The Swap (9 page)

'Sorry?'

'I found that bag of clothes under your bed, covered in muck. I dread to think what you get up to sometimes. I put the whole lot through the washing machine twice, including your plimsolls. They are as good as new now.'

'Er, right. OK. Thanks, Mum.' And he crept up to bed at half past eight, exactly as if he was nine years old. It had been a very long day and for once, for once only, it felt good.

Why do parents like waiting at railway stations? If there is anything to say it can be said in the car, or before leaving the house even. Yet here were Harvey's parents hanging about with him on the Penzance platform in an awkward and unnatural silence waiting for a train that was ten minutes delayed. 'You can go if you want, you know. I'll be all right.' I'm thirty-five, for Christ's sake. But he couldn't say that because he had a rule: never leave under a cloud. You don't want your last face-to-face words to your parents until next Christmas to be unkind ones.

'No, we'll stay, darling. We want to see you off. We see you so rarely, we have to take every minute we can.' His mother's sentimentality was kicking in and he thought he could detect actual tears imminent.

'Yeah, OK, it's nice to have some company actually.' Not yours, of course, but . . .

'You could lose a bit of weight, Harvey.' His father was not, as Harvey had learned to his cost in the past, afflicted by his own concerns around departures. He remembered vividly the day he went off to university, his first real leaving home and his father's last words to him: 'You can't do much worse there than you did at school, can you?' Half his journey had been ruined thinking about it: what kind of valediction was that when the only child leaves home for ever? Shouldn't there be some rite of passage, some passing on of wisdom from father to son, not just a wanton insult? Where was the ceremony? Where was the passion? Jesus.

'Piss off.' Rules, after all, are there for the breaking.

'Now, Harvey, don't be rude to your father.'

'He said I was fat.'

'No he didn't, he said you could lose some weight. That's a different—'

'He is fat.'

'Look, will you piss off. You're not exactly the glamorous grandad yourself.'

'He's not a grandad, Harvey. I'd so love him to be, but he isn't ...'

'Oh, for fuck's sake, I don't believe you are going to start on that now ...'

And so the leave-taking descended into abuse as, in truth, it almost always did, rules or no rules.

Harvey had been looking forward to the journey home. His father had roused him at half past six by coughing outside his bedroom door and padding up and down the landing. Harvey, who rarely arose before nine, was feeling the pace a little. The journey, he felt, could be restful. A time for clear and considered thought. He needed to draw a line under everything that had happened. Get some distance, literally and figuratively. Move on. But instead, almost at once, he found himself thinking in circles. And they were circles of guilt. 'I should have gone to the police at once'; 'I should have found out where she was staying and telephoned her'; 'I should have stayed and talked it all through with Bleeder.' This last was the most wretched cycle of all. If he had just had a little courage he might have found out how much Bleeder knew. Instead, he had left himself open to hope and fear in equal measure. For all his efforts on his future self 's behalf he had let him down after all and he felt bad about that. What if I never know? That was one of the fears assailing him. It was perfectly possible that there would be no coverage of a murder in Cornwall in the national press. He would find it hard to ring his parents more than once a week without causing major suspicion in their minds. There was the possibility that he would never hear anything further about the murder of Mrs Odd. And that was a good thing, of course, except that he knew his sleep patterns were going to suffer.

The journey from Penzance to London is of nearly six hours' duration and there is a limit to how much of the English countryside any man can take. Harvey had a book in his bag, a biography of a seventies rock star. But somehow groupies and drug binges seemed a bit shallow and unexciting; compared to the last few days at the seaside they sounded like a rest cure. So to stifle the anxiety attacks that were threatening to send him heaving to the tiny train toilet, he drank beer from outrageously overpriced tins of Watneys, warm and sticky, but good for the memory. He started soon after he boarded at ten fifteen and was still sipping from his last can when he arrived at Paddington at four thirty. By that time he had forgotten pretty much everything.

