The Swap (7 page)

'Haaarvey! Time to rise and shine. You've got a party to go to today.'

Fumbling in the dark for cigarettes, Harvey heard the voice and closed his eyes very tight. Everything was wrong. His mouth felt as though someone had come in during the night and used it as a toilet: there was unknown but malodorous matter at the back of his throat yet a sort of slimy, unnatural wetness on his tongue. His head seemed to have been remoulded so that it now came to a point in the blinding pain between his eyeballs. His belly lay about him, jellified and sagging to the sides, forming a ring around his prone form. From hours too early to consider, his father had been busily walking along the passage outside his room making a noise. This was a familiar practice and was one of a number of reasons why Harvey very rarely went home for holidays. Today, Donald Briscow had been calling. 'Do you know where that drill is, Ann? I need that particular one. I want to put a screw in the bedroom, for the picture. I've been meaning to fix that picture for ages . . .' And his mother had been calling in reply and then there had been the banging and slamming of a drill being found and then, of course, there had been the drilling, protracted and extended. And then there had been more calling and his mother had come along to admire the picture . . . Harvey, lying now on his back, lit a cigarette, opening his eyes to tiny slits and then closing them again very quickly.

'You won't want to miss it, dear, it's your last day.'

He tried to remember his dreams. They had been filled not with pretty, attentive women in wine bars finding him fascinating, but with dark passageways and shadows. He had been running, he remembered, running into . . . that was it, into his own shop. But the lights were off and he could hardly see. There was a sense of unease. Something was wrong. There were people there who shouldn't be there. Something terrible had happened. And then it all came back in a rush. 'Shit.' The air was cold on his bare arms and he tucked himself tightly under the quilt, doing his best not to burn more holes in the cover, which already showed its history as a drunken smoker's blanket. For a few minutes all he wanted to do was crawl deeper into the dark, warm, somewhat smelly cave he had made for himself, just stay there until it went away. But then a rush of adrenalin forced him to sit up, cry out as the point at the front of his head collided with the day and then scramble upright. He needed to know what was going on. Never before in his life had he prayed so hard for so little. All he wanted in life right now was for absolutely nothing to happen.

The human brain collects and stores information in extraordinary abundance just on the off chance that it might be useful. Harvey would not have said that he knew when the
St Ives Chronicle
was delivered to his parents' house each morning. Indeed, he would have said he had always actively avoided knowing anything at all about St Ives's shambolically amateurish local paper. Yet at 10a.m. prompt he was waiting on the mat and he was not disappointed. Horrified but not disappointed. The murder was splashed across all three columns of the front page and showed all the grammatical errors and inaccurate speculation of the late, replacement front-page lead. Harvey wondered vaguely what they would have led with if they hadn't got this in time. His mind played wistfully with coffee mornings and new church roofs. The story was supported by a rather fuzzy photograph of Bleeder's house looking eerily like every crime scene Harvey had ever seen on TV. The police had been called to the house at 6.30p.m. by the deceased's son, Charles Odd. His mother had been killed with a kitchen knife. There were signs of breaking and entering and police were seeking an intruder. They had not yet established any motive for the crime. The killer had made elaborate efforts to cover his tracks but the police were able to say that some evidence had been found at the crime scene . . . Jesus. Harvey clutched the paper to him and felt a wave of nausea sweep across his hangover and carry it up to a higher level. He doubled over and clutched onto the wall, then straightened up, eyes squeezed shut, breathing hard.

'Here, don't scrunch up my paper.' Donald Briscow strode out into the hall and took the
Chronicle
from him, pulled a face, and straightened it out carefully. 'Some of us want to know what's going on in the world.' Harvey willed his breathing under control.

'Ann! Ann! Look at this.' Briscow senior was appalled. '
England slump in Pakistan
. . . outrageous.' He ambled off muttering and Harvey leaned against the wall, letting the wave pass, letting it flow back in lesser form, letting it slacken and ebb away.

'I've cooked you a fry-up, Harvey. Sausage, bacon, kidneys and some black pudding we had left over from last week. Come along in and eat up, it'll do you good and get you ready for the party.'

Harvey made his way into the kitchen and sat very carefully at the table. His mother placed this butcher's shop in front of him and he contemplated it with Mrs Odd's throat in his mind. 'There's been a murder, Harvey.'

'Yes the Pakistanis are murdering us.' His father came and joined Harvey at the table.

'I'll get you a cuppa, Donald. Yes, someone Odd up by the new estates near Trehendricks. I don't mean odd, I mean Odd, it's spelled O.D.D., you see? Killed by an intruder. Isn't that awful?' Harvey's mother smacked her lips excitedly. 'You'd think we were in London.'

'Yes, you bring trouble with you, don't you, Harvey? If you are going to do things like this I wish you'd do it up in the city not down here.' Mr Briscow was chuckling.

