Forbidden fruit
(stealing baked beans from my nephew’s plate)

Sunday lunch at the Gun and Spitroast
and the moment I’ve been waiting for arrives
courtesy of my nephew’s bladder
(ha – the pineapple juices I bought him were an integral part of my cunning strategy)

Yes! He’s up and off to the loo
leaving his sausage, chips and beans totally unguarded

Swiftly, with premeditated cutleric intervention
I scoop my fork through his beans
and help my salivating self

They taste deeply baked beany
and illicitly sweet

I glance over to the bar, wiping the evidence from my lips
and resume my own relatively boring fare
whilst practising suitably innocent faces

He comes round the corner beaming at me through those thick-lashed eyes of his
with a nephewish suspicion skewering gently into my soul

“You stole a bit, didn’t you?”

I maintain a non-committal vacancy

“You stole a bit of my sausage, didn’t you?”

I consider explaining that I’m vegan and therefore don’t eat sausages but he’s still fixing me with such confident accusation
that I realise that the actual detail of my crime is absolutely beside the point
the point being…
“I didn’t touch your sausages..." I reply

"...but
I did steal some of your beans”

which admission induces in him a satisfied grin
and an instant conclusion to the case

He asks of me neither recompense nor redress
neither victim-offender reparation, nor family mediation

Just nods in a I-got-your-number-Uncle-Stephen kind of way

I sink into my recent conviction
like into a sofa full of broken springs
and
with an unclish guilt
offer the fair swap of a piece of my bread
for some more of his beans

He considers my proposal with a carefully-weighed pleasure
and then agrees

But the licensed beans of trade
don’t taste half as good
as the illegitimate beans
of thievery…