Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Copyright © Patrick Thompson 2003

Patrick Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007105236

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007571765

Version: 2016-03-15

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Epilogue: Where are they Now?

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Mum & Dad

PROLOGUE

Where do I start? Things don’t have convenient beginnings, things overlap and collide.

Perhaps it started like this:

Veronica was on her way home, carrying bags of shopping. She was travelling by bus because we are back in the days when families had only one car, if they had one at all. She’d got bags of vegetables and foodstuffs we’d fail to recognize now. She was going to have to make them into something, not just empty one packet or another into the microwave. Microwaves aren’t even a rumour. Microwaves are still science fiction. We are back in the early seventies.

The bus was crowded, and people jostled. The young people didn’t hand over their seats to young women with heavy bags anymore. Everyone was smoking.

She’d left her son at home, but he’d be fine. He was old enough to look after himself. His father would be at work until six, and then doing office work at home until midnight. She’d be cooking for the three of them.

That was how it was, and it wasn’t likely to change. Germaine Greer might not think so, but Germaine Greer wasn’t living on housekeeping in the West Midlands. It was easier to be radical when you had enough money to give up the day job. It was no trouble to be a free thinker if you had nothing urgent to think about.

Sometimes she wished she’d taken after her mother, who had been in charge of her own household. The understanding had been that her father had been there to bring in money. He was subservient to the female line. They’d been emancipated before emancipation.

She hadn’t, though, and that was all there was to it. There was too much about her mother that was too uncomfortable.

If there was a genetic component to that – which seemed unlikely, as her mother’s brand of strangeness was unscientific and didn’t sit easily with concepts like genetics – then it might have passed, via her, to her son.

Perhaps it had. Perhaps he’d have abilities of his own. If he had, she hoped they wouldn’t hurt him. He didn’t need hurting. It’d happen, of course. Life was like that. Damage got done. The innocent came off badly. He’d get damaged.

Knowing that, she tried to prepare him. He wanted a pet. They’d talked about it.

‘We can’t have anything,’ she’d told him. ‘We haven’t the money for it.’

‘I could get a paper round.’

‘For how much? A few pence? A couple of shillings? We haven’t the room for a dog.’

‘We could have a cat.’

‘There are too many roads around here,’ she’d said, shivering. A cat would never survive.

‘A mouse then. In a cage.’

She didn’t want mice, or rats, or anything else. Animals cost money. You had to feed them, and clean up after them, and he’d lose interest in it and then it’d be something else she got lumbered with. When the holidays were over and he was back at school he’d forget about it.

The bus driver was in a good mood and stopped short of the stop so that she wouldn’t have so far to walk. She thanked him and heaved her bags out into the afternoon air. It was winter, and the air was becoming colourless and frigid. In some houses the Christmas decorations were up. She thought it was too early for that. It was still three weeks until Christmas; too early even to think about it. She wondered what he’d want this year. Everything, probably, and a cat thrown in too.

You couldn’t have everything. Not even her mother had everything. Visiting her now, in her dusty old house with the cobwebs clustered wherever she could no longer reach, that was clear. You couldn’t have everything. Her father had died, worn out looking after her mother, and her mother lived on in a house she could no longer keep clean. The neighbour’s cats popped in for food and a chat. In her mother’s trade – if it was a trade – cats were a given. When she dragged her son to visit his grandmother he’d be half afraid, half annoyed. Her husband would not go at all.

It took her a while to rescue her door key from her coat pocket, weighed down as she was by her shopping. Entering the house she knew at once that something was wrong.

Her son’s voice, for one thing. It was too lively, too animated, and he shouldn’t have been talking at all. There was no one to talk to.

She put the bags on the floor inside the front door, and of course one fell down and unleashed groceries.

Someone answered her son, and the chattering continued.

They were in the front room. Perhaps it was the television. She didn’t think there was anything on, but they’d watch anything. Everyone said so.

She opened the door and looked in. Her son sat on the sofa, with an orange kitten on his lap. It was sparring with his fingers.

‘Where’s that from?’ she asked, going in.

‘I wanted one,’ he said. As though that was an answer. ‘Gran always says if you want something hard enough you can get it.’

‘Gran says a lot of things she doesn’t mean,’ she said unconvincingly. He was young enough not to notice that. The kitten looked at her. She didn’t like the way it looked. It was perhaps too orange. It was perhaps in not quite the right dimensions.

She noticed that there was someone else in the room, a ragged little boy in ragged little clothes. A friend of her son’s, she thought, although you’d have thought his mother might have dressed him properly before letting him out.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ asked her son, and when she turned to look at the new boy there was no one there after all.

She turned back to look at her son.

‘You don’t want to listen to your Gran,’ she said carefully, because this might all be reported back and there were things in that dusty old house of her mother’s that were all the worse for being neglected for years. ‘She doesn’t know everything. You can’t have everything you want.’

He looked doubtful at that.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘That isn’t your cat. Now just take it back where you got it from.’

He looked at her. He looked at the strange orange cat. He did something – and she couldn’t even have said what it was – and the kitten vanished, poof, gone.

‘And don’t do it again,’ she said, hoping that he’d take notice. And then she unpacked the groceries and made them a nice stew for tea.

ONE
I

Who is Les Herbie?

The question seemed to answer itself. It was the headline at the top of the page of the issue of the Pensnett Chronicle I was reading over the shoulder of the man in the seat in front of me. We were on the 256k bus, Dudley to Birmingham via Christ knows where. The 256k bus has vague timetables and glum drivers.

Les Herbie was a columnist in the Dudley Star, not to be confused with the Express & Star. Les Herbie wrote a sometimes-irreverent and often-rude column. No one knew who he was. No photograph accompanied his column. He didn’t make personal appearances. He didn’t do publicity. He’d picked up a readership of young people, bright people, not the usual Dudley Star share of the demographic. The Chronicle had nothing like him, and so they ran daily articles failing to discredit him.

He was a reporter writing under an assumed name, they’d claim. He was a rich boy slumming it in Dudley. He was the man who wrote the horoscopes expanding his remit.

The man in front of me turned the page. I didn’t want to read any more of his paper; I had one of my own. I was young and bright; I had a copy of the Dudley Star. I turned to Les Herbie’s column.

They took my car away.

Let’s quantify that. Let’s pin it down flat and dissect it.

They took my car away. So now I have to flag taxis or walk. Let’s not talk about buses. Let’s not go near buses. Buses are not an option.

There are some advantages to not having a car. I have time to think, while I’m waiting for the taxi.

They say, they always say, that it’ll be there in five minutes. They’re liars. That’s the only reliable part of the business, the fact that it starts with a lie. After that it’s all fiction. Everything – the route, the fare, the language, the glumness with which they take the tip – is subject to change. Only the time the taxi turns up is not subject to change. It is change. It’s the thing itself.

While I’m waiting I write my column, which is why it’s all about taxis. But not buses. I’m not going near buses.

I do have a car. I’m not dependent on public transport. My car developed a noise, and it’s gone to the garage for a few days. Maybe three, maybe six, maybe August, they couldn’t narrow it down. It’s only what they do for a living. You wouldn’t expect them to know how long it’d take.

While I’m waiting, if I’m not writing my column, I’m thinking about costs. A journey by taxi costs me too much a mile. But I save money on not buying a car, or taxing it, or handing out cash to the constables at speed checks. I don’t have to take the taxi to the garage. I can have that second drink.

That’s not counting the gaps. Time is money. My time has gaps, now. There’s the gap between calling the taxi and the taxi turning up. There’s a space between wanting to go somewhere and setting out.

It’d be worse if I was going by bus. On the bus, you pay less in cash, but they take the remainder out of your soul. Plus you need to buy new clothes, afterwards.

The gaps add up. I write half a column, and then have to go, and then I don’t know where the column was going. You can’t write a column in the gaps.

Let’s quantify that. Let’s pin it down flat and dissect it.

I can’t write a column in the gaps. You can’t write a column at all.

So, I can’t go from A to B at time t. I have to go at t+n. My column suffers. My life becomes gappy. The taxi is late, right now, as I write this. It’s taking its time.

When it gets here, it’ll parp and toot. It’ll flash and honk. Suddenly there will be a need for hurrying.

I want my car back, so that I can hurry on my own terms and in my own time. I want my own time back. I don’t like taxis, because of the gaps. I can’t use trains, because the nearest station is ten miles away and the trains only go to Coventry and who wants to go to Coventry? How would I get to the station? It’s in a bad area. I wouldn’t want to go there on foot.

In a tank, maybe. In a Panzer. In an ambulance, more likely.

But not on foot.

And not in a bus.

I don’t do buses.

Have you seen the people on buses? Have you? They come in three types. Bus drivers, still learning how to use the gears and the brakes and the road. People too young to drive, although they should be able to hotwire a car. What’s wrong with young people these days?

The other type has subtypes. The dead, the doomed, the dispossessed. They wear bad clothes and don’t clean them. They live with their mothers.

I’d hate to see their mothers.

They look like child molesters or serial killers. They look like victims.

So, I’m waiting for the taxi, and writing this to fill in the gap.

If I’m lucky, it won’t be a long wait.

If I’m really lucky, this column will cover the fare.

It was a short column for Les. Sometimes he’d have half a page to himself, and sometimes only a paragraph. I folded the paper and looked out of the window. The view was different from the top floor. I didn’t usually travel by bus. I had an Audi. But it wasn’t well, and it had gone to the garage.

‘They’ll rip you off,’ said Dermot, meaning the mechanics. ‘They’ll have seen you coming a mile off. You can’t go on the bus. It’s full of scutters. They’ve all got nits. They’ve all got satchels and scabies. You want your car back.’

II

I did want my car back. You’d know why, if you’d ever been on the 256k bus. It goes every fifteen minutes on average, apparently managing this by running every two minutes at three in the morning, when there’s no one at the bus stops, and once an hour during daylight hours. All bus passengers have a look of despair, forlorn pale things counting their change in the petrol fumes. Women with six children occupy entire decks, men with Elvis haircuts and their hands in their pockets sit next to you and breathe like donkeys. Everyone smokes rollups. At every other stop someone gets on with the wrong change. They go from seat to seat asking if anyone can change fifty pee. No one admits that they can. Everyone looks out of the windows. Everyone puts a bag on the seat next to them.

