Exchange

by Paul Magrs

  ‘And… there’s books here that belonged to your mum and dad. Books that go back years…’ she said, more quietly. ‘It’s one thing, chucking out their clothes and all the stuff that’s useless now. But… their books! That they loved, Simon. That you all loved… She shook her head. ‘Well, that’s like getting rid of them themselves. Their actual memories. All the stories that they ever read…’

  Simon’s face was scalding over like a pan of milk. He found himself snapping at his gran. ‘We have to get rid, don’t we? There’s no point in keeping anything to do with them…’

  She flinched at his words. ‘Ah, don’t say that.’

  They went quiet for a bit. Simon could have kicked himself, upsetting her like that. She’d sounded disgusted with him. It wasn’t just his loss. He shouldn’t lash out. Not at her.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘We’ve got plenty of room. Your grandad won’t mind. Look how many books I’ve got around the place! He won’t even notice a few more. Come on. Bring them. Bring them with you.’

  ‘All of them?’

  She nodded determinedly, pursing her lips. ‘Yes. It seems wrong, somehow, to get rid of books. You need them. They’ll remind you of who you are. And where you’ve been. And you’ll need them even more, when everything is changing…’

  It was true that the bungalow was already quite full with his gran’s own books. There were bookcases in each of the rooms, even the kitchen, and the paperbacks were stacked two deep. Some of the shelves were so tightly packed it was hard to prise particular volumes out.

  There was a passageway in the middle of the bungalow, and his gran had built piles of books against the walls. Even in the few weeks Simon had been there, those piles of books had started to grow. They were creeping up the magnolia walls towards the ceiling.

  It seemed that his gran brought books home every single day. Every time she left the house, she returned with a brown paper parcel. More books, rescued from charity shops, mixed in with the day’s groceries. To Simon it seemed like she was smuggling them indoors and adding them to the growing heaps, hoping they were unobtrusive. They were like orphans or lost pets she’d found out in the world, and she was hiding them from Grandad — who, Simon knew, thought the bungalow was full enough.

  ‘The whole place stinks of old paper,’ he grumbled. He wasn’t exactly overjoyed when the transit van arrived from Simon’s old home, bringing the six boxes of novels his gran had convinced him to keep. ‘There’s that nasty, smoky, woody, dirty smell,’ his grandad complained. ‘You can catch lice from old paper, you know. Yellow fever. Scarlet fever. Diptheria. Oh, they’re dirty old things, books.’

  He was sitting in his favourite chair, squinting at them as they unpacked Simon’s books in the living room. Gran was tutting and cooing over titles, absorbed in flicking through pages. Simon didn’t know if his skinny, sulking grandad was just teasing, or whether he was really annoyed with them. Sometimes it was hard to know how to take the old man. Simon was used to him being a quiet, mildly ironic presence. Living with him, he was seeing a harsher side to his grandad. He had a temper Simon had never seen before. He flew into moods and he could get quite irritated with Simon’s gran who, to Simon’s surprise, didn’t shout back.

  That night he erupted all of a sudden when Gran asked him if maybe they could store some of Simon’s books in the garage.

  ‘Well, why not?’ she asked, keeping her voice steady. ‘You’re always saying there’s too many smelly old books in the house. That garage of yours is standing mostly empty…’

  Grandad rattled his newspaper crossly, warningly. ‘You can’t put them in there, because the garage is mine, do you hear, woman? That’s the only space I’ve got. In this whole world. After nearly seventy years in this life, and that garage is the only place I’ve got to myself. My only privacy…’ He coughed explosively and glared at them.

  Simon could see his point. The garage was Grandad’s den. There was hardly anything in it. Just an old armchair and a bit of carpet. Ancient oil stains on the concrete floor. But it was his grandad’s own separate world.

  Gran had fallen quiet. ‘God knows what he does in there,’ she whispered to Simon, later that evening. ‘I dread to think. But I do think it’s mean of him, not to let us use the space…’

  In the event, Simon emptied the crates of books into his own narrow’ bedroom. It turned out there was just enough room if he stacked them against the wall to about shoulder height. He had to devise an expert way of piling them up. He layered them like bricks, like a master builder. He tried different ways — the books collapsing and avalanching onto his bed — until he got it right.

