The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,2

the icy air and contemplated the empty street. Few customers here, no passing trade. The sigh was a part of him, as much as the hunch of the shoulder and the reach for the cigarettes from the inside pocket of his denim jacket. He struggled to light up in the hectic wind, failed, swore vaguely and made his way back into the shop to sit once more behind the counter on one of the two high stools. After a few moments he stabbed out the butt with a hard vicious motion.

'Turn that shit down, will you, Josh!'

'OK, Harvey, OK. You don't need to get nasty.' And Harvey put his head in his hands and felt the way his hair was disappearing, leaving him: abandoning ship.

'What I could have done.' It was one thirty and the Queen's Head was full. But they had been there for over an hour and had a prime seat. It was a pub without noticeable character or appeal. But it was located midway between one set of office blocks and another and had accepted the benefits of fortune without complaint. It was also the closest place to get a drink to Inaction Comix.

'What might have been.' Harvey was making a song of it, an ironic little play for Josh's benefit. What else could he do? He'd told the story too many times.

'Yeah.' Josh's mind and his glasses were on the fruit machine and more specifically the T-shirt of the pretty blonde leaning against it. 'Yeah, you could have been in Tahiti or something.'

'New York.' Harvey didn't like his fantasy to be made commonplace. No lottery winner's confusion for him. He knew what he'd have done. 'A little coffee house downtown with murals on the walls, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, you know, classy but trashy, and I'd still have collected but just for fun.'

'Yeah, cool. A Superman One would have got you that, no problem.' Josh smiled hopefully at the blonde who turned away to her less desirable friend with a grimace. 'You could have been a contender.' He put on a comedy-Brando to cover his not unanticipated failure and tried to catch the friend's eye.

'Yeah, I could have been a contender,' – Harvey pulled on his third pint – 'but Bleeder is the contender now. He's out there somewhere with a Superman One. And good luck to him.'

The blackboards above the bar described the almost risibly limited selection of foodstuffs that the pub had to offer. He examined them with the eyes of one who has read them before but seeks distractions.

'Maybe he's sold it, but maybe he chucked it away the day after you gave it to him.' Josh found his attention caught, as it often was, by the topic of Harvey's loss.

'No, he hasn't sold it: they only come on the market every blue moon and it's always in the press when they do. I've sat and watched its value increase for twenty years. Every year I look in Overstreet and every year it's another few thousand dollars. A few thousand a year for twenty years . . . So yeah, maybe he chucked it out with the trash. Or maybe he just likes reading it too much to part with it.'

'What did you swap it for again?' Josh wasn't usually malicious, that's why Harvey liked him, or tolerated him at least. He picked up his pint and finished it in a long mouthful.

'Fuck off,' he said.

'So, have you decided about going to the reunion?' Josh was struggling to keep pace and his fourth pint was making him slur a little. Harvey had strict standards about alcohol consumption: don't get silly until the fifth pint, but he politely ignored Josh's faux pas.

'I've thrown the letter away,' he said, making sure he enunciated clearly. 'I just don't see the point really. What could I possibly say or do to interest those people?'

The letter had arrived in the Saturday post and Harvey had been expecting it. It offended everything in his nature that he was expecting it, indeed he had tried very hard not to expect it, which is a difficult trick to perform. Every year they came, and every year he attempted it. And every year the trick failed. When it arrived he had a debate with himself and this too was a repeat of one he'd been having for twenty years. The debate involved two levels. The first was the 'I'm not going to go' level. The second was the 'I'm not going to