that I have come to know Eliza as well as I have, it is no surprise that her intense inquisitiveness and unrelenting energy finally wore them down to the point that they told her. It is yet another way that Eliza and Christine have always reminded me so very much of one another.
And so, now, all these many years later, what the Watson clan has is something resembling a family business. The two younger Watson boys, Brenden and Charlie, they’re the muscle. Rightly so. I never met the elder Mr. Watson, but if the other three Watson children are, in fact, his, then Brenden and Charlie are not. There’s no way the same DNA that produced the three older Watson children produced the Herculean monsters that are Brenden and Charlie Watson.
Russell, the oldest, and his younger brother, Theo, are long and lithe, like Eliza, and are the ones who do impossible things like scale walls and bound across rooftops. And then, of course, there is Eliza. The actress. The seductress. The glue that binds them all together.
It is Eliza who keeps heads turned the other direction while the boys are doing whatever the boys are doing. It’s not hard for her. Turning heads, that is. It would be hard for her not to.
Even so, I don’t think I ever would have fallen into whatever it is I fell into with Eliza were it not for her brothers. Free will is free will and we all make our own choices in life, but it was the brothers Watson who decided that it would be a good idea to start playing a little game of “who can steal it better.” And ek gee nie ‘n fok nie who you think you are… no one on the earth can steal better than Alec van den Berg.
And that is why, as our little game wore on over the next couple of years—sometimes them capturing the flag, sometimes us—somehow Eliza got thrown into the mix of things that I had to prove I could steal from underneath everyone. And that was my entire motivation. My whole focus. I didn’t think about how it might affect anything else.
Gaan kak in die kaap, man. I didn’t think about how it might affect Christine.
And honestly, man, by the time we had stolen the quarter million pounds from them, and Danny had left, and Christine and I were on our own, and…
Shit. I don’t feel regret. I truly do not. But if regret has an illegitimate stepchild, perhaps that is what I feel, standing here watching rain streak down the windows of my hidden castle. I’ve been here for a few weeks now. It’s been raining the entire time. I wonder if that’s an omen of some kind. Probably not. I’m probably just making connections where connections don’t exist.
Eliza and I have had a deal: We will only be together when I’m in England. And then only if Christine is not with me. The thing about that, of course, is that it’s not hard to find my way to England. And it’s not hard to send Christine off on a mission or task of some kind somewhere halfway around the world. I could have picked a place to regather my strength anywhere on the planet, but I chose here. Along with not feeling regret, I do not second-guess myself. But…
With everything that…
And with what Christine just…
And with what I have…
Suddenly, a hand tracing the tattooed triangle on my back pulls me out of my contemplation.
“Hey,” she says, kissing me on the shoulder. We just had sex. Again. That’s all we’ve done since I arrived here however many weeks ago and called her to come join me. There is something desperate and frantic about our lovemaking. Always. It’s simply because we’re acutely aware that every time could be our last. That’s true for all lovers anywhere in the world, but we are conscious of it. “What’s in there, just now?” she asks, tapping me on the temple.
“Do you remember the night we met?” I ask.
“Of course. You tried to act like you didn’t see me watching you.”
“Did I?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Was I successful?”
She shakes her head.
“Shame. I thought I had put one over on you.”
She sniffs a laugh. Then, “What about that night were you thinking on?”
“You told Christine that the hardest part about stealing the Crown Jewels wouldn’t be the actual stealing but figuring out how to do it without anyone knowing it had been done.”
“That’s right,” she says, resting her head on my shoulder and staring out the window with me.
“Putting aside for a moment that I might disagree that that’s the hardest part”—she laughs—“it’s advice I should’ve heeded.”
She lifts her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… when Danny, Christine and I stole my father’s diamond—the one that got him and my mother killed—you know the one I mean…” She doesn’t say anything. “It was impulsive. I was angry with my father. I mean, I was always angry with him, but… fok die kak. I don’t know. The whole point was that I wanted him to panic. I wanted him to lose his shit. I just didn’t know that those fokken Russian okes he owed the diamond to were going to…” I trail off.
She turns me around to face her. She’s also still naked.
“Hey. Look, I mean, I don’t know what I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know you then, but… what’s done is done, yeah? We can’t none of us change the past. Can we?”
“Can’t we?”
“No, Alec, we can’t. So, I mean, you can dwell on this if you like—it’s very sexy and broody and all that—but I need to tell you something that…” Now she trails off.
“Yeah? That what?” I ask. “What is it?”
“Well, that’s more about the future, if you like.”
She bows her head and looks down toward her toes. I tip her chin and point her eyes back at mine, saying as softly as I can, “Fok does that mean?”
I don’t know why I say it that way. It’s just what comes out. Because suddenly, I have this odd feeling in my chest. It’s that feeling that comes in a crisis just before I breathe into myself and that Hulk fokker emerges.
But there is no crisis here.
There’s no threat.
There’s just me and Eliza.
Isn’t there?
“It means,” she says, taking a breath, “Alec… I’m pregnant.”