A boy with cropped ginger hair and an idiot expression sits in front of you, one seat to the left, with his head turned around, staring blankly at you the whole way home.

III

I write small computer applications, using Delphi as a front-end for Oracle databases. Databases are logical, until people get near them and put data in. Then they turn into a mess. I write small applications – applets – to allow users to get at the data and fix it. The trick is not to allow them to do anything. The trick is to give them buttons to click on and primary colours. If it beeps at them from time to time they’re delighted. I can program without working at it. It’s something that just clicks with me. I pick up computer languages. I read books about them for fun.

‘You fucking would, you sad git,’ Dermot would say. ‘It’s the only thing you do pick up. You don’t pick up women, that’s for bloody certain. What happened to that Julie? Where’s she gone to? Let me guess, you told her all about fucking operating systems and she went out for cigarettes and never came back? You sad man. Computers. Sad.’

I had a PC at home, a 500 mhz Pentium III with 128 meg on board and a 32-meg TNT2 graphics card. State of the art for a couple of months. I wrote applets on it I could have written on a 486.

You can’t have a slow PC if you’re a programmer. You wouldn’t be able to hold your head up in company. You can have horror stories about the Amstrad you learned on, or how long it took to learn the keystrokes for Spectrum Basic. Remember the Spectrum? Little thing that had rubber keys and four colour-coded shift keys; every other key could have four meanings depending on the combination of shift keys you held down as you pressed it. You have to know about them. You need to have experienced them. But you can’t have a slow PC now unless it’s a spare, wired up as part of your own little LAN or sitting in the corner running an algorithm to find the highest prime number.

My pretty little desktop PC was more powerful than things that filled rooms in the seventies. It could do billions of calculations a second. It could plot millions of points instantly, do four-dimensional trigonometry, produce print-quality images, connect to the Net and kick-start the revolution.

I played games on it.

I have played games on an old ZX Spectrum, and on a Commodore 64, and on an Atari ST and now on a PC that has none of its original components. Everything has been upgraded. Everything has been replaced at least once.

I have also owned a couple of consoles, an old Sega Megadrive with a dodgy converter and a Nintendo 64 that was better than a PC four years ago. I have drawers full of computer games, video games, video-games magazines. I used to read science fiction, all those books about unhelpful robots and alternate universes.

Video games are an alternate universe. Each one is a window onto a new world. They are self-referential like no other art-form, and they started that way. The first widely available game was Pong, marketed by Atari.

Atari – the word – is from a game itself. It’s from Go, and it’s the state a group of stones is in when it has one liberty left, when it’s in imminent danger of capture.

Games are like that. They feed on their own history.

Pong gave you control of a bat; you had to hit a ball with it. The ball was square. Lo-rez was hi-rez at the time. Pong had one control, and three instructions. The best one was:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

Dermot is right.

I am boring about computers.

IV

I met Dermot six or seven years ago. I was on a training course in Birmingham, learning the fundamentals of object-oriented programming. The course was in a small building on a new business park close to the NEC. It was the peak time for new business parks. They were everywhere, and they were all the same. Each one had the small, flat, white building that did computer training, the grey warehouses for furniture companies, the sprawling blocks occupied by new businesses going out of business, the inconvenient out-of-town sorting office. There was a van selling burgers and egg baps. There were signs with arrows in bright primaries. The road names were misleadingly pleasant and rural.

On the first two days of the course, I went to the restaurant for lunch, along with everyone else. It was the usual business park restaurant, with no evening menu and no atmosphere. Secretaries leaned across tables. Men shouted into mobile phones. Nothing meaningful happened. We had scampi that had been constructed from recycled scales, tails and fins. We had French fries made out of anything but potato.

On the third and last day of the course I said I had some work to catch up on at lunchtime. I’d had enough faux scampi. I’d had enough of mobile phones. I went to the burger van. It had been a VW camper once upon a time. It was white under the grime, which was considerable. It was leaning slightly into the road. The tax disc was months out of date. One side of the van had been cut open and brutalized into a serving hatch.

There was no queue. There was no menu.

‘What do you have?’ I asked.

The proprietor looked down at me from behind the crusted sauce bottles. He had black curly hair and a round nose. He looked like a cartoon Irishman, and as it turned out that summed him up pretty well, apart from his accent. His accent was all over the place, and as I soon discovered, he put heavy emphasis on at least one word in almost every sentence.

‘I have fucking burgers, what do you think I have? Truffles?’

‘What sort of burgers?’

‘Cheap ones.’

‘Do you sell many?’

‘Not round here I don’t. They’re all in there, eating really cheap burgers.’ He nodded towards the restaurant. ‘They’re all in the fucking tuck shop. Have you noticed that? It’s like a campus here. It’s like a university. They’ve all got the same clothes. They’ve got tie clips. Fucking tie clips. Jesus.’

He looked at my tie.

‘Did you tie that? Was the light on when you did it? You have to be a computer man.’

I told him I was.

‘Fucker of a day this is turning out to be. Only one customer and he’s a computer man. I’m sick of this. Do you want a drink?’

‘I want a burger.’

‘I’ll give you a fucking burger. It’s your funeral. Then can we go for a drink? They have a bar in there?’

I nodded.

‘Right we are then. Settled. Here.’

He dropped a burger into a bap and passed it to me.

‘Sauce is there if you want it.’

He closed the hatch. I heard a door close on the far side of the van, and then he walked around it. He was shorter than me but not by much, and far more alive. He was more alive than anyone I’d ever met. He was all energy.

I took a bite of my burger.

‘There’s a bin there,’ he said, pointing. ‘Take my word for it, throw that fucking thing into it.’

‘I thought it was my funeral.’

‘And it’s my fault. Do they have beer in here or is it all wine and shite in bottles?’

‘They have beer.’

‘In tiny fucking bottles or in pints?’

‘Both.’

‘Fair enough. You had enough of that?’

I had. I dropped it into the next bin.

‘First sensible thing you’ve done. For the second one, you can buy the drinks.’

‘I’m buying the drinks?’

‘Of course you are, you cheeky cunt. I bought lunch.’

V

If you’re old enough to remember a time when there were no video games, then you’ll know that the first time you saw Pong it was a vision into a new place. Cyberspace is the place you look into when you look into a monitor, past the screen and into the game world. In there – out there – everything is possible. You can control events there.

In the real world, events control you.

I used to be a student. You don’t need to be a student to get into software. Most early coders – the ones on the frontier, the ones on the cutting edge – taught themselves. They had to. There were no landmarks. Now, you need qualifications and experience. I learned how to code from a ZX Spectrum, trying to write games that would make me a millionaire like Matthew Smith. You’d see pictures of him in computer magazines, this long-haired seventeen-year-old said to have a million-plus bank account. This was in the early eighties, when a million was big money. The computer magazines of the time used to have long listings of programs, endless pages of hopeless code for you to type in at the keyboard of your computer. They always contained typos. If you typed them in correctly, they failed to run. You had to interpret and debug the code. You’d spend days typing this stuff in, saving it to a C90 cassette every now and then. Saving took minutes in those days. You had to watch the tape run and listen to a high-pitched electronic squealing.

Sometimes, even now, I hear that sound as I fall asleep.

I corrected the code in magazines and got programs to run. I got jerky stick-men to stroll across the screen. I got fifty bad versions of Space Invaders to run. I got bad eyesight and pale skin.

I gave up on programming games. With games the cutting edge is always somewhere else. In computing the cutting edge is in all directions, and you can’t keep up with it. You have to find a wave and ride it. You have to pick a direction and head that way.

I learned computing by myself, and then couldn’t get a job. The first wave had gone. The second wave was coming up behind me, schools full of kids learning to program. I didn’t have a wave to go with, so I got stuck in the trough. I needed more experience. I had some money in my bank account, left to me thanks to helpful deaths on remote branches of the family tree. I invested it in myself and took a degree course at Borth College. That’s where I learned about other worlds. That’s where I learned that they’re bad places. And then, like all students, I forgot everything I’d learned.

VI

Dermot looked at the interior of the restaurant.

‘Look at the state of this place. Is this tacky or fucking what?’

A barman in an anonymous black suit watched us nervously. He looked too young to be behind a bar. He looked much too young to deal with Dermot.

‘We want beer,’ Dermot told him. ‘We need beer. We’ve been having a hard old time. I’ve been shifting commodities all morning and I’m thirsty. What have you got?’

The barman listed drinks; designer lagers made up most of the options.

‘Two pints of lager then,’ Dermot said. ‘Fizzy piss but you haven’t got anything else. You want to talk to the brewery about it. I have friends in catering. I could put a word in. Would you like me to do that? Would you like me to see what I can do?’

‘It’s not up to me,’ said the barman.

‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Dermot. ‘I’d imagine not. We’ll have two whiskies to go with them.’

‘I’m driving,’ I said.

‘I’ll drink them then. That’s two lagers, two whiskies, and have one yourself.’

‘I’m not really allowed to drink.’

‘But I want you to have one. I’ll be offended. I’d take it as a rebuff. Who says you can’t have one?’

‘It’s how it works.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t try. Don’t say I didn’t offer. Just the lagers and whiskies then, thanks. He’s paying.’

I checked my wallet. I didn’t know what the prices were like. The training people had paid for all of the meals until then. Which was fair enough as the training was costing thousands of pounds. I checked the room for clues about costs. There was a lot of flimsy wood panelling and acres of flat red cloth. Glass ashtrays the size of dustbin lids held mounds of smouldering butts. The waitresses were teenage girls with the facial expressions of expiring fish apart from one older woman who, on first inspection, appeared to be dead. They wore unmarked uniforms, somewhere between French maids and policewomen. Someone in procurements had overlapping fetishes.

Clusters of men wearing Armani suits they couldn’t quite afford or carry off talked about deals they were involved in. Dermot and I were easily the oldest people in the room if you discounted the older waitress. Which, as she seemed to be dead, you could.

‘School holidays, is it?’ asked Dermot. ‘Didn’t tell you, did I? The name’s Dermot. My mother was from Cork, so she used to say. Course she was off her head, she could have been from Mars for all I know. Didn’t know my father, he fucked off to Belgium before I turned up. Belgium! Who goes to Belgium?’ He had a drink and thought about it. ‘That’s my family history done. Who are you then?’

‘Mick Aston.’

