The Swap (2 page)

'The thing about reunions is that they bring out the old you.'

'So don't go.'

'But that's the point, I like the old me. I like the me that I was at school. Believe it or not, I was cool. In with the in-crowd. Comics gave me that. That's why I've stuck with them. But whereas it was cool at school it kind of gets less and less cool as you get older. To the point where it will, very soon I suspect, become ridiculous. And then what do I do? Go for a job at a bank or somewhere, and they'll ask: 'Experience?' and I'll say: 'Adding up the cash register after selling a
Fantastic Four Number Six
.'

'What condition?'

'Never mind.'

'It's a big price difference. I mean if it was mint then, to be honest, I would think any bank would be impressed.' Josh spluttered into his drink. 'And I guess for you it's especially poignant, going back.'

'Why?'

'Because that was a time when you weren't bitter and twisted.'

'What the fuck do you mean?' Harvey demanded, knowing exactly what he meant. 'Who's bitter and twisted?'

'You are, about the
Superman One
. But you didn't know it was valuable then, so it's the one time in your life you weren't thinking about what you might have had.'

Harvey looked for a while into the bottom of his glass. It was an occasional habit of Josh's to speak a devastating truth unexpected and unlooked-for. Harvey had once taken, very briefly, to wearing a cape to work. It had been long and black with a red velvet lining. As he walked from the tube one morning he had caught sight of his reflection in a shop window and had tried hard to place what he saw. When he arrived, Josh was waiting outside the shop and Harvey had asked him what he thought. 'You look like the Frog Prince,' Josh had said simply. And Harvey, for all he had told him to go fuck himself, knew at once that he was right; and the cloak had been quietly put at the back of the cupboard against the unlikely event that he was ever invited to a fancy dress party. And Josh was right again: that time was special because he hadn't carried the burden that he always denied he carried now. That time did appear somehow blessed and he always seemed to be looking for some way back to that. All roads for a long time had seemed to lead backwards. So he told Josh to go fuck himself.

'So maybe you'll go back and you'll meet Bleeder there.' Josh smiled encouragingly, making Harvey grimace, not least because it saddened him to think that his shop assistant knew this boy's playground nickname from his schooldays well enough to use it in conversation without pausing to think. They had had this conversation before. But not for a while and Josh was suddenly animated. 'I mean, he hasn't been back to any of the other reunions, has he? But this one is twenty years. People get more sentimental as they reach middle age, maybe he'll feel the time is right.' He spoke with all the wisdom of the young and Harvey shook his head, wincing slightly at the words 'middle age'.

'I doubt it,' he said. 'You really don't listen, do you? Bleeder had a shit time at school, I've told you that. Every day of every term he had a shit time. Everyone took the piss, all the time. That's how it was. Why would he want to come back and see everybody again? He'd have to be mad.'

'Well, why did you pick on him?' Josh blushed, making Harvey wonder, not for the first time, if perhaps he had suffered at school.

'Because he was odd. I've told you before. He was weird and everybody knew it. He didn't have any clothes other than these sort of weird mismatches from the charity shop. And his hair was cut short by his mum. And he talked funny, sort of high-pitched and freaky, like a kind of girlish voice. And he wasn't into anything. He didn't know music, or comics, or sport, and, of course, he didn't stand a chance with the girls 'cause of, well, all of the above. And to top it all he was ginger. And gingers are by definition fair game. In fact, in some parts of the world they are legally hunted.' He sipped the last drops from his glass and noticed that Josh wasn't smiling. 'Look, he took shit, OK? Every school has one and he was ours. I didn't like it, didn't do it much, didn't encourage it in others. If I thought about it, which I didn't very often, then I thought it was harsh. But it happened. And if it had happened to you would you go back to see all those lovely people who made your life hell for a get-together? No, of course you wouldn't. So that's why he's never there.'

He spoke clearly and with confidence, but in his mind there was already forming a picture of Bleeder standing in the school hall where the reunions always happened. He was looking a bit downtrodden and sad and pathetic but Harvey was going up to him and shaking his hand. And Bleeder was smiling and saying there was no hard feelings and then he was telling Harvey: 'Oh that old comic, oh no we burned that years ago' and the two of them were having a laugh about those strange times and that strange day of the swap and that funny length of plastic that Bleeder was carrying and Harvey was saying 'If only we had that comic now we'd both be rich' and they were laughing and shaking their heads over the inequities of fate and then it was over and Harvey was getting on with things, getting on with his whole life, in fact, without thinking about something as pathetic as this all the time.

That it was such a fully realised fantasy sweeping so swiftly through Harvey's mind is explained by the fact that it had done so many, many times before. 'I'd love to see him,' he said meditatively now, 'just talk it over with him once. I've thought about phoning him a million times. Or phoning his mum anyway, getting a number for him, assuming he isn't still living at home.' He sniggered before remembering that Josh lived with his mother. 'Getting hold of him and just having a chat, you know. Seeing what he's up to, how he's doing ...'