  He felt like he was walling himself in. Insulating himself against the world, like a Pharaoh in a gilded tomb, embalmed with all his treasure. The pages of the paperbacks started to crinkle with the damp in the air, seeping through the plaster of the walls. But still Simon felt reassuringly insulated and separated from the world.

  It felt good to be back in that narrow room, having returned from his grocery trip, changing out of his school clothes, into his jeans and that favourite soft blue shirt. He left the shirt untucked and over his jeans, like he had to nowadays. He’d started putting on some weight recently, from eating his gran’s dinners. Her steamed puddings and extra helpings of mash; the doughnuts and biscuits she pressed on him. He was really starting to thicken round the middle and he should do something about it, he supposed.

  He felt like the little boy in the fairy tale. Kept captive by the witch in the cottage made of gingerbread. She was feeding him up for the cooking pot. She was blind, the old witch, and, when she pinched his arm to check how succulent he was, she couldn’t see he was poking an old chicken bone through the bars. He was deceiving her. No, I’m still skinny. Still skinny as this. It isn’t time to eat me yet.

  Well. She would expect him back in the kitchen soon. Friday night. She’d be doing her corned beef hash. In about an hour they’d be eating at the kitchen table, shovelling up the delicious, steamy stodge. Drinking hot, milky tea out of mugs. He could hear her now, through the thin walls, clashing the pans about with her usual gusto, and warbling along to some cheesy radio station.

  He had maybe an hour to read before they’d want to know where he was. He picked up the next book from the stack closest to his bed. He didn’t even look to see what it was. A satisfyingly fat, soft-covered book, the spine bending easily, but not cracking under his fingers. He lay down on the bed, propping himself up on all three pillows. It was a collection of ghost stories he was reading. Just right for the weather, the time of year. From the 1930s. Vintage, twee, gently spooky, and just alarming enough.

  He let himself sink into the first few pages, getting his bearings. Slowly but surely, drawn into the tale.

  Two

  ‘On a Saturday you have to get out of the house,’ Winnie said. ‘It’s no good just going round all the shops in your own town. You have to get on the bus. You have to get out of town. Go somewhere special. Make the most of Saturday.’ They were catching the bus in the market square at ten in the morning. Grandad was still in bed, but Simon and his gran were togged up in coats and scarves, eagerly waiting for the 213.

  ‘Saturdays are special,’ Gran said, clapping her sheepskin gloves together. ‘That’s when you go out and explore.’

  Simon smiled weakly. He was still half asleep really, his head woozy and his mouth too sweet with milky tea. In recent weeks he had been his gran’s willing shopping companion and accomplice. They had been on buses going north to the city, and south to smaller towns, then deeper into the countryside to villages hidden away. Winnie knew all the towns in the county, and all the bus routes and timetables. She was an expert in public transport, knowing just where to wait and when. She went jumping nimbly on and off small, short-hop minibuses and then aboard the bigger express coaches that ran up and down the business-like motorways. Simon was amazed at how adept she was, remembering all the connections and everything, so there was never any vague and use
less hanging around on kerbsides.

  On subsequent Saturdays through the autumn their journeys took them rolling and twisting through decrepit pit villages, industrial new towns and quaint medieval towns with castles green and mouldy, and tree-lined routes blazing gold and orange.

  Simon and his gran always made for the back seat of the bus. It was as if they were pretending it was a huge limousine, driven for just their benefit. As they bounced up hill and down dale the bus was swerving about beneath them, making Simon feel sick the first few times.

  When his mum and dad had needed to shop they had gone out in their own car. Straight up the motorway to the nearest mall. This was quite different. This was more like an adventure. He was spending whole days out on the road with his gran.

  ‘Don’t you think we should spend our Saturdays with people our own age?’ Simon asked half-jokingly as they clambered aboard, rolling up the long strips of tickets and shunting down the aisle as the bus roared off. Apart from them, it was empty of passengers. A rural service, Simon reflected — probably in danger of being shut down. Then what would his gran do? What would he do? They’d be trapped in that small town at the top of the hill, overlooking miles of muggy green countryside.

