The Swap (6 page)

'Is that you, dear?' The voice seemed to come from a dream of another world, another life that he had once had.

'No, it's your secret lover.' His own voice, too, sounded uncanny.

His mother chirruped happily, 'Come and have a chat, Harvey. I'm just brewing a pot of tea.'

'Yeah, I'll be down in a minute.' He ran to the stairs. Denim jacket, buttoned over bare flesh, was not a suitable sight for his mother. Nor were his sodden socks. Nor was the bloody bundle he carried in his arms.

'Don't just disappear, will you, darling? We want to see you.'

'No, Mum, I'll just grab a quick shower.' That used to work.

'Oh good idea, love, I'll put the immersion on, although you may have to wait for it to heat up completely but if you're only in there for a few minutes you might be all right, I'm not sure if your father . . .'

Harvey left this nuisance to continue by itself and headed for his room. The bundle he put into a carrier bag and placed beside his bed. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. 'Jesus Fucking Christ,' he said very slowly. Carefully he removed the jacket and laid that on the floor. He took off his socks and put them in the carrier bag and then slid it under the bed. After a few moments he made his way to the bathroom and ran the shower. It was cold but he stood under it anyway and scrubbed himself, picking and picking at his fingernails. When he was clean he went back to the bedroom, shut the door and lit a cigarette: the first since the nightmare had begun. Never in human history had that particular mixture of carcinogenic material and nicotine tasted so good. He dragged the smoke into his lungs as if it was feeding him, as if it was nourishment. Eventually he moved to the chest of drawers and found another black T-shirt distinguishable from the first only to a trained expert in comic imagery, and got dressed.

'So, what have you been up to today? Nothing dodgy I hope.' His father was in jocular mood and Harvey was not sure that he could cope.

'No, just having a bit of a look around.'

'Well, yes, you've probably forgotten the place, you haven't been down for so long.'

'Mmm.' Harvey had the newspaper and was pretending to read it, but as usual with his father this didn't seem to reduce the unwanted conversational gambits.

'I hope you have left my car as you found it?' Harvey ignored this altogether so his father moved on to more general topics. 'Did you see the new development by the seafront: twenty-two new flats they're putting in. It's going to be wonderful for the area.' Like most country people, Harvey's parents approved enthusiastically of anything that would uglify their area or ruin the environment.

'Oh yes, they'll be right on the sea, perfect,' his mother joined in. 'It'll do the town so much good.'

'Mmm.' The newspaper was a local one and led its front page with a boy-scout jamboree. Harvey couldn't help feeling that tomorrow's edition might be rather more eye-catching.

'So, you just wandered about, did you? Didn't see any of your disreputable friends, I hope?'

'Donald! I'm sure Harvey's friends aren't disreputable, or ... well ... not all of them.'

'That Jack Cranshaw is very disreputable, was when he was young and still is. Got into drugs and all sorts, didn't he, Harvey?'

'Er, yeah, I guess.'

'Totally worthless sort of character. Now he comes down every few months and sponges off his parents. He should be a parent himself by now and instead he's living like a feckless teenager with some girl in Wales.' Like most country people, Harvey's parents were also fascists. Harvey did the sigh and found it oddly satisfying. However unpleasant sitting talking to his parents might be, at least he wasn't cleaning dried blood off a carpet with a corpse in the cellar and possibly a psychopathic killer in the house. And frankly, this was a comfort. That sound had stayed with him. Had he really heard it? The garden had been dark . . . and he had been about dark business. Perhaps he had imagined the click of a door closing. Perhaps the breeze through the kitchen door . . . but there had been no breeze. He shifted uneasily in his chair and reached for his cigarettes.

'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.

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 understood 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.