‘A Theft’ by Kevin Power

Patrick Rocha was my friend for years before he stole my work, although we were never what you’d call exactly close. We belonged to the same college clique: the drama gang. In those days I wanted to be a writer and Patrick wanted to be an actor. Everyone presumed that Patrick would be the one to make it: he had the kind of insecurity that shows up, in real actors, as an unruly kind of charm. The signal thing about Patrick was that his family was rich. His parents had inherited the rolling grounds of some ancient demesne in the wilds of Tipperary. And Patrick was hidden from himself – I now think – in the way that rich people sometimes are. Never having to worry about money, you are free to ignore certain urgencies – among them, the task of figuring yourself out.

Friendship in college is so often circumstantial. We joined the drama club at the same time, Patrick and I, and we were thrown together as collaborators on one of the semi-improvised plays that were assigned to each new group of freshers. The senior members gave us a script and encouraged us to ‘go crazy with it.’ Patrick took this direction seriously. He overruled the nominal director and recast the play as a knockabout sex comedy, crammed with catchphrases he had learned in school. ‘Top hole!’ one of these catchphrases went. (Patrick had attended a private boarding school in Kildare, where one of the in-crowd’s in-jokes had involved the ironic resurrection of ancient British slang.) At the climax of the play, Patrick stood proudly atop a table in a toga and a bowler hat while a girl in stockings and a garter belt pretended to fellate him. ‘Top hole!’ became the joke of the year.

The girl in question – Charlotte Finn – was my first college crush, though at that point I had absolutely no idea how to go about becoming her boyfriend. I was disappointed, but not surprised, when Patrick asked her out and she said yes. Charlotte, aged twenty, thought of herself as dreamy and disengaged. She liked to sit curled on one of the big leather couches outside the drama club’s black box theatre, reading novels by Somerset Maugham, wearing a pair of glasses that she didn’t really need. Later, Charlotte would decide that her actual gifts were largely practical and mundane. Nowadays, she works in office administration for an American investment bank. But back in college, Charlotte’s romanticism led her into relationships with all sorts of unsuitable people, including Patrick Rocha.

That first year, Patrick briefly earned the nickname ‘Captain Popularity’. A rumour went around that he had successfully auditioned for MTV’s The Real World and turned down the gig because he wanted to be a serious actor. He had slept with four or five other drama club girls before he settled into his high-stakes fling with Charlotte. Patrick and Charlotte were briefly famous for stripping down to their underwear in somebody’s parents’ private steam room (the drama club was disproportionately populated by the children of wealthy parents, and our parties tended to take place in enormous houses kitted out with studies, home cinemas, steam rooms). Then they became more famous still for spending all night flirting with other people, exchanging bitter glances as they did so. They broke up and got back together, ad nauseam.

During term, Patrick lived by himself in a three-bedroom house off Morehampton Road in Donnybrook. It was his house in all but name: his parents owned it, and there was an understanding that the deeds would be signed over to Patrick when he graduated. Nevertheless he lived there like a tenant – or perhaps I should say like a student. There were clothes and beer cans scattered across every antique settee and credenza. At the end of our first semester, Patrick offered the house as a venue for the drama club’s Christmas party. Naturally, we trashed the place. Patrick stood serenely in the middle of it all, sipping a cocktail of his own invention: the High Tai (it was a Mai Tai sprinkled with crystals of MDMA). Early in the evening, before most of the guests had arrived, I wandered around the house, frankly snooping. (Writers, I thought then, were licensed snoops.) On top of the Steinway upright piano in the living room I found printouts of an email correspondence. Patrick had gotten in touch with Loring Mandel, the screenwriter of Conspiracy, a TV movie about the Wannsee Conference.

‘Dear Loring,’ Patrick had written, ‘I represent a small drama society based in Dublin. I was wondering if you had ever considered adapting Conspiracy for the stage? Or collaborating with someone on a stage adaptation?’ Mandel had replied: ‘Dear Patrick, Thank you very much for your interest in Conspiracy. I do think the script would work well as a theatrical piece, but at this time I’m afraid rights issues prevent me from adapting the play into any other form. Wishing you the best of luck with your own writing.’

