The Swap (10 page)

'Can you talk?'

'Er, yeah.' Harvey glanced at Josh who had acquired a packet of wine gums. He hadn't had them when he came back with the McBreakfasts and Harvey wondered vaguely how he had managed to go out and buy them without leaving the shop unattended. 'Yeah, no problem.'

'Look, this isn't an easy conversation for me to start. But I figured you didn't have my number . . .' Would Josh really just wander off and leave the shop? 'Harvey?'

'Yes. I mean, no, I didn't. If I had I would have called you.'

'So when I didn't hear from you after that ridiculous fight . . . God, fighting like two schoolboys, how pathetic was that? I assume you're OK?'

Leaving the shop unattended was strictly forbidden. 'Oh yeah, yeah, I'm fine. I guess I didn't exactly shine in the hero stakes but I did get a black eye.'

'Oh please! The very idea of Jeff attacking you . . . I suppose that reunion just put him back in the playground. Not that he ever moved very far from it in the first place.'

'Yeah, well, he was obviously angry. I mean, I was hugging you.' OK, he had left the shop unlocked all night but that was different. Drunkenness had always been an acceptable excuse for bad behaviour in Harvey's world but Josh was stone-cold sober.

'Yes, you were, and I think we need to talk about that.' He'd have had to go all the way to the newsagent's. That was further than McDonald's.

'Right, yeah.'

'I can tell that you don't want to talk about it. Men never do want to talk about things.'

Ten minutes minimum. 'Mmm? Well, it is hard, like you said.'

'Yes, it is. But I think we should be clear about what happened and where we are now. For the record, Jeff and I have broken up. I've left him.'

Fifteen if that girl Shanaz was serving. Josh always went all red and giggly and hung around wasting time when she was there.

'Right. Bad one.' He thought for a moment. 'Or rather, good one. Look, where are you?'

'I'm here. I've come up to stay with my old school friend Lisa. It's strange, this all seems to be about school somehow, about going back . . .' Fifteen minutes, they might have been cleaned out. Harvey looked round the shop critically. What if half his stock was missing? He was mentally checking the racks when he realised there was a pause to fill.

'You're in London?'

'Yes.'

'Cool. Let's go out.'

'You want to go out?'

'Hell, yeah. Of course I do.'

'I've just told you I'm not sure what is going on. I've arrived five minutes ago. I don't know where I am or what I'm doing. I think maybe I want to just be on my own for a while, think things through.'

'Yeah, right. You must be confused. So maybe a drink or something, yeah? Make you feel better.' Everything looked all right.

'Harvey, are you listening to me? I'm totally confused. I don't know what I'm going to do.'

'Oh, OK. No problem, maybe a meal, yeah? Pizza?'

'Jesus. You don't let up, do you? All right, maybe a drink . . .'

'Cool, OK.' The thought of drink made Harvey feel slightly queasy but he knew himself well enough to know that by the evening this feeling would have been mysteriously replaced by a sort of grey thirst, as if only beer or spirits could unfur his tongue.

'Where shall we meet? I'm in Croydon and I feel like I've moved to another planet.'

Jesus. 'Er, OK, can you get to earth? Maybe we could meet in town, yeah?'

'OK, where?'

Harvey focused at last. Shit, where do you take a beautiful woman you want to get off with but who wants to talk about life? Especially when you've slept in your clothes, have Satan's hangover and are very possibly about to be accused of murder? Harvey thought for a moment: 'I'll meet you at the Boot.' Perfect.

After giving fulsome directions, Harvey rang off and confronted Josh. 'Where did you get those wine gums?'

Josh regarded him with a cold eye. 'Mary gave them to me.'

'Mary gave them to you?' Harvey felt a wave of remorse. Mary was a mad Scotswoman who lived in one of the covered alleys opening off Old Street. Occasionally when business was especially good they would give her a pound from the till and then watch her go to the off-licence across the road (where she got a discount) to buy a can of Tennants Super. She would always open it in the doorway and then raise it in a toast to them and to Inaction Comix. They liked that. And in return, because she was, like many street people, heart-wrenchingly generous, she would bring them things. One day she brought them a very battered
Beano
that she had found in a dustbin and they had considered it seriously and told her that if only it had been in mint condition it would have been worth a fortune.

'You let Mary buy you sweets?'

'She found them in the street and thought I might like them.' Mary liked Josh better than Harvey whom she regarded as a representative of the ruling classes. Mary was very class-conscious.

'And you are eating them? You are eating sweets that a tramp found in the gutter?'

'Yes.' Josh selected a red one and put it ostentatiously in his mouth. 'Want one?'

'Yeah, all right.'

And all was forgiven.

