The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,3

let my going or not going mean anything in a feeble, shallow way about where my life has got to' level. The letter was an invitation to a reunion at his old school in Cornwall, and at both levels he usually lost.

This year was particularly pressing as it was twenty years and would be a more formal affair. Twenty years since they had sat their O levels together in the draughty school hall, the same place they would hold the reunion. And now O levels were an historical relic, as meaningless when trying to impress the younger generation as boasting of your high-score on Space Invaders.

'So tell them you run a comic shop.' Josh managed to make it sound like a good thing to say.

'Mmm, you mean tell them exactly what I told them the last time I was down two years ago, and the year before that and five years ago, and ten?'

'Well, yeah.'

Harvey sighed his sigh, and flicked cigarette ash into a metal tin on the ugly little table that the pub grudgingly allowed its customers to sit at. 'Admit that in the years since I last saw them I've not got married, or had any children, or had a promotion, or inherited a fortune . . . That what I've done is exactly the same things I was doing last time I went?'

'Well, tell them you've expanded.'

'They'll see that for themselves.'

'In the shop, tell them you're doing really well and planning to open another branch, something like that.'

'Lie to them?'

'Yeah.'

'It's a thought.' Harvey dropped the stub of his cigarette into the tin tray and watched it lying there smoking by itself. 'But if I'm going to do that why not tell them I've won the lottery and am moving to New York to open a coffee house with superheroes on the walls? I mean, if I'm going to lie why not make it something exciting?'

Josh grinned to announce a joke: 'Tell them you found a Superman One.'

Harvey closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he sighed. The fact that he did it a lot didn't mean it was only a habit.

Chapter Two

'The thing about reunions is that they bring out the old you.'

'So don't go.'

'But that's the point, I like the old me. I like the me that I was at school. Believe it or not, I was cool. In with the in-crowd. Comics gave me that. That's why I've stuck with them. But whereas it was cool at school it kind of gets less and less cool as you get older. To the point where it will, very soon I suspect, become ridiculous. And then what do I do? Go for a job at a bank or somewhere, and they'll ask: 'Experience?' and I'll say: 'Adding up the cash register after selling a Fantastic Four Number Six.'

'What condition?'

'Never mind.'

'It's a big price difference. I mean if it was mint then, to be honest, I would think any bank would be impressed.' Josh spluttered into his drink. 'And I guess for you it's especially poignant, going back.'

'Why?'

'Because that was a time when you weren't bitter and twisted.'

'What the fuck do you mean?' Harvey demanded, knowing exactly what he meant. 'Who's bitter and twisted?'

'You are, about the Superman One. But you didn't know it was valuable then, so it's the one time in your life you weren't thinking about what you might have had.'

Harvey looked for a while into the bottom of his glass. It was an occasional habit of Josh's to speak a devastating truth unexpected and unlooked-for. Harvey had once taken, very briefly, to wearing a cape to work. It had been long and black with a red velvet lining. As he walked from the tube one morning he had caught sight of his reflection in a shop window and had tried hard to place what he saw. When he arrived, Josh was waiting outside the shop and Harvey had asked him what he thought. 'You look like the Frog Prince,' Josh had said simply. And Harvey, for all he had told him to go fuck himself, knew at once that he was right; and the cloak had been quietly put at the back of the cupboard against the unlikely event that he was ever invited to a fancy dress party. And Josh was right again: that time was special because he hadn't carried the burden that he always denied he carried now. That time did appear somehow blessed and he always seemed to be