Contract

If I give you my favourite conker, will you give me your blue cat's eye marble?

In exchange for this cup of tea (strong, two sugars, just how you like it), I'll take a blue Rizla paper and a pinch of tobacco.

You offer me a half-eaten apple (a Hitchin Pippin), assuring me it is the sweetest, juiciest apple you have ever tasted. I take it reluctantly, and in exchange I give you a water-stained prayer card -- St Dymphna, a lily in the crook of her elbow and  a fettered demon at her feet.

I give you a sock puppet with button eyes and a red felt tongue. You put a mother of pearl brooch buckle into my pocket.

For a still-warm oatmeal and raisin biscuit wrapped in tinfoil; a milk bottle you found in the stream bed, packed full of emerald moss.

A notebook -- blank now that the first four pages have been ripped out -- is swapped for a string of fake pearls and a diamanté brooch shaped like a lizard, with red glass eyes.

An iron file for a forked hazel divining rod.

A bone lace bobbin for a pack of old playing cards - on the back a bottle-green mermaid chases her tail through a forest of water weeds.

We shuffle, cut the cards three times. I draw the queen of spades; you the knave of hearts.

You hand me a pen made from a goose quill and a bottle of black ink. I sign my name with a flourish; give you my hand, palm facing up, trusting you will take it.

You offer a rumba; I counter with an American smooth foxtrot.

In exchange for your great-grandmother's wedding ring -- old Welsh gold, peachy as a California sunset -- I hand you a plane ticket, for anywhere in the world, economy class, one way, non-refundable.