The Swap (4 page)

The road was eerily familiar. Tired bare trees led the eye from the end of a row of cheap prefabs directly past the house, as though the planners had intentionally wanted it not to be noticed. Harvey could see their point. The estate had encroached a little more perhaps. A few extra buildings, but indistinguishable from those that had marked the end of the estate in his day. There were even some boys riding their bikes up and down the road, using the kerb as a mini-jump to perform wheel spins. The boys gave Harvey a look-over and passed some inaudible but apparently hilarious remark, and then carried on. None of them was singing. Harvey was glad of that.

The house itself sat with its same grim disinterest back from the road behind a garden that had the look of somewhere that had been beaten up. It was as though someone had stepped into the matted nature and slashed about them with a scythe until there was a semblance of desolate order. Harvey stood uncertain outside the peeling white gate in the peeling white fence and looked at the windows. There were net curtains at all four of them, grey net curtains. Then he walked, whistling casually – until he realised he was whistling 'Jesus Christ Superstar', at which he stopped abruptly – along the road past the house. He assumed Bleeder must be out, for no handsome silver car adorned the road in front. 'If I had a car like that I wouldn't leave it here,' Harvey muttered to himself and then realised the implications of that. 'Shit, what if he's parked down on the main road and is even now watching me through the netties.' Harvey himself had parked his father's car ('Now don't go scratching me paintwork, I know you'; 'Piss off, Dad') about half a mile down the main road from the town. Now he stomped on through the estate, past the boys who stopped their play to stand and stare at him, their mouths agape. 'Bloody inbreds,' he said. But he said it very, very quietly.

Last night had been a long one. He had returned home early, his mind so full of Bleeder and the conversation in the car that he had forgotten the dangers of family life. It was only as he crossed the threshhold and heard that oh so familiar phrase, 'Is that you, dear?', filled with hope and joy and eagerness, that he had realised his peril.

'Yes, it's me, Mum. Who else is it going to be?' Funny how fourteen is still lurking in even the most full-grown of men: the words had come as naturally as breathing. He had attempted the surly stalk upstairs to his room. But what had worked in youth seemed to have lost its power. Maturity had emasculated him. That or his mother had grown braver with age.

'Come in and have a chat while I make you something to eat. Your father's in the garden and we can have fresh salad with the stew. There's football on later, your father said, and we might get the Scrabble out. Could we play and watch at the same time? I know how you men like to watch football and not be disturbed . . .' and on and on. And it was either use the absolute sanction, the 'fuck off, you old cow' option, or come on the Reds and double-word scores. Harvey had done the sigh and accepted that you couldn't go for the absolute on your second night in town: second of four. So he had gone in and listened to his mother's voice talking about her church meetings and her friend's bad leg and the tourist who drowned in the bay and the bad weather and anything else that floated into her mind. And while she spoke he sat and went over and over the conversation with Bleeder, picking it clean of meaning, stripping it, trying to tear his way to an answer he could accept. At some point his father had come in clutching a handful of spring onions and started being boisterous. 'Come along, come along, where's my dinner, woman? I'm back from the hunt and ready to eat.'

'Oh yes, you must be starving, darling, and Harvey is too, aren't you, dear? Two big hungry bears . . .' Harvey had sat smoking at the breakfast bar, into which, if he looked closely, he could see 'Johnny Flame' carved in his own childish hand. He tried not to look closely.

'Starving, are you? Good man. Need a bit of real cooking. Not that rubbish you eat in those fancy restaurants, eh? None of that nouvelle cuisine? Shite cuisine I call it.'

'Donald!'

'Well, it is. Not enough on a plate to feed an Ethiopian. Real food, that's what we want, eh, Harvey?'

'Mmm.' Harvey wondered vaguely if perhaps one day, a long time ago, someone had laughed at one of his father's jokes, someone other than his mother, of course, who was now tittering distractedly. Harvey wondered if it might be possible to find that person and punish them in some way. After all, the past did piece itself together sometimes. Pieces that seemed unlinkable, knots that seemed unpickable . . . sometimes the past can surprise us. And so back to Bleeder.

