Exchange

by Paul Magrs

  On Friday night Simon’s phone bleeped and Kelly had sent a message:

  Terrance is taking some convincing. I’ve explained what we need the cash for. He is thinking about it.

  Simon smiled. He liked the way Kelly never abbreviated herself when she wrote texts. She spelled out each word laboriously.

  ‘What’s this?’ Winnie said, watching him over the top of her novel. ‘Is this your Kelly, hm?’ She looked at him indulgently. ‘What are you two cooking up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said quickly. He didn’t want to tell Gran anything yet. Just in case the excursion didn’t happen. Next Friday. A whole week away. This time next week the literary lunch would be over and done with… He just had to make sure they could get there. But he didn’t like the sound of what Kelly was saying. She was having to convince Terrance. The Exchange owner didn’t believe that the magazines they had stolen were worth the price they wanted.

  But they had to be! After everything they’d gone through to get them out of the house! After betraying his grandad and all.

  As if on cue his grandad returned home at that point. He surveyed the living room blearily and grunted at the sight of Winnie and Simon, both holding novels, both under the glare of their reading lamps.

  ‘Can I get you a ham sandwich?’ asked Winnie, jumping up. ‘Do you want your cocoa, Ray?’

  ‘No,’ he said, crossing the room.

  ‘I’ve made some broth,’ she said. ‘I could warm it up…’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ he said, and then he was gone. Winnie sighed and gave a fake little laugh as she sat back in her armchair. ‘He’s off to that garage of his again.’

  Simon nodded, filled with dread. Surely his grandad had realised by now that his magazines were gone. When would he say something? What would he do?

  It was bright and freezing the next morning. Simon and his gran were togged up in scarves and hats and umpteen layers as they queued for the bus. Winnie was fussing over some metal contraptions she had bought to go over the soles of her boots, to prevent her slipping on the ice. They were digging into her feet, she claimed.

  They hadn’t seen anything of Ray that morning, but that wasn’t unusual on a Saturday. He always slept in, revelling in the undisturbed quiet of the bungalow on the day that Winnie and Simon took their trip on the bus.

  ‘Can you feel it in the air?’ she asked Simon, as the bus wound through the industrial estate outside Kelly’s town. ‘It’s all Christmassy. All of a sudden. It happens overnight. A different night each year.’ She grinned at him. ‘I woke up feeling all special.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’ He was thinking about his own surprises. He’d had a text from Kelly at nine o’clock that morning. It was oddly but thrillingly concise: Success!

  She had convinced Terrance to pay up. So they were going to do it. They were going to do this for his gran. It was going to work.

  Even without knowing of their plans, Winnie seemed buoyant and excited this morning. She claimed it was because she felt Christmassy (oh — he didn’t want to think about that yet), but he realised it was really because she’d be seeing Terrance in the Exchange. His gran was just about quivering with anticipation, clutching her shopping bag on the back seat of the bus.

  ‘You really like him, don’t you?’ Simon asked her.

  ‘Hm?’ She looked sideways at him, and realised who he meant. ‘Oh, now,’ she said. ‘Don’t go getting any silly ideas. He’s just a very nice friend. A proper old-fashioned gentleman.’

  ‘Kelly reckons he fancies you.’ Simon couldn’t resist mixing things.

  Winnie’s eyes flashed and then crinkled up with unalloyed pleasure. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I can’t say that anyone’s fancied me in about forty years! Fancy? Me! That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Not impossible, though,’ said Simon. ‘You’ve kept yourself smart. You’re still… pretty.’

  His gran was blushing, with two high spots of hot pink on her cheeks. ‘Well, I make an effort to look as nice as I can. Not like some of these old ladies. But really, Simon. I’m an old married woman… I’ve told you before. I’m past all of that.’ She mouthed the word ‘that’ very primly, as if it was the safest way to allude to a whole world of sensual temptations.

  ‘Rubbish,’ Simon laughed. ‘Terrance obviously doesn’t think so. He’s not past it, either.’

