The Swap

by Antony Moore

  'Another one? You keep Marlboro going on your own, you do.' Harvey didn't bother to look up.

  'Piss off, Dad.'

  'You'll kill yourself with them.'

  'Your father's right, Harvey. I was reading a piece in the Mail about it. There are so many ways to stop now. Lots of different methods, it's really not that difficult.'

  'He doesn't want to stop. If he wanted to stop he'd stop tomorrow. It's not hard, a bit of will power is all you need. But he doesn't want to stop. He wants to kill himself . . .'

  'No, Donald, don't say that. But, Harvey, they make a sort of thing you can put on your arm. It's like a sort of plaster and it feels like smoke going into your arm, it's quite reasonably priced . . .'

  'Right. Thank you.' Harvey put the paper down and stood up.

  'Oh, are you going out, dear?'

  'Yes.' Harvey surprised himself. 'I wasn't, but obviously I have to if I'm going to get any chance of peace or non-lunatic conversation.'

  'Oh charming!' His mother chuckled. 'Well, take your jacket. It's not as warm as it was. It's not as warm down here as it is in London.'

  'That's right, Mum, you have a different climate in Cornwall.'

  'He hasn't got a proper jacket. Denim isn't a proper jacket. How is that a jacket? It's not waterproof, it doesn't have a lining. It doesn't even cover your backside. It's not a jacket. If you want a jacket, Harvey, borrow one of mine. There's one on the peg. That'll keep you warm when you're out gallivanting . . .'

  'Thanks, Dad. If I want to look like a reject from a special-needs charity bazaar, I'll definitely take you up on it.' Harvey picked up his cigarettes, left the room, put on his denim jacket and ventured back out into the night.

  'Bye, dear, don't be too late back.' He could hear the voice still calling to itself as he walked away down the road.

  Chapter Ten

  Harvey's reactions were concerning him. There was a feeling of studied calm to how he had behaved since his return home. He had sat on his bed and he had sat in the armchair. He hadn't shivered, or experienced panic attacks. Could it really be as easy as this to commit crimes? Perhaps it was. Perhaps the idea he had always had of criminals as abandoned creatures, living on the fringes of the civilised world, was quite misplaced. Perhaps they were just like him: popping out to do terrible deeds in the afternoon and getting home again in time for macaroni cheese and Star Trek Voyager.

  He walked out from his parents' house onto Trelawney Road, close to where Mrs Odd would have moved to if she had lived. She and his parents would have been near neighbours: something about keeping all the strange people in one place came into his mind but he ignored it and walked on. The hill ran down towards the town centre and from there he could see the whole sweep of the bay, from Porthminster Point out to the north of the town, along St Ives's own beachfront to the harbour and then away to The Island to the south. For all that he felt St Ives represented repression, misery, bourgeois values and empty traditionalism, it still held a certain picturesque charm. He had been away long enough to recognise that. The town nestled neatly as if held with a mother's love in the two arms of the bay. And it had held him. He was aware for a moment of just how safe this place had always felt. That's why he had wanted to leave it, of course. But now? Did it still feel that way? Harvey walked down Church Road, past the church where he had gone as a child to Sunday school and where he had first learned to smoke; past the little car park with the great white wall where he had once sprayed the Batman logo in gold paint; and down onto the high street where he and Rob and Jack used to go shoplifting on a Saturday afternoon. 'My life of crime,' Harvey muttered. It was odd to think, now that he had time to think, that the most criminal thing he had ever done had happened in safe little St Ives. And it had happened this afternoon. What he needed, he realised, was a drink. Several drinks.