‘Mick? That’s what you’d call a sheepdog. We can work with it though. Could be Mickey, could be Michael, could be Mike. You’re stuck with Aston, though. You not drinking that?’

He pointed at my whisky and I shook my head. He downed the drink.

‘Tell you what, tell you what I think. I think we need to get out of here. Out of this fucking business park. You up for it? We can go into town and have a real drink.’

‘I have a course to finish.’

‘Well finish it then. Finish it now. You can always do another course. You might not see me again. What have you got to lose?’

‘My job. My liver.’

‘There are other jobs out there. I can get you a job.’

‘Selling burgers?’

‘Not fucking likely. You don’t have the skill set. You don’t have the aptitude. We can use the van to get to town.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I’ve had a drink. There’s a difference. Having a drink is sociable. Getting drunk is disgraceful. I don’t get drunk.’

The barman eyed him warily.

‘I get rat-arsed,’ Dermot told him. I get arrested. Nice place, hope it takes off. You’re fucked if it doesn’t. You coming?’

Of course I was. I didn’t know what to make of him but it’d be an interesting night. You’d have thought that after Dr Morrison I’d know better, but after Dr Morrison I really didn’t know what I knew.

‘Good man. Fair play. We’ll take the van. You’ll need to be careful in there.’

‘Why? The fat fryer?’

‘No, fuck that. We can dump that. You’ll have to watch out for the mirrors. There are the wing mirrors, the driving mirror, might even be some shiny surfaces in there somewhere. I doubt it, it’s filthy. I honestly doubt it. But there might be some chrome or something.’

‘I don’t mind mirrors,’ I said. Dermot smiled evilly at the barman.

‘Oh yes he does,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like them at all. And now he doesn’t know whether he likes me or not, either. Confusing old world isn’t it? Come on then.’

I followed him.

TWO
I

That afternoon we got ridiculously drunk. I don’t remember much about it. I remember abandoning the burger van halfway down Broad Street in Birmingham. Dermot had, as he’d promised, dumped the deep-fat fryer on the pavement at the business park. We’d left it there, leaking grease and steaming.

‘Off we fucking go then,’ said Dermot, scampering gleefully off into the afternoon crowd. We had a few in the first open bar we came to.

After that my memory skips like a vinyl record. I remember a staircase leading down to some toilets far beneath a dingy club. I remember being brightly sick over a flashing fruit machine. I remember it paying out three jackpots in a row in response.

I remember being in a bathroom with a long mirror of polished metal, Dermot beside me, holding my hand out. His small hands were too strong to resist, like the rest of him.

‘You can touch it,’ he said, meaning the mirror. ‘You can touch it.’

Our blurred reflections looked back at us, mine terrified, his delighted.

‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Touch it.’

A pair of post-punk punks – all polychromatic hair dye and studded leather – arrived in time to hear that. They moved to flank us.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Dermot.

‘Pair of queers in the bog,’ said one. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘Where?’ asked Dermot, looking around theatrically.

Something about him made them leave. He looked for a moment like a werewolf, without any transformation. He was suddenly all violence. They backed off, hands up and palms forward. If they’d been dogs they’d have rolled over. The door dragged itself shut behind them.

‘Pair of cunts,’ he said. ‘Not going to touch the mirror, then? Come on. More drinks.’

We had more drinks. How do you become afraid of mirrors? Easily. Here’s how it happened for me.

II

In 1983 all sorts of things were changing. There were new sorts of amusement arcades and new sorts of amusements. We were living in the most immoral decade since records began. We were moving into the age of image.

I was moving into the final year of a three-year course in software engineering. This was at a tiny college two miles from Borth, which is a small town on the wet Welsh coast in the middle of nowhere. The campus held a few residential blocks, a blocky little student pub, and a three-storey H-block style building that held everything else. It had been built in the seventies, and designed by an architect with a fondness for the T-square and a big gap in his imagination. The computer rooms held out-of-date green-screen workstations linked to an ancient server. The server was tended by unspeaking drones in lab coats. They gave the impression of depthless knowledge; they never provided evidence of it. The server had its own room, locked with state-of-the-art locks for that time. Large windows with embedded wire mesh let you look in and see the server at work. It was the size of a pair of double wardrobes, with enormous switches and great tangles of cables. Banks of reel-to-reel recorders spooled miles of tape in all directions. The technicians would feed punched cards into slots, pull levers, and run for cover as processing began.

Borth college didn’t run many courses, and it didn’t attract many students. It didn’t attract any good ones. I went there because the entry requirements seemed to consist of turning up. This turned out to be true. It was all subsidised by government handouts and charitable donations, otherwise it would have closed down three weeks after it first opened.

The computer courses were run on the ground floor, and so all of the windows had to be barred. This was Wales in the early eighties and green-screen workstations could fetch a few pounds. On the middle floor they ran hairdressing courses. On the top floor the experimental psychologists watched mice run through mazes. In those days higher education took very little of your time and didn’t cost you all that much. I had a lot of spare time on my hands and nowhere to spend it. The campus was situated in a wet wasteland. What seemed to be huge distant mountains were actually small mountains, quite close by. It rained three days out of five. There was a single bus stop, and the bus went between the campus and Borth twice a day each way. If you went there at night you had to get a taxi back, and there were no taxis. Now there are no taxis anywhere in Wales. They were all removed. Now there are only tacsis. There’s lufli.

I made friends, out of necessity. There was nothing else to do. For three years there was only the company of other students. At night the lecturers drove home in Morris Minors and Volkswagens. The hairdressers vanished. You could try and date them, but you wouldn’t get anywhere. They were Welsh and miserably insolent. They were dark-haired, thin, a genotype. They looked like goths, without trying. None of the locals seemed to stay up after eight.

To pass the time, we would go to the student bar. Presumably the college funded it. It didn’t seem to do enough trade to stay afloat.

In the first term of my third year, I met Tina McAndrew. We had an affair that didn’t do either of us any good, but we got out of the wreckage with our friendship intact. That was just as well, as there were few other people there. You couldn’t afford to lose a friend. There were sixteen computer students, the unassailable hairdressers, and the psychologists. Tina was a psychology student. I remember looking out of a window while I was waiting for yet another Cobol program to compile. I saw her walk from one of the residential blocks, wearing one of the long coats that everyone had in those days. She was heavier than the girls I usually fancied. I liked them tiny, and she was my height. She looked as though she’d beat me at arm-wrestling. She had long hair and the Welsh weather was busily fucking it over. I watched her until she walked out of my line of sight.

A couple of nights later I saw her in the student bar and decided to talk to her. I was egged on by Olaf, one of the other computer students. Olaf came from a wealthy family, by early eighties standards. He had a sense of humour that only he understood. You had to decipher him. Olaf wasn’t his real name, obviously. His real name was Peter, but he called himself Olaf.

‘It’s short for “Oh, laugh, for fuck sake”,’ he once told me.

The night Tina turned up, he watched me watching her. I sometimes thought he should have been with the experimental psychologists. He liked observing. I sometimes wondered if he was an experimental psychologist, sneakily studying the computer students. I knew that was paranoid, which hopefully meant that I was sane.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Talk to the lady.’

There was no point ignoring him. After all, I wanted to talk to her. I managed to get to the bar before she was served.

This wasn’t difficult. The student bar had a lone barman, named Sid. He was older than the students and distant in manner. He would strive not to serve people. He would do his best to avoid talking to you.

‘Until he gets to know you,’ Olaf once said. ‘Then he still doesn’t talk to you. But at least he knows you.’

Sid could take a long time to pour a simple pint and girls usually chose more complicated drinks. They’d want mixers and ice; that could take him all night. I sidled closer to Tina, whose name I didn’t know at the time.

‘Hello again,’ she said.

I looked around. She was talking to me. What did she mean, ‘again’?

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Who’s that you’re with? Not one of your crowd. I thought you hung around with a livelier bunch.’

She looked slightly quizzical. Her features managed to be both heavy and delicate; a neat trick, I thought. I didn’t know what had compelled me to talk to her. Olaf and drink, perhaps. My usual approach was more circumspect. Still, I did know that I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anyone who looked that good.

‘You must have me mixed up,’ I said.

‘That sounds about right. Can I get you a drink?’

‘I’ll get you one.’

‘That’s a bit old fashioned, isn’t it? I’m allowed to buy the drinks. We’re in the eighties now, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you sure we haven’t met?’

I said that I was. I’d have remembered her. It wasn’t as though I met many girls. Computers didn’t attract them.

‘I’m Tina,’ she said, ‘and as I don’t know you, you’ll need to tell me who you are.’

‘Mick Aston,’ I said.

‘Are you doing anything tomorrow evening, Mick Aston?’ she asked. I wasn’t. ‘Well, you are now,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

III

The next night she took me to Aberystwyth to see a film. I was expecting something French and gloomy, but she chose a noisy extravaganza with car chases and guns. She seemed to be watching me as much as the film. Perhaps it was because she was a psychology student, I thought. On the way back to Borth on the night bus, she edged closer to me across the seat.

‘Do you think people always have hidden depths?’ she asked. ‘Or is what you see what you get?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you’ve got depths,’ she said. She visibly came to a decision and kissed me, as though she’d been wondering whether to or not. I’d already reached the same decision and left her to it.

We had a brief affair, and ended up as friends. That’s as good as it gets, I think. Anything longer-term is based on a different emotion. It’s still called love, but it’s another flavour. Our little affair was all over in a month.

It was obvious early on that we wanted different things from the relationship. I wanted everything. I saw her and became happy.

She, on the other hand, saw some potential in me. She saw something under the surface. She could see a possible me, and it was him that she was after. He stayed hidden, however. She liked me, but not as much as she liked the version of me that I failed to become.

She began to cool. I attempted to woo her. It wasn’t something I had a talent for.

I tried to write poems for her, but they came out lifeless. I couldn’t get words to do anything good. We’d hold hands and walk the four-mile round trip to Borth and back. We slept together in my tiny student bed. I would find her crying from time to time. By the third week, that was all she was doing.

She told me she was sorry, she’d like to be friends.

We were friends. I didn’t have an easy time with that. But hope springs eternal, the vicious little bastard.

IV

Borth is really not much more than a road by the sea. You approach it by way of a long road that follows the estuary of the river Dyfi. The road winds past the college grounds, a thin strip of swampland, and a golf course. The road goes through the middle of the links, splitting the course into two and providing golfers and motorists alike with an extra hazard. A high sloping wall of grey concrete blocks the view out to sea. There are car parking spaces next to the sea wall. Inland, there are mountains and clouds.