Now that’s flash, I thought. It had never occurred to me that you could simply email a professional writer out of the blue and ask to collaborate with him. But it had occurred to Patrick. Where other people were handicapped by shyness, or embarrassment, or by a lack of savoir faire, Patrick was brazen. It came, I theorised, from being rich – from attending the school he had attended, from knowing that he would never have to worry about buying a house or struggling to establish a career. He was, I thought – invoking a term of opprobrium I had gleaned from my sociology lectures on Marx – bourgeois.

I realised, of course, that Patrick had left this email correspondence out on the piano so that someone would find it and read it. A few months later, I said, ‘Hey, did you ever get anywhere with your version of Conspiracy?’

Patrick winced and said, ‘Writing’s hard work, you know?’

I did know. That year I was wrestling with the paradox that ensnares every writer at a certain point: I was trying desperately to make myself into something, but I had no idea what that something was. I had a go at every genre, every form, on the off-chance that one of them would turn out to be ‘my thing.’ I wrote haikus and verse epistles, I wrote short stories, I wrote novellas, I wrote editorials for the college paper. Joining the drama club had convinced me that I should write plays.

‘Plays are easy,’ I announced to Charlotte one morning outside the drama club office (I was in a fever of discovery). ‘It’s just dialogue. There’s no prose.’ During the Christmas break I wrote a three-act satire of the South Dublin bourgeoisie called The Dinner Party, the central gimmick of which (eight scenes unfolding in reverse chronological order) I had stolen from Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. I was very excited about The Dinner Party. It was the first full-length project I had ever managed to complete. I showed it to everyone – all 120 pages of typescript. I could hardly believe I’d produced something so substantial.

In March The Dinner Party was staged as part of the drama club’s spring lineup. Halfway through the first night, as I sat in the lighting box, I realised that I hated my script. It was dreadful, a derivative excrescence. I wanted to pull it immediately. It was Patrick who convinced me to let it run. ‘You’ll never have a chance to learn this much again,’ he said. (He had read the script but declined to audition, citing an unnamed prior commitment.) I let the play go up, taking notes every night on where I had gone wrong. For years afterward, I couldn’t think about The Dinner Party without clenching my fists in shame. But Patrick was right: the experience had taught me something.

After that, I temporarily abandoned writing plays, although a year or so later I did produce a short two-hander, Mass Destruction, for the drama club’s Short Play Festival. This was one of Charlotte’s initiatives: she had by now abandoned acting and was determined to become an arts administrator. Mass Destruction was a satire on the invasion of Iraq; Patrick played a bluff government minister who defends the war in oracular terms. He wore his own three-piece suit for the part.

By then, Patrick and Charlotte were long broken up, and Patrick was living what he called ‘the single life’, by which he meant a career of agile and slightly shamefaced promiscuity. For a while, there existed a kind of club or subculture of drama group girls who were pissed off with Patrick for sleeping with them and then dumping them. His stock, on the NASDAQ of our esteem, began to fluctuate. For Patrick, Charlotte once said, other people’s feelings were like bits of indigestible gristle in meat: you ate around them and then left them tactfully at the side of your plate.

One evening, I ran into Charlotte in the library. She was holding a Post-it note and staring at the shelves disconsolately. ‘You know the English section,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to find this book.’ She showed me the Post-it, on which was written, in her loopy, precise handwriting, ‘John Donne: Life, Mind and Art – John Carey.’ Feeling chivalrous, I found the book. As I reached upwards, I found that Charlotte was standing very close to me. Suddenly we were kissing. I stood for a few moments with one hand on an upper shelf and the other cautiously pressed against Charlotte’s waist.

‘We can’t,’ she said abruptly. She held out her hand for the book. ‘I won’t be able to concentrate on this now,’ she said, smiling a dreamy smile. She walked off towards the checkout desk, leaving me with an erection that needed to be discreetly tucked under the elasticated band of my boxers.

