I stared at the Bangladeshi man across from me, wholly convinced that I was going to prison over a value pack of black lace underwear priced at just under £5.
The first and only time I got caught shoplifting, I was in a room two floors beneath London’s bustling Marble Arch. I hadn’t even bothered to slip the package into my backpack or waistline. Instead, I had clutched the synthetic fabric in the same hand as my cell phone, snapped my back upright, and smiled at the security guard as I walked out of Primark, confident that I would get away with it again.
My criminal misconduct that year started innocently. I was a university student living in London, one of the world’s most expensive cities, dodging bus fares to spend my change on pints and entry to neon-lit basements. The townhouse I shared with four girls was strewn with unwashed wineglasses and tumblers that we’d hidden under our puffer jackets when exiting restaurants and pubs. At self-checkout, I elbowed the occasional avocado into the shopping bag, “Live well for less!” lasered onto its face in white ink.
I was rummaging through the polyester junkyard of Urban Outfitters’ sale section, surrounded by rows of broken hangers and damaged handbags, when I first stole something worth more than a few pounds.
I tried to look bored as I picked out an open-knit, rainbow-colored cardigan without buttons or clasps. I held it to the window, fiddling with the material and contemplating its price. It looked as though it belonged to an Instagram influencer turned wellness guru living in Bali.
Take it. You deserve this.
A voice—my own, but I had never heard it before—pushed out the one I was more familiar with in my head.
I paced my breathing to regulate my pulse. With the grace of a ballerina, I turned my back to the mirror, leaned against the wall, and shoved the cardigan into my tote. It was a gesture so swift that a bystander would have assumed the cardigan was mine.
“Have a nice day!” I called as I walked out. The security guard nodded and blinked twice to signify that he had heard me. I turned the corner and let out the air caged in my chest, waiting for guilt to claw itself back in.
In Islam, theft is an unlawful sin punishable by the amputation of your hands. I wasn’t a practicing Muslim, but having grown up in Lebanon, Islam shaped my understanding of right from wrong. My heart thumped, and the adrenaline swirled. I pictured nubs where my wrists met my palms, but the guilt never came.
Something had finally gone my way. Instead of images of sterile emergency rooms and my father’s motionless body, I felt a sense of pride. It swallowed the feeling of dread that had taken hold of my mind since his funeral.
I found out my father died on Facebook. The sound of my roommate and her boyfriend next door woke me up before my alarm that morning. I checked the app as an excuse to stay in bed longer. The first post at the top of my feed was my uncle’s, written in Arabic and shared only a few hours prior. I read it three times, convincing myself that I’d forgotten the letters of my mother tongue.
I slept on the flight back home. I slept in my parents’ bed with my brother. I slept in the hair salon’s swivel chair where I’d gone with my mother before the memorial service to have my hair trimmed and blow-dried. I slept right before they laid his body, straitjacketed into a white shroud, on a mattress in the living room that we reserved for guests.
Poor thing—the infuriating pity in everybody’s eyes betrayed their thoughts—she’s just a baby.
I was only 19, but I refused to accept that I would need others to get through this.
I had never been to a cemetery before and his was cramped, full of banners of young men’s faces who lived as fighters and died as martyrs. My father was neither. He was a ping-pong-playing, beach-loving, salt-avoidant man in his early 50s. He was the one who taught me that there were rules to live a longer and happier life.
And so, just as my father had followed rules for living, I devised—and adhered to—rules for crime.
- Steal only from corporations and chains, not small businesses.
- Always steal two egg and cress sandwiches from your local Co-Op or Tesco, one for yourself and one for the homeless man crouching under a two-toned blanket.
- While stealing, fake a phone call with your mother. Speak in a different language if you can. Gesticulate.
- Nick only perishable foods off the shelves of the high-end food halls and the brown paper bag of eight peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies that are satisfactorily gooey if microwaved for 15 seconds. Leave them in the middle of the vandalized table in your staff room. Indulge everybody in the dessert that costs half your hourly wage.
- Don’t joke about any of this on a first date. They won’t laugh.
The allure of stealing wasn’t its material rewards. It wasn’t even the fact that it made me feel sexy—a compliment rarely given to my full cheeks and toothy smile. What appealed to me most was the self-discipline required to carry out each operation successfully.
I stole reasonably priced cotton tees from the fast-fashion store that advertised its lace tops and frilly shorts exclusively to teenage girls and women who weighed less than 130 pounds. I swiped fancy sourdough sandwiches and hid kilos of frozen salmon underneath the heavy coats needed in the torrent of English rain. I tucked gold-plated jewelry into the back pocket of the black jeans I had purchased for a third of their price after swapping out the tags. If it weren’t for the meddling employee at Lidl who watched me struggling with the cardboard box twice my size, I could have walked out with a brand-new rechargeable fan.
My shoplifting became a party trick. My friends jokingly accused me of increasing retail companies’ annual loss prevention budget. For a while, it seemed that when I stuck to the rules, I was in the clear. It was a refreshing reminder that I could still get what I wanted from the world. There was an intoxicating power in deceiving others around me. In this world, my world, I am cunning and in control, undeterred by the consequences of my behavior. In this world, I’m doing just fine.
In the early dawn of my father’s death, I was left without a ledge to grab hold of. I had moved out of Lebanon and left my family a year earlier. Grief had changed my life without my permission and reverted me to a child again. It pounded and pulverized my muscles and tendons, turning me into the most brittle and vulnerable version of myself. Every limb went sore when I realized that nothing about my life or the world, which I was only beginning to make sense of at the cusp of my 20s, would ever be the same again.
Children lash out for their parents’ attention when they don’t get what they want. They don’t have the tools or language to articulate their needs or to mitigate their reactions. In that moment, the only way to deal with my irretrievable loss was to take and take and take what didn’t belong to me. The hunger for more could only be satisfied by getting away with my crimes again and again and again.
Nineteen was too young to discover that the people we love are mortal, and so I reasoned I wasn’t old enough to behave any better.
After he caught me, the Bangladeshi security guard turned my backpack upside down, exposing its contents, some of them stolen, and my father’s ivory rosary, an heirloom. He photocopied my Lebanese ID, front and back, and took lopsided photos of my British permit, the same card that my father picked up from the embassy for me. In the picture, my hair is unkempt and my expression smug—vaguely resembling a mugshot. Again, I pictured my hands sliced from my arms, left on my own to bleed out and repent.
“You kids think you can do anything you want,” he said with his back still turned. “This is £5. You don’t have £5?” I held back a giggle as he waved the pack of underwear in my face. He was trying to discipline me, like a father lecturing his deviant child.
When I remember myself in that room, under the interrogative lights of prime commercial real estate, I don’t feel much shame. Stealing as retribution for loss feels painfully obvious and self-serving, but my rules had helped me piece the world back together, even if temporarily.
The man let me go that afternoon. After I left, I crossed the street to the nearest tube station. The sun had emerged again from behind the afternoon’s clouds—a nudge to remind me that my father was still there, watching over me.
Soon after my punishment at Primark, I donated all of my stolen clothes—the pastels, the neon, and the glitter. Sooner than I had expected, there was no more space for that girl in my closet. I had to grow up. But I kept the first real thing I stole, the rainbow cardigan. This interminable grief demands to be felt, and I am still learning how to embrace it with my hands clasped behind my back.