After Scrabble ('I'm sure "quark" is a word, dear, but I've never heard of it so we can't count it: that's our house rule, remember . . .'), and after
Match of the Day
('They're overpaid and should respect the referee!'), when he was finally allowed to get away and up the stairs into the one true sanctuary he had ever known, Harvey lay very still in his bedroom and blew smoke at the ceiling. What had Bleeder said? 'I'll think, but it's probably gone,' something like that. What did 'probably' mean? Well, it meant it might be gone. And that would be all right. As he smoked, Harvey had nodded to himself, unsurprised by this fact. If it had definitely gone – sent off years ago to some kids' charity, or burned on the bonfire or whatever – then that was OK. On the other hand, if it had only been given away in the last couple of days . . . that wasn't OK. Where would it have been given to? Oxfam, Bleeder had said. Could he go trawling round the second-hand shops of St Ives hunting for a comic? Did charity shops even sell comics? He'd been in enough but couldn't remember ever seeing any. What if the charity shop owner knew enough to enquire about a first edition? What if the headline in the local paper a week from now was 'Charity Shop Owner Strikes It Rich (And Opens Superhero-themed Coffee Shop In Downtown New York)'? That very definitely wouldn't be all right. But Bleeder's stuff hadn't been gone through yet. That was the point. That was, in fact, a very key point. Harvey had sat up and looked around his room for a while. It was a room unchanged since his childhood and that, of course, was typical in families like his. What was less typical and slightly more troubling was that it bore a close resemblance to his current rooms in London. The old bedroom posters were of
Batman
and
Spider-Man
rather than
Darkman
and
Tomb Raider
, but they weren't posters he would find unacceptable in his grown-up world. He sometimes tried to argue that this was because he had always had good and adult taste. It was an argument entirely with himself, and was another that he rarely felt any confidence of winning.

Sleep had not come that night, not until the morning was advancing. This was unusual. Harvey was normally a good sleeper, beer having a pleasantly narcotic effect. But this time there was a reason for insomnia. Deep in his heart he already knew that he was going to rob Bleeder's house. He couldn't pin down when that decision was made. It was as if he had always known it. Perhaps it had formed as an inevitable somewhere in those twenty years of waiting. You can't care this much about something so particular for this long without some sort of action, however ineffectual, becoming necessary. Harvey knew that he owed it, as it were, to the next quarter of a century, to do everything he could do. It was as simple as that: his future self depended on it.

Which didn't make it easy, of course. As he strode rapidly away from Bleeder's house, he thought of how impossible crime could seem. He sometimes liked to think of himself as a bit of an outlaw: the tin under his bed with the lump of Black in it; the car with the 'applied for' sticker in place of a tax disc; the 'adult graphic novel' section of his bookshelves. But somehow this had nothing to do with breaking and entering. The house looked so solid. The walls and windows such tangible, physical proofs of right and wrong. It was as if, for a moment, as he walked purposefully away in the wrong direction, he could see the very tablets of the Old Testament reformed and reconstituted into solid whitewashed walls.

Breaking a window with a brick is actually quite difficult.

After a swift walk through the estate, intended to give the impression that he was late and going somewhere important, Harvey had made his way round to the cul-de-sac that ran along the bottom of Bleeder's garden. The road had no houses on it and came to an end in a thicket of half-grown trees and burned-out cars, with only a muddy track running off it. Harvey recognised the track as the one he used to walk up to school. At other times he might have stopped for a brief bout of nostalgia, characterised by the words: 'Thank Christ I don't have to do that any more.' But today's business was too serious for such indulgences. From the path, Mrs Odd's back garden looked worse than her front. No wild threshing had happened here. Thick nettles and brambles were intertwined with long grass and piles of rubble. Bits of unknowable things emerged from bushes. This was comforting to Harvey. Clearly no one had been up Mrs Odd's garden for a very long time.

After traversing the hedge and the jungle of the undergrowth with only a scratched hand and a slightly twisted ankle sustained in an encounter with a deflated but still smiling Spacehopper, Harvey had found himself standing, SAS-style, to one side of the kitchen window, as if about to burst in shooting. Glancing down and observing his beer gut heaving in a way that looked frankly unhealthy, he forced himself to breathe more easily. He was in the garden of an old friend, it was hardly a capital offence. The brick in his hand was less easy to explain.

He tried tapping at the window, just to check that the Odds weren't having a quiet afternoon in, and then with the mixed air of fear and interested experimentation, he walked to a safe distance and slung the brick at the central glass panel in the kitchen door. Plan A was that there would be an explosion of glass and a nice brick-shaped hole would appear for him to put his hand through. Luckily, Plan B was to run like a deer as soon as he threw it because, in the event, the pane merely split in an ugly and deafening crack up the middle and the brick landed at his heels.