'So, she's left him and she wants you to come out tonight.' Josh's excitement was pretty to behold. Unlike other single straight people of Harvey's acquaintance, Josh rarely seemed jealous or bitter when Harvey achieved romantic success. Rather, a sort of focused fascination came over him, and he achieved a look similar to the one that came into his eye when he was reading
Vampirella
. Harvey had wondered before whether this was due to genuine kindness, a desire for an example to follow in his own life or just plain weirdness. He had settled – mostly for malicious reasons – on the last of these. 'And he hit you for snogging her?'

'Yeah, kind of. He sort of chased me round and then he punched me in the face.'

'Shit!'

'I know.'

'Real danger. Shit. Total action adventure. What else happened?' They had finished the wine gums and they had made Harvey thirsty. One of the good things about running a comic shop was that you rarely got a rush, so you could focus on these things.

'I need a drink.'

'Water is what you need.' Josh fetched him a pint glass, stolen from the Queen's Head, filled with grey tap water.

'Was that glass clean?'

'Course. So what else happened?'

'Well, he kicked me in the kidneys and then the others pulled him off. He's a big bastard, mind, a rugby player. I could have been killed.'

'Right. Shit.' Josh's glasses were shining with interest. 'So hospital, yeah, or not?'

'No. I just went to bed for a bit and then Bleeder arrived so I had to go.'

One of the reasons that Harvey had been satisfied with the silent-treatment from Josh was that it meant he had been able to delay this moment until he was capable of dealing with it. He took a long pull on his glass of water, grimaced at the mixed tastes of dust, very very old beer and London tap water. He decided, in the brief moments that he had to think, that this last was probably the least appealing of the three flavours.

'Bleeder!' Josh's voice when excited would sometimes move up an octave, as if he was transported back to a prepubescent state. It did so now. 'Bleeder was there?'

'Yeah. Yeah, he was at the reunion and then he came along to the party. We had a chat.'

'A chat! You chatted to Bleeder!' Harvey had to like Josh. For all his many and various failings as a friend and an employee, he was a very good audience.

'Yeah. We talked twice actually . . .'

'And . . . was there . . . ? Did he . . . ?' Harvey, despite himself, burst out laughing.

'I'm not telling,' he said and reached for his cigarettes. 'But watch this space.' And with that, and with a plaintive and desperate shop assistant trailing him back into his office, he returned to the couch and, after a heartening cigarette, slept once more.

She was late. Which did not surprise Harvey and he sipped his Scotch without rancour. It was not an easy bar to find and Croydon was a long way from it. As he drank, Harvey could feel the hangover that he had woken with and the horrified realisation, and the daylight sleep that he had had since, and the second awakening and the second horrified realisation, all sort of hanging around waiting for the Scotch to kick into it and wake it all up and make it play. Meanwhile, he surveyed his favourite bar with a brand of Martian affection. It was on another planet: planet Gaelic perhaps. The walls had pictures of hurling teams and the floor was covered in genuinely filthy sawdust. The barman was drunk and everyone else was keeping him company. There is, of course, a very good reason why people go to pretend, plastic 'Oirish' bars in London, and that is so that they don't have to drink in the real thing. But, for Harvey, the Boot represented an authenticity that he had long had to accept was never going to emerge from his own disordered and misplaced identity. He had even, at one time, toyed with an Irish accent but had sounded offensive. So he just tried to look Irish, which wasn't too hard because coming from Cornwall he was pale and dark and miserable to begin with and soon he would be drunk to complete the picture. He had never tried to get off with anyone sober and he doubted it was possible. While alcohol may inhibit the sex drive, without it the act would become entirely impossible: something mythological that only happened in ancient civilisations, before the internet.

While he waited, Harvey considered his options. There was the possibility that he could tell Maisie Cooper everything that had happened in Cornwall. While not particularly drawn to confidences, Harvey could see how sharing his problem might help, certainly it might stop his brain revolving in his skull, just to speak it out loud. However, there was also the possibility that she would insist he go to the police and that would lead to irreconcilable differences much too early in the relationship. She might also suspect him and again starting a romance with one party thinking the other is a murderer, while not a situation he had been in before, seemed unlikely to succeed. So he decided to do nothing at all. It was a decision he made often in his life, but rarely found wanting. This choice was still fresh in his mind when she walked in. She was wearing a long, orange, kaftanesque thing with beads and tassles. Her hair was tied up in a scarf and she had on Doctor Marten boots. Harvey was not sure he had ever seen anything so lovely. Very hippy-dippy, he thought, very gorgeous.

'Hello.' He grinned and felt the truth of the smile, it was one of those smiles that sort of take over from inside. He turned away to stop the smile from spilling all over her.