The next time I saw her – in the drama club office – she was preoccupied with the year-end accounts. ‘Was it any good?’ I asked, doing my best to be coy.

‘What?’ she said, without looking up.

‘John Donne,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said, her mouth set. ‘That wasn’t the one I needed, actually.’

I was hurt – though at the time, imagining myself a worldly sophisticate, I pretended to shrug and write the whole thing off as just another chapter in my sentimental education. In reality, of course, I thought about that kiss all the time. It was the main thing on my mind, two weeks later, when we all drove down to Tipperary to celebrate Patrick Rocha’s 21st, at a party thrown by his parents.

The Rocha estate was something. The driveway was lined with high walls of box hedge. There was a circular ornamental fish pond, its surface frothy with lime-green algal goop. ‘You’re staying in the servant’s quarters,’ Patrick said with a grandiose gesture as we unloaded our bags from the car. This was a joke; but it also wasn’t a joke. We really were staying in the loft-like annexe where the servants had once slept. It was now the family games room. Before dinner, tuxedoed butlers served canapes and cava on the lawn. As we sang ‘Happy Birthday’, everyone doffed their imaginary caps to ‘Master Rocha’. It became the joke of the night.

Later, Patrick’s 21st became known as ‘the Apocalypse Party’, because so many people fucked each other illicitly in so many rooms of the Rocha manse and so many couples were thereby broken up. I had my own reasons for remembering the event with a certain bitterness. As we gathered on the lawn for drinks – the girls, I noticed, sank little tee-holes in the turf with the heels of their designer shoes – Charlotte gave me a long, mournful stare that said: How tragic, that we can’t be together. Of course, as far as I knew, there was no actual reason why we couldn’t be together. I assumed that Charlotte was just being romantically stupid. Naturally, I also assumed that she would get over whatever imaginary obstacles she had created and kiss me again, later in the evening.

I made my move, such as it was, around 1am, after the DJ had clocked off and the ballroom – there was an actual ballroom – had emptied out. I had gotten very drunk. I was lying on the sprung wooden floor and looking up at the coruscations of a revolving disco ball. Charlotte was lying beside me (we had decided that now was the time to lie on the floor). Her hand was close to mine. I extended a pinkie finger and touched her hand. Apart from ourselves, the room was empty. ‘This is romantic,’ I said. Charlotte stumbled to her feet. I sat up. ‘Where are you going?’ I said.

In the doorway, his bowtie undone and his shirt collar open, was Patrick Rocha. As I watched, Charlotte took his hand and they slunk off, looking – I was gratified to see – extremely guilty. I was alone on the ballroom floor. ‘I don’t need you people anyway,’ I shouted at the disco ball. ‘I’m going to be a writer. I’m going to leave all this bullshit behind.’

Three weeks later, Charlotte and I were a couple. We lasted barely longer than Charlotte and Patrick had, their first time around: four months. Charlotte dumped me a week before finals, saying she needed to concentrate on her studies. ‘I knew you’d break my heart,’ she said, in flagrant contradiction of the fact that she was the one breaking up with me. That night, on the floor of my on-campus apartment, I hugged my knees and cried. I felt I was mourning not just my relationship with Charlotte, but the entirety of my college life: the parties, the plays, the gossip, the fabulous houses, the wonderful friends. Of course, the next day I decided that Charlotte was crazy and I was better off without her. Free life advice: in difficult situations, pick a simple narrative and stick to it. For a while, you’ll mistake it for the truth.

Just after finals were over – everyone was still in Dublin – Patrick Rocha texted me with an invitation to dinner. He named a Michelin-starred restaurant on Stephen’s Green.

‘Maybe on your salary,’ I texted back.

‘On me,’ Patrick replied.

Over dinner, Patrick told me he’d written something and he wanted my opinion on it. I was, by now, fairly well established as one of the drama club’s ‘official’ writers: a piece of mine had appeared in a semi-obscure literary journal, which was, apparently, canonisation enough for Patrick. He handed me a slender bundle of manuscript. It was a short story called ‘She Was The One’.

