The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,15
tapping at the window, just to check that the Odds weren't having a quiet afternoon in, and then with the mixed air of fear and interested experimentation, he walked to a safe distance and slung the brick at the central glass panel in the kitchen door. Plan A was that there would be an explosion of glass and a nice brick-shaped hole would appear for him to put his hand through. Luckily, Plan B was to run like a deer as soon as he threw it because, in the event, the pane merely split in an ugly and deafening crack up the middle and the brick landed at his heels.
After a pause for thought, spent standing on one foot ready to flee at the slightest sound, Harvey returned from his position in the undergrowth, removed his denim jacket, wrapped the brick in it and began to bash away at the cracked pane. This proved more productive as well as oddly satisfying and within a minute he had made a neat hole for his hand to pass inside. After admiring his handiwork for a while, Harvey dragged himself into the danger of the moment, reached inside and fumbled for a latch. That it was reachable was entirely a matter of good fortune, but reachable it was. And with a troubling sense of this action being both easy and impossible, Harvey found himself opening the door of a stranger's house and stepping inside.
He had been inside the house only once before and it had been a mess. The first impression now was that things hadn't changed. Piles of damp newspapers stood incongruously around the sink, and the sink itself had a brown discolouration, a soiling that laid a faint patina of disgust over his insurgent terror. But as he moved on through the cooking area, he realised that, in fact, things had a certain order. Boxes stood open with old and nasty frying pans emerging from them; plates were stacked in reasonably matching piles; knives and long-handled spoons protruded from a carrier bag. The hand of the social services could be seen in the way the base shell of the kitchen was appearing from its years of darkness.
As Harvey moved, mouselike, towards the hall he was aware of an almost overwhelming need to defecate. Into his mind flickered a complete story, pictured, perhaps predictably, in comic-strip form: of him rushing upstairs to the toilet, relieving himself, and then finding that the flush was broken. 'The police were able to trace the intruder using DNA samples found at the crime scene . . .' Harvey gave a low gasp of fear that was also, unexpectedly, a sort of hysterical giggle and forced himself to run upstairs.
His parents would love this. That was the thought that beset him as he crept, a faint fat shadow, along a landing lit only by the most meagre light from the bedroom windows. Ever since he brought home a presentation book of Brooke Bond Tea cards belonging to his best friend's sister when he was nine he had been perceived as potentially criminal. 'It was only to be expected,' he could almost hear his father saying. 'We always had our suspicions.' There was something rather satisfying about fulfilling so exactly his parents' worst fears. Perhaps he should become homosexual as well, and start supporting Chelsea.
He found Bleeder's room without difficulty. It too seemed like his own, unchanged from boyhood. But here the lack of progress seemed less the product of sentimental mothering and more of a generalised neglect. Nothing appeared to have changed in the Odd house for a very long time indeed. Owner ship of the bedroom was confirmed by the poster of Abba hanging above the bed. He knew that poster: Arrival. White jumpsuits and cowboy boots. In the seventies you could buy it for 50p from any newsagent in the land. It was a poster that would have been out of date by the time Bleeder was ten. It was the sort of poster only someone who had really given up trying would have had. He stood for a moment transfixed. He'd forgotten how tasty Agnetha was. Had Bleeder even realised that? Harvey doubted it. He did the sigh, or a sort of panicky version of it, and moved to the one large cardboard box that stood in the middle of the otherwise stripped room.
The box had been sealed neatly with long strips of masking tape and for a moment Harvey felt an odd impropriety