Author: Gavin Cameron

For the five Mondays in June, I’m taking a break from discussing and analysing the world of writing, and make one of my stories available free online. This one is called An Abundance of Apples.

Last week in part one, we met an orchard owner who started off with too many apples apples, traded them for blackberries, and the blackberries for carrots, and he wants to continue up the alphabet in this manner. In part two, below, he is in possession of a flask.

Flask

I checked You & We the next day. More people had shared the link, and I found an e-mail waiting for me. Tom Jeffreys offered to swap my egg cup for a flask. If I wanted it, I only needed to go around there at my convenience.

I must’ve spoken to him on the porch for less than two minutes. During this brief time, Margaret didn’t say a single word to me, but continued her dusting in the hallway behind him, sighing at least twice and making sure she saw me checking her watch.

Golf club

It took further days and a couple of online updates before I could trade again. This time, a friend of a friend offered me a golf club she’d been left in a divorce settlement.

It turned out to be a large, expensive driver, and I asked Irene several times if she felt sure about this, as I could only offer her a flask that held barely a cup of coffee.

“I’ve no use for it. Neither did he, that’s why he didn’t take it.”

I thanked her, and spent the rest of the evening at the driving range before advertising it for swaps.

Throughout this time, I’d still been working in the orchard all day, but instead of reading at night, I would update my Web presence. I decided to merge all my activities from the home-made Web page onto You & We as I seemed to get a lot more reaction there.

Unknown to me, another user had tipped off the local press. I received an e-mail from a journalist who wanted to interview me and arrange another swap.

Helicopter trip

The journalist introduced me to a businessman who ran experience days, and who wanted to give me a voucher for a short helicopter trip in exchange for the golf club and an article in the paper. I gladly accepted it.

When Mum and Dad read the article out, Daniel immediately danced around the room and told all his You & We contacts he would be going up in a helicopter.

Once he’d calmed down, I took great delight in reminding him I would be exchanging the the voucher for something beginning with I.

“But that’s not fair. That’s my reward for helping you.”

“Helping me? How did you help?”

“Well, I said you’d swapped apples and blackberries, then them for carrots, then that for a doorstop.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And the egg cup. I seem to remember you couldn’t care less about that, or the flask, or the golf club. And now because it’s something you want, you expect me to hand it over to you.”

“It’s only fair.”

“All you’ve done for the last fortnight is watch football. You haven’t lifted a finger to help, so don’t expect me to give you anything.”

“But that was then and this is now.”

I ignored him. I turned to my parents, who were now re-reading the article to themselves with smiles on their faces. Before I could say anything to them, Daniel had bounded over to me and punched me in the shoulder. He hadn’t done this for years, but my reaction remained as sharp as ever. I kicked him in the shin.

“Stop it,” shouted Mum, “don’t you dare do that. Daniel, get to your room now, it’s way past your bedtime.”

“Yes, Daniel, you just get to your beddy-weddy.”

“And you stop winding him up,” she shouted at me.

“Hate you all,” stated Daniel as he slammed the door shut.

“How am I winding him up? He knows I’m going to swap it and he hasn’t done anything to earn it.”

“He’s only young,” soothed Mum, now calmed down from her shouting.

“I had more sense than that at his age.”

They both laughed.

“You were exactly the same,” said Dad.

“No I wasn’t.”

They laughed even harder.

Now the paper had published my You & We address, my one e-mail every few days became half a dozen a day. I had to sort through them.

I first deleted those who failed to grasp the concept, offering items that didn’t begin with I, such as bookshelves. I then put them in order of relative value, disregarding any below the value of the voucher, such as a model igloo. I narrowed it down to two possible items.

Italian Grand Prix programme, signed

I decided against the offered iPhone from an electronics dealer because it had been used. But after a few inquires, it seemed the signed Italian Grand Prix programme was worth more than the helicopter trip, although I’d never heard of the driver.

I arranged a meeting with the seller. He appeared smartly dressed and wealthy, and we exchanged items.

On opening the envelope containing the helicopter voucher, ripped-up pieces of paper fell out. I’d left it near the door so I wouldn’t forget it. I could only apologise to the seller, who told me he understood, and would hold the programme until I obtained a replacement.

I drove home, ignoring every speed limit sign, to find my parents watching TV while my brother played his football game. I grabbed the computer from his hands, threw it across the room and gave him an overdue beating. It would have been worse if Dad hadn’t pulled me off him.

I told Mum and Dad what he’d done, and showed them the ripped pieces of paper. They expressed disappointment with him rather than anger, while I spelled out to him exactly what it had cost me, not just in monetary terms, but wasted time.

Daniel said a pitiful, “I’m sorry.”

“You will be,” I countered.

Happily, the helicopter company saw the funny side and replaced the voucher, allowing me to swap it for the programme.

