Exchange

by Paul Magrs

  Simon wondered where she would want to go. He had never shopped with a girl his own age. Would he have to hang around while she messed about with shoes and bras and nails and make-up? Would she want to go to weirdo shops that reeked of incense, or tattoo parlours where the air was rank with blood and ink? And would she convince him to have a tattoo done or have some part of his anatomy agonisingly pierced?

  He’d buy her lunch, he decided. It would be his treat. They’d go somewhere not too expensive, not too tacky, and they’d eat duck and hoisin sauce, or fajitas with loads of sour cream and avocado and fiery hot salsa. He wanted to say thank you, for bringing him out.

  He looked at his watch as the motorway petered out and they pulled into the suburbs, past jumbo-sized supermarkets and car parks, and looming tower blocks and breweries with funnels belching tangy smoke. By now, he thought, at school, he’d be finishing the morning’s bracing cross-country run. He’d be coming in last, lathered in black mud, trudging heavily towards the showers. Kelly had saved him from all of that. She had given him something to look forward to, instead. It’s so easy just to walk away, he thought. To do something great instead.

  Then they were crossing the high, broad bridge over the river, and zooming through dark underpasses, and at last they were pulling into the bus station.

  As they disembarked Kelly said, ‘It’s dead rough round here. Keep your hand on your wallet.’

  It was so like something his gran might have said, Simon almost laughed. Looking at the deadbeats hanging around the station, though, Simon didn’t feel worried. Kelly was the hardest-looking person in sight.

  He went to the nearest cashpoint and took out a cool fifty quid.

  Kelly whistled. ‘You’re loaded,’ she said.

  ‘I want to buy us lunch.’

  ‘Big spender.’

  ‘Insurance money,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  He explained how he’d come in for a bit of money when his parents died. ‘I’m suppposed to save it all for when I go to college. It’s my nest egg, Winnie always says.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kelly. She led the way up the street towards the city centre. They marched quickly past the cheap shops; the everything costs-a-pound shops and the amusement arcades. Simon had never seen so many charity shops in one place. Somehow the volume of them was depressing, and it robbed him of the desire to go into any of them.

  ‘It’s no consolation, is it?’ Kelly said. ‘That bit of cash. In exchange for your mum and dad. Any amount of money wouldn’t have been a fair exchange.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said quietly. Straightforward and honest. Grandad had described her. Forthright. Sometimes, though, that could come across as tactless.

  ‘I don’t remember my mum much,’ Kelly said. ‘I never really knew her.’ She was thinking hard, squinching up her painted eyes, shaking her spiky head. ‘But if anything ever happened to my dad…’ She clicked her tongue and whistled. ‘I can’t even imagine it. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  Simon found he was touched by this. ‘Doesn’t he mind?’ he asked. ‘About the way you dress and everything?’

  ‘Ha,’ she said. ‘You should see the pictures of him when he was our age. Unbelievable. He shouldn’t have been allowed out, really. He was shocking.’

  They walked for miles that day, looping great distances around the city centre, popping into record stores and bookshops as and when they pleased. They walked down to the riverside and under the old, dripping arches to visit smaller, more esoteric shops. Simon stood patiently in a hippy shop called Guru as Kelly examined earrings and necklaces made from silver, jet and coloured glass baubles. They found a cafe and ate nachos with chilli, sour cream and green jalapeno slices. It seemed very intimate, sharing a large plateful of sloppy food like this. Simon smiled at the careful, birdlike way that Kelly ate. She insisted they have wine at lunchtime, though he wasn’t keen. Red wine would give him a headache on the stuffy bus ride home, he knew. But they ordered it anyway, and Kelly looked like she was drinking a goblet of sacrificial blood.

  They walked along the redeveloped riverside, glancing up at spruce, new, architectural marvels: spindly pieces of statue; a bouncy footbridge; the spartan, gleaming frontage of a modern art gallery. They tried to imagine what this whole place must have been like when it was docks and shipyards. Back in Winnie and Ada’s time.

  ‘Have you ever been round the old streets where your gran grew up?’ Kelly asked. ‘It can’t be far from here.’