Although he had taken very little to the reunion, he still found his rucksack heavy and unwieldy. Stumbling a little and slipping on the polished platform surface, he considered abandoning the bag in a passing luggage trolley. However, with a quick snatch of 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' by the Clash, which happened to be in his mind, he decided instead to keep the bag. It was his after all. People were looking at him, he realised, as he made his way towards the Underground and he smiled benignly. 'Hello,' he called kindly. 'I didn't do it, in case you are wondering. I am entirely innocent. Well, no . . .' he corrected himself, 'not innocent entirely, not guilty or anything. I broke a window, for Christ's sake.' He swung the bag up from his trailing hand onto his shoulder, buffeting an old lady who was following behind him. 'Ha, shouldn't stand so close. '"Don't Stand so Close to Me".' He sang a bar or two of Sting as he turned round again to give her a smile, but she had gone. 'Bye. Shit.' He stumbled again and headed for a bench. 'I must sit down.' He sat for a few moments, aware of two things. One was that he had cured the circling thoughts in his mind, they had definitely disappeared; however, it now seemed that everything else was going round and round. The other was that the station was prettified by a sort of plastic facsimile of a traditional English pub, which opened off to one side of the concourse. Harvey had the idea that he had drunk there before and decided that he should revisit those days. This spirit of nostalgia got him through two further pints before he felt ready to go. 'Cheerio,' he said to a slightly smelly but very friendly man he had met in the pub. 'Have one more on me.' He handed the man a fiver and received an expansive smile.

'Ta, gov.'

Then smiling in a way intended to take in the rest of the pub's patrons and, in truth, the entire human race, he made his way to the Underground.

It was as he was buying a ticket that he became aware that he wanted to go to his shop rather than head for home. He wanted to look at what, if the hard truth was faced, was his only real achievement in life. He wanted to run his hands over it. Feel that he really was back in town. With a brief burst of 'Mack the Knife', he headed for the barriers. Josh had been left in charge for the four days Harvey had been away and Josh was not to be trusted. He was not managerial material. A good manager should check his stock. A good manager put job before home-life. So instead of taking the Bakerloo Line to Charing Cross, Harvey took the Circle Line to Moorgate and walked up Old Street to Inaction Comix through a light drizzle. The shop was in darkness and he took a while getting out his keys. Like most of the shops in the area a metal awning had been sealed shut from top to bottom over the windows and door and Harvey spent a long time trying to get the key into the lock at the bottom of the doorguard before realising that he was using his house keys. Giggling and with a long, ultimately explosive fart, he found the right key. Grunting with satisfaction he opened the padlock and slid the metal up. He had always liked the way the metal grille folded in on itself and tonight he did it twice before unlocking the door, turning a switch and blinking in the painful glare of the strip lights. Carefully he shut the door behind him and looked around.

All seemed to be well. No one had stolen the stock or set fire to the cash register. Nor were there any signs of flooding or insect invasion. Giggling again, Harvey found his way past the counter and into the back room. It was not uncommon for him, when drunk, to sleep on the long grubby grey couch that took up most of one wall. He seriously considered his condition now. Was he drunk enough to stay the night? It was always a bit of a toss-up. It meant instant rest, which suddenly seemed terribly compelling, but it also meant waking up cold, fully clothed, on a couch, usually with Josh standing over him looking considerate. Like so much in life there were pros and cons. He picked up the heap of mail that Josh had dumped on his desk, most of it bills, and sat down on the couch. It was very comfortable. No, he didn't want to come and look at a fifteen-year-old boy's comic collection, no, he didn't want a TV licence, no, he didn't need another four credit cards, no, he wasn't the winner of a million-pound prize draw. Josh had done very little to sort the mail, mostly because he knew he wasn't allowed to open it and this rankled. But to prevent it slipping off the desk and onto the floor he had piled it in size order with the larger items at the bottom. This meant that the hard-backed A4brown envelope that provided the foundation for the whole pile was last. Harvey was yawning and feeling really that in fact a lot of decisions just made themselves. He leaned back against the tobacco-scented cushions and tore the end off this last envelope, then with a slight struggle, extracted its contents. After that he sat and looked at what he had got for a long time. It was a mint-condition copy of a
Superman One
in a plastic slip protector. And on the front of the plastic protector were a number of red, smudged fingerprints.

Harvey held it for minutes that seemed to be sucking at him, as if time was draining the alcohol and the faith out of him. Then he got up and walked unsteadily to his desk. He found the keys on the top and this time got the right one at once. Unlocking the bottom drawer where the petty cash was kept and lifting out the black metal tin inside, Harvey put the
Superman One
underneath it and then replaced the tin and closed and locked the drawer. Then he walked backwards to the sofa, unconsciously enacting an exact reversal of his previous movements, and fell heavily onto its untender mercy. He lay for a long moment awake but without thought, without response. Blank. And then he sank, blissfully, into total darkness.

'You left the door unlocked . . .' Josh's voice seemed to be coming from the locked drawer at the bottom of Harvey's desk, which unexpectedly was buried under some brambles in Bleeder's garden. '. . . all night with the shutter up.' There was amazement in his tone, mingled with a sort of grudging respect. 'I can't believe you did that.' Harvey untangled himself from his T-shirt, which had become rucked round his neck, pushed off the cushion that was smothering him, shook off the dream that was still circling round his head and sat up. Then he groaned. At everything.

