Exchange

by Paul Magrs

  Simon blushed. ‘I thought he seemed happier. After Kelly came round. He made such an effort. He looked so smart. You said yourself he was cheerful for days afterwards.’

  ‘Well,’ said Winnie, getting up to make a start on peeling potatoes for supper. ‘That didn’t last long. Everything’s changed again, with his switch of mood. He was whinging about all of us this morning. I was evil for keeping him awake and bringing too many infested books into the house. You, he reckons, aren’t even going to school any more. He says you’re skiving off and running about on the buses instead.

  Simon’s heart started hammering at this.

  Winnie continued: ‘And now he reckons that your Kelly is just the same as all the other girls. Just a common, spiky-haired tramp, he said. He said she was cheeky, being so familiar, talking to her elders when she came round here. He said she’s only knocking about with you because of your insurance money. ‘Clause you’ve got a bit more cash to draw on, more than any other, normal boy of your age…’ Winnie was reaching into the fridge for the eggs as she said this. She froze suddenly, and looked ashamed. ‘I shouldn’t have told you all that,’ she told Simon.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I’m sure your grandad didn’t mean it.’

  Simon shrugged. It couldn’t be true, could it? Kelly hadn’t known he had a bit of cash until they went on their day out together. And besides, it wasn’t like he was a millionaire. It wasn’t that much money. And, anyway, what had his grandad meant: ‘any other, normal boy’ of his age? Did Grandad think he was a freak, too? Like Simon himself did?

  His gran was now flustered and cross with herself, for giving too much away. As she set about tremblingly peeling spuds, Simon felt a bit sickened. He felt like he had been eavesdropping on a very private row — and he had heard upsetting mention of himself. His gran shouldn’t have said anything, he thought. Now she was standing with her rounded hack to him, worrying at the potatoes, letting their dark skins fall away in long, expert ribbons.

  Simon spent most of the rest of that evening lying on his bed, keeping out of their way.

  His grandad came home in time for supper. He was woozily drunk and quiet, stewing with either repentance or resentment — it was hard to tell which. He dipped hot, glistening chips into the bulging yellow eye of his egg and didn’t say a word, to either Winnie or Simon.

  Gran was mostly quiet, too. She let out the occasional sigh, trying to draw attention to herself.

  Gran’s not blameless, Simon found himself thinking, stretched out on his bed, trying to read. I used to think she was perfect. I thought she was kind and all knowing, full of generosity and compassion and humour and sense. But… she’s a bit selfish and silly, sometimes. She doesn’t know when she’s upsetting people. She can’t see it. And if she’s got something to say, something she has to get off her chest, then she’ll just go ahead and say it. No matter who gets hurt as a result.

  She steamrollers over people. She would never admit that. She goes on like she’s the one who bends over backwards to please and serve everyone else. She would claim that she puts everyone else’s needs ahead of her own. And it’s true that she cooks and cleans and irons and washes and keeps life here on an even keel (just about…). But my gran is a woman who likes things to go all her own way.

  Simon suddenly saw his grandad’s tempers in a different light. As the thwarted resistance of a man ground down by his wife’s dominance.

  But that didn’t fit either, thought Simon. He thought about the way Grandad Ray talked to Winnie: the way he routinely dismissed and disparaged her. ‘Oh, shut up, you daft old woman. What do you know about the way the world works? You don’t know anything. You get back in your kitchen. You should stop reading all them novels. They give you ideas. Making you think you know something about the world, about things that really matter. And you don’t. You know nothing.’

  ‘He belittles me,’ Simon remembered his gran telling him. ‘For years and years he’s done that. It comes automatic to him. It’s a habit. He makes me feel like nothing. Like I’m stupid. Like I’m a bit simple. Like all I can do is cook his meals. That’s how he keeps hold of me. Because I end up feeling like there’s only him who needs me, or wants me around. I feel like my only purpose is taking care of him…’

  Now it was late. He wanted to read. He wanted to stop thinking about the lives of everyone around him. Ironically, the book he was reading just then was Ada Jones’s first novel, which he was borrowing from his gran. After visiting the old streets by the docks, albeit briefly, last week, he had felt like he wanted to read the novel. He wanted to understand Ada’s account of that shared childhood. Simon knew the sights and smells of that place — at least, how they were nowadays. The stiff’ breeze coming in from the open sea — that must be the same as it was back then. (Just the thought of that sharp chill made his sore lip throb.) Now, he thought, he wanted to hear the voices, too, back in the past.