  Winnie sat down on the velveteen of the back seat, having checked first for any nasty marks or chewing gum. She considered his question, hugging her shiny brown handbag to her bosom. When she thought like this, her mouth would squinch up at one side and her eyes would narrow, as if she was visualising the answer written down in her head. It was the expression she wore when reading, too.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, as their bus took several tight corners round the marketplace and they were forced to lean gently side to side, ‘the thing is, Simon, people my own age and your age really bore us. I can’t stick other old women my age. Gossiping and showing off about what their kids have done, and what they’ve all got. And I know that you’re not really fussed about young people your age, either.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Simon.

  ‘You’re deep,’ his gran smiled. ‘And they don’t want to think about things seriously yet. Well. That’s how I was, when I was that young, I think.’ She looked at him. ‘I wonder if you’d think I was shallow. If you could see me as I was, back then.’

  Simon was frowning. It seemed a funny thing to imagine: Winnie as a girl, as a teenager. He had never even seen photos of her that young. He couldn’t picture her. She was his gran. She had always been the same. Solid and rather broad in the beam. Wearing crocheted cardigans and woollen skirts. A camel hair coat. Once, dim in his memory, her hair had been browner and longer. Now her perm was tinted soft candyfloss colours. She had always been older than he could imagine and she always would be. She was his only companion on these trips out, and they had become the highlight of both their weeks. Simon had moderated his usual walking pace so that they could amble along easily together. He sat in cafes with tea and biscuits more often than he normally would, because Winnie needed to gather her strength for yomping round the crowded streets and shopping arcades.

  Simon supposed they might look a bit funny going round together. Like Winnie had a toyboy. Like he’d kidnapped some old bird, or was helping her cross the roads like a boy scout would. Sometimes they linked arms, at the end of the day, when she was starting to flag. ‘It’s the dodging past all the people, all the crowds,’ she’d gasp. ‘It’s different these days. They’re all so pushy and aggressive. You’ve got to mind your feet.’

  She wasn’t really complaining, though. She loved her Saturdays out with her grandson. By the time they caught their bus home — when it was dark and the queues at the bus station were twenty deep — her eyes would be gleaming with excitement, her arms and legs would be aching and she’d be dying of thirst for a cup of tea at home. Tea in cafes was all very well, but it tasted much nicer at home, after a day of being out and about and amongst life.

  The two of them would sit on the bus home clutching their bags of pic-n-mix from Woolies and their second hand novels bound up in brown paper bags, sweaty and crumpled in their hands. They’d spend the long trip home examining their finds, poring over their brand new battered books.

  ‘We both like the same things, Simon,’ she was saying now. ‘That’s why we both love our days out. It’s all tea cakes and Earl Grey and bags of sweets and lovely novels. What more could we want, eh? What more could we possibly want?’

  Sometimes it depressed him. Every now and then he’d find himself in a charity shop, standing next to Winnie as she went rummaging in the stacks and racks, and a wave of miserable pity would wash over him. What were they doing in this place, surrounded by the dreary, unwanted, terrible leftover stuff of other people’s lives? That smell of old clothes, musty and never quite clean; the saggy cardies and blazers and hot pants and party dresses; the incomplete jigsaws and cracked geegaws and — somehow saddest of all — the discarded baby toys.

  His gran’s zest for these places was boundless and unquenchable. They were forever in and out of the RSPCA, Cancer Research, Sue Ryder and Scope. Winnie would shuffle in, like she was breezing through Harvey Nichols. She’d ease past the other shoppers — usually fellow pensioners — and she was content just to take her own time, picking through the debris. Simon had to look more enthusiastic than he really felt about these parts of their afternoons together. The saving grace of the drab charity shops would be the inevitable shelves of paperbacks. This was the cheapest way to buy books, and he liked how they were jumbled together: ancient classics check by jowl with recent popular blockbusters; westerns and romances; fantasy and stark, searing realism. The erratic order of things exactly reflected his own reading habits and the almost random way he chose what would take up his attention next.

