The Swap (5 page)

Well, this was more like it. The darkness was all-embracing and all-disorientating. Even with the tenuous light from the hallway, Harvey's senses were befuddled by the absolute blackness. This surely was what a burglar was meant to feel like. Again it was his parents' faces that swam into Harvey's mind. When he was small his father had liked to tell him tales of how pirates would hide in the local caves and some would get lost in the darkness and never be found. The child Harvey had been frightened by these stories and had questioned their validity. 'Oh yes, it's quite true, dear,' his mother had told him when he asked. 'Only wicked pirates go in dark caves, wicked pirates and naughty boys, of course.' It had been a source of resentment over many years that he had been frightened in this way. And even now he was able to feel a certain annoyance that his first thought on being in this dark place was that pirates might come and get him. He fumbled along the wall for a light switch, trying to keep his mounting terror within rational boundaries. Surely there had to be a light switch? If there wasn't then his future self would have to just accept that he'd done his best. Or to put it another way, his future self could go fuck himself.

Still clutching the kitchen knife in one hand, Harvey patted the other along the wall, aware of soft things brushing his fingers that he hoped were spiders' webs (rather than pirates' beards, for instance). After a few edgy moments his fingers discovered an old-fashioned switch and pushed it down. This drowned him in light and switched his fears of the dark to panic as to what this display might do if seen from outside. Moving quickly onto the little square landing at the head of the stairway, Harvey pulled the door almost closed behind him.

Stepping forwards, he immediately banged his head on the first of a series of low beams that ran down at about ear height. Ducking and peering before him, he concentrated on making his way down the damp and splintered steps. What if they couldn't support his weight? What if the Odds found him in the morning, dead in the cellar? Or what if they never came down here? What if they shut up the house and Mrs Odd moved to St Ia's and he was never found? What then? Harvey wasn't sure what then, so he just tested each step with his toe while hanging on very tightly to an equally uncertain wooden rail that ran down the wall on his left side. The rail wobbled slightly in his hand and he had a nightmarish vision of the house simply waiting to collapse under the weight of abuse that it had suffered over the years: the Odd years. Perhaps his violation was the last straw, perhaps the house itself would take its revenge. Like in
The Haunting
(graphic novel edition). It seemed to take an age to turn the corner on the stairway and to find his way down into the cellar proper. And he was almost at the bottom and on the cellar floor itself before he dared to raise his eyes from the steps and survey its contents. There was not a lot down there. Clearly it had never been much used. But this was not the thought that came first to Harvey. What was down there was quite enough. In front of him there stood one large cardboard box. Like the others upstairs, it had clearly been sealed but the masking tape had been shredded from its top. This should have caught Harvey's attention but it was mostly fixed on what was beside the box. At first he thought it was a mannequin, some ageing tailor's dummy abandoned on the floor. It was the great circle of darkness around it that told him he was wrong. She was lying on her back, her mouth and eyes open, and at her throat was a long, curved opening.

Harvey took all this in very slowly. Moving uncertainly, as if wearing rollerskates, he stepped forward into the black pool around her and squatted down beside Mrs Odd. Laying down the kitchen knife, he put one hand on the slimy surface of the floor and reached out to feel her neck. There was no pulse and he knew in some distant place inside that it was ridiculous to think there might be. For a moment he just stayed there next to her, looking at the purpled mouth of the wound and wondering where he had seen something like it. Into his mind came the thought of a sex show he once attended in Amsterdam: the opening in her neck was like some pornographic display put on for his titillation; as if she was posing like this for him. And then he was unexpectedly and violently sick.

The sound of his vomiting filled the damp silence of the cellar and came back to him in a muffled echo. It was the sound that roused him and made him stand. For a moment he stood erect, drool running down his chin, feeling as a physical sensation the rising of the panic that was coming, hearing it like the sound of an approaching train. In the moments before its arrival he looked around again, not at the body but at the cardboard box. It was with only a vague, distant aftershock, that he saw, tucked inside the open flap, a mint-condition
Superman One
. It was still wrapped in its plastic casing. He moved carefully around the thing that lay on the ground, and picked up the comic. He remembered this cover, he remembered buying it, remembered the day of the swap, when he had haggled this away for a strip of plastic. The comic looked perfect, untouched. He examined the wrapper carefully and as he did so noticed that where he touched it his fingers left vivid crimson smears on the clear plastic. And that is when the panic arrived.