  His gran was on with Ada’s fourth novel by now. She was reading them in sequence. Simon lay listening to his gran going to bed, banging the door to the living room, saying a grudging goodnight to Grandad Ray. Simon imagined her sitting up in bed, resolute and stiff, reading her novel, not to be deterred.

  Ada’s novels seemed to follow’ the progress of her real, private life. That’s what Winnie claimed. Reading deeper and further into the fiction, Winnie was reaching into that unknown life of her friend — following her away from the north, into the south and her adulthood: discovering what had become of Ada Jones.

  ‘And the life she led is so different to mine, Simon,’ Winnie had said, sadly. ‘Foreign travel. The best restaurants. Famous people. She must have been everywhere. She’s got all the culture and knowledge and class. It’s all very glamorous. A million miles from where she started out. And all the men, too! All the husbands and… lovers. She’s had a wild life, really, if even half the things in her books are true. Ada’s had a rare old time of it. Really, I’ve done nothing — nothing! — with my life, compared to her…’

  Ada’s reading should have put her streets ahead at school. Winnie knew how good she was but the teachers never did.

  Their school was high walled and red-bricked: the rusty colour of dried blood, Ada always said. It was on a hill overlooking the docks, surrounded by sandy dunes and tussock)’ grass. It was a high, bleak place, fenced in and prison-like: the teachers flapped around in black robes like rooks.

  All the teachers thought Ada a waste of their precious time. She showed no interest, nor any special aptitudes. She was one of the slow-witted mass that swelled the dark corridors and filled the assembly hall: all of them destined for, at best, lowly jobs in the factories or the dockyards. Most of the girls would stay at home. They would turn themselves into facsimiles of their mothers, tending to children and men; scrubbing doorsteps, nappies, pots and pans.

  Winnie watched Ada at school. She marvelled at the girl’s quietness and smallness; her way of blending in. Ada sat at one of the desks at the back. Even at thirteen, fourteen, her legs were too short to reach the ground. She cast wary glances about, keeping her distance from everyone. But she was watching everything: her eyes were brilliant and green, like two sticky boiled sweets.

  It was as if Ada believed herself to be invisible, observing everyone.

  In school, within those high walls, Ada kept her distance from Winnie, too. If they passed in the corridor or the schoolyard Ada would look at her friend blankly. At first Winnie had been offended by this. Oh, so I’m good enough for her when we’re at home, when I can teach her her lessons and give up my time… But that wasn’t it. Slowly, over years and years, Winnie came to realise that Ada wasn’t being two-faced. Rather, in publicly pretending that they hardly knew one another, Ada was protecting her friend.

  Ada was an outsider. Rough family, rough tongue. She would pass no exams, she’d curry no favour. She’d never get anywhere. The world had already given up on Ada Jones. She looked dirty and shabby; she smel
led fusty and unwashed. Winnie knew that the girl did her best to keep herself clean and nice. She was fighting a losing battle, though. Living in that house, in that family. She brought her family’s taint to school with her.

  Winnie, on the other hand, was popular because she was average and normal as could be. She was the mumsy type. Neither beautiful, nor clever, she wasn’t envied or despised by anyone. She wasn’t stuck-up and she was respected because her mother was known by other people’s mums as a decent woman. In fact, Winnie received commiserations now and then, for having to live next door to those dirty Jones people.

  Sometimes it would infuriate Winnie that Ada kept her head down and mumbled when the teachers barked questions at her. How could she keep all her restless intelligence and energy squashed down all day long? Winnie knew that brilliant things were going on inside Ada’s mind all the time: she was crackling and fizzing with ideas and stories and jokes. How come nobody could ever see that? Nobody seemed aware of the brilliance seeping out of her.

