Exchange

by Paul Magrs

  Now here was this Kelly, looking so smug.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I read all the time. I read loads.’

  ‘Novels?’ he asked. He was irked.

  ‘Nothing else,’ she said. ‘I hate non-fiction. Loathe it. It makes me feel like I’m meant to be memorising facts. Fascinating facts! It feels too much like schoolwork, and learning things by rote.’

  ‘I hate non-fiction, too,’ he said. ‘Except biographies. I love those.’

  ‘Oh, of course, biographies,’ she said. ‘I should have said they were OK. Great big fat ones, full of terrible scandal and gossip and fabulous photos. My favourite ones arc of painters and writers.’

  He nodded. ‘God, yes. And film stars. I like reading about where they lived and who they knew and who they fell in love with…’

  Kelly locked eyes with him at just that moment. ‘Oh, really?’ she grinned. She bit her bottom lip, smearing her purple lipstick. ‘All those books are about love, aren’t they? All the novels. Anything decent you read. That’s all they’re about, really. Aren’t they? Love?’

  He looked at the floor — at the faded, swirling pattern of the carpet. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

  She laughed. ‘You will. One day soon, you will.’

  She was really patronising him now. He shivered with irritation. At least, for a second, he thought it was irritation.

  ‘I’ll let you search out for your books,’ she said. ‘I’ll not interrupt you any more. But I’ve written my phone number on your membership card. I thought I’d spare you the embarrassment of having to ask. What with you being so sensitive and all…’

  Seconds later, hiding behind the wall in one of the other rooms, he took out his Exchange membership card and saw that she really had written down her number. The cheek of it! That girl really thought a lot of herself . What did she think he was going to do? Just ring her up? One night after school? Suggest that they meet up? Like, on a date or something?

  He laughed and shook his head.

  Yes. Of course that’s what he’d do.

  Seven

  Ada Jones never had any books of her own.

  That family of hers, they never had enough jumpers and socks and coats to go round. Books were their last priority.

  It was Winnie who kept Ada in books.

  Early on in their friendship they realised that they both loved stories. Ada couldn’t read and so Winnie spent the time with her, sitting out in the backyard, spelling the words out in the great big treasury of nursery-rhymes and fairy tales that had once belonged to Winnie’s mum.

  Ada had been grateful, fascinated, then utterly hypnotised by the way her new friend made these rhymes and stories lift off the page. She knew it could be done. She’d a half-formed awareness already that magic like this existed in the world. And then she got a whiff of it — in the opening of that grand book of Winnie’s. It was an old, splendid volume with a gold and white cover, its spine and corners frayed with use. The Children’s Golden Annual, it was called, and it was what Winnie used to teach Ada Jones to read. Ada learned fast and greedily. Then she wanted more and more.

  They went to the ornate, imposing library in their town. They felt alarmed, just stepping inside. They were dwarfed by the plaster pillars and the vast, translucent dome overhead. They stared at gesticulating lady statues and sombre Latin mottoes, and they attracted hard stares from folk sitting down at the long desks. The people who worked there, flitting purposefully, carrying piles of books, didn’t look too pleased to see them either. Winnie and Ada were mesmerised, though, by the tall bookshelves: the endless, faceless order of them.

  Where do we even start? they both wondered. Which ones are even storybooks? Where arc the books that we would like? The ones we’d be able to read?

  They pushed along, finding thick, dull-sounding books. Things that called themselves journals or indexes. Nothing that looked very interesting at all. Nothing at all like the Children’s Golden Annual. Nothing that, when opened, exuded that particular scent. It was a scent they couldn’t quite identify, but one that never failed to promise them tales they had never heard before. Or rather, unheard tales that, somehow, still seemed half-remembered. Or remembered from a dream.

  What they both wanted was stories that made them hanker: after other times and other places.

  The books in that library didn’t seem as if they would do that at all. They hefted them down and opened them up, and inside they found graphs and tables of numbers, everything set out in black and white. They discovered maps which might have been exciting, had they been about adventure and voyages and where monsters dwelled. Instead the maps were about where cabbages were grown or fish were netted.