A large public toilet, which has won awards, stands between the sea wall and the town. The shops all sell the same things; buckets and spades, strange paperbacks, cheap tat. Behind the main road, reached by way of a track, is a church of dark stone. It’s not visible from the town. It’s as though they’re ashamed of it.

A railway line runs behind the town and there’s a station which is not abandoned, despite appearances. Trains stop there at uncertain intervals. Once in a while, if the wind is in the right direction, you hear one clattering off along the estuary, upsetting the seagulls. The town is bookended by two small amusement arcades.

I spent a lot of time in the amusement arcades.

There are two chip shops and one general store. On a high promontory overlooking the town there is a war monument. From there, looking down, you can clearly see that Borth is a straight line of a town, that single road running dead level with the shore. Inland, a great expanse of featureless flat land stretches away to the mountains. It’s as though someone decided to try to build a resort on a salt marsh, just to see if it could be done. From this high viewpoint, you can also see the beach.

To get to the beach you have to climb over the sea wall, which is just over six feet high. It’s triangular in cross-section, and slopes at about forty-five degrees to the vertical. There are steps, but most people scramble up the flanks. In the lee of the wall you notice a chilling wind. On the top of the wall, it does its level best to throw you miles inland. Families wrapped in flapping cagoules struggle with chip papers. The beach is of fist-sized pebbles that are uncomfortable to walk, lie, or fall on. Either the tide or the bored populace has arranged the pebbles into large steps. Scrambling inelegantly down them, you come to a foot-wide strip of sand and then the heaving grey sea. Someone’s dog will shake itself dry next to you. Screeching herring gulls flap out of the surf and are whisked away by the wind.

On bank holidays, people come from most of the Midlands to spend a grim couple of hours struggling along the shore. Children unsuccessfully try to spend their pocket money in the shops. At about five, the town empties. The tourists go home. The wind dies down. The pubs do a miserable trade. In the evening, there’s nothing to see in Borth.

We used to go there in the evenings.

V

By midway through our final year, the student bar had lost any attraction it had once had. Instead, I took Tina to the Running Cow. The pubs in Borth were still pubs at the time, and families weren’t welcome. The choice of meals consisted of either cheese or ham baps, individually wrapped in cling film and left out on the bar to die. There was a choice of beer or lager and a small selection of shorts. Tina had half a lager. I had a pint.

She was wearing black everything. Her hair had been crimped into crinkly submission. In other circumstances, I wouldn’t have found her attractive. In Borth she was the brightest thing around.

We had decided to be friends. Well, she had decided. I was being friends in case it led back to being lovers, which it doesn’t. Twenty years later we’re still friends.

‘How are you for money?’ she asked.

‘I can afford a round or two.’

‘No, you moron. I mean generally.’

Well enough, I thought. I was a little way into debt but not so far that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. By all accounts, computer programming would pay more money than I could handle. I’d be a tax exile inside a decade.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘It’s just that they’re paying people for research. They want two people.’

‘They? Who are they?’

‘Psychology. Dr Morrison is after two volunteers and he’s got a research grant. He’s paying a hundred apiece. I’ve volunteered. Which leaves one place free.’

‘What do we have to do?’

‘He won’t say. It’d prejudice the results.’

‘Maybe it’d prejudice the volunteers.’

‘Perhaps it would. Look, Mick, it’s not as though you have anything else to do.’

‘Just my course.’

‘And how much do you have on at the moment? This is a single afternoon. You won’t miss an afternoon. You can do programming in your sleep.’

‘One afternoon? And I get a hundred quid?’

I didn’t know why I was quibbling. I had already decided to do it. A hundred would buy new games, with maybe some to spare for pens and paper. I could also buy a couple of floppies to save my work onto. The college computers used a variety of floppy disk that I never saw anywhere else, 7¾-inch things with hardly any capacity. Unlike modern floppy disks with their protective plastic covers, these were genuinely floppy. If you waved them in the air they flapped, and you lost all of your data.

‘Cash in hand. Money for next to nothing,’ said Tina, still under the impression that I needed persuading. The bar was quiet, as it always was. The locals went to other pubs if they went anywhere at all. Perhaps they all stayed in.

‘You’re doing it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll do it. But if he asks me about my mother I’m leaving.’

She gave me a strange look.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?’ she asked.

‘Like?’

‘Any niggling worries? Anything on your mind?’

‘No,’ I said, ignoring the niggling worry about the ‘just friends’ business. I had got used to ignoring that. The only time it became difficult was when I was trying to go to sleep at night.

‘Should there be?’

‘Not if you don’t think so.’

I didn’t think so. We drank our drinks and set out for the walk back to the campus. There was no one out, although I knew that if we scrambled up the sea wall there’d be a few people walking dogs along the hostile beach. There was always someone walking a dog along that beach.

‘Let’s walk on the sea wall,’ Tina said suddenly, already well on her way up.

‘What for? It’s windy up there.’

‘We’ll be able to see more.’

‘More Borth. Who wants to see more Borth?’

‘Oh come on,’ she said, grabbing my arm and hauling me up after her. ‘Look at the sea. Don’t you want to swim in it? Don’t you just want to throw yourself into the sea?’

‘Are you mad? It’s night and it’s cold. There are things in it.’

‘Well do you want to cut through the golf course then?’

What was she getting at? She wasn’t planning to seduce me in a dark corner. We were just friends. We’d both agreed to that except for me.

‘What are you on about?’ I asked her.

‘Ask me again next week,’ she said, and then, as though it was just a throwaway line:. ‘Did I tell you I’d met somebody?’

No, she hadn’t. That explained her peculiar mood.

After that, we had a very quiet walk back.

VI

Although I had been at the college for almost three years, I had never been to the third floor until I turned up to earn my quick hundred quid. I had thought about it, and had decided that it couldn’t do any harm. I was surprised to see that the stairs continued on up past the third floor, through a locked grille. Presumably they led to an attic or loft. The doors were numbered. I was after 304. It was eleven in the morning and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Didn’t they have psychologists in Wales? With all of that research material going free? That seemed a terrible waste.

‘I didn’t think you’d turn up,’ said Tina, trundling round the corner with an armful of brown folders.

‘I’m getting paid for this. We are still getting paid, aren’t we?’

‘We are. Don’t worry about the money. Now, lets see if he’s in.’

She knocked on the door. On the lower floors, the doors had glass panels at head height. Even the door of the server room had one. Up here in the realms of the headshrinkers, the doors were of flimsy but unbroken wood and painted a matte white. She knocked again.

‘Come on in,’ said someone. Tina opened the door and bundled me in.

‘This is him,’ she said, meaning me.

‘Ah,’ said the man in the room. He was a young man, probably no older than twenty, and he was wearing a lab coat. He looked like he might be related or married (or both, this was Borth) to one of the computer technicians from the ground floor.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said in a nervous voice. He gave me a limp, sweaty handshake. It didn’t seem like the sort of contact he was used to. There was a good chance that he wasn’t used to any at all. He had the sort of sparse ginger hair that shows a lot of scalp without the need for total baldness. His eyebrows were invisible unless he stood at the right angle in strong light. His eyes were a watery blue and he did his best to keep them from looking directly at you. When he spoke, he sounded as though he might stutter. He never did, but there was the feeling that he might. He was always fidgeting with the skin around his fingernails, and from time to time he’d absently bite off a stray strip. To do this he’d bend an arm across his face, turning his hand to the necessary angle for auto-cannibalism.

The top of a black tee-shirt was visible in the V-shaped opening at the throat of his lab coat. There was no writing on it.

‘I’m Betts,’ he said, letting go of my hand with evident relief. ‘I’m the technician. The lab technician, I mean. I’ll run you through what we’re about, then Dr Morrison will run through the experiment. It won’t take long. ‘I’ll give you some background first. If that’s alright?’

We said that it was.

He told us about some tricks you could do with mirrors.

THREE
I

At the time, the technique was new. One or two progressive European clinics were using it. Dr Morrison was a fan of progressive European techniques.

‘What’s it a technique for?’ I asked.

‘Whatever,’ said Betts. ‘It can relax the mind. Sometimes it can provoke reactions. It’s all to do with self-image.’

He went into a spiel about the Self while Tina and I sat at a desk. I didn’t want my Self getting any ideas so I looked out of the window until it was over. It was like being in a lecture, from what I could remember of them.

‘You can try this one,’ he said. ‘This one shows you what I mean. Here. Put your hand flat on the table. Palm down. Now, watch this.’

I had my hand palm down. He ran his index finger along each of my fingers.

‘There, you can see what I’m doing and you can feel it. That makes sense to you. Now, keep your hand flat but hold it under the table.’

I put my hand under the table. He continued to run his right index finger over my hand, but now he kept his left hand on the table, following his right hand. At first it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Someone was tickling my hand and a table. Then he got his hands synchronized. As he touched the back of my index finger – which was out of sight, under the table – with one hand, he touched the same place on the table with the other. Every time he touched me, he also touched the matching place on the table.

My eyes decided that they knew best, and overrode everything else.

I lost my hand.

All of a sudden it wasn’t there. I could see my arm going under the table, but the sensations weren’t coming from there. They were coming from the table. The table felt as though it was part of me.

‘Ah,’ said Betts, reclaiming his own hands. ‘There. You’ve remapped. Your hand is mapped to the table. See how easy that was? That’s how it works.’

‘Let’s have your hands where we can see them,’ said Tina. I pulled my hand back into view. It didn’t feel quite right. It was numb. I patted it with the other hand and it was normal again.

‘It’s sight that does it,’ said Betts. ‘If you mix the signals, give a visual stimulus that doesn’t match a physical stimulus, the body doesn’t know what to do. It can’t interpret the signals. You could see me copying what I was doing under the table with my other hand, and because you could only see that one you mapped the sensation of touch to match the vision. Dr Morrison uses mirrors.’

‘Nice,’ said Tina. ‘I could do with a mirror, the rain’s played havoc with my hair.’

‘How does this help?’ I asked.

‘It sets you apart from yourself,’ Betts explained. ‘It lets you see yourself in a different way, without the body getting in the way. I just went through all that. Weren’t you listening?’