  St Ives had a lot of pubs. Most made their money in the summer but they all stayed open throughout the year. In theory, there was a wide selection to choose from, but like most people in their home town Harvey could only really think of going into a handful. And all carried baggage. There was the Lifeboat on the harbourfront where tonight there would be a juke box and on Fridays a local band; that was where he had first thrown up into a public toilet and first dragged self-consciously on a joint. There was the Golden Lion, which would be quieter but might contain one or two hard lads with shaven heads and tattoos; that was where he and Rob had fought and won against two rugby players from the rival secondary school. Or there was the Blue Bar, which would be the quietest of all with a bit of folk music playing on CD; and that was where he had taken Jill Penhaligon on the night her parents were away at a funeral, so there was somewhere to go back to, for the first time. And all these memories were tied up with the places and meant that he needed to get the choice right. And although a part of him felt that distractions were just what he needed or that toughing it out might be the best option, he went to the Blue Bar because a larger part knew that he needed to think and to feel safe and to be cared for by the gentler ghosts he would find there.

  The lounge bar of the Blue Bar had been redecorated since he was last there, the walls painted in a pale lime green and the floor laid to stripped pine. The walls were enlivened by pictures by a local artist, which featured beach scenes where there was a lot of blue for the sky and a lot of blue for the sea and a tiny strip of yellow in the middle for the sand. They were not like any Cornish beach Harvey had ever seen. He found them depressing. The Blue Bar had always been more of a wine bar than a pub and there had been a time, around the age of sixteen, when Harvey had considered wine bars the height of sophistication. On a damp night in February it was almost deserted and just seemed rather hopeless and displaced. The bare whitewood tables and chairs had the appearance of a set of deck-chairs laid out on some forgotten liner. He ordered a pint of Guinness from a bored student and found a corner. What he wanted was peace and he had found it. It crossed his mind that it was possible to have too much peace because his thoughts began at once to crowd in. He might be arrested tonight. When he returned home his mother might be in tears and his father nodding knowingly. There might be a brief explanation, a reading of rights . . . things from The Bill. And then he might get in the back of a car and be taken to a cell to spend the night. And the next night and the next. This was real. He could be arrested for concealing a murder . . . was that a crime? Harvey felt there was probably a more official term for it but that was basically it. He had concealed a murder. And not some drink-driving or a hit and run but a real, old-school, Agatha Christie, body-in-the-library, suspicious-vicar sort of murder. Like most comic fans, Harvey was not drawn to real drama. He contemplated the enormity of what had happened for several minutes with the aid of his Irish assistant. He would, he realised, need to get very drunk indeed. So he rose quickly to get a second pint, and it was then that he saw her.

  'Oh, hello.' Maisie Cooper smiled at him and he wondered how she could have been so near to him without him sensing her presence.

  'Er, hi. Where did you spring from?'

  'Oh, I just got here. It's nice to see you again.'

  'Oh right, you too. You on your own?' Harvey tried to keep the hope out of his voice.

  'No, Jeff 's gone for a pee and the others are on their way. We've all been somewhere else, the Lion, I think, but we're doing the rounds.'

  How did she manage to convey in these simple words just how grim this itinerary had been and just how much better it would have been if Harvey had been with her? He did not know but he certainly believed he heard all of it in her voice. He caught the student's eye. 'What are you having?'

  'Oh, it's OK, you were enjoying a bit of peace, by the look of it, and now you're going to be disturbed.'

  'That's all right. I'm happy to be disturbed by you.' How clumsy and crap was that? He blushed at his own ineptitude and then blushed more to find himself blushing.

  She smiled at him. 'OK, I'll have a white wine, thanks.'

  'Right.' She under
stood his embarrassment. She was someone who understood things. He immediately felt that was what he most needed right now. At which point the pub door opened and half his past fell through it.

  'Bollocks, you can have a double or nothing, you slacker ... H!'

  'H!'

  'H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H, H!' It became a chant.

  'Er, all right, lads.' Harvey felt, strangely, that while he wished he hadn't spent the afternoon wading around in blood it was still perhaps preferable to having spent it with his friends.

  'Where've you been, man?' Steve threw his arm around Harvey's shoulder and, reeling, almost carried them both to the floor.

