I am in central London, looking for somewhere not too expensive to have lunch. I enter a caf?, and see a recently-acquired friend, an assistant at a nearby bookstore, on his lunch break.
"I've got news for you," he says, as I sit down. "You're being followed."
"Really!"
"Oh, it's not that bad. And it's stopped. You know yesterday, when you came in to the store?"
"Yes."
"Well, as you left, one of the security men came over to me and said, 'Who is that guy?' 'Oh, he's just a friend of mine, a writer,' I said. 'Well, we've been following him around. We thought he was probably a thief. Thank heavens we didn't stop him.'"
I contemplate myself as a potential criminal. "I can quite see that I look very suspicious. But I'm in the shop for hours, browsing, taking books into the caf?. I must keep them very busy."
"Oh," says my friend, "he's as thick as a plank, that one. I've taken him off the case though. You might not enjoy wandering around the shop if you knew you were being tailed."
But would it make any difference to me? Would it alter the mixture of elation and depression with which I enter, usually at night, those quiet harshly-lit spaces broken up by the still-life dump-bins? It might give me an extra thrill, and I could pretend to be Fagin giving Oliver and the Dodger a lesson.
We talk on a little, before he must go back. Security at the shop is never-ending, he says, although they have suffered a number of very successful scams. The cameras are even on the assistants' faces as they ring up the purchases. Even in the toilet you are being watched.
I remember-although there is no time to share it with him-the occasion when I was at an artists' rest home in the country, and one of my fellow guests was a well-known philosopher. During one discussion I mentioned, thinking it would be uncontroversial, that about half the time when you walk round in London, and slightly less often elsewhere, you are being filmed. But he took me up sharply, saying that this was paranoid nonsense, and that the problem with my thinking was that it tended to be solipsistic. I made my own fears and impressions the basis of a general rule.
I was forced to admit my intellectual sloppiness, then we turned on the news. The first item was about the Brixton bomber, and the fact that he had been caught on camera.
It is certainly a curious society in which its citizens watch each other day and night, but I suppose it keeps many innocent people in business. And, while we are all cowed, few of us are entirely above board. That security man was right to watch me, because the avalanche of books I possess has been acquired in a great variety of ways. Bookshop assistants, for instance, have traditionally been very kind to me, offering me books at knock-down prices, and sometimes at no price at all.
It is quite some years since I have actually stolen any books, though. The last time I tried it-at least, from a shop selling new books-was at Foyles in the late 1980s, and I was permanently cured by being caught. I was obsessed with learning Latin at that time, and the two books I stole from the dusty Classics section were pitifully cheap: a volume of the Cambridge Latin Course and a study of 2nd century Lyon. As I hesitated a long time before slipping them into my satchel, I was aware of a young man lingering in the shadows. I was so inept that as I hurried down the main stairs I almost knew he had observed me yet I did not turn back.
Immediately I was in Manette Street, the young man-small, dark, unshaven-tapped me on the shoulder. "A word, please."
Quickly discovering the theft, and identifying himself as a store detective, he began marching me up the back stairs to his office high up in the building. He used the shortest possible commands, at a shout: "Up!", "Right!", "In there!" I knew for the first time what convicts and prisoners have felt throughout the ages.
When we were in his shabby office, I noticed almost immediately that he was keeping a bird in a box. There were no bars, but the bird was struggling around on some paper. "Is it wounded?" I asked him, in astonishment.
"Never you mind," he said. "Sit down. I'm going to take your details."
I confessed humbly, terrified of what was going to happen to me, yet oddly fascinated by this strange guard, who looked with some disgust and puzzlement at the books I had been trying to steal.
Finally he said, "Right, I'm going to give you a choice. I can call the police in a minute if you like, and they'll come and charge you, for trial later. Or I'll give you the opportunity to pay for those books. Do you have ?6.50?"
"Oh, yes, I've got a tenner. Please take that."
"You'll get your change. And never do this again. Or the consequences won't be so easy."
"I never will," I said.
He escorted me to the door, and gave me a more friendly warning as I left. I never saw him again, although I visited Foyles often, hoping to see him, nerving myself to steal a book, but never daring to.
