The Swap Read Free Page B

He saw the shaved head – where once dark hair had been tied back in a ponytail – shaved, not to look like David Beckham so much as to stop him looking like his dad as it fell out of its own accord. He saw the stomach bulge underneath the black T-shirt with StanTheManLee written across it in green. He did the sigh. It was hard when people only saw you once every few years. How could that be anything but a punishment? The only consolation was that it was mutual. He thought for a moment about old Rob's battle with cancer and then hated it when he found himself smiling. Shit, that was not how he'd meant to end up. And that was the problem, of course: this was all about how you'd ended up, but he never felt like he'd ended anywhere really. He always felt, somehow, that he was about to begin.
    And that took the guilt about forgetting Bleeder's name away. It was all so distant now, so meaningless. Why should he remember something from that far back? Who he used to be was disappearing into the image in the glass, as if he could see the person he had once been fleeting away from him in the racing landscape. What did it matter what Bleeder's real name was?
    *
    'Charles Odd.' The man in the smart suit – rather too smart for these surroundings – held out his hand and Harvey shook it with wonder in his eyes.
    'How are you?' Harvey felt the hand in his, firm and dry. The voice was strong, rich, without a trace of Cornwall in it.
    How do we recognise people? It's an unanswered question. Harvey had once read an article on psychology that said we plot the face like a computer scanner, remembering the tiniest nuances of singularity. Well, he had scanned this face long ago and it was fixed. He had sighted it from across the floor where he stood surrounded by most of the old crowd: Jack, who had got into heroin for a while after college but now was clean and living in Wales with his 'old lady'; Rob, who played lower league football for three years after school and then did a bit of coaching and now, following cancer treatment, worked in a sports shop in Ealing . . . ('We should get together, H, I'd like to see your shop . . .' Slight panic there, partly at the idea of someone witnessing the reality of his carefully constructed fantasy life, and partly at being called H again – a name that was so cool it hurt at school, but which now made him think of that twat out of Steps); Susan, who used to go out with Jack but who was now married to a man in the navy who was away a lot (Harvey noticed Jack look at her with a mixture of nostalgia and possibility); and Steve, who'd stayed in town, stayed in little old St Ives all this time, and ran a beach shop. That had led to the usual humorous remarks: 'Not far to come then, Steve?'; 'Well, you've spread your wings, you must have flown at least two hundred yards,' etc, jokes which were genuinely funny at that first get-together, fifteen years ago, which was a less formal affair when everyone was still optimistic, and when the town seemed like a deadly snare rather than something troublingly like what they were looking for.
    And the man whose face he'd scanned all those years ago had come over and smiled. 'It's Harvey, isn't it? H? I'm sure I remember that face.' And Harvey had swallowed, like a child meeting a policeman, and had grinned and felt a ludicrous blush spread over his cheeks. 'Er, yeah, and I know you ...'
    'Charles Odd. I was in your class, actually, though I don't think we moved in the same circles, did we?' He laughed. 'It's good to see you though. How's things?'
    Harvey wanted to scream. Indeed, he felt some sort of cry welling up inside and had to actively repress it. Bleeder. Bleeder Odd: not just odd but Odd. Fuck, he should have remembered that. Bleeder was here. Exactly as he had dreamed it. As he had seen it in his mind's eye. Except here he was dapper and smiling, not the shuffling, miserable deadbeat that Harvey had created. But here he was. A man he had thought about every