  ‘But he’s not got any arms!’ Winnie cried, starting to laugh. ‘I mean, what can you do with a man with no arms?’ Simon was amazed at her being so candid. ‘So you’ve thought about it!’ he accused.

  Immediately his gran clammed up. She looked ashamed.

  ‘Indeed I haven’t,’ she told him, and looked away, at the shabby houses and shops of the South Road, until they arrived at the stop closest to the Book Exchange.

  Once inside, as the consoling amber gloom settled around them, Simon watched his gran hold a whispered conversation with Terrance. Then Kelly slid up to him and stood at his elbow. She was like a spy at a rendezvous. She was loving the drama of all of this. She kissed him lightly on the check.

  ‘I’ve got them,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘These.’ She pushed three cardboard tickets into his hand. He grinned at her, knowing he didn’t have to look to see what they were. ‘Well done, Kelly.’

  She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘I had to talk him into it. He gave me the exact amount. I told him what we were doing. Well, look how he’s behaving around her. He’s so in love with her. He’d do anything to make her happy.’

  Simon gulped. In love with her? He narrowed his eves, watching Terrance walking Winnie along a wall of bookcases, sliding a particular volume out for her — expertly, with his stiff arms.

  ‘Have you told her yet?’ asked Kelly. ‘Have you told her what we’re taking her to?’

  Kelly was more excited about it than Simon was. ‘Not yet,* he said. ‘I wanted to wait till it was definite. I didn’t want to raise her hopes.’

  He told her that afternoon. After they had managed to drag themselves away from the Exchange and say their goodbyes to Kelly and Terrance.

  ‘See you on Friday, sunshine,’ Kelly hissed, touching his nose.

  ‘Sssh.’

  Winnie and Simon shared a pot of tea in a nearby cafe and that was when he told his gran about the literary lunch. He produced the tickets and laid them out. They were cream and embossed with gold: special as wedding imitations.

  Winnie was amazed and horrified.

  ‘Where did you get the money…?’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Simon said firmly.

  Winnie narrowed her eves.

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about the money. It’s all sorted out.’

  ‘But…’ she gasped. ‘But…’

  Simon laughed at her gawping expression. All around them the cafe was going about its everyday business. Steam was billowing out of the cappuccino machine; the waitress was noisily knocking coffee grounds into the bin. Latin dance music was vibrating through the wooden floors.

  ‘Ada Jones,’ said Winnie, shaking her head. ‘After all this time…’

  ‘We’re going to have a brilliant afternoon. The lunch menu is on the back of the tickets. It sounds gorgeous…’ Suddenly he was keen to stress the other aspects of the event next Friday: not just the reunion-with Ada part. Just in case that didn’t work out. He didn’t want that to be the be-all and end all of their day out.

  ‘Simon…’ said Winnie. ‘This is so thoughtful of you. I can’t believe…’ Her voice trailed away. Then she turned the colour of raspberry mousse. ‘Oh, but she wouldn’t want to see me again, would she? Just imagine… how awful it would be, if she doesn’t even remember me?’

  Simon moved to say something, but his gran was in a world of her own, roving over the possibilities. ‘Oh no, Ada has left all her poverty-stricken past life behind her, hasn’t she? Right behind her. She’s grand. She’s a famous lady now. What would she think? Her shameful past coming back to haunt her…’
Winnie fell quiet. Then she looked at Simon and giggled. ‘Thank you, Simon. It’s a delicious idea.’

  *

  Coming home that teatime in the early dark, Simon found that he was starting to feel Christmassy after all. It was hard to put into words. A rising sense of excitement, of optimism. A feeling that, if he could just get past these last few weeks of school, his ongoing sense of dread would dissipate: he could relax.

  All the way home he looked out of the black, shiny windows of the bus and counted Christmas trees in front rooms and felt a bit childish for doing it. It was what he had always done — in the back seat of his parents’ car as a kid. His mum had started him on the game — the running tally of Christmas trees — when they used to drive forty miles up the motorway to visit his grandparents.

