Exchange

by Paul Magrs

  In here he felt illicit. He felt like they were somewhere they shouldn’t be. It added an extra spice to the melange of scents and sensations in the Book Exchange.

  Kelly had brought him here for a reason. All of a sudden Simon felt like he was undergoing a kind of test. It made him feel confused. He glanced up at a calendar of nudists from 1958. Pale pink women were springing about, energetically playing volleyball; their hair frosted with lacquer and their private parts airbrushed out of sight. None of it made him feel sexy. Was it supposed to? Was that what Kelly had been intending?

  Swiftly he turned and lowered his head to kiss her. He took her by surprise so that she cried out and he ended up with a mouthful of sticky hair. ‘Oww! Simon… !’ She pushed him away. ‘What are you—?’

  ‘I was having another go!’ he protested, rubbing his tongue on his shirtsleeve. ‘Your hair gel tastes foul.’

  ‘That was rubbish,’ she said. ‘You call that kissing? That’s twice now, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ll end up banging our heads together and knocking us senseless. You’ve got no sense of timing. You’re completely out of synch with me. What is it, have you never kissed anyone before?’

  He was colouring up. He looked down at his trainers. ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Well, no.’

  ‘You’ve never had a girlfriend? Never practised on anyone? Round the bike sheds at school?’

  He shook his head. Kelly bit her lip, looking ashamed at the way she had bawled him out. She shouldn’t have criticised his technique. He didn’t have a technique! It had taken him all his courage to push himself forward, pucker up his lips and go in to plant one on Kelly’s black-painted mouth. He groaned with shame.

  ‘Simon,’ she said, as he turned to duck back through the glass-beaded curtain. ‘Come back.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said. She had humiliated him in front of those nude, volleyball-playing lovelies. He could almost imagine them, giggling behind his back.

  Kelly caught up with him in the main room of the Exchange.

  ‘You left everything unattended,’ he said. ‘Anyone could have come in and looted the place.’

  She shrugged. ‘Hardly anyone ever comes in. It’s like hardly anyone knows we’re here.’

  ‘My gran will be back soon,’ he said, though he had no idea whether that was true or not. He couldn’t look Kelly in the eve. ‘I’m going to choose some books,’ he said.

  ‘Simon, look. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re a great kisser, when you get the hang of it. Because you ‘re sensitive and lovely and you’ve got those soft, full lips…’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said, squirming.

  ‘I’d love you to kiss me properly,’ she said. ‘But the time’s just not been right. We haven’t got it right yet. Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t. But I’m sorry I yelled. You just gave me a surprise back there. Eating my hair.’

  He pulled a face.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘Lighten up! Look — it was my fault. I’m jumpy. I’m twitchy. I’m nervous as well.’

  ‘What of?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. But… I like you, Simon.’

  He nodded. ‘Me too. I mean, you. I like you.’

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  ‘Can we shut up about it for now?’ he asked, wincing.

  She nodded. ‘You go and find some books. But first, let me tell you about my idea.’

  He frowned. ‘What kind of idea is it?’

  ‘About getting money. For our tickets. For the Ada Jones literary Lunch.’

  ‘Oh, that again…’ he said. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘We have to,’ said Kelly. ‘And from what I hear, Ada won’t be around for ever. She’s been very ill. Her publishers are saying this is the last big publicity tour she’ll ever do. If we ever want to see her and if your gran wants to see her again, then we have to do this, Simon. A slap-up lunch a week on Friday! We just have to!’

  He was starting to picture it. It would be Christmas, suddenly. He put the three of them into lavish surroundings. Wonderful food and tinkling, soft music. And a reunion in the offing.

  Something his mum had once said was coming back to him. ‘Even if you have nothing left to show for it afterwards, you should never regret spending money on having a wonderful time. Even if all you’ll have are your memories of that day. At least it’s a day you will always remember. And just think how many other days simply sink into oblivion! Just how many days are completely forgettable…’

  Of course — his mum’s advice now would be that they would have to go. She’d be standing there, agreeing with Kelly. The two of them would be nodding solemnly. They’d be bonded together in agreement. So maybe the two of them would have got on, after all.

