The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,14
St Ives hunting for a comic? Did charity shops even sell comics? He'd been in enough but couldn't remember ever seeing any. What if the charity shop owner knew enough to enquire about a first edition? What if the headline in the local paper a week from now was 'Charity Shop Owner Strikes It Rich (And Opens Superhero-themed Coffee Shop In Downtown New York)'? That very definitely wouldn't be all right. But Bleeder's stuff hadn't been gone through yet. That was the point. That was, in fact, a very key point. Harvey had sat up and looked around his room for a while. It was a room unchanged since his childhood and that, of course, was typical in families like his. What was less typical and slightly more troubling was that it bore a close resemblance to his current rooms in London. The old bedroom posters were of Batman and Spider-Man rather than Darkman and Tomb Raider, but they weren't posters he would find unacceptable in his grown-up world. He sometimes tried to argue that this was because he had always had good and adult taste. It was an argument entirely with himself, and was another that he rarely felt any confidence of winning.
Sleep had not come that night, not until the morning was advancing. This was unusual. Harvey was normally a good sleeper, beer having a pleasantly narcotic effect. But this time there was a reason for insomnia. Deep in his heart he already knew that he was going to rob Bleeder's house. He couldn't pin down when that decision was made. It was as if he had always known it. Perhaps it had formed as an inevitable somewhere in those twenty years of waiting. You can't care this much about something so particular for this long without some sort of action, however ineffectual, becoming necessary. Harvey knew that he owed it, as it were, to the next quarter of a century, to do everything he could do. It was as simple as that: his future self depended on it.
Which didn't make it easy, of course. As he strode rapidly away from Bleeder's house, he thought of how impossible crime could seem. He sometimes liked to think of himself as a bit of an outlaw: the tin under his bed with the lump of Black in it; the car with the 'applied for' sticker in place of a tax disc; the 'adult graphic novel' section of his bookshelves. But somehow this had nothing to do with breaking and entering. The house looked so solid. The walls and windows such tangible, physical proofs of right and wrong. It was as if, for a moment, as he walked purposefully away in the wrong direction, he could see the very tablets of the Old Testament reformed and reconstituted into solid whitewashed walls.
Chapter Six
Breaking a window with a brick is actually quite difficult.
After a swift walk through the estate, intended to give the impression that he was late and going somewhere important, Harvey had made his way round to the cul-de-sac that ran along the bottom of Bleeder's garden. The road had no houses on it and came to an end in a thicket of half-grown trees and burned-out cars, with only a muddy track running off it. Harvey recognised the track as the one he used to walk up to school. At other times he might have stopped for a brief bout of nostalgia, characterised by the words: 'Thank Christ I don't have to do that any more.' But today's business was too serious for such indulgences. From the path, Mrs Odd's back garden looked worse than her front. No wild threshing had happened here. Thick nettles and brambles were intertwined with long grass and piles of rubble. Bits of unknowable things emerged from bushes. This was comforting to Harvey. Clearly no one had been up Mrs Odd's garden for a very long time.
After traversing the hedge and the jungle of the undergrowth with only a scratched hand and a slightly twisted ankle sustained in an encounter with a deflated but still smiling Spacehopper, Harvey had found himself standing, SAS-style, to one side of the kitchen window, as if about to burst in shooting. Glancing down and observing his beer gut heaving in a way that looked frankly unhealthy, he forced himself to breathe more easily. He was in the garden of an old friend, it was hardly a capital offence. The brick in his hand was less easy to explain.
He tried