‘No he wasn’t,’ said Tina. ‘He was looking out of the window and thinking about arcade games.’

She was right, as usual.

‘It’s better with mirrors,’ said Betts. He became less nervous as he expanded on his subject. ‘We block your view of yourself, and let you see parts of your body reflected. You move your left hand, and see your right hand move. That’s the sort of thing. It disassociates you from yourself.’

‘And that’s all I do for the afternoon? And I get paid?’

‘It may be distressing. Some people react to it badly. We’re paying you because you might not enjoy yourself.’

‘Bring the mirrors on,’ I said.

‘Dr Morrison is setting things up. We have to get the line of sight right for your height.’

‘How do you know how tall I am?’

‘You’re about my height. Maybe a little taller. A touch less than six feet. Your eyes are level with mine. This isn’t rocket science.’

It didn’t seem like any sort of science. We were going to stand and look at ourselves in strategically placed mirrors.

‘Isn’t there a control? You have control subjects in experiments.’

‘You’re both control subjects. You’re both going in there, and neither of you will know when you’re the control. It’ll switch between you.’

‘Fine.’

The three of us ran out of things to talk about. I don’t like to provoke conversations. I feel more comfortable joining them once they’re underway. Tina seemed preoccupied. Perhaps she had some buried traumas she was worrying about. Betts began to nibble at the skin around his fingernails. He winced and shook his finger as he caught a live bit. I looked back out of the window. The mountains were rendered faint by low clouds or thick sky. I wondered if the rooms across the corridor had a view of the sea.

‘I’ll see what he’s up to,’ said Betts, leaving Tina and I alone in the room.

‘How’s your hand?’ she asked.

‘It’s mine again. That was weird. I could feel it but it felt like the table was my hand. Or my hand was the table. It felt strange. It’s an illusion, though. It’s not as though my hand became part of the table.’

‘Illusions can be enough,’ she said. She seemed to be on her way to saying something else, and then stopped and looked out of the window. Between us, we were in danger of using the view up. There wasn’t much of it – grey sky, grey mountains, grey fields – and it wouldn’t stand up to much more attention.

‘What’s Dr Morrison like?’ I asked.

‘What do you think he’s like?’

‘Are you examining me?’

‘All the time. You need it. So, what do you think he’s like?’

‘Like a movie mad scientist. Mostly bald and with coloured stuff in test tubes. Getting ready to feed us a serum that’ll turn us into zombies.’

‘He’s about thirty, and he has hair. He doesn’t have test tubes.’

‘Just mirrors?’

‘You can be very negative. We’ll have to see about knocking that out of you.’

‘I’d be careful. Negativity is half of my personality. I don’t know if the rest would stand up without it.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Possibly not.’

She popped her elbows on the table, folded her hands together, and dropped her chin onto them. She looked at the desk.

Neither of us said anything else until Betts came back.

II

At that time video games were everywhere except in the home. In pubs they stood and twittered in corners. There were little tables with video games built in. Player One sat at one side and Player Two sat at the other, and their mates put ashtrays and pints in the middle of the screen and laughed. There were video games in pubs, chip shops, amusement arcades.

Home machines weren’t advanced enough to play real arcade games then. The best you got was Pong, and a poor version of that. That’d be on a console with wooden sides and huge silver knobs. To play real video games you had to leave the house.

I would walk into Borth with a pocketful of pound notes. Cars crammed with tourists and their kit – lunch boxes, kites, pets – drove around me. There were no pavements and the verges were of swampy mud beneath a thin veneer of moss. The smell of the estuary would wash over you if the tide was out, a rank stink of rot. On the other side of the estuary, a few miles away by boat but half an hour by car because there was no bridge this side of Machynleth, you could see Llandovery. Llandovery was a town which attracted more tourists than Borth but had less car parking.

Out to sea, you couldn’t see anything. There were seldom any boats and never any large ones. There was a harbour over in Llandovery, but the yachts didn’t come our way.

I’d walk past the golf course, watching out for stray shots. These were common and not always accidental. Not all of the locals welcomed students.

The amusement arcade at the near end of town was in a wooden building. It might have been a barn at some time. Now it was full of machines calling for attention. There was a single row of six one-armed bandits, the old ones made without software. They took two-pence coins and had jackpots of twenty pence. The one second from the left had an OUT OF ORDER notice on it for three years. It may still be there, out of order, on its own.

There were penny falls with prizes that seemed to have been welded to the spot. There was a betting game with tin horses on sticks racing around a striped track under a glass dome. There were machines with prizes arranged beneath a claw that would touch them and then leave them where they were.

Past all that, at the back, past the booth containing a miserable middle-aged woman and the spare change, were the video games. There were only three, but they were already taking most of the money. They had bright screens and they made more noise than anything else around. Written on them were instructions in a new version of English.

Not to miss shoot for top score!

Tapping button for super jump!

On the left was a classic Space Invaders, one for the retro crowd even then. Next to it was an Asteroids machine, with its simple vector graphics. Finally there was a Missile Command, the one where you controlled the cursor with a trackball. There was a game for the early eighties. Missiles would drop from the sky towards your cities. You’d launch countermeasures, aiming them with that strange trackball. But the missiles would get through, levelling your cities. Nuclear devastation, mass deaths, game over.

If only Ronald Reagan had seen that console. The SDI money could have gone to something useful instead.

I’d change a pound and slowly feed the machines. Missile Command was cheerily nihilistic, but Asteroids almost pointedly demonstrated the futility of working. You controlled a little triangular spaceship which sat in the centre of the screen. Large irregular boulders – the titular asteroids – arrived and began to move across the screen. Two large rocks, moving slowly: no trouble, you’d think. You’d line up your ship and press the fire button.

But after you shot a large rock, it broke into two quite large rocks, which headed off in new directions. Now there were three rocks to avoid. If you shot a rock, it subdivided into smaller rocks, and those into smaller ones, until the screen was a mass of debris.

Once they were very small, shooting them destroyed them. But by this time, you were in trouble because one of them inevitably caught you unaware and you lost a life.

The way to play Asteroids was not to shoot the asteroids. Even in video games, work only leads to more work.

After spending a pound I’d wait and watch the screens. They were still a new enough phenomenon to keep my attention. After half an hour of that I’d change another pound and feed the machines again. I’d repeat this cycle until the pound notes ran out, and then it’d be back out into the drizzle and back to the college.

Those old machines fetch high prices at auctions these days. In the early eighties no one would consider owning one. No one serious even played them. They were a piece of cultural ephemera, a passing fancy. They were the eighties embodied – flashy, expensive, violent, pointless – and no one noticed. In the twenty-first century we can see them for the revolution they were. At the time, it was only adolescents who gathered around them, throwing in the dole money.

There, Tina was right. I really was looking out of the window and thinking about arcade games.

III

Dr Morrison didn’t join us for the experiment. His presence, Betts told us, wasn’t necessary. It might influence the results. He passed on his instructions by way of Betts. That didn’t surprise me. Tina had once told me that psychology experiments were eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty. Betts arranged us out of sight of one another in a room with closed blinds and dim lighting. Large mirrors standing on easels were positioned around me. Betts covered them with cloths.

‘I’ll have to ask you how you’re feeling. I have to record it all. I have a cassette recorder, but you’ll have to speak clearly. You will need to look where I tell you to look. I will be touching you as part of the experiment. Not all of the time, but I’ll need to give you the odd prod. Mick, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Remember how I remapped your hand? We’re trying to disassociate you from your senses, and map your Self to somewhere else. Are you both ready?’

We said that we were. I was bearing in mind that everything Betts had said might well be part of the experiment. Eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty, Tina had said.

‘We’ve started,’ said Betts. He’d positioned himself out of sight. The experiment consisted of him removing cloths from selected mirrors, so that I saw myself from different angles. On some of the mirrors there were two or more reflections somehow overlaid.

‘Look to your left,’ he’d say. My reflections would look in all directions. Something would touch me on my left ear, but in the reflected versions it’d be the right ear, or both ears. The thing that had happened with my hand began to happen to my entire body. It began to feel like it wasn’t mine. I would raise my right hand and see my left hand move, or both hands.

I wasn’t sure which hand was moving.

It began to feel the way I’m told meditation feels, the sense of the body slipping away. I was feeling increasingly relaxed.

‘Look to your right,’ Betts said. ‘Tina, what are you seeing?’

She said something that seemed to come from a great distance. She sounded as though she was outside, in the damp landscape. I could see the landscape in the mirrors, presumably reflected from the window. I hadn’t noticed it before.

A tiny figure was running towards the college from the mountains. It seemed to be coalescing from the clouds.

I let myself enjoy the show. No doubt Dr Morrison wanted me to react to the approaching figure, now clearly a human being. Betts would be slyly watching me, waiting to see what I did. So I didn’t do anything. I watched it come.

Whoever he was – it was a male figure, I could tell that much – he was coming too quickly to be real. The mountains weren’t as far away as they looked, being smaller than you thought they were, but they were still a fair distance away. The running man was already close to the campus. He looked dwarfish, no more than four feet tall, a grin you could make out at a distance of several miles playing across his coarse features. He wore baggy grey clothes and pointed shoes.

From a long way away, Tina was making a lot of noise.

‘I can’t see him,’ said Betts. ‘Are you sure?’

The small man was now so close that I shouldn’t have been able to see him. He should have been out of my line of sight, obscured by the angle of the window, but he came straight on.

‘Not supposed to,’ said Tina. ‘Wake him up.’

Not supposed to what? The man was now too close to fit comfortably in the mirrors. He was squashed. He put out a white hand and gripped the edge of the frame.

He said something unintelligible.

I didn’t think this was a part of the experiment. This was something else, getting involved. This was an outside complication.

The small man pulled himself free of the mirrors, climbing out of them as though he was stepping through an open window. He didn’t look quite human. There was something about the set of his features. He shouted something at me, but it was only a noise and there was no sense in it. I stood up. Tina was standing against the back wall, and Betts was standing in front of her.

There was a sound of breaking glass. Silvered shards flew past me. I watched the small man scamper through the door, grinning nastily at us and emitting sounds that, although unintelligible, sounded anything but pleasant. He ran out of sight and we listened as the sounds of his footsteps – slightly scratchy, because of his long toenails – faded into nothingness. Betts chewed his fingers, shaking. Tina was white. There were only the three of us, standing in a closed room with a few mirrors, some of them broken.