  ‘I’ve an idea how wc can get the money, too,’ Kelly said, her eyes glinting.

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ he protested. ‘My grandad goes through all my bank statements and my receipts. He’d hit the roof, soon as he saw I’d spent £120 like that. It’s bad enough spending money on books. He resents even that. But this… !’

  Kelly smiled. ‘I’ve thought of something else. I’ve thought of a way we can raise the cash. Actually, I’m surprised you haven’t thought of it yourself.’

  ‘What? How?’

  Kelly walked back to her stool by the cash desk. ‘Your grandad’s glamour mags. You should smuggle them out of his den. They’ll be worth a fair bit, from what you’ve said. Terrance would give you a good price for them. He’s very fair.’ Simon stared at her. His mouth fell open. ‘Steal them? Steal them from my own grandad?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought you liked him! You thought he was a nice old bloke. Why would you want to steal from him?’

  ‘He’s a bully,’ Kelly said. ‘He’s bullied your gran for years. He’s stood in the way of her happiness — that’s how I sec it. He deserves to be taught a lesson. He needs to take part in the Exchange ..

  Simon was reeling. This was proper theft Kelly was suggesting. But, even as his mind went spinning, Simon was going over all the possibilities and ramifications. Could they really do it? And maybe they could even make it look like a burglary… He shook his head. What was he thinking of? Thieving off his own grandad! Who had taken him in and given him a home…

  Kelly continued. ‘Just think what it would mean to Winnie. Seeing Ada Jones again. Just before old Ada dies.’ Kelly fixed Simon with a hard stare. ‘You should do everything you can to make it happen. Look. I’ll help you. I’ll do everything I can to help you.’

  He wasn’t sure. It seemed like a really bad idea.

  As the days went past, it seemed like an even worse idea. He tried to forget it. He tried to ignore Kelly’s messages. He deleted the texts from her: the ones that Hashed up green on his mobile, urging him to action. Telling him that they were running out of time. If they were going to do it, then they had to get on with it. They had to raise the money. They had to buy their tickets. This was the Ada Jones farewell tour. The places at the lunch would be selling out rapidly.

  He imagined Christmas place settings, with candles dickering and sprigs of mistletoe and holly.

  He didn’t reply to her. He couldn’t do it. Steal from his grandad? It was a nasty idea. A cruel and selfish one. Simon watched his gran and grandad going about their everyday routines and he realised that they were living in their own separate bubbles. They might look as if they occupied the same bungalow and came to sit at the same table to eat Winnie’s plain, homely food, but actually they were operating in two distinct dimensions. They had come unstuck and, these days, they each hardly seemed to notice the other’s mood.

  Which, Simon reflected, was probably just as well. Grandad was more erratic and sulky than ever. He was out every evening down the Legion, too. As if he had decided he could no longer bear being in the living room with Simon and Winnie. He came home after closing each night. Simon grew used to hearing the latch of the garden gate clashing and his gran jerking upright in her chair, determ
ined to carry on reading as Ray swayed back into the room.

  Winnie’s mood was peculiar that week. Her depression had seemingly lifted. A little, anyway.

  ‘We had the most wonderful, exotic coffee,’ she said. ‘With chocolate in it and all this whipped cream on top. And cakes like you’ve never seen, Simon. It was like being in Vienna or somewhere. These great big things all heaped up and slathered in icing sugar and even more cream. And Terrance just said, “Eat up, Winnie! I hope you don’t go counting the calories like all those other foolish women.”’ Winnie blinked and grinned, coming out of her reverie. ‘He said I was perfect, Simon. He said I was the perfect example of a woman in my prime.’