  ‘Most of them are gone. Cleared away,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if their houses are still standing. I remember going there once. When I was very young. We went back to visit my great-grandmother in her little house. She was a tiny woman, sitting underneath all these woollen blankets in her back parlour. It was like going back into the past. I remember being quite scared. I must have been a toddler. I was scared they were going to make me stay there, back in the olden days, with this old woman…’ In telling this to Kelly he found the memory stirring. It was as if the putting of it into words made the pictures and sensations real again. For the first time he thought about how precarious his memory was. Real things could be lost for ever. He would forget. Inevitably, he would forget all kinds of things.

  Now they had wandered into these older streets. Where the houses were red-bricked, terraced and seemingly crumbling and rumbling down the hill and ultimately into the sea. They had tiles missing, walls coming down, some had shrubs growing out of their chimney stacks. Everything here seemed derelict and in its final days.

  ‘It must have been somewhere near here,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t remember what the street was called.’

  ‘There’s going to be a museum, apparently,’ Kelly said. ‘I read something about how they’re converting an old church. “The Ada Jones Experience”, they reckon it’s going to be called.’

  ‘Never!’ laughed Simon.

  ‘They’re going to reconstruct her house inside. Just like it would have been, back in the past, right down to the tiniest detail…’

  ‘They should ask my gran,’ he said. ‘She’ll tell them what it was like.’ Then, suddenly, he had a very clear image of pale, dirty Ada Jones out in the street here, reaching up to bang on Winnie’s mum’s front door. Demanding to be let in and to be given paper and pencils and sanctuary. Finding freedom at the kitchen table next door.

  Almost every day, Winnie had told him. That’s how often Ada had started to come round in order to write her stories down. She would think them up and hone them down as she lay in bed. Then, the next morning, she’d dash round to the kitchen next door, and sit at the table, scribbling away. It was amazing that Winnie’s mum — that wizened, wrinkled person Simon himself just about remembered — had put up with such an imposition. Winnie’s mum hadn’t been known for her forbearance or her patience. She certainly had no love for the mucky family next door. But Winnie’s mum — whom the neighbours called the Duchess — liked to be seen to be doing a good turn.

  ‘She was helping this poor, dirty, neglected child with her education. Just by giving her a corner of the kitchen table to work at,’ Winnie had laughed. ‘I don’t know if my mum ever heard that Ada eventually became a writer ..

  Winnie was the teacher and, for a while, she felt like she was the one in charge.

  The smaller, paler, less fortunate girl would sit and gaze steadily as Winnie dispensed her wisdom.

  Ada was a quick learner. She drank all the knowledge up. She exhausted Winnie’s stocks and supplies and soon Winnie was left standing.

  Winnie was still necessary for the actual buying of books, and Ada would take them off her and she would read them aloud to her teacher: whizzing fluently through hundreds of pages. Ada would happily skip the boring bits, or passages she thought Winnie might find too perplexing or difficult. Winnie would sit, stunned, listening to her protegee.

  ‘Chuntering on’ is what Winnie’s mum, the Duchess, always called the sound of Ada’s reading aloud. She would sometimes
chase them away from her kitchen table, exasperated at their clutter of papers and books and scratchy pencils. The Duchess didn’t see any point in stories. ‘There’s no profit in reading books. No money in made-up things.’ When she delivered a verdict like that, the stout Duchess looked very grand and sure of herself. She was a domineering figure in a stiff white blouse with a black cameo brooch at her throat. As she hovered around her immaculate kitchen, she flicked at stationary objects with her tea towel, as if defying dust to settle. The Duchess liked things to be just so. She was astonished when Ada answered her back.

  Ada slammed her book shut. ‘But somebody has to make money out of made-up things. The people who write these books do, don’t they?’ She rapped scabby knuckles on the hard, shiny cover.

  Winnie drew in a breath and took a step backwards.

  The Duchess said, ‘You cheeky little thing!’ She raised her hand, as if to deliver a slap. Instead she flicked out her tea towel, shooing the girls out of her kitchen. ‘You’ve always got a smart answer, Ada Jones.’

  ‘But it’s true,’ Ada said. ‘Somebody has to write these books. They don’t just write themselves.’