IV

That’s why I don’t like mirrors. I don’t trust them. The small man might have been something I imagined, if Tina and Betts hadn’t seen him too. He might have come from the mountains, or the mist, and not the mirror at all. I didn’t care. It was mirrors that I became afraid of, and many years later Dermot had somehow picked up on that.

In the toilet of the club, Dermot let me off the hook.

‘More drinks,’ he said. ‘You need more drinks and less mirrors. Check out the decor in this place. Fucking wild. It’s like a Bronx alleyway down here. It’s like a working men’s club. They still have working men round here? Not that sort of city any more, is it. None of them are. Come on then.’

He led me back to the bar. ‘Now, drinks. What are we having?’

Pints and chasers, he decided. He saw a machine in a dark corner.

‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Bargain. That’s a Joust. Where have they been keeping that then? There are kids in here younger than that machine.’

He called the barman over and exchanged notes for coins.

‘I used to be good at this,’ he said, leading the way to the machine. ‘You’re a programmer, right? That’s what you said you did. Can you program things like this?’

‘I do business stuff,’ I said. ‘Databases.’

‘Fucking wild, that must be a riot. Well take the controls then, you’re that guy over there. That’s a life you’ve lost, put the fucking drinks down and pay attention.’

He was staring through the screen. I was reminded of the man who’d turned up from nowhere and ruined that experiment, but Dermot looked nothing like him. He didn’t feel like him, either. Dermot was merely cheerfully unbalanced, not alien.

He was a lot better at Joust than I was. I was in the low hand-eye co-ordination stage of drunkenness and I couldn’t focus properly.

‘Oi, watch that one. That fucking one,’ he’d say as I missed the bad guys completely. ‘You always this hopeless?’

I had to keep paying for extra lives just to keep up with him. His score was absurd, pinball-table high with half a yard of trailing zeroes. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking two drinks and he was still beating me.

‘King of video games, that’s me. Can’t play pool, can’t play darts, but give me one of these things and that’s me sorted.’

Finally he lost the last of his lives, and entered his name in the high-score table.

‘Right then. That’s that done. Now, let’s get ourselves something to eat, I’m fucking starving. They still have curries in Birmingham don’t they? Fucking must do. Cheers then boss,’ he said to the bouncers on the way out. They watched us make our way along Broad Street.

We couldn’t get a curry, because it was only four in the afternoon and nowhere was open. In the end we got lukewarm burgers at New Street station while I waited for a train that went my way. Commuters went the long way around us. The station concourse felt like a toilet, all grimy white tiles and headachy echoes. Dermot helped me onto the train when it turned up. The last I saw of him he was running along the platform, following the train as it pulled out, only stopping where the platform sloped down into the sooty Birmingham undergrowth alongside the tracks.

FOUR
I

Of course, that wasn’t the last I saw of him. One Saturday a few weeks later I was at home filling in job applications. That wasn’t the most fun you could have on a Saturday, even in Dudley, but it was something I needed to do. I’d passed my training courses and I had gained new qualifications and I thought that my salary should reflect all that. I was working for a small software house with offices on the Merry Hill site. They thought that my salary was good enough, or at least as good as it was going to get.

This is why I was filling in job applications. I had qualifications and experience. I should have been able to get into a higher wage band. Perhaps I’d be able to afford to move out of Dudley.

I don’t know many people in Dudley. I got a flat there because it was cheap and there seemed to be a lot of programming jobs in the West Midlands, which had just caught on to the idea that making chains and nails wasn’t going to bring in much wealth. It was close enough to Birmingham to commute. I had a theory that local industry was going to renew itself, but it didn’t. It just got older and more tired. It managed to let go of thirteenth-century jobs – making nails and chains – but never managed to make the leap past the industrial revolution.

As I said, I don’t know many people in Dudley. I had friends in other places. I still saw Tina. She’d moved into a cottage in Bewdley, along with her husband Roger. I liked him, although I didn’t know him well. She’d kept her maiden name, which helped me to pretend that she was still single and therefore available. I’d go and see them once or twice a week and we’d have a meal or go to a pub.

I’d rather have been in a pub just then. The job application forms were giving me a bad time. I couldn’t see why they asked so many extraneous questions. Each form was the size of a first novel, too thick to skim through in case you missed anything but too thin to pay full whack for. They all wanted the answers hand-written so that they could get someone to analyse your script and make sure that you weren’t a rapist or a bed-wetter. They wanted to know what other interests you had. I only had other interests. I had no interest at all in filling in forms.

My attention was wandering. I had sworn an oath to myself not to switch my PC on and start playing games instead of doing anything useful.

I turned the PC on. Handwriting was something that had been left behind in the days of chain-making. I would have a quick game of something and then get back to work. I could cope with that. I had self-discipline. I also had writer’s cramp.

I had a shareware game called Wolfenstein 3D. In it, you played a prisoner in a Nazi castle. It was in 3D, as the name suggested. You looked down the barrel of a gun and walked around, and you killed everything that moved. If you sent off fifteen dollars, you’d get more of the game. I didn’t have any dollars. In Dudley they used pounds, or bartering.

I would just have a quick run through a level or two, I thought.

Two hours later, the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone, Dermot least of all. Still, it wasn’t entirely a surprise when I opened the door and found him there.

‘This your place then? Bit of a mess. What is all this shit? Are you going to get me a cup of tea or what?’

He was already past me and sitting on the sofa, shuffling my job applications to one side.

‘After another job? It’s all fucking go in the software world. What’s those magazines, porn?’

They were computer magazines, mostly about games but with a couple of grown-up ones thrown in.

‘You can’t get any good games on computers,’ he said. ‘You want to get a Megadrive or something. I’ve got a Megadrive, smashing thing. Where’s your computer then?’

It was in the bedroom, on a small table next to the bed. It was a 486DX, whizzy for the time. It was still running Wolfenstein 3D.

‘What’s this?’ Dermot asked.

‘It’s a 486,’ I told him.

‘Not the fucking computer you dickhead. What’s the game?’

‘Wolfenstein. It’s a free one.’

‘You’re fucking joking. They’re giving this away?’

‘Only the first part. You have to pay to get the rest of it.’

‘Where’ve you had it from?’

‘Off a magazine. They have disks on the covers.’

‘How do you work it? Where’s the controller?’

I showed him the keys to use and he took over. He was a little outfaced by the keyboard, but soon learned the game-player’s way around it: ignore all of the ones with letters on.

‘I haven’t seen that tea yet,’ he said. ‘Is this that virtual reality, then? Is this what it’s like?’

It would be another five years before it turned out that virtual reality hadn’t been the next big thing after all.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘In virtual reality you wear goggles. They project an image into each lens, and you see it in real 3D. And they use motion sensors, so when you move in real life you move in the virtual world.’

‘So this is what?’

‘There isn’t a name for it yet.’

‘They can name it after me then. Dermot reality. That’s what this is. I know it isn’t the real world. Because if it was the real world I’d have had a cup of fucking tea.’

I made him a cup of tea. He couldn’t control the game one-handed, so he looked around the flat while he drank it.

‘Fucking hell, mate,’ he said. ‘What is all this shit? Don’t you ever throw anything away?’

I didn’t, as it happened. The flat was crowded with old clothes, old magazines, books, CDs, and old vinyl albums. I didn’t like to throw anything away. I always had the feeling that it’d turn out to be useful sooner or later. I still listened to some of the records. I might reread some of the books.

‘I might have to get one of these. How much do they go for?’ he asked, back at the keyboard.

‘You’d get one for twelve hundred.’

‘Fucking hell, they’re paying you too much. I don’t know what you’re filling in job applications for. You’ve got a good enough job now. I can’t afford twelve hundred for a fucking computer. You coming out?’

‘Where?’

‘See the sights of Dudley. And bring a coat, it’s fucking cold out there.’

II

We went for a walk through Dudley. The market was doing a roaring trade despite not selling anything you’d want to buy. The Merry Hill centre had opened a few miles away, a shiny mall with all of the shops you needed. Dudley had competed by curling up and dying. The strange thing was, Dudley was still crowded on Saturdays. What shops there were, were packed. People gathered around the market stalls, picking up tea towels and misprinted greetings cards.

‘What are they all after?’ Dermot asked. ‘What do they come here for? I mean, I came here to see you and that’s hardly the most important thing I could be doing with my day.’

‘How did you know where I lived?’

‘You told me, you piss-head. You were drunk at the time. I said I’d come round. Are there any real shops here?’

‘Not as such. They’re all closing.’

‘So what are this lot buying? Scotch fucking mist?’

I shrugged.

‘We’ve got two choices then. As I see it. We can walk around looking at this fucking market all afternoon, or we can go to the pub. They still have pubs here don’t they? Or, third choice, we can go in the amusements. I’d like to see what amuses these weird fuckers. Public executions? Badger baiting? So, pub or amusements?’

‘It’s a bit early for the pubs.’

‘Oh, let’s not wake the poor sleepy fuckers up, shall we? It’s only half past eleven and they’re still in bed. Shipleys it is then. How much money have you got? Well there’s a cashpoint over there look, get yourself another twenty. Call it thirty. Amusements don’t come cheap these days.’

There was a small queue at the cashpoint, headed by a woman who didn’t know which way up her card went. The machine kept rejecting it. She’d look at it, and put it in the wrong way up again.

Dermot had long since got bored and gone into the amusement arcade by the time I got some money. I found him by the video games, which were at the back. There was a booth containing a middle-aged woman, who looked to be the same one that had been in the booth in Borth thirteen years earlier. There was a machine that gave change in exchange for coins and notes, except for all bank notes and most coins. Those it rejected.

There were rows of fruit machines, now mostly in software. One or two still only cost five pence a play and paid out in pocket money. Most took twenty pence pieces and had alleged jackpots around the fifteen pound mark. A handful of young men walked around the machines, clocking the reels, shaking handfuls of loose change. There were small tinfoil ashtrays resting on every level surface.

The video games were much larger than they used to be. They had appendages: steering wheels, guns, skis, periscopes.

You didn’t have to go out to play video games any more. You could play them at home. Video games had to do more work to get any attention at all, like old pop stars. Hence the guns and steering wheels.

‘Check them out,’ said Dermot. ‘See why they’re called Space Invaders? Because they’re taking up half the fucking space. Give it another six years and these fuckers will be playing each other.’

