The Swap (16 page)

They met in a Pizza Express. This wouldn't have been Harvey's first choice for what his genitals were characterising as one of the more important evenings of his life. He was not without romantic nous and had some insight into how women thought. He would have preferred somewhere intimate and personal; somewhere that they could perhaps call their special place; somewhere that they would always go back to on their anniversary and point out fondly to their grandchildren. Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to think of anywhere. So they met in the weirdly unreal, post-modern splendour of the Islington Pizza Express. The way Harvey was feeling perhaps it wasn't such an inappropriate choice.

'You look terrible.' Maisie had taken his hand as he stood up for an awkward peck on the cheek. The kiss had been mistimed and he had bashed the side of her head with his chin.

'Oh, thanks.' They both sat down, with Harvey attempting to retain her hand as they did so, almost knocking over the rare and unlikely foreign flower with which the table was inevitably adorned. He let go and sat heavily.

'I mean, you look worried. Are you worried?'

'Oh no, I'm fine. Not a care in the world.' Harvey shook his head and closed his eyes, then remembering he wasn't speaking to Josh, but to the woman that parts of his anatomy had been dreaming about almost unceasingly, he opened them again and sighed. 'Sorry. I don't mean to be mean, yeah? But I'm having a bad day.'

'Another one?' Her smile reached across the table and her hand came with it to reclaim his. 'Tell me,' she said. So he did.

'Shit, OK, so now we know where we are.' They had ordered pizzas and were sharing a mixed salad and garlic bread in preparation for their arrival. And Harvey, while telling her about the stain in the car, had revisited a little of his earlier sorrow. He pronged a moody cherry tomato and shook his head.

'I know where I am: in bloody Reading Gaol, that's where. Bang to rights and doing stir. Bastards.'

Maisie was not sure who this last expletive was directed at but decided that it was probably better not to ask. 'No, now you will have to tell the truth and that is a good thing, Harvey. If I was you I would go to Jarvin first thing tomorrow. How long does it take for them to analyse a stain? Probably a day or two, so you'll have plenty of time to go and sort everything out.' She saw the look on Harvey's face. 'I'll come with you if you like,' she said gently. 'It really is for the best.'

'They'll arrest me.' Harvey could feel the tears from the cleaning session still hanging in his vocal cords. 'They'll put me in a cell and hold me. They won't let me go once I tell them. Jesus, I'm so stupid.'

'Well, perhaps . . .'

'I don't mean that. I mean with Bleeder. Why didn't I talk to him when I had the chance? I keep thinking of that. When I saw him at Steve's party he wanted to tell me something, I know he did. Stuff that I don't know about his mother and about the past. Jarvin thinks the murder is linked to the past and to Bleeder. He obviously hasn't told the police very much.' He stopped and bit his lip. 'I just wish I could talk to him, just get everything straight in my head. Because they will lock me up, Maisie, you must see that. If I go in there and tell Jarvin that I was at Mrs Odd's house, and that I broke the back window, and that I saw the body and that I wiped up all the fingerprints, and then add, "Oh, but by the way, I'm not the murderer," he is never in a million years going to just say, "Oh fine, well thanks for popping in." He is going to chuck me in a cell and give me a small bucket to piss in and a bar of soap to protect my honour in the showers. Shit. I need to talk to Bleeder.'

'All right.' She spoke with sudden authority and took him by surprise. 'We'll go down there tomorrow. I'd been thinking about it anyway, actually. You should speak to Charles, he obviously wanted to talk to you. And I'd like to set eyes on him myself. If this is the centre of our lives and he is the pivotal figure, I'd at least like to know what he looks like. We'll get this straightened out.' She said it with such certainty that Harvey was moved.

'That's really kind,' he said softly and she smiled at him. 'But I'm not seeing my mum and dad!' he added suddenly with real vehemence. 'And I'm not fucking staying at their house.'

'No, OK, we'll find a B. & B.' She smiled. Harvey grinned back and his genitals gave a little shimmy of delight.