  Ada managed to keep herself incognito. Winnie flinched and ducked whenever a teacher flung a wooden blackboard cleaner at Ada. Once it cracked off her collarbone, puffing up chalk dust. Winnie could see that it had really hurt her. The teacher had let his frustration push him too far. Ada bit her lip and refused to cry or complain. Steadfastly, Ada refused to give answers when the teachers asked even the most rudimentary questions. She refused to do homework. She refused to pass exams. And, eventually, because the other kids were so rowdy and demanding, and because there were so many of them, Ada slipped past the teachers’ notice. She bided her time and left school, unqualified for everything, at the first possible opportunity.

  ‘But why do you fail deliberately?’ Winnie kept asking her, after school, over the years. ‘You know more than any of them. You can write things down better than anyone.’

  Ada tutted and rolled her eyes. Only once had she given Winnie an answer that rang true. ‘They don’t teach anything that’s of any use to me,’ she said. ‘All their measurements and weights and chemistry and rats’ guts. They turn everything into useless stuff you have to learn off by heart…’

  On the very last day of school all of their year group had walked through the school gates with the slightly hunched, tense postures of prisoners of war being liberated from a camp: expecting a bullet between the shoulder blades at any moment. Thinking, surely, it can’t be right? We can’t be free to go…?

  It was Ada who broke ranks first, of course. As she reached the sand dunes she started to run. She clutched her battered leather satchel to her still flat chest and she pelted into the bracing sea wind, kicking up plumes of stinging sand. She let out one huge roar, which startled everyone else.

  Winnie laughed — at Ada, at everyone’s faces — and she ran after her friend. She didn’t care who saw they were friends. She had never cared about that. But now, maybe, with school over, Ada would no longer hold her at arm’s length. Then, everyone else was too caught up in their own dramas of fleeing the schoolhouse for ever, to even notice that Winnie and Ada were running together, down to the beach, over the lumpen dunes. They were screaming together now, holding hands. Winnie’s fingers were crushed in Ada’s fierce grip, but she didn’t care.

  Winnie’s satchel hadn’t been fastened securely and she lost a few exercise books and pages of painstaking work. She even lost the sentimental sheet of autographs she had collected from teachers and staff of the school: all of these pages went careening away across the beach. Winnie didn’t mind. She wasn’t going back to school, either. She was no scholar, but she had the certificates that she needed. She had learned quite enough. Her mum had made it plain: it was about time that Winnie brought a bit of money home. She wasn’t a child any more.

  Finding a job would be easy. The Duchess was well known and respected in their part of town. She had contacts. Winnie would be a good worker, if she took after her mum. She was the dependable, homely type. Winnie wasn’t flighty. She would never give anyone any trouble.

  This was the next stage Winnie was looking forward to, that afternoon. She was imagining working in a shop on the high street. A job fixed up by an acquaintance of the Duchess’s. Maybe in the big department store. Shoes, or corsets… or the stationer’s counter, perhaps. Creamy papers and the blue smell of ink.

  Running along the seashore with Ada she could put that future out of her mind for a while, as they tore through the onrushing waves and swung their satchels round their heads.

  She was plumper than Ada and out of breath sooner. She had to pause to heave in ragged breaths and hold her knees and, when she looked up again, Ada was still running. She was splashing through the foam and freezing salt w ater as it slid up the damp beach.

  ‘Wait! Wait for me, Ada!’ Winnie laughed, panting.

  Ada didn’t look back.

  Limbs like pistons, she carried on running, just like Winnie knew’ she would.

  Eleven

  On the bus that Saturday morning, Simon was starting to wonder what Kelly had meant. What was this ‘news’ she reckoned she had for him? It was something to do with his gran, she’d said. Something they were going to do for her.

  His gran certainly needed cheering up. She had hardly said a word this morning. Usually Winnie was a morning person: infuriatingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at breakfast time. Not today. She didn’t even look that bothered about going to the Great Big Book Exchange. She had packed her shopping bag with last week’s freight of novels, ready to give them back. Simon knew that she hadn’t even finished them. Some of them she’d hardly looked at. All she’d read all week was Ada Jones.