  Simon thought that was maybe pushing it a bit. But there could be no doubt about the fact that Terrance had been determined to flatter and impress Winnie. He was wooing her, Simon thought. He was wooing her with gateaux and frothy mochas and the tender ministrations of his plastic hands…

  ‘What else?’ he asked his gran, as they ate supper together. His grandad wasn’t there to eat with them. This was the first time that he had missed a meal, staying in the pub. At first his plate steamed, untouched, at the head of the kitchen table. Winnie jumped up to put it in the oven, and then she described her cafe jaunt with Terrance in a hushed tone and even greater detail.

  ‘I don’t know what else to say,’ she said, looking bewildered. ‘We talked. We talked about all kinds of things. It was nice. To have someone else to talk to.’ She caught his eye and reached out to pat his hand. ‘Oh, I know- I talk to you, lovely. But you know what I mean. Someone of my own ancient years. And he talked to me like a real person. He wanted to know all about me. Well, imagine! I didn’t know’ where to start. I told him, there’s nothing to tell. I’ve never really done anything. The most exciting thing I ever get up to is reading all these novels and finding out what exciting things all the other people get up to… And he laughed at that, Simon. Not nastily. Not in a belittling way. Do you know what he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said that he’s the same. He’s lived all his life in books. He says that most of the people he knows don’t really exist at all. And they’re more vital, more alive than the real people he sees. He says he only loves those people who aren’t meant to be real…’

  ‘It all sounds a bit weird to me,’ said Simon. He realised that he was sounding more cynical than he wanted to.

  ‘He sort of put me in a trance,’ said Winnie. ‘Next thing I knew, I was asking a really personal question. I said, did he think it was easier to love people in books, than in real life? He looked at me and he’s got these marvellous eyes. Haunting. Almost yellow where they should be white. The irises are nearly orange, like a tiger. Those eyes of his blazed at me. And he said that characters in novels never leave you, and they never die. You’ve got them for ever. They can’t come to any real harm. Even if they die, at the end of their story, you can always turn back to the start and there they are again. Large as life, and talking and breathing once more.’ Winnie stopped toying with her mostly untouched dinner and put her knife and fork down neatly, at the half-past six position on her plate. ‘I said that it wasn’t the same. I didn’t think it sounded healthy. I told him that even I — with all the reading that I get caught up in — well, even I know that it isn’t really real. The people in the books aren’t more real than the people in my life, and my family around me.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  A shadow seemed to pass across Winnie’s face. ‘He just said, “What about Ada Jones?”‘

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘I’d told him I’d started reading her books in order, properly. To reacquaint myself with the Ada I used to know. And he just said, “Well? Isn’t she real to you from your reading?

  Isn’t the Ada from the books more real now than your memories?”‘

  ‘Wow,’ said Simon. ‘That’s heavy.’

  ‘I thought about it, and it was true! I thought about moments from the past, like when I first met Ada and when she came round our house to write, and I realised that what I was remembering came from her novel, and not from my head at all. The books were realer than real life.’

  As Simon absorbed this, and started to turn the thought over, they both heard the garden gate rattle and then crash open. Winnie shot Simon a look He knew it meant: let’s drop this subject now. Don’t talk about any of this in front of your grandad.

  When Grandad Ray appeared in the kitchen, looking mithered and wobbly on his feet, Simon thought: my gran is behaving like a woman embarking on an affair. Already she sounds like she is falling furtively in love. All they have done is eat some cake and talk about weird stuff. Weird stuff that made Simon slightly dizzy.

  He watched his gran get up and bustle and cluck around Grandad. (‘Leave off, woman! I’m not hungry now!’

  ‘You’ve got to eat! All that drink on an empty stomach! Look, I’ve done fish fingers and crinkle cut chips! They’re not too dried up in the oven… Sit yourself down, Ray!’)

  Simon watched them, feeling very removed from the scene. He thought: if I was to write down everything I knew about my mum and dad, now, while it’s still all there in my memory… if I was to write it all down, in the kind of detail like you get in a novel — would that make them real again? Realer than they are now in the real world? Well, they’re nothing here now, are they? They don’t exist any more. They’ve gone. And if I were to write about them and do everything I could to conjure them up… Would that bring them back? Just a little bit? Even if it’s just in a small way, a fake way… Would that count?