  Winnie wasn’t saying anything. She was biting her lip and watching the proceedings and wanting to dash for the toilet outside. She knew her mother was about to fly off the handle at any moment.

  ‘Books,’ scoffed the Duchess. ‘On a broiling, muggy day like today, the two of you want to sit there with that thing. Filling your heads… You should be out getting the fresh, sea air.’

  ‘I’m going to write books,’ Ada said mockingly. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’

  The Duchess sighed at her. ‘That was a fine game when you were a little girl. When you were nine and ten and Winnie was learning you your letters and that. When you used to sit here and write your daft little stories.’ The Duchess’s face drooped sadly. She looked anxious now, over how fervent Ada seemed. ‘But those games can’t go on, can they?’

  Ada’s body was rigid. ‘Daft stories?’

  ‘You’ve gone twelve years old,’ said the Duchess. ‘You’re nearly grown. You both need to buck your ideas up. You’re both far too babyish for your age. You’re stuck in your stories with princesses and fairies and fine ladies in grand houses. That’s all you care about. But you listen to me. You’ll be finishing school before you know it — and then what, hm? The two of you haven’t got an idea between you.’

  Ada sneered. ‘I’ve got lots of ideas.’

  ‘The wrong ideas,’ sighed the Duchess, flicking at the mantelpiece clock with her tea towel. It gave a mournful ‘bong’. ‘Ideas above your station.’ She turned to look at Ada — and at Winnie, too — as she said: ‘The likes of us don’t write books. Don’t be ridiculous, girl. It will never happen. Ever. The sooner you face that fact, the better.’

  Winnie watched Ada’s face twist for a few moments, as the girl struggled over what to say next. Winnie watched her trying not to weaken and let herself cry. And she managed to stop herself shouting and raving and swearing at Winnie’s mum, like she would her own. Instead, Ada’s face slowly took on an expression of benign composure. It was like watching blancmange setting. Winnie watched as Ada patiently hid her desires and ambitions out of sight, and faced the Duchess with calm, determined wilfulness. ‘I will prove you wrong,’ Ada said.

  Later, when the sun was going down over the docks, Ada and Winnie sat out in the sand dunes, sulking and plotting. They hid in the long, bleached grass, hunkering down in the sand and slats of golden, eggy sunlight. They gazed through the stripey grass with eyes like feral cats.

  ‘I will, you know,’ Ada kept saying. ‘I’ll prove it to all of them.’

  ‘The seagulls arc so loud,’ Kelly said. ‘They’re really screaming. I suppose you wouldn’t notice if you lived here all the time.’

  They wandered along the seafront, chilled by the breeze that ruffled the water silver. They watched a ferry slide by, in no particular hurry.

  ‘Let’s head back into the city,’ Simon suggested. This place was beginning to make him feel maudlin. Today was meant to be their fun escape. Here they were dwelling on somebody else’s past.

  Back in town Simon found himself buying brand new books. In a mammoth chain store, the bright covers and the newness of their smell and their unbroken spines conspired to make him want to own new books for once. He splashed out. He made his choices — novels too recent to be circulating in second-hand shops or the Great Big Book Exchange just yet. He wanted novels without reputations; novels that were so new they were untried, untested. He found the idea of blank, undiscovered territory alluring.

  Then he watched Kelly buying black suede boots with money she had been saving since last Christmas, she said. Soon they were walking around with bulging shopping bags, just like everyone else in the city centre. Did that make them feel like they fitted in more? Did they feel that they’d made a few choice purchases, along with everyone else?

  Kelly shrugged. ‘I’ve no desire to fit in with everyone else. Not at all. Look at them all. Look at the state of them!’

  Simon winced. She’d get into bother if anyone heard her.

  Late in the afternoon, the Christmas lights started to sparkle and fizz. They were all animated snowmen doffing hats; holly and mistletoe jiggling about on the municipal tinsel strung between lampposts. Simon and Kelly went to a wine bar, not too far from the bus station. To Simon — used to old ladies’ tea rooms and sharing a pot of Earl Grey with his gran — this seemed like the very height of sophistication.