  His gran was getting depressed, he thought. She wasn’t even enjoying her reading the same.

  Outside, across the flat, muggy landscape, the weather was mirroring her gloom. The windows of the bus were running wet and the trees were getting battered leafless by the wind. It was foolhardy, going out to trot around the shops. Already Winnie’s brolly had blown inside out, snapping several struts, as they’d walked to the bus stop. The whole day around them felt disastrous: like the worst, most ominous day to be out in.

  But still Winnie and Simon were heading out for the Exchange. They hadn’t even discussed the option of staying at home instead. Home, where it was cosy and dry and they could read their old books to their hearts’ content.

  Neither of them wanted to stay at home today.

  They didn’t want to be around Grandad.

  Grandad had blown his top this morning. It had happened when he’d ambled over to put his breakfast plate and mug into the sudsy water of the sink. What he’d found there were all last night’s supper dishes waiting for him. Around that stack there were floating islands of globby grey grease.

  Ray had gone up in a blue light: lashing out furiously. His words hadn’t even been coherent or clear enough for the others to make out what he was saving, but the sense of them was obvious. He was sick to his eye teeth of living in a filthy midden. Winnie — whose responsibility their home was — had let it go all to hell.

  Winnie was sitting at the kitchen table with her mug of tea raised halfway to her mouth. She watched expressionless as Ray hopped and danced about like wicked Rumpelstiltskin. Her eyes hardened as she watched him screech and gesticulate. Perhaps she hoped he’d stamp a bit harder; stamp a hole in the ground and disappear for ever, just like Rumpelstiltskin had.

  But Ray didn’t disappear. Instead he hurried to the bookcase in the corner of the kitchen — one of many spill-over bookcases in the bungalow — and yanked out an armload of paperbacks. Before anyone could stop him, the old man whirled them around and dumped them unceremoniously into the sink of dishes and greasy cold water.

  ‘There!’ he cried. ‘Filthy! Everything’s filthy! How do you like it, eh? You dirty old woman! How do you like your dirty books now?’

  Then he was picking up more books, plucking random volumes from the rickety shelves — cookery, science fiction, travel guides — and flinging them into the sink,
so that grey slimy water sploshed everywhere and a rack of relatively clean dishes were dashed noisily to the lino.

  Winnie and Simon took a few moments to react to this extraordinary display.

  ‘What the devil…?’ Winnie began, terrified. She got up and started to back away, staring at her books turning to mulch in the sink.

  ‘Grandad…’ Simon said warily, feeling useless. The damage was already done.

  As always, quite abruptly, the wind went out of Grandad’s sails. His mad, destructive fit passed by — quick as clouds across the moon on a stormy night. He stood stock-still with books still clutched to his chest, pages dropping out and drifting to the floor. He let the whole lot fall amongst the debris on the kitchen lino. ‘Well,’ he said, glaring at his wife and grandson. ‘See? There’s only so much I can take, you see. There’s only so much mess and filth and chaos that I’ll put up with.’

  ‘Ray…’

  He made a swift gesture with his hand, cutting Winnie off short. He didn’t want to discuss anything with her.

  ‘Ray,’ she persisted.

  ‘You’re going to get rid of them,’ he said darkly. ‘You and the boy. You’re going to get rid of your dirty old books. You hear me? I want them all out of my house.’

  Now Winnie was coming out of her trance.

  Since Ray’s fit this morning she had been in a kind of stupor, perched meekly on the back seat of the bus beside Simon. She hadn’t wanted to discuss this morning’s scene, or anything much at all. Simon didn’t fancy talking about it either. He was starting to think that his gran might have been right. Grandad was losing his marbles. Who else would go into paroxysms over a few books piled up around the place?

  He’ll make you get rid of yours as well, Simon reminded himself. It’s your grandad’s house, after all. It’s his name on the rent book. It’s up to him who and what belongs there.