‘You can read it now,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m going for a smoke. Wave when you’re finished.’

‘She Was The One’ was a barely fictionalised account of Patrick’s relationship with Charlotte. Several pages offered explicit descriptions of things they had done in bed. Then the story collapsed into a welter of rationalisations. It ended like this: It was only way later – too late, if you asked him – that Peter realised that Ella had maybe been The One after all. Hadn’t she? Yes, he decided. She had been The One.

‘I want you to be honest,’ Patrick said when he returned from his smoke.

‘It’s got a lot of power,’ I said. ‘It’s really raw.’

The waiter arrived with our main courses. ‘Thank you,’ I said. Patrick said nothing until the waiter had left. He was renowned for his rudeness to people who worked in restaurants and shops. I remembered Charlotte’s remark about the bits of gristle.

‘I spent ages on it,’ Patrick said. ‘I started it as a monologue. Then I was like – fuck it, it’s a short story.’

‘It’s difficult,’ I said, ‘writing about real experiences.’

‘Is it really obvious?’ Patrick said.

‘Maybe it’s just that I know you,’ I said.

‘You know,’ Patrick said abruptly, ‘she said I date raped her. But I didn’t. I would never do anything like that.’

I was startled. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Charlotte?’

‘She said she was drunk and I, like, took advantage or whatever,’ Patrick said. ‘But it was her idea, you know? I just wanted to get back to the party.’

‘This was at your birthday,’ I said. I was trying to assess the truth value of Patrick’s statement – trying to reconcile it with my own knowledge of Charlotte.

‘Can you believe that?’ Patrick said. He was studying me carefully. ‘I just hope she didn’t go around saying it to everyone. You know? You can really damage someone’s reputation with that shit.’

This, I realised, was why Patrick had invited me to dinner: he wanted to talk about Charlotte. He wanted to make sure that Charlotte hadn’t told me anything he wanted kept secret. ‘She Was The One’ was probably just a pretext – though I suspected he really had agonised over it; it was embarrassing to read, the way a deeply felt piece of writing often is.

‘She never said anything,’ I said, ‘that I know of.’ I felt something that I later came to understand was disappointment. Patrick was pursuing his own ends, by asking me to dinner. I was merely instrumental. We had never been friends – not really.

‘Yeah,’ Patrick said. ‘That’s good. That’s good.’

A couple of months later, Patrick was accepted to study at one of the big London drama schools. With his parents’ money, he rented an enormous house in Stoke Newington and turned it into party central. Every so often, I heard outrageous stories about how he was getting on over there: he had allegedly performed Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ monologue naked, while clipping his toenails; he had supposedly contrived to seduce two gay women and had, briefly, joined their relationship as a third wheel.

I stayed in Dublin. I got a job in a bookshop and, having more or less expunged my shame at the failure of The Dinner Party, began writing another play. This one was called The Neighbourhood, and it was a crime story inspired by the seedy apartment block in which I was then living. I saw Patrick only on his rare trips home. Whenever we met, he seemed uncomfortable – he kept looking past me, over my shoulder, as if in search of someone more interesting to talk to.

When I finished The Neighbourhood, I had the idea of convening some of the drama club gang to read it, to see if it was actable. I emailed copies to a select group and we arranged to meet up on a Friday night. Someone must have forwarded the email chain to Patrick, because when I arrived at our chosen venue – the basement flat of another drama club alum named Karen Collins – Patrick was there, full of enthusiasm at the notion of reading the lead male part. ‘Your style,’ he said, riffling the pages of the typescript and shaking his head. Clearly, I thought, if Patrick’s time studying drama in London had taught him nothing else, it had taught him what writers wanted to hear.

Karen Collins plays a part in this story, too. She was one of those girls who elects herself den mother of a group of boys and more or less orders them to be friends – the sort of person who keeps the gang together, once the scaffolding of college has fallen away. Patrick, raising an eyebrow, used to call her Wendy. Karen struggled with her weight; her mother was (significantly, I used to think – though what the hell did I know?) a dietitian.