  'Avoiding you.' Harvey disentangled himself. 'How many have you had?'

  'Not enough. We're on the doubles tonight, Harvey boy. Pints and doubles only. We are getting pissed!' This last was shouted at great volume and was greeted with a cheer from the other twenty or so reunionists who had poured in behind the vanguard. 'We are drinking the town dry!' Steve yelled again and then leaned himself heavily on the bar. 'Bar, beerman,' he called.

  'Steve's getting going well.' Rob joined Harvey and Maisie Cooper. 'I don't think he gets out that much these days what with the third baby. So he's letting his hair down.'

  'Yeah. That's not all . . .' Harvey wished he could have made the quiet moment with Maisie mean something before they all arrived, but there hadn't been time.

  'And we've had quite an afternoon,' Rob went on, slurring himself a little. 'And guess who we had a drink with earlier? Only Bleeder Odd. I drank with Bleeder Odd, I can die a happy man.'

  'You saw Bleeder?'

  'Yeah. He was in the Bell, wearing a suit and chatting on his mobile phone, for all the world as if he was a real human being. So we all bought him a pint. I think we owed him a few, you know what I mean? When we left he had about twenty pints in front of him on the table. So now we've made up for all the years of misery.' He chuckled happily.

  'At it again, Briscow? You can't leave my wife alone, can you?' Jeff Cooper, appearing through the crowd, was smiling slightly less than the last time he made this joke. 'I thought that was you skulking in the corner when we came in. Only a sad bastard drinks on his own, mate. And you are a bit of a sad bastard, aren't you? Look at you, you look like a fucking weirdo. Why don't you grow a decent amount of hair and buy some clothes that aren't designed for teenagers?'

  'Er, yeah, OK, Dad.' Harvey reached for his drink but found he hadn't got one. For once this was a good thing as it meant he could focus on that rather than on Jeff.

  'Pint of Guinness and a white wine when you've a minute, mate,' he called and turned to his little group. 'Drinks?'

  They sat in the corner, Harvey and Maisie and Rob and Steve, who came to join them. Jeff had a chair at the table and no one took it but he spent most of the evening in the doorway with the rugger buggers, as Harvey had always known them, shouting and at times singing in a fashion that Harvey could only feel was not conducive to marital bliss. Mostly, though, he was unaware of Jeff or of anyone else but her. Steve and Rob were debating politics and football and beer and music, and it was a conversation he could have recited by heart before they began it. So he talked to Maisie Cooper. It struck him as funny, when he had time to think of it afterwards, that when the evening started he would have said that nothing short of an earthquake could drive the thought of that afternoon from his head, yet for long periods it hardly entered his mind so complete was his immersion in her. What did they talk about? As he walked home, Harvey asked himself that but found no obvious answer. Or none that could account for how good it had felt to do the talking. And the listening. She was interesting, she knew about stuff. And not just beer and sport and music but about people and ideas, stuff that he used to think was important but which somehow got lost in the comic shop and the growing older and not really getting what he wanted or even knowing what that was. When occasionally Rob or Steve had tried to join their conversation, usually when the other of them had staggered to the bar or the toilet, she had been kind and open but had made it clear, to Harvey at least, that she preferred to return to the one-to-one as soon as possible. Once or twice Harvey had caught in Steve or Rob's eye an enquiring look, familiar from another century, but he had ignored it. Let them think what they wanted, he had no answer to those looks because he had no idea what was happening. As he wandered, cold but smiling, back up Trelawney Road at nearly midnight it struck him that life-changing days come along only very rarely. There seemed at that moment a good chance that this might be one for two entirely unrelated reasons. It made him smile and, because he had been on the whisky for a nightcap, it made him sing. So he ended the evening singing a plaintive, if somewhat uncertain, solo of 'Reeling in the Years' by Steely Dan (it had been playing in the pub): when only a few hours earlier he would have laid pretty long odds against ever singing again.