He picked on the machine with the largest gun.

‘Stick a couple of quid in then,’ he said. ‘Let’s mow down a few innocent bystanders.’

III

After that, I saw him about once or twice a week. He always came to see me. He lived in a small house on the outskirts of West Bromwich and said that I wouldn’t want to meet him there.

‘You think Dudley’s bad, you should see West Brom mate,’ he used to say.

After I’d known him for about a year, I invited him to meet Tina and Roger.

‘Roger?’ he said. ‘You mean that’s really a name? I thought it had been made up. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Roger. Where do these two live then?’

‘Bewdley.’

‘What, out in the sticks? Sheepshaggers are they? You used to knock about with this Tina then. What’s she like?’

‘She’s like married. That was all a long time ago.’

‘It’s about time you got someone else mate. You’re pulling in enough money. You want to get yourself a girlfriend before you do your eyesight some permanent damage. How are we getting there? Tractor? Coracle?’

‘I’m driving,’ I said.

‘Count me in. I’ve always wanted to spend a night with the yokels. Can I dress casual?’

‘Do you ever do anything else?’

‘Not for your sake mate. I just wouldn’t want to give poor old Roger too much of a shock.’

‘I think he can cope with you,’ I said.

‘You never know,’ said Dermot, with an evil little grin.

IV

Bewdley is a fairly large town masquerading as a small village. The river Severn runs through it, and over it at some times of year. After crossing the Severn by way of the old narrow bridge I drove around the church. You have to, as the church was built in the middle of the road, with one lane on each side of it. For Bewdley, it’s not inconvenient enough to have a river running through the middle of the town. They also have to have a church in the middle of the main road.

Thanks to the river, which allowed goods to be transported from other towns, Bewdley was one of the major English towns until those new-fangled canals were invented. Compared to rivers, canals had the advantages of going to the right destination and not breaking their banks. As canals – and then railways – became the main mode of transporting goods, Bewdley dwindled and Birmingham grew like a tumour.

In response, Bewdley reinvented itself and became picturesque. Now every shop sells antiques, most of them good-quality new ones. The roads are narrow, as they were designed for traffic with hooves, and there are often long queues. When the river floods people come from Kidderminster and Kingswinford to stand and watch water misbehaving. The houses closest to the river are always up for sale.

I left the car on the Pay and Display car park, which was free in the evenings, and Dermot and I walked along the river to Tina and Roger’s house. Their house was Georgian and damp, as are most of the riverside houses. It had a step up to the front door, but not a high enough one to avoid the floods. Twice a year they’d have to move everything to the top floor and then spend a week going through the house with the scrubbing brushes and the detergent. Whenever the river Severn visited it brought a lot of things with it, and it left a lot of them when it went. There was a tidemark on the outside wall at about waist height. When it rained heavily in Wales, Tina and Roger would start hauling furniture upstairs.

It often rains heavily in Wales. I know that from my time in Borth. Sometimes there would be more water in the sky than in the estuary.

Dermot was unimpressed with Bewdley.

‘I thought it’d be more, you know, more countryside. It’s like Stourbridge.’

‘It’s Georgian.’

‘It’s like Stourbridge but older. And what’s with these fucking shops? They all sell antiques. Do they eat antiques round here? Or are they all off in the fucking fields hunting down potatoes? Who lives out here?’

‘Tina and Roger.’

‘I notice you always put them in that order. Here,’ he said, alarmed. ‘There are ducks in the road.’

‘There’s a river there,’ I said, pointing to it.

‘I can see the fucking river. Why aren’t the ducks down there in the water?’

‘Maybe they fancied a change.’

‘I’m happy for them. Do they bite?’

I looked at him.

‘Are you scared of them?’

‘I’m scared of nothing.’

Despite his claim, he gave the ducks – a couple of mallards – a wide berth.

‘You’re scared of ducks,’ I said. ‘How are ducks going to hurt you?’

‘You’re scared of mirrors,’ he said. ‘That makes more fucking sense does it? Where are the trees? We’re in the countryside and all I can see is shops and a river. Where’s all the nature?’

‘All directions. You have to walk to it.’

‘Where are we, the middle fucking ages? No one walks anymore. Even you don’t walk. We’re in the nineties now, nature wants to get its arse in gear.’

‘This is their house.’

Dermot checked it out.

‘Looks alright,’ he said.

Tina let us in. She was wearing a loose flowing thing from the Gap. Roger was dressed in a collection from French Connection, as usual. He didn’t look anything like a lecturer; all of the other ones I’d encountered were of the leather-elbow-pad variety.

They’d painted the inside of their house the colour of gentlemen’s studies in old films. It looked warm and amber, with a density of light you almost had to push your way through. Tina went in for rugs with a lot of dark red in the patterns. Carpets were pointless as you couldn’t get them upstairs quickly enough when the river came in unannounced. They seemed to have a lot of dark wood furniture, until you looked more closely and realized how little there was. A table with four ladderback chairs, a cabinet with a small television (they only had terrestrial channels, and only four of those), a small chest of drawers with framed photographs on the top. There was no sofa, no armchairs, nothing that’d take a lot of hoisting up the stairs when the Severn started getting too lively.

I’d seen the kitchen on previous visits and I knew that all of the cupboards were mounted at head height, well above the high-tide mark. They kept the fridge/freezer on the upstairs landing and the washing machine in a spare room upstairs. The small electric oven could be manhandled up the stairs with the help of the neighbours. Even after everything had been moved above the high water mark, the house was uninhabitable until the water level dropped. There would be no electricity until the river stopped having its fun and got itself back where it belonged. The presence of three feet of water dropped the temperature by several degrees, and the water wasn’t clean.

In the film Titanic, when the sea finally pops in it’s a nice fresh shade of blue. It looks chlorinated. The floodwaters in Bewdley were the colour of shit, not without reason.

It all seemed a lot of trouble to put up with for the sake of living somewhere picturesque.

Dermot settled himself into one of the ladderback chairs.

‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘Got a touch of the Sherlock Holmes to it. Sorry, we haven’t been introduced, our Mickey doesn’t do manners. I’m Dermot, a friend of Mr. Aston here. I know you’re Tina and you’re Roger, and you knew him when he was a student. Did he have any manners then?’

‘No,’ said Tina. ‘He was hopeless. Wouldn’t hold a door open for you, wouldn’t offer to carry things.’

‘It was 1983,’ I said. ‘Men weren’t allowed to hold doors open. It was sexist. It was politically incorrect.’

‘And that died a death, didn’t it?’ asked Dermot. ‘Now we’re right back where we were before all that. Still, kept us on our toes for fifteen years.’

‘We’ve had plenty of things doing that,’ said Tina. Roger arrived with an open bottle of wine, an aged French one. The name meant nothing to me. No doubt he’d had it breathing somewhere. Roger knew his wines. If they’d lived somewhere less prone to going subaquatic, he’d have had a cellar. As it was, he had racks in the attic.

‘What sort of prices do places go for round here?’ Dermot asked. Roger told him while Tina set out place mats and cutlery.

‘I hope you’re not a vegetarian,’ Tina said.

‘Not fucking likely,’ said Dermot. Tina smiled genuinely; Roger smiled tolerantly.

She’d done a game terrine with tiny new potatoes and fresh garden peas in some sort of mint dressing.

‘This is what the middle class have for tea is it then?’ asked Dermot. ‘Any more wine?’

Roger looked uncomfortable at being tagged as middle class. Tina didn’t seem to mind.

‘Only the ones with good enough cooks,’ she said. ‘The rest of them make do with takeaways. What do you have then? Fish and chips? Kebabs? Tripe and onions?’

‘Aye, pet. And we have cabbage on Saturdays as a treat.’

‘What do you do?’ Roger asked Dermot.

‘Nothing really. I don’t have what you’d call a trade. I pick up jobs. You can get by like that.’

‘Nothing longer term? What about pensions?’

‘Bollocks to pensions. I’m too young for pensions. That’ll all sort itself out.’

Tina raised one eyebrow, her code for a good point being made. I was in a private pension scheme because programming jobs weren’t lifelong. Sometimes they lasted as long as the project. Sometimes the projects were canned and the programmers got their cards. Besides, there were always people headhunting from other companies.

Roger took a sip of wine to allow him time to compose himself. He couldn’t have been five years older than Dermot, but managed to look twice his age. He had grey creeping in at his temples and a touch of middle-age spread at the waist, but it was more his attitude. He was like a father. Dermot was cheerfully playing the part of an unruly child, and Tina and I were the well-behaved children watching the show.

Except that Tina seemed to want to spar with Dermot.

‘So you’re working class then?’ she asked. ‘Only we thought that they’d gone. Everyone has an office job now. And if you don’t actually have a job, you can hardly be called working class, can you?’

‘I was born working class,’ said Dermot.

‘I doubt that,’ said Tina. ‘I really doubt that. There were lots like you at college, kids who pretended to live on the frontline. What were they doing at college then? Advanced scaffolding techniques? New movements in welding? No, they were doing media studies and art classes.’

‘Being working class is a state of mind,’ said Dermot.

‘I thought you were born into it.’

‘It’s a state of mind you’re born into. It’s a way of being.’

‘That’s Zen Buddhism, I think you’ll find. How many of your jobs involve any manual labour? Excluding things like manually writing on paper with a pen, or manually sitting at a desk.’

‘Enough. When I met him,’ Dermot pointed at me, ‘I was working in a burger van. Cooking burgers. And kebabs. That was manual.’

‘But it wasn’t exactly foundry work. You just come across as a middle class white boy doing lowlife jobs to make yourself more interesting.’

‘You don’t know anything about me. How can you sit there judging me when you live in this fucking cottage? You’ve never been to the real world.’

‘I could ask Mick what he knows about you. He’s known you for a while, hasn’t he?’

‘He doesn’t take a blind bit of interest. As long as he’s getting along with his own life, that’s all he thinks about. I don’t think he’s ever asked what I do.’

‘No,’ said Tina. ‘He’s not like that. Are you, Mick?’

The two of them looked at me.

‘I don’t like to intrude,’ I said. ‘I don’t like to pry into people’s business.’

‘You don’t want to know about them, more like,’ said Dermot. ‘I mean, you’re more remote than these two and they live in a cottage in the fucking sticks. You live in Dudley. Do you know any of your neighbours?’