  He didn’t know. He really didn’t know.

  He watched his surly grandad, chomping on dried-up fish fingers. His grandad glared past him.

  What’s the point of reading, if I can’t write back?

  What’s the point of knowing unreal people, if they aren’t the ones I want to know?

  Who do I want to know? he thought. Who do I want to be with?

  He imagined sitting with loads of blank paper, his pen twitching, eager, but unable to start. Unable to think up a perfect first sentence. He imagined trying to bring them — to bring anyone — to life.

  Thirteen

  Kelly was talking like what they were planning was a bank heist. Her texts and her messages had become very terse and serious. It was ridiculous, in a way — all this fuss over a box of old magazines — but it all made Simon feel quite nervous. Kelly was plotting and planning and he was being swept along in it all. He wasn’t brave enough to stop her and to make her call it off.

  He lay in his narrow bed at night and imagined that box of saucy mags, snug in their hidey-hole, up in the rafters. They exerted a strange pressure on him. If he was to go along with Kelly’s plan, would they get away with it? What if they were caught? When would Grandad realise that his boxful of sunbathing beauties had absconded?

  He was Bluebeard, of course, with his garage of wives from bygone years.

  Simon was nervous because he knew, really, that they had to do this. He had to get his gran to this literary lunch. Something had clinched it for him. Their conversation, perhaps, about how the books were now more real than Winnie’s memory. Simon wanted Winnie to meet Ada again and see that that was wrong. The real person was still there. The memories were still strong.

  It was as if, in this way, Simon would be proving something to himself. Something about his own memories of his mum and dad. He wanted to know that he could keep them both alive inside his own mind.

  Novels are just a shadow world, he told himself. They’re not as real as anything that happens here. Even if someone is dead, they are still more real than a character in a book.

  He lay in his dim, chilly room, thinking this and trying to convince himself. The stacks of books around him looked like towers and skyscrapers looming over him.

  He woke in the same position, with the sun gleaming weakly through the narrow, net-curtained window. It was December now and, even without checking,
he knew that it had turned frosty overnight.

  His gran was whipping up scrambled eggs in a hot skillet, tapping her moccasins to something on Radio 2. ‘You’ve got a parcel, look,’ she said.

  It was by his breakfast plate. Obviously book-shaped.

  Brown paper and string, which seemed affected and old-fashioned. It was addressed in scrawled Gothic lettering that he just knew was Kelly’s. He recognised her elaborate script from his Exchange membership card.

  ‘How nice,’ Winnie grinned, bringing toasted muffins and eggs and peering over his shoulder at the vintage thriller Kelly had posted him. The cover was lurid with moonlight, bats and scratchy branches. ‘I wish somebody would send me parcels like that.’ She patted his shoulder. ‘It must be something she wants you to read urgently, if it can’t wait till Saturday…’

  Simon waited till his gran beetled off to sort out her own breakfast, before he opened the note Kelly had poked inside die collection of mystery and adventure stories. The note was written in silver on purple sugar paper:

  Sunshine -

  Face it. You need my help to do this. Your nerve will fail. You’ll get a fit of conscience. So you need me — heartless me — to help make it look like thieves have been in and nicked your grandad’s precious hoard.

  (Or is that horde? Dunno.) Anyway, I’m not giving you any chance to wimp out of this, kiddo. I’m coming round your way tonight (Wednesday! You should have this parcel with you on Weds morning. Yes?) and I’ll help you smuggle out the booty while your grandad’s down the pub. OK? You know it’s the right thing. Your gran’s need is greater than his, I reckon. OK? OK. See you tonight. I’ll get there just after six.

  XXXX K

  Kisses, he thought. He was surprised she had put kisses at the end. He wondered if they were the failed and useless kind, when you ended up clashing teeth. Or were they the kind that made you horribly self-conscious? Or the ones where you ended up with a mouthful of hair? Also, kisses done like XXXX seemed a bit ordinary for her. He’d have expected something a bit more Gothic and unique from her. Grinning skulls and crossbones, maybe.