  Chapter Eleven

  'Haaarvey! Time to rise and shine. You've got a party to go to today.'

  Fumbling in the dark for cigarettes, Harvey heard the voice and closed his eyes very tight. Everything was wrong. His mouth felt as though someone had come in during the night and used it as a toilet: there was unknown but malodorous matter at the back of his throat yet a sort of slimy, unnatural wetness on his tongue. His head seemed to have been remoulded so that it now came to a point in the blinding pain between his eyeballs. His belly lay about him, jellified and sagging to the sides, forming a ring around his prone form. From hours too early to consider, his father had been busily walking along the passage outside his room making a noise. This was a familiar practice and was one of a number of reasons why Harvey very rarely went home for holidays. Today, Donald Briscow had been calling. 'Do you know where that drill is, Ann? I need that particular one. I want to put a screw in the bedroom, for the picture. I've been meaning to fix that picture for ages . . .' And his mother had been calling in reply and then there had been the banging and slamming of a drill being found and then, of course, there had been the drilling, protracted and extended. And then there had been more calling and his mother had come along to admire the picture . . . Harvey, lying now on his back, lit a cigarette, opening his eyes to tiny slits and then closing them again very quickly.

  'You won't want to miss it, dear, it's your last day.'

  He tried to remember his dreams. They had been filled not with pretty, attentive women in wine bars finding him fascinating, but with dark passageways and shadows. He had been running, he remembered, running into . . . that was it, into his own shop. But the lights were off and he could hardly see. There was a sense of unease. Something was wrong. There were people there who shouldn't be there. Something terrible had happened. And then it all came back in a rush. 'Shit.' The air was cold on his bare arms and he tucked himself tightly under the quilt, doing his best not to burn more holes in the cover, which already showed its history as a drunken smoker's blanket. For a few minutes all he wanted to do was crawl deeper into the dark, warm, somewhat smelly cave he had made for himself, just stay there until it went away. But then a rush of adrenalin forced him to sit up, cry out as the point at the front of his head collided with the day and then scramble upright. He needed to know what was going on. Never before in his life had he prayed so hard for so little. All he wanted in life right now was for absolutely nothing to happen.

  The human brain collects and stores information in extraordinary abundance just on the off chance that it might be useful. Harvey would not have said that he knew when the St Ives Chronicle was delivered to his parents' house each morning. Indeed, he would have said he had always actively avoided knowing anything at all about St Ives's shambolically amateurish local paper. Yet at 10a.m. prompt he was waiting on the mat and he was not disappointed. Horrified but not disappointed. The murder was splashed across all three columns of the front page and showed all the grammatical errors and inaccurate speculation of the late, replacement front-page lead. Harvey wondered vaguely what they would have led with if they hadn't got this in time. His mi
nd played wistfully with coffee mornings and new church roofs. The story was supported by a rather fuzzy photograph of Bleeder's house looking eerily like every crime scene Harvey had ever seen on TV. The police had been called to the house at 6.30p.m. by the deceased's son, Charles Odd. His mother had been killed with a kitchen knife. There were signs of breaking and entering and police were seeking an intruder. They had not yet established any motive for the crime. The killer had made elaborate efforts to cover his tracks but the police were able to say that some evidence had been found at the crime scene . . . Jesus. Harvey clutched the paper to him and felt a wave of nausea sweep across his hangover and carry it up to a higher level. He doubled over and clutched onto the wall, then straightened up, eyes squeezed shut, breathing hard.

  'Here, don't scrunch up my paper.' Donald Briscow strode out into the hall and took the Chronicle from him, pulled a face, and straightened it out carefully. 'Some of us want to know what's going on in the world.' Harvey willed his breathing under control.

  'Ann! Ann! Look at this.' Briscow senior was appalled. 'England slump in Pakistan . . . outrageous.' He ambled off muttering and Harvey leaned against the wall, letting the wave pass, letting it flow back in lesser form, letting it slacken and ebb away.