Next week: Jigsaw.

For the five Mondays in June, I’m going to take a break from discussing and analysing the world of writing, and make one of my stories available free online. This one is called An Abundance of Apples, and it totals 4500 words. Part one commences below.

Apples

Last year, we ended up with too many apples. We experienced just the right weather conditions, we harvested at the optimum time, and we ran out of storage space. The supermarkets would take the bulk of the crop, but as a family-run orchard, we wanted to sell as much as possible.

Blackberries

I phoned around the other farms to ask if they needed or wanted any of our surplus. Only the blackberry growers did. They said they couldn’t pay us, but offered to swap for some of their surplus. Mum agreed, so my brother and I drove there.

My brother Daniel is 13. Even before I reached his age, I’d been collecting and trading items: cards, coins, books, tokens from cereal boxes, anything I could. The skills I’ve built up over the years have stood me in good stead, so I’ve tried to pass on as many as I can to the boy.

Mum looked again at the three large boxes of blackberries as we unloaded them from the car. “I can’t use all these. I thought you said they only had a few left.”

“They did. This is it. Their yield’s been good as well.”

“By the time I make jam with the first box, the rest of them’ll be rotten. You’ll have to get rid of the rest.”

“How?”

“Phone Margaret Jeffreys. See if she’ll take some off your hands.”

“Oh, not Margaret Jeffreys,” Daniel and I complained in unison. We dreaded seeing, phoning or dealing with this family friend and her gruff, short attitude.

Carrots

However, her son Tom answered the phone. He was the polar opposite of his mother, and happily agreed to pay for the berries, throwing in half a dozen misshapen carrots from his vegetable patch. Mum wouldn’t complain about vegetables.

On the way home, Daniel stared out of the window in a thoughtful manner. “Did you know we’ve gone up the alphabet?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we had too many apples, so we swapped them for blackberries. Then we had too many blackberries, so we swapped them for carrots, so we’ve gone A, B, C.”

I thought about this, “I suppose we have.”

“So what are we going to swap them for?”

“The carrots?”

“It has to be something beginning with D. A doorstop, darts, maybe even a dog.”

“You begin with D; I’ll swap you for them. No, but let’s not get too carried away.”

“But can we? It would be great if we kept swapping for bigger and bigger and bigger things and got to Z and got a zebra.”

Doorstop

Mum never got to see the carrots. As I drove Daniel into town the next day, I told him I knew a bloke who owed me a favour.

We walked into the ironmonger, where we told him about our adventures in swapping items alphabetically. He hesitated and asked us a few questions, but gave us a doorstop in exchange for the carrots, bursting Daniel’s hopes of obtaining a drill.

The shopkeeper played his part perfectly. Although we’d made a genuine exchange, I’d arranged it with him the previous evening.

Egg cup

A few days later, I received an e-mail with the subject line Offer to swap doorstop for egg cup. It couldn’t possibly be spam with such a specific heading, so I opened it. The sender made reference to a website, which I didn’t click on. The message had been sent to my address and Daniel’s, so I confronted him.

He excitedly showed me a page he had made, detailing our swaps so far and appealing for help with the next letter.

“What have you done that for? Get that down right now,” I ordered.

“But I thought you wanted help with it. It’s a great way of telling people, and they can give us all sorts of things.”

We argued about this for some time and we came to a compromise. He could keep the page up, provided he removed our details. I contacted the woman who offered the egg cup and explained the situation. As she had taken the time to write, I decided to take the time to meet her in a café and arrange a trade.

Despite his initial eagerness, Daniel’s interest faded in the space of a week, and he became engrossed in football. I didn’t share his enthusiasm for the game, so I left him to it.

I started to consider the egg cup meeting again. It felt like being a kid, when you had two identical trading cards and finally found somebody who also had duplicates. You’d work out which you could swap, and what you had to buy. It’s how youngsters learn the value of items without risking large sums of money.

I chose to make a go of it.

Daniel gladly handed over the password to the site. I rewrote his posts in adult-speak, adding an appeal for something beginning with F. I opened a fresh e-mail account that I didn’t mind getting spam into.

But after another week, I had no replies, and the hit counter hardly rose. I asked him how it had come to the attention of the woman who offered the egg-cup after 24 hours, yet I’d had nothing for seven days.

He’d posted the link to our page on an apparently massively popular website called You & We. His list contained over three hundred contacts. I hesitated to say friends because I doubt even the Pope knows that many people personally, although he insisted he did. He’d posted the link, two people had given it to their contacts, and it spread exponentially from there.

I’d never previously paid attention to these sites as I would usually be working, reading or asleep, but I joined You & We out of curiosity. Once I added Daniel, the site made suggestions based on his contacts about people I might know. In just under two hours, I’d connected with more than fifty people from real life.

Next week: Flask.