'Oh dear, that's not funny,' said Mrs Briscow, chuckling also. 'This poor woman killed in her own bed . . .'

'In bed?' Harvey, who was still contemplating his breakfast, roused himself for a moment.

'Well, wherever she was.'

'In the cellar.' Mr Briscow had the paper. 'He cut her throat in the cellar. Now that's plain evil, I don't know how you can say he shouldn't be put down for that, Harvey. Killed like an animal that's what should happen to him. It would stop this sort of thing from happening all the time. But oh no, the bleeding hearts want to give him counselling and let him out after twenty minutes so he can do it again. These people are evil, Harvey, and they should be put out of their misery.'

'Oh Christ.' Harvey put an undercooked lamb's kidney in his mouth and tried to chew. It tasted simply of meat, he could feel the blood leaking onto his tongue. A grimace filled with exhaustion crossed his face. He hadn't realised how tired he was.

'What's wrong with that, Harvey?' His mother was scandalised. 'That's lovely, healthy food that is. You should eat that up, it's what you need.'

'Yes, none of this vegetarian rubbish you get up in London. Alfalfa sprouts and soya beans? They're not sprouts and they're not beans. Should be done under the trade descriptions act. Simple as that.'

Harvey focused for a rare moment on what his parents were saying. He had sometimes tried to picture London as they viewed it: a place of constant violence where no one ate anything but tiny portions of vegetables, before going off to watch pornography and take drugs. It actually wasn't that far from his experience of it. He tried to smile and then grimaced again as it made his head hurt. He put a piece of black pudding in his mouth and then, realising too late that this was a more serious proposition than he had expected, he started to chew.

'It says the son, Charles Odd (35) – why do they have to tell us how old people are all the time? What do we care how old he is? – went to Trehendricks . . . Well, Harvey, that would mean he was in your year.' Mr Briscow looked at his son with genuine interest for the first time Harvey could remember, and Mrs Briscow jumped up and whipped round to check the facts over his shoulder.

'So it would. Charles Odd, Harvey, you must have known him. Now let me think, do we know a Charles . . . Was there a Charles in your football team? No, that was a Christopher, wasn't it? Charles? Charles? Do you know him, Harvey? You must!'

Overwhelmed by the experience of the black pudding and troubled by his parents' enthusiasm, Harvey nodded. 'Yeah,' he managed, still struggling with stray pieces of skin between his teeth. 'I knew him but I never really hung round with him at all. But, yeah. I saw him at the reunion on Saturday . . .'

'You saw him at the reunion!' Both parents pounced like hungry seagulls on this titbit of news. 'You saw him on Saturday and on Sunday his mother was killed,' Mrs Briscow said triumphantly. Harvey frowned.

'So what?' he demanded. 'Everyone there saw him. It's no crime to have seen him.'

'Don't get defensive, Harvey. You'll only cast further suspicion on yourself.'

'Piss off, Dad.'

'If you did it you may as well come clean.'

'Look, you may find that funny—'

'But, Harvey, perhaps the police will want to interview you.' Mrs Briscow's eyes were shining.

'Why the fuck ... ?'

'Harvey!'

'Language, boy, you're not in London now.'

'Why the fuck would the police want to interview me? I saw him briefly at the reunion. We hardly exchanged two words. Why the fuck . . . ?'

'You spoke to him! Harvey, I thought you said you didn't know him. You spoke to him and the next day his mother is killed.'

'Jesus Christ . . .' Harvey felt suddenly that this would never end. Why had he come to this awful reunion in this crappy little town to be with these ghastly people who asked him impossible questions at breakfast and fed him terrible meats that tasted of death? He shuddered bodily.

'Eat your breakfast, dear. It'll do you good and get you ready for the party. Now, tell us about Charles Odd. What did you talk about at the reunion?'

Harvey filled his mouth with black pudding. It seemed the easiest way to stop himself from crying out loud.

The worst aspect of growing older was when habits became traditions. The lunch party had become another one: after every reunion they went to Steve's and stood around in his sitting room, drinking too early and feeling uncomfortable. This unease was usually added to for Harvey by the fact that Steve had two children, now risen to three, and he had no gift with children. Even though his interests were, by his own admission, almost exclusively juvenile, he did not enjoy sharing them with, well . . . juveniles. And he hated fucking Pokemon and that always created a clash. Today, however, he hardly gave the kids a thought. Indeed, he felt quite ready to pretend to be a train, or build something out of toilet rolls or even watch Japanese pocket animals if it was required of him. He was feeling a powerful and passionate desire for normality. He wanted to be bored.