'Leave that!' he said suddenly as Josh, attempting to perch on the edge of the desk, moved the pile of opened mail. 'I'll deal with that.' He rubbed his hand over his face to clear the dreams that had invaded the deep, dark wonderful nothingness of his drunken slumber and then, pushing himself up like an old man, ran bow-legged to the toilet. Josh heard what seemed to be a river cascading through the shop. It took a while before the flush went and the sound of taps replaced it. Harvey re-emerged, drying his face on the filthy hand towel that they kept in the equally filthy staff bathroom. 'That's a first even for you,' Josh continued as if Harvey had not left him, 'all night. Anyone could have wandered in and stolen the stock or done you in. How lucky are you?'

'Lucky?' Harvey emerged for a moment from the towel, his face pink overlaying grey beneath the stubble; his whole head gleaming with droplets. He considered the word for a moment as if examining a rare Japanese Hentai. 'How lucky am I?'

'Well, you could have been mugged.'

'Yes. I could.' He made his way back to the sofa and sat down to light a cigarette.

'What happened by the way?'

'Eh?'

'Your eye. You get in a fight, yeah? Or fell down or something?'

'Oh yeah, bit of argy-bargy, nothing really.'

'Right. Bad one.' Josh put on his best bedside manner. 'Want a McBreakfast?'

'Yeah, OK.' Harvey realised that Josh was right, he did need a McBreakfast.

'Big Breakfast?'

'Yeah.'

'How many?'

'Two.'

'Sure?'

'Yeah . . . No. Three.'

'Right. Can I take a fiver from petty cash? I'm a bit boracic?'

'Yeah, yeah, OK.' Harvey was searching for his matches, which had fallen off the end of the sofa during the night. The difficult bit was getting his hand down to the floor without bending over because bending over made the blood, and more importantly the pain, rush to the front of his head. Josh tinkered for a moment with his keys and then began to pull open the bottom drawer of the desk. His progress was impeded by Harvey who rugby-tackled him from the side and hurled him bodily to the floor.

'What in fuck ... ?'

'Shit. Sorry.' Harvey got up, shut the drawer and then rubbed his shoulder. 'Shit, that hurt.' He looked down to where Josh lay on his back. Somewhat distractedly he reached out to help him up. 'Sorry, just, er, playing.'

'You nearly broke my bloody back, you fucking idiot.' Josh got up slowly and tested his limbs for damage. 'You could have killed me.'

'Yeah, sorry.'

'What the fuck's the matter with you? Just 'cause you get in one fight in Cornwall you start acting all . . . twatish . . .'

Twatish? Harvey stifled an inopportune giggle, which started in the pool of hysteria he could feel somewhere down at the bottom of his stomach. 'Sorry, Josh. Look . . .' He felt in his pockets and found a tenner. 'Look, get us both some breakfast, all right? Get yourself some pancakes and syrup, that's your favourite. And a thick shake.' But Josh was not to be mollified. He refused to go at first but then grabbed the money and without a word stalked off, slamming the shop door behind him. As soon as he'd gone Harvey went at once to the bottom drawer. There was just a chance, if he prayed really hard, if he called in all the favours he had ever done a benevolent maker, that it would turn out to have been just a drunken hallucination. That was the best plan he could think of at the moment. He knew it wasn't a good plan and that it had very little chance of success. And sure enough the
Superman One
was lying neatly under the moneybox. He took it out and looked hard at it for several minutes. None of his old desire was left. He felt no pleasure in it, no wish to open the packaging, no interest in its contents. It represented nothing but suffering and misery. And mystery. While drunken sleep rarely fulfils the same purpose as good sober rest, it had allowed some things to clarify. What Harvey now felt for certain as he had only vaguely guessed before was that he was being set up. Somehow, someone was trying to get at him. He felt the rising panic, the anxiety attack coming, he felt his head throbbing, his mouth felt like a sawdust floor and he could taste vomit somewhere in the background of his palate. As he held the bloodstained comic in his hands he realised something more: whoever it was was succeeding. Never in his life had he felt as got-at as he did right now. What was he to do with the evidence? He had read Edgar Allan Poe but had always considered him a fool. Hiding something in plain view was all right in novels but if he left a real
Superman One
on the mantelpiece Josh would wet his pants. He might perhaps have burned it, although if Josh came back to find him setting fire to priceless comics at ten-thirty in the morning that might be the end. Harvey wasn't sure that the end hadn't come anyway because when Josh did return he refused to speak and took his pancakes and syrup off to the counter where he sat making disgusting slurping sounds. Having returned the
Superman One
to the petty-cash drawer, Harvey went and fetched his three Big Breakfasts without complaint from the counter where they had been dumped. In truth, the silent treatment was just what he needed.