  I just drift along, he thought, collecting this stuff together. Any old stuff. No judgement, no value. No real choosing. Just picking up book after book and making my way slowly but surely through them.

  Now he was sitting on the bus, and they were entering the suburbs around the market town. Beside him his gran was staring with interest at the new housing developments and Simon was suddenly realising: I’ll never have enough time to read all the books I want to. Even if I read every hour, every day of my life and if I took breaks only to eat and sleep enough to keep me alive… I’d still never read everything. There were too many novels out there. They stretched into infinity and usually he would find that thought consoling (‘I’ll never run out of stories to distract me! To fill up my time!’) but today the thought of reading and reading and never getting to the end; of never really getting anywhere… this thought actually made him shiver. As did the thought of scouring all these charity’ shops with his gran. They seemed endless, too: every doorway leading to shops crammed with knocked down, priced-up, second-hand rubbish.

  ‘Have you ever thought of joining the library?’ Simon asked his gran.

  She frowned. ‘What? And drag back books that loads of other people have read?’ Such was her logic.

  ‘But everything you read is second-hand,’ he said. ‘You never buy books brand new.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s different. I keep them. They’re mine afterwards. Oh, no. I’ve never loved libraries much.’

  Simon did. He loved the quiet of libraries. He loved to read without making a sound, without moving a muscle. When he went to libraries he felt tense and alert, like a creature hiding in jungle undergrowth, camouflaged but ready to dash. Winnie, on the other hand, tended to read quite noisily. She crunched apples, crisps, boiled sweets. She commented out loud on the action, letting out involuntary cries and squawks and bursts of laughter. Sometimes she even hummed or whistled as she sped-read through novels, as if providing her own incidental music to the movie inside her head.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, elbowing Simon gently in the side. ‘We’ve stopped here for some reason. Something’s up.’

  Simon had been too busy daydreaming to notice that they had parked up on the roadside, still some distance from the town centre. Peerin
g out, he saw that they were on the long South Road. It was a row of shops that had once been a lot smarter. These days many were closed down, their windows dark or boarded up. Others had become tatty takeaways or sunbed places (‘Tan Your Hide!’).

  ‘We’ve broken down,’ said Winnie, gathering herself up. ‘Look at the driver.* He was out of his seat, looking cross in the aisle, muttering into his mobile. The other few passengers were getting up and starting to leave. ‘It’s about a mile into town,’ Winnie sighed. ‘That’s a walk we weren’t expecting. I’m glad we haven’t got our groceries yet.’

  Simon was just glad they hadn’t brought that tartan shopping bag. This morning he’d managed to talk her out of dragging it along with them.

  ‘It’s not your lucky day, is it?’ Winnie asked the driver as they squeezed past him. He was still on his phone and he ignored her. ‘Bit touchy,’ she mouthed at Simon.

  Then they were out on the pavement, in an only vaguely familiar part of town.

  ‘Mind out for that dog muck,’ Winnie said. ‘It’s not very clean round here.’ She wasn’t at all impressed with the South Road. ‘Come on, then. We’ll never get there at this rate.’

  Simon roused himself and managed to get his bearings. And that was when he saw the name on the shop directly in front of them. The windows were dowdy and dim, and at first he thought it was one of the empty, abandoned places. But it wasn’t.

  The shop’s sign was gleaming green and pink. Its lettering had obviously received a fresh and meticulous new coat only recently.

  ‘What is it?’ Winnie asked, as he drew her attention to the shop before them.

  ‘Look,’ he grinned. ‘Read.’

  She squinted up at the sign.

  THE GREAT BIG BOOK EXCHANGE.

  Three

  It smelled delicious inside. It was as if all those hundreds, thousands, millions of pages had spices crushed into their worn grain. What was it? Nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, saffron. As Simon and his gran moved hesitantly, almost shyly, into the Exchange, he was trying to identify the different scents. There was a homely feel to the place. It was like opening the cupboard where all the spices and ingredients for baking were kept. Smells leading to a million associations and sensations.