'Seeing if he's still got the
Superman One
. Seeing if you can have it back'. Josh was not in forgiving mood.

'No. Well, yeah, why not? Who knows what people keep, you know? Half the world doesn't know the value of what it's got in its attic. I've probably got a Rembrandt, or a rare stamp or some other junk. He might have a
Superman One
. I'd love to just check.'

'And rip him off. Offer him 50p for it, say you want it back for sentimental reasons. And then flog it for a couple of hundred grand. Something like that?'

'Er, yeah.' Harvey didn't like it when people he considered intellectually inferior to himself read his mind. 'Something like that.' And he laughed, but without much enthusiasm.

'Well, why don't you just ring him then? If his mum still lives in Cornwall why not just get her number from the directory and ring her up. For all you know he committed suicide as a result of your cruelty and you've been dreaming of ripping him off all these years for nothing.'

This was so outrageously over the top that Harvey snorted with laughter and Josh was forced to join him. 'It might happen,' he said, trying to remain angry. 'Anything might have happened in twenty years, you don't know.'

'Yeah, he might have had twenty years of therapy and be ready to forgive me. Maybe he'll even give me the comic to prove he's cured.'

'So why don't you, you bloody git?'

'Why don't I ring him?' Harvey was sniggering in anticipation. 'I'll tell you why, shall I? I don't ring him because I can't remember his fucking name. All I know is that he was Bleeder the odd boy.' He laughed so loud he caused heads to turn in the pub and drowned out Josh's spluttery cackle. 'Oh Jesus,' Harvey said, 'I really ought to remember his name, after what we put him through.'

On the journey down from London, Harvey again tried to remember his name. He could see the pale, unhappy face before him but all he could think of was the odd boy. Bleeder the odd boy. It brought a vague and, in truth, fleeting feeling of guilt that he couldn't come up with any more than that. In the carriage of the 10.05 from Paddington to Penzance he prepared with what he considered military precision (but what was actually closer to civilian sloth). Lounging with a pen in one hand and a fake-leopard-skin-covered writing pad – one pound for two from Quidbusters, Lewisham – in the other, he planned his past. Josh's suggestion of lying had impressed him and, once he had decided to attend the reunion, he had spent some time toying with mysterious women friends, unexpected side careers, and even, for a dangerous moment, MI5. However, he had settled, as Josh had suggested, on a sense of heightened reality. Nothing too unlikely, just a mention of other departments at the shop; buying trips – actually to Bristol and Manchester – extended, more by implication than direct statement, to include New York and Vancouver; Josh multiplying, splitting amoeba-like into a multitude of assistants; hints about cars, property. Harvey jingled the keys in his pocket and thought for a while about the house in Hampstead they might belong to. He really could picture it: nothing too flashy, one of those cottagey jobs up by the park. Was he married? No, that was too much. But he was involved. Kind of in love: who wouldn't love her? But he wasn't sure he was ready. How do you ever know for sure? That was his problem. He actually chuckled out loud at the trickiness of the situation: how could a man in his position ever be really sure someone better wouldn't come along? She wanted kids, but, you know, he wanted to wait until he could see something of them, and that meant waiting till the pressure was off, and that could be a long wait. As the train entered a tunnel he found his own reflection looking back at him in the window. He saw the shaved head – where once dark hair had been tied back in a ponytail – shaved, not to look like David Beckham so much as to stop him looking like his dad as it fell out of its own accord. He saw the stomach bulge underneath the black T-shirt with StanTheManLee written across it in green. He did the sigh. It was hard when people only saw you once every few years. How could that be anything but a punishment? The only consolation was that it was mutual. He thought for a moment about old Rob's battle with cancer and then hated it when he found himself smiling. Shit, that was not how he'd meant to end up. And that was the problem, of course: this was all about how you'd ended up, but he never felt like he'd ended anywhere really. He always felt, somehow, that he was about to begin.

And that took the guilt about forgetting Bleeder's name away. It was all so distant now, so meaningless. Why should he remember something from that far back? Who he used to be was disappearing into the image in the glass, as if he could see the person he had once been fleeting away from him in the racing landscape. What did it matter what Bleeder's real name was?

*

'Charles Odd.' The man in the smart suit – rather too smart for these surroundings – held out his hand and Harvey shook it with wonder in his eyes.

'How are you?' Harvey felt the hand in his, firm and dry. The voice was strong, rich, without a trace of Cornwall in it.