After a pause for thought, spent standing on one foot ready to flee at the slightest sound, Harvey returned from his position in the undergrowth, removed his denim jacket, wrapped the brick in it and began to bash away at the cracked pane. This proved more productive as well as oddly satisfying and within a minute he had made a neat hole for his hand to pass inside. After admiring his handiwork for a while, Harvey dragged himself into the danger of the moment, reached inside and fumbled for a latch. That it was reachable was entirely a matter of good fortune, but reachable it was. And with a troubling sense of this action being both easy and impossible, Harvey found himself opening the door of a stranger's house and stepping inside.

He had been inside the house only once before and it had been a mess. The first impression now was that things hadn't changed. Piles of damp newspapers stood incongruously around the sink, and the sink itself had a brown discolouration, a soiling that laid a faint patina of disgust over his insurgent terror. But as he moved on through the cooking area, he realised that, in fact, things had a certain order. Boxes stood open with old and nasty frying pans emerging from them; plates were stacked in reasonably matching piles; knives and long-handled spoons protruded from a carrier bag. The hand of the social services could be seen in the way the base shell of the kitchen was appearing from its years of darkness.

As Harvey moved, mouselike, towards the hall he was aware of an almost overwhelming need to defecate. Into his mind flickered a complete story, pictured, perhaps predictably, in comic-strip form: of him rushing upstairs to the toilet, relieving himself, and then finding that the flush was broken. 'The police were able to trace the intruder using DNA samples found at the crime scene . . .' Harvey gave a low gasp of fear that was also, unexpectedly, a sort of hysterical giggle and forced himself to run upstairs.

His parents would love this. That was the thought that beset him as he crept, a faint fat shadow, along a landing lit only by the most meagre light from the bedroom windows. Ever since he brought home a presentation book of Brooke Bond Tea cards belonging to his best friend's sister when he was nine he had been perceived as potentially criminal. 'It was only to be expected,' he could almost hear his father saying. 'We always had our suspicions.' There was something rather satisfying about fulfilling so exactly his parents' worst fears. Perhaps he should become homosexual as well, and start supporting Chelsea.

He found Bleeder's room without difficulty. It too seemed like his own, unchanged from boyhood. But here the lack of progress seemed less the product of sentimental mothering and more of a generalised neglect. Nothing appeared to have changed in the Odd house for a very long time indeed. Owner ship of the bedroom was confirmed by the poster of Abba hanging above the bed. He knew that poster:
Arrival
. White jumpsuits and cowboy boots. In the seventies you could buy it for 50p from any newsagent in the land. It was a poster that would have been out of date by the time Bleeder was ten. It was the sort of poster only someone who had really given up trying would have had. He stood for a moment transfixed. He'd forgotten how tasty Agnetha was. Had Bleeder even realised that? Harvey doubted it. He did the sigh, or a sort of panicky version of it, and moved to the one large cardboard box that stood in the middle of the otherwise stripped room.

The box had been sealed neatly with long strips of masking tape and for a moment Harvey felt an odd impropriety in undoing such careful handiwork. That this was an inappropriate concern in a burglar who had already broken a window struck him forcibly and he began tentatively picking at the strips with his fingernails. This took some time. The tape had been layered in thick gouts, one strip on top of another, and Harvey's fingernails were bitten almost comically short. After some ineffectual picking and swearing, he ran back downstairs and returned armed with a long-handled kitchen knife. Panting, but prepared, he slashed the masking tape with inexpert precision. The
Superman One
was not inside. What was inside was a very motley collection of items. Maths text books; some electronic devices of unknown use; a hairdryer (when did Bleeder Odd ever wash his hair?); a Dennis Wheatley novel; a picture of Victoria Principal; a packet of condoms (when did Bleeder Odd, etc); three pairs of shoes; a nasty and possibly unsanitary pink teddy bear; and at the very bottom of the box, under some tight-waisted knitwear with stars up the front, a pile of comics.