  Winnie was reading out the menu on the back of the lunch tickets. ‘Look at all the choices,’ she said. ‘Melon balls or Scottish salmon. And look at the trimmings for the main course… Oh, and the desserts…!’ Then she looked at him sharply. ‘Is Terrance coming along?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘I didn’t think to invite him…’

  Winnie dismissed the thought. ‘There’s no reason why he should. I’m just being silly.’

  Simon hesitated. Part of him wanted to tell her how the Exchange owner had helped to make the trip possible, but he couldn’t do that.

  ‘What will I wear?’ she said. ‘Shall I splash out on something new? I’ll have to make a hair appointment. Rini will be booked solid with all the old ladies and their old folks’ parties…’

  Winnie spent the rest of the bus journey fretting happily like this.

  Their buoyant mood lasted until they got off the bus, walked across town and reached the end of their street.

  ‘I can smell something funny,’ Winnie said, instantly alert.

  ‘Me too,’ said Simon, sniffing.

  It was an almost homely smell, like woodsmoke. Like there would be a blazing hearth to welcome them home. Except that the bungalow only had a gas fire and radiators. And the blaze was in the back garden. It was dying down now, unattended, smouldering orange and sending out plumes of choking violet smoke.

  It was burning paper.

  Winnie and Simon hurried into the garden, waiting the dark, crackling air with their arms, staring appalled at the mass of blackened paperbacks and the glowing cinders that Grandad had left for them to see.

  ‘No,’ Simon whispered. ‘He wouldn’t.’

  Motes and smuts were still alight and floating around their heads, trying to land in their hair and on their clothes.

  Winnie stopped brushing them away as she stood there, dumbfounded at the sight of her books. They could see half—scorchecd pages with some type still legible amongst the ashes. Lurid paperback covers were curled and blackened and they, too, were being eaten up in the last of the blaze.

  ‘Ray!’ Winnie threw back her head and howled up into the smoke-darkened sky. ‘Ray!’

  They found him lying in the bed he shared with Winnie. All the white pillows and duvet and tangled sheets were blackened with soot that he’d dragged in on his clothes and shoes. He lay there shivering and coughing in his dirt. Simon took in the scene in a moment — noting the empty lager can on his bedside table, just as he had noticed the others in the living room and kitchen; just as he’d noticed the ransacked, depleted bookshelves.

  Winnie had become very calm and grim, Simon realised. He would have preferred it if she was furious and shrieking. His gran clenched her fists and glared coldly at Grandad in the bed. Grandad Ray was aware of their presence, even as he was wracked with another coughing fit; doubling up with it. His face, all filthy like that, was almost comical.

  ‘You stupid, stupid old man,’ Winnie said quickly. ‘What have you done?’

  Ray fell back flat on the mattress, wheezing heavily, as if the sheer force of Winnie’s stare was exhausting to him.

  ‘I haven’t burned them all,’ he said feebly. ‘Just…’

  ‘You’ve burned enough,’ Winnie said. ‘You’ve burned plenty. You stupid, stupid old man. Everything stinks. Everything is spoiled.’

  ‘I didn’t burn them all,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s enough,’ she said.

  ‘The fire got out of hand. I breathed in too much smoke. I had to come indoors and lie down. I’m sorry.’ He gasped. Simon flinched at the bubbling, choking noise in his chest. It sounded like a saucepan kept too long on the boil.

  ‘You could have killed yourself,’ said Winnie. ‘Messing about like that, drunk. You could have burned the whole place down. Do you realise that? We’d have had nothing then, do you hear me? Nothing!’ Then her suppressed fury finally broke and she was shaking with grief. ‘You could have gone and killed yourself,’ she sobbed. ‘You stupid, stupid old man.’

  Fifteen

  She sighed and took a very dainty sip of sherry. She was on to her third ‘medicinal’ sweet sherry by now, as she and Simon sat talking late into the night. ‘All I had, my only consolation… my one bit of freedom… was my books. And he knew that. He even envied them. He did! He resented the time I was off in my own world. And so he had to destroy them, didn’t he? He had to take that life of mine and set a light to it. Watch it go up in flames…’

  The smoke had wreathed itself through all the rooms of their home. It would be weeks before they would be rid of the acrid, heavy scent of scorched paper. It was in Simon’s clothes and his hair. As he sat listening to his gran and watching her upend the sherry glass into her mouth, he was conscious of the gaps on the bookshelves around them, and the one or two dropped books lying on the carpet. He had already checked out his own room and found that maybe a third of his own collection had gone. His grandad had grabbed up armloads, it seemed, quite randomly, with indiscriminate spite — and lugged them outside to feed the flames.