Looking back on the party afterwards, Harvey found it very hard to fix his emotional reactions. He had arrived with so much to think about, more really than he had ever had before, but he spent much of the early period talking about sex with men less knowledgeable in that area than himself – and such men are not easily found. How this happened was not altogether clear. He had arrived seeking boredom and the absence of incident and at first had found it in abundance. But then someone had mentioned the murder. A discussion of Bleeder and his mother had begun and Harvey had suddenly felt a desperate need to stop it, as if between them the reunionists were about to solve the crime and point the finger at him. So he had mentioned, pretty much at random, that it might be a sex killing: that perhaps the local press was being delicate to spare Bleeder's feelings. This led to a general expression of doubt that anyone would wish to seek sexual congress with old Mrs Odd. And Harvey, whether through the desire to move the conversation into other areas or through some obscure gallantry, felt compelled to defend the old as potential sex targets. This had led to the suggestion, from Steve, that perhaps Harvey liked 'a bit of scrag-end'. From here the conversation had taken a personal turn and Harvey had found himself becoming red in the face and defensive. 'I do not have any interest in screwing old ladies, you fucking arsehole' were the exact words he was speaking into a silent room populated by, among others, two children aged six and three and a babe-in-arms, when Maisie Cooper arrived. There was a long silence penetrated by sniggering from the men grouped around Harvey.

'Well, that's good to know Harvey.' Jeff Cooper had also arrived. 'But your mother must be devastated.'

Many smokers feel angry about the bans and prohibitions around their habit. But Harvey had always rather welcomed them. Being part of a segregated minority, being oppressed, was something he had quietly dreamed of through most of his adult life. Nothing too harsh, of course, not racism or lack of human rights, but the minor grievances of being a smoker in a non-smoking world suited him rather well. And for this reason he felt an unfair but real animus against Steve for being liberal and open-minded enough to have ashtrays all around his sitting room. What was the matter with him? Didn't he care about his children? No one in London would dream of behaving in such a decadent manner. What Harvey craved was to get out into the peace of the garden, turn his jacket up against the cold, perhaps moan a little, certainly do the sigh, and have a long miserable smoke. Instead, he was cornered by a bunch of men discussing sexual fetishism. 'And what about vacuum cleaners?' Rob was saying. 'Who discovered that one, that's what I'd like to know,' when she came over and joined them. 'Hello, Maisie,' Rob broke off to greet her. 'We are just talking about having sex with household implements,' he added helpfully, 'in case you have any interests in that area.'

There was a collective leer in which Harvey steadfastly refused to join.

Maisie smiled. 'No, I prefer garden tools to be honest. Have you seen the garden, Harvey?'

'Er, no,' Harvey lied loudly to cover the sound of melodramatic intakes of breath from the circle around him.

'Be gentle with him, Maisie. He's new at this, he may not be ready for the lawnmower. Stick to the shears . . .'

He followed her out through the open French windows.

The day had taken a turn towards rain and a light spittle darkened his denim jacket. They walked round the side of the house and found some shelter under a denuded willow tree. She took a cigarette from him and he had to cup his hands round hers to make a wind-break. For a moment it was as if he was holding her hands in his own, as if he was sheltering her. 'Thanks.' she looked at him and he dropped his eyes to concentrate on lighting his own cigarette. Then he looked up and met her gaze. He shivered. He had not seen her outside before, the wind was flicking her autumnal hair out from its neatness and into a wilder frame for her face. It was like watching her lose her civilisation for a second, watching her animalise. He groaned. 'God, you're lovely.' It was the first time he had said anything of the kind and she looked troubled by it, but he did not take it back.

'Thanks, but you shouldn't say that.'

He wondered if he had spoken too much or too soon, but really he didn't care. It was not a day for worrying about the niceties. 'Does he tell you that? Jeff, I mean. He should tell you every hour. If you were mine I'd tell you every hour.' Looking back that evening, Harvey found it hard to imagine that he had actually said these words to another human being. He was forced to wonder if perhaps being involved in a major crime had somehow achieved an alchemical reaction in him: transformed him into the dashing and irresistible lover he had always dreamed of being. If so, it was a terrible price, but he was not at this moment sorry to pay it.

'No, he doesn't tell me that, and nor should you.' She said it as a criticism but he heard the longing in it and felt his stomach turn over. He was suddenly aware how much he wanted her. It was hard to remember anything that he had ever wanted so much. Except, of course, the
Superman One
. He pulled a face and turned away to look into a different emotion: he could see again the plastic cover and it was stained with bloody fingerprints. 'It's funny, I came down here with Jeff on sufferance. I thought I was going to absolutely hate it.'

'And you don't?' He hadn't cleaned the fingerprints off because it wasn't there. He could feel the nausea again, the sudden certainty that things weren't going to be all right.

'Not completely, no. Not completely.'