Dropping this thing he had thought about every day of his adult life as if it was rubbish, as if it meant nothing at all, he ran for it. Where in descent he had tried every step carefully, on his return he simply flew over them. He charged up the stairs, his feet battering a terrible beat on the exposed wood. He ran headlong along the passageway towards the kitchen, desperate, as if life depended on it, to breathe some air that was not touched by what he had seen. He charged through the kitchen and overturned the box of unsanitary saucepans. They came down with all the sound of Armageddon and he heard himself sob with terror. Hurling the back door open he ran into the jungle. He didn't stumble this time. It was as if he was floating over the uneven ground, as if fear had lifted him free of the normal inconveniences of the everyday. Through the nettles he fled, into the bushes and the brambles, down the little ditch at the end of the garden and into the cul-de-sac. He turned instinctively towards the road, towards aid and civilisation, but then some other instinct, not as deep but equally compelling, made him pause, turn and race the other way. Up the track he ran, the bare boughs of the heavy cedars bringing an early twilight, past the long grasses that lined the path. Over the gate of the school, a vault that used up what little youth he had left, across the rugby pitch, stumbling now in the thick, clogging mud; over the gravel path they used to follow from classes to the gym; and over the low front fence onto the main St Ives road. Without looking he sprinted across and onto the grass verge on the other side. Wheezing now and with cramp in his side he stumbled on for several minutes and then, hearing a car approaching behind him, threw himself, with a final act of will, into a gap in the hedgerow and lay there prostrate among the leaves, gasping like a landed trout.

Only when he felt the solid floor beneath him did Harvey raise his eyes from the steps and survey the scene once more. The body was gazing at him with unflinching accusation and he nodded a sort of greeting. 'All right?' He didn't actually say it out loud but he came close. For a nightmarish moment he imagined her replying, 'Hello, Harvey'; he could hear it in his head, her thick Cornish vowels: 'Hello, Harvey.' He tried to focus on the fact that she was no great loss to the species. Callousness and insensitivity had seen him through a number of difficult situations in his life; he could see no obvious reason why they shouldn't work here.

He had sat for a long time in the wet grass by the roadside. When he could stand upright again he had run at a lumbering and heart-attacking pace back to his father's car. And then he had driven for a while, following the road towards Truro – Cornwall's only city, and a place of great grandeur and metropolitan grace to the boy Harvey. As he drove he found he went that way as if by instinct, seeking – as he had learned to do so well in London – the safety of the urban environment, the blissful anonymity of crowds. He had wanted to be away from little places, the narrow places of his past, from funny little culs-de-sac with burned-out cars, from new estates where a stranger was watched by half-feral children, and from cellars where steps led down to unimaginable horror. And thankfully there was traffic on the Truro road. The red Ford Fiesta Fling that his father had unwisely but not untypically selected as his mode of transport blended so completely into the background roar that Harvey had felt he was already away, felt he could drive on for miles and never be found, never go back, finally sever those links with a past he never wanted in one swift chop of his hand. But then he had seen the knife.

It had crept back into his vision like some glimpsed terror in the corner of the eye. Its red plastic handle so bright and clean against the deep black crimson of the blood. Driving had done what it sometimes did for Harvey, for whom learning to drive and the advent of maturity were linked: it had made him think like a grown-up. He had broken into a house; he had picked up a knife; he had left fingerprints; he had left the knife with his fingerprints on it next to the body of an old woman whose throat had been cut; his fingerprints were on her throat. He was in trouble. And he knew what it was necessary for him to do. Where the road for Truro turns off from the dual carriageway there is a roundabout. Harvey went round it twice. As he whirled, a hundred uncertainties flashed before him from which appeared two clear paths, two exits from his spinning motion: he could take the Truro road, drive straight to the police station, tell all and it would be over. Or he could drive back the way he had come and try to fix things, to make it all right. Twice he went round and then he took the St Ives road.