  ‘What is the point,’ asked Ada, ‘of books without people in them? Or animals? Or stories or jokes or fights or… I don’t know. Stuff All the stuff you ever want in books!’

  Winnie tried to shush her. They were still under the echoing stone dome. Ada was forgetting where she was, talking too loud again. She was getting carried away by the thought of books and what ought to be inside them. The disappointment in her voice was stark and obvious, bouncing up and around the cool stone hollow of the chamber. Disappointment at what they had found there.

  Moments later, they were thrown out of the place. The librarian grasped them by their shoulders and marched them firmly back to the main doors. Ada was protesting loudly and Winnie’s face went beetroot.

  So the library wasn’t for them.

  Instead, Winnie became Ada’s library. She was given pocket money by her mum. She was relatively rich and spoiled in a way that Ada wasn’t. Winnie could spend her money on books of her own that she could keep for all time. After saving her pennies each week she could afford to buy maybe a book or two every month. She would read them and pass them along to Ada. She even snitched a dab of furniture polish and dusted their shiny covers: that was how she looked after them. Ada was a grateful recipient. She was grateful, but not really very gracious. She was demanding.

  Ada had soon learned to read much faster than Winnie, and demand outstripped supply. So she wound up reading these books again and again. She could memorise them and embellish them with touches of her own: these tales of genii, pirates, fairies, princesses, serving girls, phoenixes and dragons. She learned what made them tick and she learned to take them to pieces and put them back together. And so, without telling anyone — not even Winnie at first — Ada started to make up her own stories. To herself, inside her mind. Never writing anything down in those early days, just retelling the tales to herself like mantras and imagining them in plush detail as she lay in her shared bed. She was cramped into the hot, sweaty bed with three of her siblings, under the damp eaves of their attic. Mam and Dad’s good winter overcoats were heaped onto the blankets for extra warmth and, in that giddy, feverish heat, Ada’s stories bred like germs. Changing the tales slightly each time, she told and retold them to herself, and she found that her supply of tales was inexhaustible. They became more elaborate. They became more her own.

  The night that she realised this, Ada Jones sat up straight in the crowded bed and, to the muffled complaints of her brothers and sisters, started laughing. She was trembling, full of glorious awareness of what she would do for the rest of her life. By then she was just over ten years old, and she knew. She knew with complete certainty that if she could just keep the story she had only just invented inside her head till morning — if she could keep on remembering all its twists and turns until the dawn broke and she got up and went to find a pencil and paper from somewhere — if she could just do all that, then she would have started off on a course that would occupy her for the rest of her life.

  ‘She was ten and she simply knew,’ said Winnie. ‘I was the one who answered the door to her. She came banging on ours at the crack of dawn the next morning. I thought there’d been some disaster. But she was wanting paper and pencils. They had nothing she could use round their house.’
r />   Simon was impressed by his gran’s tale. ‘You’re the one who started her off then, really. Giving her her first lessons…’

  His gran smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘Oh, I just happened to have a little writing book lying around. I’d been given it at Christmas. I’d not even started writing anything in it. I was keeping it… for something special and worthwhile. I don’t know what.’ She paused, turned back to the cooker, giving all the pans a quick, perfunctory stir. She was stewing beef in Guinness and thyme for a pie and the kitchen was filled with delicious scents. ‘Maybe,’ she went on reflectively, ‘that’s the difference. Ada knew she was a writer, a born writer, at the age of ten and it was just dead natural to her, to take that book off me when I offered it. To take it and fill it up with that story she’d been keeping in her head all night. She said it was beating a rhythm in her mind, like a tune. She was humming it — and, when she started to write it down, very messily in my lovely lilac, flowery Christmas book, this first story of hers came just spilling out, for hours and hours. She sat there at our kitchen table, swinging her legs, frowning, scribbling away. Like I say, a natural. It was marvellous to watch, really. Me? I’d kept that book pristine. Like I was keeping it for very best. I’d never have even started it. Let alone filled it up like she did. I’d have worried too much about spoiling it — this lovely book — with the kind of rubbish that I’d write.’ Winnie laughed sadly and came back to sit with Simon at the table. She had set him on to whittling the stalks and outer leaves off the Brussels sprouts. ‘Does that sound daft?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Simon. He had a whole collection of beautiful notebooks himself. He loved stationery. But he hardly ever used it. Like his gran, he felt that he’d be spoiling it, even trying to put his thoughts and ideas onto paper. He’d tried a couple of times, but became too embarrassed and self-conscious in the attempt. By now he knew that he’d never be a writer. ‘We’re readers. That’s what we are,’ he told his gran. ‘And we read enough to know that we can’t do it. To know that writing is hard.’