After the pizza there was wine. There had been some during the pizza, of course, but not enough for Harvey to attempt romance. But once the eating was over and the decision was made, he was able to let his genitals really take over the planning of the rest of the evening. He ordered a bottle of red and drank it quickly and efficiently and ordered another, so that within a fairly short space of time he was able to worry about the garlic bread he'd eaten earlier and just hope that she had had her share, because he was kissing her over the table. She tasted as clean as a broad bean, how did women do that? He wasn't sure what he tasted like but when he went to the bathroom, he found that his teeth had turned a nasty sort of glistening purple colour. They were making good progress on the second bottle by that time and Harvey had been doing more than his fair share to keep up the pace. He wasn't really a wine drinker, except at parties where he would drink anything. But these days he went to fewer parties than in his youth and beer had rather taken over. It is, of course, possible for a man in his mid-thirties to go up to the bar in a straight pub and order a glass of red wine for himself but Harvey had never actually seen it done. When examining his teeth in the bathroom, he noticed that he was also rather red in the face. Kissing did make him red, he knew that of old. Kissing and tennis. When he returned she was still there, which while hardly unexpected was not necessarily a sure thing in his experience.

They kissed some more and then came his least favourite bit of any romantic evening, when they got their coats and paid the bill and didn't look at each other's faces in case they caught the wrong sort of expression there.

'Er, shall we get a cab, or are you heading straight off?' Harvey had used this question before. It wasn't perfect but it did allow some suggestiveness without crudity and some freedom without rejection. It prevented, in fact, the worst scenario, where he said 'please' and she said 'no' and then they had to make conversation for half an hour while they waited for two separate taxis to arrive.

'I'd like to see where you live.'

He wondered if she'd used that before too, because as far as he was concerned it was just about perfect.

'Cool. We'll do the taxi thing, yeah?' And they got one almost at once, which was in itself pretty miraculous, and the driver was only mildly sarcastic and bitter when Harvey mentioned their destination. And they kissed some more in the back with the driver talking about West Ham, and apart from one moment when Harvey had to pause to correct him about Bobby Zamora, the journey was unusually trouble free. And when he surfaced occasionally for air Harvey saw that the Old Kent Road had never looked so beautiful, nor so exotic and strange, as if he had left his usual bubble existence and was experiencing how someone else might see south-east London: the eyes of someone from another dimension perhaps, who had seen it before but never quite like this. This idea so caught his imagination and he became so involved in the visualisation of how it might work as a comic, that he almost forgot to kiss her.

Deptford isn't lovely but Harvey reminded himself that she had been living in Croydon and relaxed. He opened his flat door with something of a flourish: no point in doing all that cleaning if you didn't show off a bit. The kitchen he'd spent extra time on, even going so far as to throw out the milk cartons and beer cans that he usually stored on the window ledge for decorative purposes, so he led her there.

'Er, you know, there's not much to it.' He saw a certain something in her face. Was that disappointment? 'You were expecting something a little bigger, yeah? Well, I kind of live at work mostly. I just need a place to crash really so this is like my crash pad, and . . .' She laid a hand on his arm and he stopped. For some reason he had started trying to talk like a Miami drugs baron. He was even beginning to work in a little of the accent.

'I like it, Harvey.' She said his name to bring him back to earth, or at least to the right side of the Atlantic. He nodded and felt the red wine swoosh from the back of his head to the front.

'Er ...'

'But I just don't see anything of you.'

'Oh right, yeah, it's just a place to crash.' He stopped again. 'I guess I haven't really done much with it.' He tried his own voice instead. 'I'm not here that much.'

'How long have you lived here?'

'Um, well,' shit, 'about fifteen years.'

'Fifteen years? Harvey!' She walked through into the pine-fresh lounge and once he'd put the kettle on he followed.

'I know, I haven't really been here that much.' He said it again but even to him it sounded hollow.

'What can I learn about you from this flat?' She looked around interested, as if playing a favourite game.

'Er, well, not much probably.' Jesus, what did she expect, cushions and cut flowers?

'The posters of course are distinctive.' She examined a
Tomb Raider
– with Lara swinging from a rope – as if looking at some rare collector's item. It was a generic poster, really commonplace now since Lara had got so popular. He should have taken it down and gone for one of the Japanese ones: same graphic but with Japanese writing . . . bit less common . . . his brain sort of came to a standstill. He hadn't got what she wanted. Perhaps she hoped for Impressionist prints or something, but he'd never really got on with art. 'I know a lot about art, but I don't know what I like.' That was his favourite line when asked, which wasn't very often, and this was fortunate because it was entirely untrue. He had done Art History for A level, but that had mostly been eighteenth-century English art, and all he could remember was a lot of horses and really weird trees. If he hadn't fancied the girl who sat next to him he might have swapped to cookery. What was her name? And why didn't she ever come to the reunion?