How do we recognise people? It's an unanswered question. Harvey had once read an article on psychology that said we plot the face like a computer scanner, remembering the tiniest nuances of singularity. Well, he had scanned this face long ago and it was fixed. He had sighted it from across the floor where he stood surrounded by most of the old crowd: Jack, who had got into heroin for a while after college but now was clean and living in Wales with his 'old lady'; Rob, who played lower league football for three years after school and then did a bit of coaching and now, following cancer treatment, worked in a sports shop in Ealing . . . ('We should get together, H, I'd like to see your shop . . .' Slight panic there, partly at the idea of someone witnessing the reality of his carefully constructed fantasy life, and partly at being called H again – a name that was so cool it hurt at school, but which now made him think of that twat out of Steps); Susan, who used to go out with Jack but who was now married to a man in the navy who was away a lot (Harvey noticed Jack look at her with a mixture of nostalgia and possibility); and Steve, who'd stayed in town, stayed in little old St Ives all this time, and ran a beach shop. That had led to the usual humorous remarks: 'Not far to come then, Steve?'; 'Well, you've spread your wings, you must have flown at least two hundred yards,' etc, jokes which were genuinely funny at that first get-together, fifteen years ago, which was a less formal affair when everyone was still optimistic, and when the town seemed like a deadly snare rather than something troublingly like what they were looking for.

And the man whose face he'd scanned all those years ago had come over and smiled. 'It's Harvey, isn't it? H? I'm sure I remember that face.' And Harvey had swallowed, like a child meeting a policeman, and had grinned and felt a ludicrous blush spread over his cheeks. 'Er, yeah, and I know you ...'

'Charles Odd. I was in your class, actually, though I don't think we moved in the same circles, did we?' He laughed. 'It's good to see you though. How's things?'

Harvey wanted to scream. Indeed, he felt some sort of cry welling up inside and had to actively repress it. Bleeder. Bleeder Odd: not just odd but Odd. Fuck, he should have remembered that. Bleeder was here. Exactly as he had dreamed it. As he had seen it in his mind's eye. Except here he was dapper and smiling, not the shuffling, miserable deadbeat that Harvey had created. But here he was. A man he had thought about every day of his adult life. And never without regret and desire, pity and self-pity, guilt and bitterness, avarice and anger. Here was that face: the pinched eyes grown clear: the long, pointed nose, drawn back by the fleshing of the cheeks: the narrow, frightened mouth, full-lipped and open to show perfect teeth in an almost constant smile. All the singularity altered, yet recognition was instant and indubitable. Harvey tried to focus on psychology. He couldn't take much else in.

'This is my first time back in St Ives for ages,' the clear voice said as if telling him something small and of little interest, not something he had wondered about for twenty years. 'I don't get down much and I'm not so sure about reunions, it's a funny business, isn't it, meeting up like this? But this time I happened to be here anyway so I thought I'd drop in.' He glanced round with polite interest at the school assembly hall, taking in the long passageway that ran off it where the boys' toilets were: toilets in which Harvey knew for a fact Bleeder had been beaten senseless more times than he could remember. Harvey felt he was inhabiting a dream. Like fantasising all your life about meeting Lou Reed and when you finally do finding that he chats about soft furnishings. He hadn't really ever fixed in his mind what they would talk about, except of course for the
Superman One
. But he had assumed it would be significant, emotional, meaningful, that it would matter. Now here he was, here was Bleeder, and he just happened to be here and was exhibiting every sign of finding it a bit dull and of preparing to leave. 'Have you been before?' Bleeder asked politely.

'Er, yeah, yeah once or twice.' Looking for you. Only looking for you.

'And are they always like this?'

'Like what?'

'Well . . . a bit sad?'

'Mmm. I guess so.' Harvey could feel the top of his head beginning to lift, as if his brain was about to make its own way out of the situation. He put his hand up and scratched hard.

'So, what are you up to now?' This was a question that he and the old crowd had actively and specifically banned when they came back for that first ever get-together. It was sort of a joke, so now they said it with irony and it actually meant 'this is boring, let's move on' sort of thing. But now Harvey said it and realised that it was The Question, it was what he had wanted to ask every day for two decades.

'Oh, I do a bit of work in the City.' Bleeder smiled. 'Maths was always my thing, I guess.' No it wasn't, you didn't have a thing. You never had a thing.

'Yeah, I remember.'

'So I set up a little company a while ago and it worked out quite well. I sold out last year, but I still do some consultancy work, a few days a week, here and in New York. It keeps me busy, without the stress.' He smiled again and Harvey found himself smiling back. He reached desperately for his pockets and remembered that it was no-smoking this year for the first time. He also remembered his leopard-skin notebook from Quidbusters, might Bleeder have one too?

'Really, the City, cool. So finance, huh? Interesting.' It wasn't quite what he'd planned to say, but it was as good as anything else.

'Yes, mostly at Reiser and Watts.' Bleeder produced a card and handed it to him. 'Do you know them?'

'Um, no, I just ...'