  They perched on high stools of stainless steel, at a gleaming glass-topped bar, pretending they were old enough. The waiter brought them bright orange cocktails that Kelly had chosen from a leather-bound drinks list. The drinks tasted potent, sharp, and just a bit nasty. The whole moment was a delicious one and, as they looked out across the city rooftops, Simon couldn’t quite believe that this was him. Here he was, out with a girl on a weekday… Christmas in the air and they were having exotic drinks, all illegally. This was the high life. This was like novels.

  He became quite tipsy. He found he was telling Kelly about how he had discovered his grandad with that stash of vintage magazines.

  ‘Glamour magazines, the old man called them…’

  Kelly frowned. ‘Back in the days when I was a hardline feminist — last year, really — I’d have disapproved of that. Now I don’t think there’s much harm in it. And those old mags from the Fifties can be quite kitschy and funny.’

  ‘It was a shock,’ Simon said.

  ‘Don’t be so prudish.’

  ‘But, you don’t like to think of your grandad…’

  ‘What? Still having sexual feelings? Hm? What about your gran?’

  ‘Stop it,’ he laughed. ‘They’re both past all that. She’s told me that herself. She says she gets all the romance she needs from novels…’

  Kelly gave a barking laugh. ‘Don’t we all?’ she sighed. Simon took a large — too large — sip of his odd-tasting drink. ‘What gets me, about Grandad and his Pert and Bounce magazines, and all that, is that they’re the only books — the only publications of any kind — that he actually owns. He goes on about me and Gran having all our books and cluttering the place up. And yet all he’s got are his glamour magazines. I think it’s a bit sad ..

  ‘Don’t be so snobbish!’ said Kelly. ‘I didn’t think you’d be like that, Simon. Everyone has their own thing, don’t they? Their thing’s their thing.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I said, “Their thing’s their thing.’”

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s dead profound, that.’

  ‘You know what I mean. If old pictures of 1950s ladies in the nuddy is what he’s into, then that’s fine, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘When did you change your attitude, then?’ he asked. ‘Away from the hardline feminist point of view?’

  ‘Oh, when I started working for Terrance, at the Exchange,’ she said. ‘I could hardly he puritanical
about girlie mags there, could I?’

  ‘Why?’ he said, not following her at all.

  ‘Because of the little room at the hack,’ she said, fiddling with the paper umbrella in her glass. ‘Ah. You’ve never found the little room right at the back, have you? Behind the beaded curtain?’

  He blushed, suddenly feeling very naive. ‘No. Why — should I?’

  She shrugged. ‘Probably not. You’re too prim. It’s where all the old glamour mags are kept. Nothing too shocking, of course. Not really. It’s just another line Terrance has going at the Exchange. Ancient, saucy pictures from the olden days.’

  He gulped. ‘I hope my gran hasn’t found that room. She would be horrified.’

  ‘What Terrance has got behind that beaded curtain wouldn’t shock anybody, these days. They aren’t that rude, compared with today.’

  ‘I think my gran is quite shockable…’

  ‘I don’t think she is,’ Kelly smiled. ‘Have you ever read Ada Jones? She can get quite racy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Kelly was struck by an idea then. ‘You know, 1 bet Terrance would give your grandad quite a good price, if he wanted to get rid of his mags. If they really arc vintage, like you say.’

  ‘I doubt he would want to,’ said Simon. ‘He had them bundled up like treasure. Hidden in the rafters. There’s no way he’d want to get rid. Besides, then Gran would find out what he’d been keeping…’

  ‘1 suppose so,’ said Kelly, slurping up the last of her drink. Simon was finding that he couldn’t finish his. ‘Aren’t people just weird?’ she said. ‘Come on then, sunshine. It’s time to get on our bus. Back to the real world for us.’

  On the way back south and through the darkness down the motorway, both Simon and Kelly were reading their new novels. They sat in companionable silence aboard the mostly empty bus. It might have been the strong drink and the excitement of a day’s escape, but Simon was very conscious of Kelly’s proximity, all down his left side. Their legs were almost touching. Her elbow jarred his, each time she turned a page in her book. Simon found himself growing extra sensitive: his scalp tingling; the velveteen of the seat feeling rough through his school shirt.