The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,13
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