Harvey's heart had started beating too quickly for a man of his girth who is sitting down as he reverently removed the comics one by one. But they were just the typical frayed remnants of a boy's collection, like so many he had been sent for valuation over the years at the shop. No rare first editions, nothing special at all. He read a few pages of an
Iron Man
that he hadn't looked at for years, not really being much of an
Iron Man
fan, and then remembered his predicament and stood up fast.

When upright he found that some of his fear had lifted. The fact that his mission seemed to have failed had removed some of the terror of discovery, as if the criminality had somehow slipped out of his actions now that there was nothing to steal. With great care he put everything back in the box in the right order and then did his best to reseal the tape. That done he made his way back onto the landing. Logic said he should leave now – surely Bleeder's room was the likeliest place to look – but his future self, the one who had come to him in the restless night and said it was better to be arrested, even go to prison, than to live with uncertainty any longer, was back with him. 'I will make you come back here again if you don't finish this today,' it told him. 'I will send you to reburgle the same house again tomorrow. And just think how much more difficult that will be.' With an irrational desire to punch his own future, Harvey made his way to the next room. It was clearly Mrs Odd's bedroom and was as yet unpacked. It smelled strongly of faeces and talcum powder, reminding Harvey of a great-aunt from his youth who had been both fashionable and incontinent. The idea of Mrs Odd keeping the comic he'd swapped with her son in 1982in her bedside cabinet was pushing reason beyond any natural limit, future self or no future self. But he looked anyway. It wasn't in there. There were lots of lightbulbs and a packet of lemon jelly.

Harvey followed his own absence of logic carefully through each room in turn, and once started he was thorough. He looked under beds and inside bathroom cabinets. He opened four more cardboard boxes using the red-handled kitchen knife. None of them contained anything of any interest, or not at least to a burglar. There was a
Dukes of Hazzard
baseball cap that Harvey found rather captivating. As he made his way to the stairs it occurred to him that he might find some other object of value: what would he do then? He was surprised but pleased to find that the idea of stealing anything else held no interest for him. Perhaps he wasn't a criminal after all. Perhaps he was merely reclaiming something that belonged to him. Perhaps it was really his to retrieve . . . 'My preciousssss,' Harvey hissed and giggled loudly as he made his way back downstairs.

On the ground floor he followed the same procedure. Most of the fear had now passed, to be replaced by a sort of jumpy boredom. All the boxes contained unpleasant objects that he really had no wish to see, including an extraordinary amount of counterpanes. Did she collect counter panes? And why were so many of them orange candlewick with tassles? Was this some sort of recognised fetish? It might be worth checking on the internet. And when finally he stood in front of the last box in the sitting room, surrounded by damp-smelling bed linen, Harvey realised that he was done. Somewhere he could sense his future self throwing up his hands and smiling: 'Fair do's, you've tried, I'll give you that.' And he would continue to run a perfectly pleasant little comic shop on Old Street rather than a superhero-themed coffee house in Gramercy Park, and that was OK. Maybe it was actually for the best. With a last, almost affectionate glance round the old place (as he now thought of it), Harvey strolled out into the hallway and made for the kitchen. As he did so he was struck by a thought. He hadn't been down to the front door itself. Maybe there was a cupboard there, something like that. So he turned and walked back down the hall, with a sense almost of wanting to prolong what had really been a rather pleasing exercise: a completely new experience and those were rare in his life these days, perhaps too rare, perhaps he should do things like this more often.

Turning over the idea of robbing people's houses now and again just to keep his adrenalin levels up, Harvey approached the front door in a mood of benign affection for crime and for criminals as a group. And it was then that he noticed the wooden door on his left and realised with complete suddenness that the house had a cellar. Frozen for a moment, he stood caught between impulses. He had been ready to leave, to turn and stroll nonchalantly out into the garden and fight his way back through the jungle. His first instinct now was to continue with that plan. Who would keep a comic in a cellar? It was probably just a damp hole full of old tools or bits of coal. And he didn't, he really didn't want to go in a cellar right now. All his insouciance left him in a rush. What if someone came in while he was down there? What if he got locked in for ever? What if Bleeder Odd was the psychopath that any comic-strip writer would make him and came back and found Harvey in his basement? The basement where he kept his victims locked in metal cages, hanging upside down. What if Bleeder Odd had never left St Ives and had been living in the basement all this time just waiting for this moment . . . ? Harvey took several deep breaths. 'I know, I know,' he muttered to his future self, and, opening the door, he stepped inside.