  Simon felt quite nonplussed at losing his books like this. It didn’t touch him as it might have done. He didn’t know why he felt so numb about it.

  Why had Grandad Ray done it? What had tipped him over into this extreme behaviour? It was brutal of him. Savage. It was the kind of thing that a desperate, drunk, lonely man would do. Our of revenge.

  Grandad Ray had found his magazines were missing, Simon realised. And he’d known that either Simon or Winnie had stolen them. And this is what he’d done in response.

  ‘All I had were my books,’ Gran was saying. ‘Mv only consolation.’ Suddenly she looked up guiltily at her grandson. ‘No, that’s not true. You’re my consolation, too, Simon. Just like your mother was.’ She set down her slender glass and blew her nose very noisily. ‘Now she’s gone, and so have my books.’ Winnie smiled wearily. ‘But I’ve still got you, haven’t I, lovely? I’ve still got you.’

  Simon felt awkward. He grinned and nodded but actually he was beginning to feel like he was looking at Winnie down the wrong end of a telescope. She seemed distant and dim and indistinct. He was tired and overwrought, hut with a sudden clarity of thought he realised that he was feeling farther and farther away from his grandparents and their world. Their decades-long squabbles and their petty’ behaviour and even acts as extreme as the burning of books it all seemed remote to him.

  He needed to get away from them. Soon. He would need to escape from their lives. He had no idea how he would do this, or where he might go.

  Kelly? Maybe she represented some possibility to him. The idea of escape? Of a proper, adult life — beyond the confines of his grandparents’ stymied relationship and their small, stuffy, now sooty bungalow.

  Would he run away somewhere to be with Kelly? Could that really happen?

  He looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It was after one in the morning. His gran had dozed off in her chair.

  No, he thought. His mind was suddenly very clear. He wouldn’t run off anywhere with Kelly. He wanted to feel that being with her was right. He would love for it to be like that. But it wasn’t, quite. He knew that now.

  He shook his gran gently awake
.

  ‘Winnie…?’

  She roused herself, wiping sherry from her lips with her cardigan sleeve. ‘Look at me. I’m like a blumming bag lady.’

  ‘Where will you sleep?’

  She scowled. ‘Not with him. He’s got all the sheets black.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll bed down on the settee,’ she said. ‘If you’ll fetch me a blanket.’

  ‘OK,’ Simon said.

  During the next week Grandad had to stay in bed, chastened and coughing. Meekly he submitted to his wife’s gruff care. He wouldn’t go to hospital to have his chest checked out. He was an old, old smoker, he said. He didn’t want them looking at his lungs. They’d be full of crackling twigs and dead leaves and tar. The doctor came round and listened to his back through a stethoscope and looked down his throat and asked Winnie terse questions, and she shrugged and replied non-committally.

  This was an old married couple, Simon thought. Just going about the routinised business of caring for each other; of tending after each other in sickness and old age. His gran simply had to forget about her sacrificed novels, if she wanted to go on living under the same roof as the old man. You could go mad bearing grudges, she told Simon. You just had to let these things go, in the end.

  She didn’t say much to Grandad, though. She cleaned and fed him while he lay recuperating in their bed — which was a startling white again. Winnie went quiet and didn’t even talk to Simon that much.

  ‘You still want to go, don’t you?’ he asked her, that Monday in the kitchen.

  ‘Hm?’ She was dozy in the daytime. She hadn’t been sleeping too well on the sofa.

  ‘You still want to go on Friday,’ he said, ‘… to the Literary Lunch…?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she gasped. ‘What do you think…? Why would I change my mind?’

  He didn’t know.