'. . . or perhaps you're not in finance?'

'No, no not finance.'

'OK.' Bleeder glanced round the room as if looking for someone more interesting to talk to. 'So, what are you in?'

'Comics.' Harvey found his cigarettes and got the packet out. If he couldn't smoke he could damn well fiddle with the box a bit. Attached to the packet, as if melded by his bodily emissions, was one of his own cards, with a picture of Betty Boo on it and his address. He passed it back.

Bleeder was laughing. Bleeder was laughing at him. The realisation of how far this was from the fantasy picture he had painted was enough to make him want to join in.

'Comics?' Bleeder was gazing at the card.

'Yeah, funny really.' Harvey tried to smile. 'I just sort of carried on being interested after school.'

'Jesus, yes, you were the comic king, weren't you? Always swapping and bartering. You were a real wheeler-dealer. You should have ended up in the City really.' He laughed again and Harvey felt his scalp give another skip. Always swapping? Christ, do you really have no idea?

'Er, yeah, so I just sort of stuck with it. Stick to what you're good at.' He made a vague phrase, for no reason discernible to him. 'I've got a shop, in London, in Old Street.' He should have added something about departments and assistants and foreign trips, but somehow it got lost.

'Right.' Bleeder nodded and gave a longer, more searching glance around the room. 'Well, I guess if you like something ...'

'Exactly.' And Harvey saw his chance. He could just ask. So much build-up, twenty years of build-up was making it harder than it needed to be. He could simply ask straight out and be done with it. It would be over. Unexpectedly an enormous rush of adrenalin shot up his spine and sealed his mouth shut. If I ask it will be over. If I ask I will have to hear an answer. He looked down and saw that the cigarette packet was trembling in his hand, trembling so much that the cellophane wrapper that he had left round the box was making little crinkling sounds. He raised his head and took a deep breath.

'Oh, there he is.' Bleeder was looking past him at a crowd gathered in the corner where the bar was. 'I've got to have a word.' And before Harvey could stop him, before another word could escape him, Bleeder had moved off into the crowd. Harvey found he was panting as if he had been running. And he wanted to run, to race after Bleeder, grab him by the shoulders. He had been so close to a new life, a new start. As he stood breathing heavily and pushing the cigarette packet in and out of the cellophane he looked at the group by the bar. Bleeder had joined it and was talking to an old man Harvey didn't recognise. Could he just go over? Demand that they continue the conversation? But he needed Bleeder alone. Perhaps he could drag him bodily outside. Who was that he was talking to? What could be more important than this conversation?

Rob and Steve came over.

'Bleeeeeder!' Rob hissed. 'Having a nice chat, H?'

'Mmm, well, yeah . . .' Harvey was still gazing after Bleeder, as if watching a departing unicorn. 'Who is that?' he asked. 'Talking to him, the old bloke?'

'That's Mr Simes,' both Steve and Rob answered together. 'Taught me physics,' Steve added, 'but also took maths. Top-stream maths. Not our class. Out of our league. Swot division. Hey, did Bleeder have your comic? The one that's going to make you rich?' Sometimes Harvey regretted his openness with his friends.

'Er no. Don't think so . . . Was Bleeder in the top stream?' He moved the conversation on quickly to a point that caused him genuine surprise. 'I thought he was, well—'

'Just there to be kicked?' Rob finished for him. 'He was, he liked being kicked. But occasionally, just for a change, he did maths. Not much of a change really. I'm not sure I wouldn't have preferred the beatings myself. Touch and go.'

'Simes liked the maths swots,' Steve added. 'Bleeder was probably his pet. Kept him in a basket in the corner, fed him on bones.'

Harvey realised they were sniggering and forced a smile. 'How old are you again?' he asked. This was another regular phrase, again getting less funny as the years passed.

'Yeah, but he's Bleeder, H,' Steve said, grinning. 'He's Bleeeeeeder.'

'I know.' Harvey found a sharp note in his voice as he said it. 'I am fully aware of that.'

'Uh-oh, sense of humour failure. You need a drink, mate.' Rob patted him on the back and moved off towards the bar, which consisted of a long table with many plastic cups full of warm white wine on it.

'We all need a drink.' Steve followed Rob down the room, leaving Harvey watching Bleeder with Zen-like focus. The old man he was talking to was hunched in a suit that could only belong to a retired teacher, grey and stained by a thousand chalk accidents. Mr Simes. Harvey tried to remember if he had been taught by Mr Simes at all. Perhaps he could go over and join in the conversation, mention algebra, for instance, or fractions. He didn't remember much else from maths and he didn't think he'd ever had Mr Simes. Once he would have known without having to think. Bleeder was animated now, waving his arms. People in the group were glancing round; looks of vague surprise that anyone could talk excitedly about anything at a reunion seemed to flicker across polite smiles.