In his mind he ran over the facts. People knew that he wanted the
Superman One
. He had told his story many times. His old school friends knew. Josh knew. It seemed for a moment as though everyone must know. Except his parents, of course. He never told them anything. And people told other people: for a while part of Harvey's resentment about the
Superman One
was that it had become the most interesting thing about him. When people talked about him they would often mention it. Indeed, in his darker moments, he had imagined being referred to as 'that bore who lost the comic' or 'that weird guy who could have been rich . . . remember him?' So other people at the reunion must have known how significant his meeting with Bleeder really was. Not many people had mentioned it, of course. But that was because people were like that. They were polite or they were discreet, or most often of all in his experience, they weren't really interested enough to bother. Of course, one of those someone elses might have been rather more interested than he knew. Just because he had dreamed of the
Superman One
for so many years didn't mean that he had some special claim on it. Anyone who fancied two hundred grand might have popped round to Bleeder's house to try their luck. Harvey pictured the scene . . . for some reason Jeff Cooper was cast in the role of burglar. Mrs Odd comes in from her shopping trip just as Jeff is getting the comic out of the box in the basement. Mrs Odd hears a noise, she creeps along the hallway to the cellar door ('Don't do it, Mrs Odd'), she peeps inside but of course you can't see into the cellar from the top step, so she moves silently down step by step ('Go back, Mrs Odd') but she goes on, down and down; Jeff has a knife from the kitchen for opening the box, it is a big carving knife with a red plastic handle. He snatches it up as he hears a creak from the stairs ('Don't do it, Jeff '); she runs at him, trying to stop him; they wrestle; he turns her round and cuts her throat ('Oh my God, what have I done?'). Then in a panic he runs out of the house, dropping the knife, or maybe washing it first . . . and he must be really bloody too . . . Well, anyway, he runs out but then realises that in his fright he has left the comic behind. He returns, planning to collect it, but as he is about to enter he sees Harvey Briscow, his old enemy and sexual rival, fucking about in the garden. He hatches a cruel, nay wicked, plan. He waits somewhere outside – in a bush or whatever – then when he sees Harvey run panic-stricken out of the house having left lots of incriminating fingerprints, he sneaks back in and steals the
Superman One
, little knowing that Harvey will also return and helpfully clean up all the evidence for him. Perfect. Fiendishly simple. Harvey nodded with great confidence. Jeff did it. But then he spoke aloud: 'So why the fuck did he send me this?'

Well, it sort of almost made sense. Harvey was reunited with the sofa. He rolled flat on it again and lay in his favourite position, on his back, blowing smoke up in neat streams towards the ceiling. The problem with being in the comic business was that it made you a narrative idealist. Comics, unlike the modern novel or the post-modern artwork, had a linear and complete logic. However complex the plot, in the end the good guys won and the bad guys got caught, usually by the good guys, often with the good guys wearing muscle-defining body suits and cool capes and masks. You can't be exposed to that sort of storyline too many times without starting to expect some sort of logical outcomes and neat resolutions – involving capes at the very least – in your own life. So it was that Harvey's daydream, up till now sensible and well reasoned, did not end at that point. Instead, a whole story developed from it in which Harvey returned to Cornwall, followed the trail of clues to their obvious denouement, captured Jeff, gave him two black eyes, handed him over to the local police and got off with his wife. This last section went on for a very long time and Harvey was at the point of rolling over onto his stomach when Josh came in.

'Phone,' he said and went out again.

Harvey struggled with his erection for a moment and then managed to stand upright. Had he slept again? He looked at his watch and found that it was ten past twelve. Jesus, it was lunchtime. He discovered that he still had some bits of Macpattie in his teeth and – when he put his hand to his head – in his hair. He was picking at these as he made his way through into the shop.

'Thanks, Josh,' he said pointedly but got no response.

Harvey picked up. 'Hello?'

'Harvey? It's Maisie Cooper.' And his heart did a twist.

'Hi, Maisie,' he said, and he said it in tones of such honeyed sweetness that his erection reasserted itself, presumably assuming that sex must be on the cards. Josh also gave him a grudging glance of interest. Harvey hadn't had women ringing him for a while and Josh loved gossip. Wait until he hears she's married to my old school friend and that he gave me the black eye, Harvey thought. If that doesn't make things up between us nothing will. He turned his attention to the phone.