Exchange by Paul Magrs

Author:Paul Magrs [Magrs, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, Contemporary
Amazon: 1416916636
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2006-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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

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