Harvey turned back but found she was not looking at him. She had turned too so they had been standing for a moment back to back. He knew that this was a moment. But it was a terribly wrong moment. If he said the right thing to her now he might get what he had just realised he wanted more than anything else. Even that. Especially that. Shit. There had been blood all over his hands. He could feel it on his fingers, feel that sticky, runny, KFC quality it had as he cleaned up. He shook his head from side to side, uncaring of the hangover that still hung like a net curtain around his skull, like that grey net curtain. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 'Oh Christ, Maisie, I don't know what to do.' It came out unexpectedly, as a sort of strangled cry, and he could feel an actual sob in it. He was almost crying and he never cried, or only at
ET
, never at real stuff and now he was going to cry in front of a woman he was desperate to impress. 'Oh Jesus Christ.' But, completely unexpectedly, the horror of blood and death worked wonderfully in his favour. Because within a second, she was in his arms.

'Oh Harvey,' she responded. And even Harvey himself could see that he might have had a better name at that moment, and he could also see that what he had lacked all these years in his dealings with women was depth and that he had just acquired a massive amount of it, quite by chance and overnight.

'Oh God, you're wonderful.' He was also old enough to know that, whatever the circumstances, in moments like this absolute abandonment was the only right course of action. So he lost himself in her extraordinary hair. She smelled like warm honey and he thanked a god he had never believed in that he'd had a shower that morning. After that, he just forgot everything and let her claw herself tight against him as if he might be a buffer against all the torments of the world. And perhaps he pulled her tight for exactly matching reasons. So they clung for a long moment in each other's arms like fighters who have thrown their swords away and put all the trust they have simply in their shields. And that is where Jeff Cooper found them, of course, when he came looking for his wife.

It was an ugly scene, not improved by the fact that all Harvey's friends came out of the French windows and peeped round the side of the house to watch. Jeff went for Harvey with real violence and Harvey, to his shame, forgot his protective role and ran for it. He ran about the garden like a large, ungainly Labrador, dodging round trees and at one point using the shed as a barrier: him going one way round, Jeff the other.

'You fucking, miserable bastard.' Jeff had a way of speaking that was low and mean when he was angry, even when he was moving fast, and Harvey heard in it the sound of his own suffering. He was aware of how silent everything else was. Why wasn't anyone saying 'Come on, Jeff, leave it, he's not worth it . . .', that sort of thing? Why wasn't she saying anything? But all seemed rendered mute by the vehemence, the unarguability of Jeff 's anger. With a sudden realisation, Harvey knew that Jeff had wanted to do this for a long time; that though they had pretended to friendship at times because Harvey had been popular at school through the comics, and Jeff through the rugby, really they had hated each other, sneering beneath the banter, disrespecting each other's routes to cool. And now Jeff had found the mother and father of all excuses for doing what he'd been longing to do. If Harvey had had time to consider he would probably have been on Jeff 's side. He actually had quite strict morals about men stealing their friends' wives, it was like not buying your round or shagging women who were really pissed. However, he did not have time to give it much thought because he was busy in flight. There was, briefly, time for him to think what an extraordinary few days he was having and to wonder if perhaps everything dramatic and life-changing that ever happened to him was going to happen over one long-weekend. And then with a horrid inevitability, he was caught.

It happened as he hurtled back past the willow tree. He had formulated the vague plan that he would run down the side of the house and into the front garden and away down the road. So he had dashed behind the shed again to mislead Jeff and once he was out of sight, Harvey had come at speed, panting hard, down the lawn under the willow boughs (and it isn't easy to run fast doubled over, but he attempted it) and out the other side. However, Jeff, who was a flanker and used to chasing things, had not been completely fooled and appeared very quickly from the shed diversion. He then made the simple manoeuvre of running close to the wall of the house, thus avoiding the tree altogether and because he didn't need to double up, caught Harvey just as he was emerging from its protection. He hit him hard in the stomach and Harvey, who was already gasping like an asthmatic at an orgy, felt as if he had suddenly been placed in a bubble with no air inside at all, a bubble vacuum that would lift up into the sky and float him away from this terrible scene. As he doubled over, Jeff hit him again full in the face, catching him in the right eye, but Harvey hardly felt this second blow. Everything in him was trying to remember how to breathe. As he crashed to earth, the grass tickled his nose and he was momentarily back on the roadside near Bleeder's house, he had put bloody fingers on the comic and the comic had vanished. How do things vanish? Like this perhaps . . . In the bubble he was drifting on the air, the ground felt pillowy soft, as if he might sink down into it. Perhaps the bubble would go down not up, sucked and swallowed by the world. He knew that he had been kicked and that after that, perhaps spurred by the thought that two murders were too many for one reunion, the other partygoers had been galvanised into action and had dragged Jeff away. Distantly, he could hear her saying 'I hate you, it's over . . .', stuff like that. For a moment, he wondered if she was talking to him and then he knew she wasn't and felt glad.