‘I don’t think it really works,’ Patrick said, when the reading was finished. We had, by this point, put away half a dozen bottles of supermarket Valpolicella. Patrick crossed his legs and held a cigarette aloft. His lips were pursed.

I looked up from my script. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s too Pinter,’ Patrick said. He shook his head. ‘Or it’s not Pinter enough. It’s missing something. Can I tell you what a professional director would say about it?’

‘... Go ahead,’ I said.

‘There’s no through line,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m not sure what any of these characters really want.’

‘And I was wondering,’ Karen chimed in, ‘does my character really have to be wearing a cheerleader costume for the whole of Act Two?’

Patrick laughed. ‘That’s the best part,’ he said. ‘Get some hottie up there in her little pleated skirt? I’d go see it.’

Over the next few weeks, during my off hours from the bookshop, I rewrote The Neighbourhood. Despite Patrick’s condescending tone, I took his advice at least semi-seriously. I tried to develop a ‘through line’ for each character. It turned out that Patrick had done me a favour: I sent the play to the Abbey Theatre, and a few months later they invited me in for a meeting. ‘We’re not going to produce it,’ the Literary Director told me, over coffee. ‘But we think it’s very promising.’

In the event, I abandoned The Neighbourhood when I decided it wasn’t good enough to be rewritten. A few months after my Abbey meeting, I started work on a novel. Gradually, over the next couple of years, I lost touch with most of the drama club crowd. Karen Collins was the only one of them I saw regularly. We would meet up for coffee and she would fill me in on the adventures of the London contingent. From what Karen told me, I gathered that Patrick was going through some kind of crisis, over there in his house in Stoke Newington. He had stopped drinking and taken up yoga. When he wasn’t in class, he sat in his room with the blinds pulled, reading Chekhov or Stanislavski. He began obsessively to compare his own career to those of Hollywood actors: Brad Pitt, Cillian Murphy, Colin Farrell.

‘I’m twenty-three,’ he would fret. ‘Farreller had already made his first film at twenty-three. I’m already too old.’

Visitors to the house reported that the sink was piled with unwashed dishes and the whole place reeked of mould. Describing Patrick’s state of mind, Karen used the word breakdown. ‘Everyone’s really worried about him,’ she said, not without a certain amount of glee. I dismissed this, thinking: People love worrying about other people. It spares them from having to worry about themselves.

Still, reports of Patrick’s breakdown – or whatever it was – must have contained at least a few microbes of truth. This, at any rate, is the only explanation I can find for what happened next.

A year or so later, I ran into Karen at a summer party thrown by one of the old drama club committee members. ‘Congratulations,’ she said, ‘on your London debut.’

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘That was your play, wasn’t it? With the girl in the cheerleader costume?’

I was, by now, pretty embarrassed about the whole cheerleader costume thing. ‘Uh, yeah,’ I said, blushing behind my sunglasses.

Karen sipped from her glass of wine. ‘I thought Patrick did a really good job with it.’

‘What’s this now?’ I said.

‘The degree show,’ Karen said. ‘At LAMDA. Patrick did your play. I went over to see everyone’s degree show. You know, they have to do this whole original production for their exams. I mean, yours was definitely the best, script-wise.’

‘Patrick staged my play,’ I said, stupidly.

Karen’s eyes widened. ‘He didn’t ask you,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, he didn’t ask me.’

It was worse than that. He had staged my play and put his own name under the title: The Neighbourhood, by Patrick Rocha. I didn’t know this until one of the London gang emailed me a copy of the programme. Karen, of course, had innocently assumed that I had given Patrick my blessing. I read the programme over and over, thinking: Who would do something like that? And: If he’d asked, I would have said yes!

