The Swap by Antony Moore

Author:Antony Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: True Crime, Murder, Class reunions, Humorous, Black humor (Literature), Fiction, Fiction - General, etc, strips, Media Tie-In - General, Comic books, General, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9780385342346
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-08-26T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

When the phones had been put down, with suitable, and in his case at least, heartfelt endearments, Harvey sat in his green revolving armchair. The flat looked different to him tonight. It was the first time he'd been in it and not asleep or drunk since his trip away and a lot had changed. I'm different, he thought, I am no longer the man I was. He inspected his younger self 's living quarters with a certain measured disdain. There really was so little here. Take away the superhero posters and the record and DVD collections and you had anybody's room, anywhere in the western world. A generic, meaningless ragbag of mainstream ugliness. He sighed without rancour. He was saving the big sigh for later. Maybe he wouldn't even do it. Maybe he'd just go to sleep and not worry at all. But that would break the habit of a lifetime. So he sat for a while in the green revolving armchair and thought about what Maisie had said. And then he walked through into the bedroom and sat and looked at the only view from the flat, which looked over the rooftops to St Alfege church tower in Greenwich. Was this a life change? He seemed to have had so many false starts, so many moments that at the time appeared seminal but which turned out only to be passing possibilities leading nowhere. His view often made him philosophical, and it happened now. Did anything ever lead anywhere really? In the end, whatever you did you ended up dead. Like Mrs Odd, that twisted grey face, that terrible stillness. That's where you end up, and all the pretend revelations of life can't spare you. He did the sigh after all. It felt good to do it about something as ordinary as death, it pulled him back into the majority for a second.

The bedclothes were all on the floor where he had flung them that morning. So he picked them up and for the first time for a while, he made his bed properly. Then, to his own surprise, he did not light a cigarette, or go to the off-licence, he had a shower – washing off a grime that seemed ingrained – and went to bed. There, he lay naked in the dark, awake for a while, something rendered rare by alcohol, and he thought about Maisie, and, across all the multiplicity of roads and rooftops and people's lives that lay between Deptford and Croydon, he wondered if she was thinking about him and whether her thoughts were as warm and wistful as his own.

In the morning the rare pleasure of sober rest had done its job, as if the sleeping Harvey had been waiting a long time for a chance to speak and had a lot to say. Alongside the images of randy horses chasing young maidens up trees, which Harvey found filling his dream recollection over breakfast, was the knowledge that he could not just sit and do nothing.

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