  She was examining his handiwork with the sprouts. Hm. He wasn’t too hot with vegetables, either.

  ‘Making difficult things look easy,’ Winnie said suddenly. ‘That’s what I like. Like Fred Astaire dancing, or Ella Fitzgerald when she sang Cole Porter. Or… Vincent Van Gogh when he’s gone splashing and swirling colours everywhere. He just loved all that thick, colourlul paint and it came natural to him. That’s what Ada had — and still has. She had it the very moment she started writing. She made it look easy. She made it sound natural. Well — I was ten as well. I knew I could never do that. Of course I’d wanted to have a go. I loved my books. I was determined then to write my own. But nothing would come. Nothing that would ever be as good as Ada could do. So she put me off, you see, really. I had to be content to be just a reader.’

  ‘There’s no “just” about it,’ said Simon. ‘That’s what we are. Proper readers.’

  Winnie glanced at him — a sly look. An appraising look. ‘That nice Kelly in the Exchange. The Gothic girl. She seems like a proper reader too, don’t you think? Hm?’ Winnie watched for his reaction. ‘Don’t you think so, Simon?’

  Of course he did.

  He didn’t want to. He wanted to think that Kelly was silly or boring or easily dismissible from his mind. But she wasn’t any of those things. She was brilliant and difficult and sparky and could be nasty and sharp-tongued sometimes and yes, she had read more than Simon had.

  And she scared him.

  Not in the way that the kids at school did, or the ones who hung about the phone box in the town square. He didn’t mean that kind of scary. She was a Goth, all right: all decadent and monochrome and vampy as hell, but it wasn’t Hallowe’en type scares he meant, either.

  The thing was, he wasn’t sure how or why Kelly scared him. Unsettled, maybe, was a better way of putting it. Her gaze was too fierce and probing. She stood too close. She asked him things too directly and he was never sure what she was thinking. He was starting to suspect that she tried to sound sexy and seductive when she talked to him — especially on the phone — and that scared him too.

  He had phoned her twice since last Saturday. They hadn’t actually talked about much. That had been Simon’s fault. He knew he was useless on the phone. He hardly ever used it and tended to clam up, becoming monosyllabic, when he did. In his grandparents’ bungalow the phone was in the tiny passageway between the bedrooms and the living room and all the doors were ajar. The first time he called Kelly, he was acutely aware of his gran and grandad in their easy chairs in the next room — frozen, ears pricked, listening in as Simon talked to this girl.

  Kelly played it very cool. Between his terror and her cool, the first call didn’t get very far. Simon asked if she would be at the Exchange next Saturday. She would, she said. She was there every Saturday. After that Simon panicked, realising he didn’t know much else about her life. He didn’t even know who she lived with — her parents? Did she have parents or brothers or sisters? He couldn’t very well go asking that now.

  It would sound too awkward and fake. Instead — and he didn’t know where this came from — he asked her if she would like to come and visit his town, one night after school.

  ‘Your town?’ she said, still being cool. ‘Your town’s a dump.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said — getting defensive over a place he thought was a dump, too.

  ‘I might come,’ she said. ‘Wednesday? I’ve got nothing better on.’