It is strangely exciting, having your work stolen. For a while, you get to enjoy the thrill of righteous outrage. I drafted numerous haughty emails to Patrick – even, at one point, a letter, full of block-caps indignation. Grandly, I imagined flying to London, knocking on his door, and hurling a copy of the script at his feet: ‘Look familiar?’ But something prevented me from sending either the emails or the letter. I’d like to say that I bore Patrick’s affront stoically – that I was prepared, like Marcus Aurelius, to meet every day only ingratitude, arrogance, envy, and deceit, and that I was therefore, fundamentally, not surprised to discover his theft. But when I thought about it, I seemed to see Patrick as a kind of innocent – someone who rarely thought about the things he did, or reflected on the reasons why he might have done them. I knew that he would not have understood my anger, if I had brought it to his attention.

So I did nothing. And as things turned out, I was glad that I had done nothing. After he graduated from his acting degree, Patrick failed to secure an agent. He appeared in a few profit-share shows in places like Shoreditch and Bow – in one, he played a bipolar Santa Claus in the midst of a marital crisis. For a year, he appeared as a ‘genius’ on a TV game show that tested people’s IQs, reading highbrow banter from a prepared script. I took – why be coy? – a certain satisfaction in his decline. If Patrick had soared off into the Hollywood stratosphere, I would have become embittered: because in that case, Patrick would have been a man who succeeded because, at a crucial moment in his career, he stole my play.

But he didn’t succeed. In 2008, he moved back to Dublin. Through his father’s connections, he found a job writing an online financial advice column for a national newspaper. The title of the column was ‘Pinching Pennies: How to Live in Dublin on €5 a Day’.

A year or two ago, at Karen Collins’s 30th birthday party in her house in the Liberties, I spotted him, standing by himself in a corner. I couldn’t resist the impulse to go over. Patrick blinked at me slowly. Recognition dawned. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, in an odd, dubious tone. Cruelly, I filled him in on what I was doing: first novel, film option. His reactions were carefully metered. He seemed to be running at half speed. After five minutes I figured out what was up: he was on lithium.

‘I’m working on a play,’ he said. ‘Dark stuff. Mental illness. Did you know that sixty-four per cent of Irish people have some experience of mental illness? There’s definitely a story in that.’

‘Sounds really interesting,’ I said, with genuine feeling. ‘I can’t wait to see it.’

After a certain point, life becomes a matter of running into people you knew intimately for years, and realising that you no longer know the first thing about them. This happened to me recently with Charlotte Finn. I was at the counter of a cafe in Grand Canal Dock, ordering a latte. The woman beside me in the tailored business suit turned out to be Charlotte – she was on her way to a meeting in the IFSC. We found a table and smiled at each other.

‘This place is ridiculous,’ Charlotte said. It was one of those cafes where the tables are made from repurposed antique sewing machines and the chairs are made from repurposed carpenter’s benches.

‘We’re old now,’ I said. ‘We don’t understand what the kids are up to.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Charlotte said. ‘I have a kid. She’s almost one.’

I couldn’t imagine the Charlotte I knew being a mother. But of course the Charlotte I knew existed only in the past: a country that issues only temporary visas. Curious to know what she thought, I told her about Patrick’s theft of my play.

‘He was a weird one,’ Charlotte said, wrinkling up her nose (she had not, I was amused to observe, grown out of her characteristically flamboyant facial expressions). ‘I don’t think other people had that much reality, as far as he was concerned.’

‘He told me something once,’ I said. I was being careful. ‘About something that happened at his birthday. You know, the Apocalypse Party.’

‘Mm,’ Charlotte said. ‘Yeah. That. That was why we broke up the last time. I felt ... I just felt creeped out and at the time I didn’t know why.’

‘He suggested,’ I said. I paused, aware that I was trespassing on private property.

‘You can’t always consent,’ Charlotte said after a moment. ‘But when you’re young, you don’t always know that.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said.

The summer light outside the cafe seemed, for a moment, to catch and hold in its luminous arms a frail, suspended sadness – the sadness, I immediately decided, of a counterfeit nostalgia. No more of that, I thought. We stood. We both had work to get to. I kissed Charlotte on the cheek and said, ‘You’re still wearing the same perfume.’

‘Stay in touch,’ she said, and waved goodbye.

I haven’t seen her since.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) and the winner of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He teaches Creative Writing in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His new novel, White City, is due out in March 2021 from Scribner UK.