He was tired now and his back and knees were singing. He had been cleaning for some time. A bucket, rubber gloves, a duster and a bottle of Zest he had found under the sink in the kitchen, and with these tools he had begun methodically to remove all traces of himself from the house. The trail he had followed previously he now went over again, wiping himself away. It struck him that in some ways this was what he'd been trying to do ever since he left St Ives twenty years ago: eradicate his traces from the place, and its from him. He was topless, having used his T-shirt to wrap around his hands as he entered the house and this was now tied round his neck, giving him the air of a portly Romany. The measured calm of the seasoned house-breaker that he had affected earlier was long gone and every whisper had become a hunting, every sigh a haunting. By the time he made his furtive way down into the cellar he felt like a sweaty Orestes.

He had left the basement till last because he knew his nerve would not hold for long. Now as he stood and faced the worst, his breath came heavy through bared teeth, his mouth open in a strange grimace that he knew would stay when this was over: an expression he had never made before had entered his range. When would he use it again? The taste of beer that wasn't quite right? Josh's morning aroma? A racist joke? To what use would he put this new look that he found on his face? He closed his eyes for a moment then grabbed his sponge cleaner from the bucket and, bending, eradicated his own footprints in the blood. Then he started on the rather neat round pool of sick, which seemed to be keeping itself to itself like a little snobbish pizza. Mixing water with the blood softened it and it ran about his feet in a swirling pattern, creating pretty ice-cream sundaes on the floor. Pizza and ice-cream: his favourite. But the blood running around was bad. It was soaking his trainers. He needed to stand on something so he could clean one set of footprints without creating another. He looked around . . . What could he use? With the makings of a ghoulish grin, he glanced at the cardboard box: he could use the
Superman One
, of course he could. Perfect. He could use this priceless treasure of which he had dreamed for so long to soak up the blood. The
Superman One
would save him from disaster. Cackling, he stepped across to the cardboard box but then stood nonplussed. The
Superman One
was gone.

Harvey struggled with this for a moment. He looked behind the cardboard box. Then he looked in the box at the other stuff that was inside: curtains with pictures of trains on them, a long length of matchbox car track, shoes (there were more shoes in this house than Harvey had ever seen before), various boxes of old plastic toys, an orange counterpane . . . Because he couldn't take anything out of the box without covering it in blood, Harvey leaned right over and almost disappeared into the box as he hunted. But it wasn't there. However much he scrabbled in the illogic of the situation, he could find no trace of it. Rising, he stood in thought for a moment. If it wasn't here and he had definitely dropped it here, then . . . then what? Mechanically he continued to clean: at the last moment remembering to run his duster over Mrs Odd's neck. 'It means, of course, that someone has taken it.' Harvey spoke out loud as he picked up the red-handled kitchen knife from where it lay beside the body and sat down on the bottom step to remove his bloodsoaked shoes. These he wrapped neatly in the T-shirt from around his neck. Then, walking carefully in his socks, he made his way back up the stairs. He gave one last look down as he stood on the little landing step. Had he erased all his prints? His head ached and his knees felt as though he had been praying for days. He nodded, he couldn't think of anywhere else that he had put his hands. He mounted the final flight of steps, switched off the light and padded carefully over the damp carpet and into the kitchen. There he emptied his bucket and washed it out. He rubbed the kitchen knife over and over with the duster and returned it to the plastic bag. Putting the sponge cleaner and the dusters in the bundle with his shoes he took off the rubber gloves and put them carefully back under the sink. Then he stepped out into the garden, pulling the door closed behind him using his T-shirt to hold the handle.

The night smelled of the country and of the sea. He stood for a moment in his socks, almost too weary to walk back into the nettles and prickles of the garden, and looked up. A faint blue still sat at the corners of the evening and the stars were dim as if politely waiting for this last vestige of day to fade before they made their entrance. He breathed deeply of the clean air and was about to step into the jungle when behind him he heard a sound, just faintly, of a door closing. So he didn't step into the jungle. He ran like fuck.