  ‘You could have tea round here. Meet my grandparents properly.’ Simon could have kicked himself. I’m offering her a really wild time, he thought. I bet she can hardly contain herself at the thought of it.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Sounds all right.’

  He couldn’t believe it. Was she being sarcastic? Would she stand him up, just to make a fool of him, to pay him back?

  Maybe it should be the other way around. Maybe he should be offering to get on the bus to go to her town on Wednesday after school. He should do the gentlemanly thing and do the travelling himself and pay a visit on her, instead. But she hadn’t invited him and besides, the idea of travelling all that way on the bus at night made him shiver. Kelly sounded like she didn’t mind. Anyway, what would they do at hers? What did people — teenagers — do anyway? Hang around phone boxes? Slug back cider? He didn’t know. At least here they could have a proper tea. He tutted. I’m inviting her to some Jane Austen thing, just about.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’d better clear it with my gran. I’ll ring back tomorrow night and let you know. Plans. Times. Arrangements.’

  ‘OK,’ Kelly said — still sounding cool. But there was something else in her voice. It couldn’t be excitement, surely. Probably she was just about to laugh at him.

  After he had rung off — their goodbyes were just as awkward as the rest of the conversation — Simon returned to the living room. He was about to pick up his book and get on with it, when he realised he had both grandparents’ beady eyes on him.

  ‘Did we hear right, Simon?* asked Winnie. Her eyes were shining with mischief.

  ‘We weren’t listening in,’ said his grandad gruffly. ‘Well, maybe your gran was. You know what she’s like. She made me listen.’

  Simon sat down and smiled like he didn’t know what they were on about. ‘We didn’t talk about much,’ he said. Then, immediately, he felt himself colouring. ‘Anyway, she’s just a friend.’

  His gran started to fan herself with her novel — which was another early Ada Jones she had never read before. ‘Do you know what I think, Ray?’

  ‘What’s that?’ said the old man, cracking into a rare grin. ‘1 think our Simon has found himself a girlfriend.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Simon frowned. ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘That’s what you say now,’ Grandad said. ‘That’s how these things start off.’

  ‘Wednesday, then?’ asked Winnie. ‘That’s when we’re going to meet her properly, is i
t?’

  ‘You’ve already met her,’ Simon said. ‘It’s Kelly from the Exchange.’

  ‘The Exchange?’ said Grandad, baffled.

  ‘Oh, but it’s different, meeting her like this,’ Gran said. ‘Here, at home, having a nice tea. She’s a lovely girl, Ray. You might be alarmed at first. By the way she dresses and makes herself up…’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter with her?’ He darted a suspicious glance at Simon.

  ‘She’s one of these Gothics .. Winnie told him.

  ‘One of these what?’

  Gran shrugged, waving her book about. ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. She looks like she’s going to a funeral, or something.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just the style. Loads of the kids do it.’

  Grandad Ray looked completely lost. ‘Simon doesn’t. He dresses quite normal.’

  I do, thought Simon. So normal it’s boring and weird. Don’t all Goths flock together? Why would someone like Kelly want to hang around with me? Then another thought struck him. Maybe she’d want him to go Gothic as well. Surelv not.

  ‘So…’ Gran said, smiling broadly, and still a little mischievously. ‘You’ll want some fancy cakes and sandwiches for Wednesday, won’t you? And all the best china out…?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘I’m sure she won’t expect anything special…’

  And as soon as he said this, he knew it was wrong.

  That was something very particular to Kelly. And it was one of the reasons she unnerved and even scared him.

  Because she looked exactly as if she was expecting something special, all the time.

  Much later that evening Gran was boiling up a pan of milk for Grandad’s cocoa. Simon was despatched to the den in the garage to fetch him.

  ‘I don’t know why he always wants to be in that gloomy, draughty place,’ Winnie said.

  ‘I think he’s fed up with us reading every night,’ said Simon, looking as she watched the milk foaming and frothing, almost to the lip of the pan. ‘He said something about it the other night.’