'Hello you.' She put her hand on his arm and he realised too late that he might have kissed her. 'Interesting spot.' She was looking round and Harvey could hear that she meant it. She wasn't being sarcastic like most of his friends would be – 'Interesting spot!' – she really was interested.

'Drink?'

'Just a mineral water, thanks. Lisa and I sat up till nearly three, drinking wine and just talking everything through.' Harvey nodded understandingly while acknowledging internally that if he drank mineral water every time he stayed up and got pissed, well . . . he'd probably be a lot better off.

'It was one of those talks where you work stuff through. Do the big stuff, you know? And I guess I realised that I had been unhappy with Jeff for a long time.'

Harvey turned to the bar and ordered her some water, which came with a look of sympathy from the barman, and another Scotch for himself. If they were just going to get straight into it he needed to get another one under his belt fast.

'I'm not sure I can really remember why I married him in the first place. It was as if someone else did that and I woke up and had to face the consequences. Do you understand what I mean by that?'

Harvey nodded vigorously; he knew so well what she meant that it seemed to cover the majority of things that had ever happened in his life.

'I mean,' she went on, 'I believe one must take responsibility for one's decisions and Jeff was one of my decisions and I guess he did get me out of Bath, which is where I grew up, got me away from there, at least as far as Bristol.'

'How far is that?' Harvey sipped his whisky and wished he'd ordered a double so he could concentrate better.

'About twenty miles,' she admitted ruefully, 'but at least it was somewhere else. I guess it was the beginning of leaving. It took me a long time to take the next step.'

Harvey realised he knew next to nothing about her.

'You don't have kids, do you?' He was suddenly worried at that thought. What might he be taking on? For taking her on was what he discovered he wanted. The thought of letting this voice, this presence go, of returning to Josh and the pub at lunchtime every day without this to think about was already moving outside his range of acceptable options. He was surprised by how fast that had happened. Perhaps because most of the rest of his life seemed to have been crammed into the last few days he was speeding up.

'No. Jeff didn't want them and I was never sure. I guess I never really felt that I was there for good. Do you ever feel like you are always halfway out the door?'

'Yeah, my entire life actually. I'm always going somewhere else, always about to leave. It's not very Zen, is it?'

'No,' she smiled, 'it's not very Zen and I think it's time to stop, for me anyway. Whatever I do now has got to be what I really choose to do. I don't know yet what that is, but it has to be right.'

'Yeah.' Harvey nodded thoughtfully. 'I know what you mean.'

'Do you?' She looked at him very closely and he hid in his glass. 'One of the things Lisa and I talked about was you, and I realised that I don't really know who you are, Harvey. I don't know what's going on for you at all. You were just this man who wasn't my husband, who was kind and listened . . . It all seemed so unlikely somehow, so far away from everything. All those strange people in Cornwall. Jeff and I just falling apart. And you were there and you listened. You're a really good listener.' She put her hand on his arm again. 'I'm really grateful for that. But now I've come back to some kind of reality and I guess I'm thinking . . .'

Harvey didn't want to know what she was thinking. He didn't like the way she was talking at all. He had taken it for granted that meeting for a drink was a beginning; it only now occurred to him that she might see it as an end.

'I'm thinking that to rush into anything right now would be crazy . . .' She was continuing slowly to speak words Harvey had not prepared himself for. Usually he would have done, he had enough experience of romantic disappointment to know the importance of pre-emption, but there hadn't been time. He'd been too drunk or too preoccupied or too hungover, or too busy cleaning up bucketloads of blood and sick. He had just had to take Maisie for granted. He shook his head wildly now.

'Wait, wait!' he shouted and gained a bleary but penetrating glance from two aged Irishmen in the corner who were discussing the Eurovision Song Contest. 'Don't do this. I need your help. I really do need your help.'

He hadn't planned to say that but it was a good thing to say. If he'd said I love you, or I need you, or I know we belong together, as he would normally have done, she would have been shocked and slightly scared because they'd just met, and she would have been polite in a really sweet and intractable way. He had just met her but he suddenly felt he could read her a little bit. Unlike him, he saw now, Maisie had thought this through to quite an extensive degree. Surprise was really the only possible way of preventing her smiling kindly at him.

'What do you mean?' She went off script and gazed at him, startled by his vehemence. 'What's the matter?'

'Um ...'

'Because while you have been very kind, and you were there when I needed someone, there are so many things I have to work through . . .'

'I'm in trouble,' he cried wildly. 'I am in real trouble and I need your help.'

'What kind of trouble?' She was still looking at him as if trying to see inside his face. This time he met her gaze.

'Murder,' he said sternly. The rest of the pub returned to its own affairs. Murder was a private matter at the Boot.

Maisie narrowed her eyes. 'What do you mean?' she asked, but he could tell that she knew at once exactly what he meant.