Women like men who like art, that was a truth that he had learned down the years. It had almost got him laid when he was seventeen but it seemed to be coming back to haunt him. Maisie shook her head, as if slightly disillusioned, and moved on to his records and CDs. Harvey felt a welling of relief: this was an area he was more at home with. But of course women don't care what music you like, that was another truth. Even harder to bear than the art one. And it wasn't that he wanted her to take in all that he'd got in one glance. What mattered was what he didn't have: Elton John and U2 and George Michael and all that other shite that people who don't like music always owned. This was where he was revealing his character: in what he hadn't got in his record collection. But she didn't stop to consider. She just smiled at the amount and moved on to the DVDs. Here Harvey had rather let himself go. Deptford Market had a healthy trade in slightly suspicious DVDs and he had begun collecting several years ago. From a first, primal choice:
Blade Runner Director's Cut
, through the
Die Hard
box set and right up to the
Matrix
interactive edition, he had, he felt, found a cross section of modern cinema to rival . . . well, anyone else he knew.

So it was with a certain sinking of the heart that he heard her words: 'Wow, you sure like action films, Harvey, and what is it with you and science fiction? You're not an alien, are you?'

This last comment was especially dispiriting to Harvey as it wasn't actually the first time that he'd heard it. Indeed, for a time in his twenties when the shop was getting started he had moved in a circle of friends, mostly from Camden, who were, frankly, too cool for him and the suggestion that he was an alien who had recently landed had become something of an in-joke. On his birthday one year they had all arrived wearing deely-boppers and had given him presents themed around space, including a silver hat to protect him from rays from other galaxies. They had not remained his friends for long, and the last he heard the coolest of them all, a terribly witty gay man with impeccable taste, named Peter, was working as a supply teacher at a comprehensive in Stafford. But it was as close as he had ever been to feeling like Bleeder Odd and that realisation made him close his eyes for a moment and wince.

'Hey, are you OK?' She came over and put the back of her hand to his forehead. 'Did I say the wrong thing?'

'Yeah, no, no problem. Just, you know. I don't like being called an alien.'

'OK.'

He could sense that she was trying not to giggle and he frowned the more. 'It's kind of a sore spot.'

'I see. Does it happen a lot?' The giggle made its way out and he felt his shoulders go up and despite himself he gave a little snort of amusement.

'Yes, actually.' They both snorted in sync and then she moved into his arms in such a slinky, sensual sort of way that she was almost being satirical, but not quite. He kissed her and she let him and then smiled and said, 'Mmm, hello' in a way that made his genitals awaken and begin to plan ahead.

'Let's er . . .' He tried to explain what his groin was saying but it's a hard language to translate.

'Do you have a bath?'

The question was so unexpected that Harvey was jolted into articulacy: 'Er, yeah, in the bathroom.' He pointed to make the position clear.

'Come on then, show me.'

So he showed her his spotless bathroom, and she ran the taps and found some bath foam to pour under the hot water, just like in a proper person's house. Admittedly it was Thomas the Tank Engine bathfoam, which came with a free game where you pressed buttons to make Thomas go round a track . . . but it was a genuine bathroom product. The fact that the bathroom now smelled heavily of strawberry bubblegum seemed all to the good. She then exclaimed aloud and ran off to the sitting room, returning with three fat little candles from her bag, which she claimed were meant to be a present for Lisa. But she sat them on the corners of the bath and he lit them with his fag matches, and then she turned off the light and made him a stranger in his own bathroom. How did women do that: transform somewhere into somewhere else in a minute? The water pressure in South London is quite low so it took some time for the bath to fill but he made up for that by kissing her. And at the end of one kiss, she grabbed the back of his T-shirt and peeled it up over his head. Harvey felt a powerful desire to fight her off and drag it back down. His stomach hadn't looked too good in the clear light of a Sunday afternoon, but the candlelight and the steam, he realised, would give many things a genuinely sexy glow. Would it work for his stomach? He wasn't entirely convinced, but vague memories of other romantic evenings from the past brought the thought that if he allowed her to remove one item of his then he could do one in return. He stepped back and sucked in his breath as hard as he could: first impressions last, and then reached out for her. She was wearing a tassly, beaded sort of shirt with buttons that came down to her cleavage and he fiddled with the buttons and then fearing that he might wait too long just sort of grabbed the bottom and heaved. It came up and he could hear her giggling and she seemed to be about to ask him to stop so he pulled harder and she emerged, rather red in the face, but with a pretty smile, from underneath.