‘Not to talk to. I’ve seen them. They’re not the sort of people I’d talk to.’

‘No? You’re a snob mate. They probably don’t want to talk to you. Any more of this wine then, Roger?’

Roger went to get another bottle from the attic.

‘What are we going to do about him?’ Tina asked.

‘Our Mick?’ asked Dermot. ‘We’ll have to get him to take an interest. We’ll have to get him a hobby. Bring him out of himself.’

‘I think he’s been out of himself,’ said Tina. They exchanged a look.

‘Then we’ll have to sort his life out,’ Dermot said.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my life,’ I said. ‘Except for my friends.’

Roger returned with another bottle.

‘This should stand,’ he said.

‘Stand it here,’ said Dermot.

V

Tina and Dermot got on fine after that. They seemed to have something in common, a shared way of seeing the world. I remembered how Tina had once tried to get me to swim in the frigid Borth sea. She and Dermot shared some sort of adventurous or mischievous gene. They were ready to do something ridiculous, any time.

Whenever the four of us went out, Roger and I would sit and disapprove of them while they talked up a storm.

I suppose I was detached. I didn’t have any great interest in other people. I liked them around. I didn’t want to know their life stories.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Not even now, knowing all that I know. There’s nothing wrong with being detached.

Better that than being attached to something dangerous.

FIVE
I

Nothing changed for years. We all kept in touch, I kept getting better jobs, programming moved on and I followed it at a safe distance.

In 1998, my years of staring at monitors did the inevitable damage. Like everyone else, I read the warnings about spending ten minutes an hour away from the monitor. Like everyone else, I ignored them. I was spending most of my time either playing video games or programming, and screen resolutions were getting higher every six months. New graphics cards meant that you could get more dots per inch on the screen, and every time that happened the rez went up and the text got smaller. Ten-point Times New Roman – which used to look like a headline – now looks like it’s in the next room.

I was squinting, and getting headaches. I had begun to get strange visual effects, shadows off at the edges of my vision, dots flickering in and out of my field of view.

‘Go to the fucking optician,’ advised Dermot. Tina agreed with him. Roger agreed with both of them.

I went to the optician, and discovered that I was short-sighted. Everything more than a couple of feet away was blurred. He tested me out and gave me a prescription. I went to a big High Street store to get the frames, because they had a better selection. A week later I picked up my spectacles. I tried them on, and everything went from a cheap fuzzy lo-rez to a sharp digital hi-rez.

About that time, Les Herbie did a column about the same sort of thing. I cut it out and kept it. Of course, I kept everything. I didn’t like to throw anything away. Perhaps it was something to do with my parents.

II

I have these spots in front of my eyes. I get more of this sort of thing these days. It’s because I’m getting old. Things are closing down. Non-essential services are being run down. Manpower is being diverted elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s not that. Perhaps it’s a brain tumour pushing my eyeballs out of shape.

I go to the doctor. I say I have spots on front of my eyes. He refers me to an optician. Opticians do eyes, he explains. Perhaps it’s eyestrain, he tells me.

You didn’t think it was a brain tumour, did you? he asks.

No, I tell him. Never even thought about it. Never even crossed my mind.

He knows I’m lying. Everyone lies to him. We don’t make anything of it.

I go to see the optician. He makes me read things I can’t read. He tries different lenses out.

Suddenly I can read all of the rows on his chart.

He tells me one eye has a focal length half the focal length of the other. One of them is round. The other is egg-shaped. That’ll need correcting. He can do that with lenses. That’s what he does.

He does me a prescription for lenses. I choose some frames. It’s risky doing that before I can see properly, but I don’t have a choice. I don’t want computer programmer frames. I don’t want trainspotter frames. I want to choose good frames, right now.

They’ll be ready in a week. In a week I go and get them. I put them on. I can see everything. I don’t look a lot like a computer programmer. I don’t look much like a trainspotter. I can get away with it. I can carry it off.

I go outside and read things. I read road signs. I read everything, because now I can.

I wonder how one eyeball got egg-shaped. What made it do that? Was it happier that way?

I think about brain tumours. Perhaps a brain tumour has pushed one of my eyeballs out of shape.

I have these spots in front of my eyes.

And now I can see them really clearly.

III

I didn’t want bifocals. I could see things clearly without my specs if they were close to me. I could see everything within a few feet perfectly with my unaided eyes. I could see the monitor when I programmed or played games. With them on, I could see everything else. Switching from one to the other, just after I put them on or took them off, there would be a moment while my eyes readjusted and focussed. My left eye was more short-sighted than my right eye, and they had to get used to working together.

Sometimes, in the moments while my eyes got their act together, I would see things. Dots crawling up the walls, shadows, nothing substantial. After I blinked once or twice, it’d be gone.

Not long before the end of 1999, with autumn feeling very like winter and a freezing wind blowing through Dudley, getting in through the gaps between door and jamb, I was trying to finish a game I’d been playing. It was the first in what was to become a very successful series, and it had got me frustrated almost to the point of throwing the keyboard through the window.

I kept killing off the lead character. Whatever I tried, she fell to death on one or another of what seemed to be a million sets of spikes. My reactions weren’t good enough for that sort of game any more. I turned off the PC two hours later than I’d planned to, having got nowhere. I put on my spectacles and looked out of the window, to give my poor battered eyes some relief.

From the front window of my flat, there’s a view down Dudley High Street. I can see about half way down it, as far as Woolworth’s and one of the grisly butcher shops. It was about one in the morning and the market was empty. The red and white stripes of the awnings wouldn’t settle in my vision. A woman walked into view at the far end of the High Street. She was carrying a pair of guns, one in each hand. She looked cartoonish, and not all that well rendered. She looked a little like the character I’d been unwittingly dropping into spiked pits for the last few hours, but not enough like her to infringe anyone’s copyright. I had a very careful imagination, apparently.

She wasn’t real. I knew that. She was some sort of hallucination. She walked under the awnings of the market, went out of sight for a moment, and then reappeared close to the statue of Duncan Edwards.

Duncan Edwards was a footballer, and one of Dudley’s famous sons. There is a statue of him on the High Street, up on a pedestal, poised on the verge of kicking a metal football. There is a road named after him, too. On one side of the road is a sign saying:

DUNCAN EDWARDS CLOSE.

On the other side is a sign saying:

NO BALL GAMES.

The woman with the guns snuggled up to the statue, having suddenly leapt ten feet up to it from a standing start. Not something most people would be able to manage, but easy enough for a video-game character of course.

She looked woodenly around and then clocked me. She span around the pedestal and down to the floor, hitting the ground running. She was heading for my flat.

My flat is on the second floor, two floors removed from Dudley. Completely removed from Dudley would have suited me fine just then. She vanished from my point of view, being too close to the front of the building for me to get a fix on her. She wasn’t real, I reminded myself. Something was going on. I wondered whether it was my eyes or my brain that had broken down.

It all seemed to be over. I couldn’t see her.

Then, making me jump about half a mile, she flew to the top of the nearest lamppost, appearing to spring from nowhere. She levelled both of her guns in my general direction and hurled herself at me in a tight somersault. She hit the window firing, her muzzle flashes lighting her but not the surrounding environment.

As she came through the window, which failed to shatter, she lost integrity, becoming disassociated pixels and stray flashes of light. The pixels faded, the flashes went out. The last to go were the three pairs of pixels which had mapped the centres of her eyes, the barrels of her guns, and the tips of her pointed breasts. Then that strange new constellation also faded and she was gone.

I felt unreal, which seemed unfair. She was the faux video-game character. I had spent too long at the keyboard, I thought. I’d have to give myself a day off. There was no point in overdoing it and risking my health. I took off my glasses and tried to think calmly. I squeezed the bridge of my nose between forefinger and thumb. I tried to be detached and rational.

It was difficult. You can get hallucinations for several reasons. You can get them by taking the right – or the wrong – chemicals. Cheese is mildly hallucinogenic. Bram Stoker is said to have written Dracula after nightmares brought on by too much cheese. Which is apt, as modern vampires are overwhelmingly cheesy. Psylocybin mushrooms are well known for their psychotropic effects in some circles.

The problem was that I didn’t do that sort of drug. I smoked the occasional joint, and that was all.

Tiredness could make you see things. I had been tired, after too many late nights trying to finish games. That didn’t even feel like a good reason to be tired. It wasn’t as though I’d been searching for the cure for cancer. I didn’t think that I’d been tired enough to see things that weren’t there.

The only other reason I could think of for having hallucinations was that my brain was misfiring. Perhaps some neurones were doing the wrong thing. Perhaps my visual cortex was dissolving. What were the symptoms of brain tumours? From my limited medical knowledge – gathered from all of those drama series about doctors that seemed to light up the lives of the BBC programme planners – there would be headaches and the illusionary smell of roses. I didn’t have headaches and the only thing I could smell was the fishmongers. And that was with the windows closed.

I thought about BSE. The government of 1986 had done all that it could to get that as widespread as possible short of actually injecting it into people. I had eaten cheap beefburgers while I was a student. I’d had kebabs from vans that the UN would have sanctioned for breaching germ warfare regulations. I’d had curries from places the health inspectors only visited under duress.

I didn’t know what the symptoms were, other than wobbly cows. I didn’t think it was that. Thinking about it, the kebabs and curries were more likely to contain domestic pets and rodents than farm animals.

I didn’t feel dizzy or sick. I didn’t feel confused. I wasn’t suffering from mood swings. It was just that what appeared to be an anonymous video-game character had waltzed along Dudley market and thrown herself at my window, guns blazing.

I wondered whether it might have been a trick, perhaps an image projected onto my window from somewhere. I rejected that theory. She’d stayed in scale with the background. That would have been close to impossible to code. Plus, she’d left a few pixels in my room, like coloured scales from the wings of a butterfly. More convincingly, she was how I’d imagined the character to look. She was my version of a popular myth, something I’d invented rather than something I’d seen.

I put it down to tiredness. I decided to go to bed.

I really didn’t feel like playing that game any more.

IV

I tried to keep videogaming to a minimum for a while. I had early nights and took vitamins. I read books instead of playing games. I called Dermot and Tina and arranged to go out as often as I could.

The trouble with my flat was that it was boring. It wasn’t that there was nothing to look at. There was plenty of junk. There was everything I’d bought in the last twenty years because I couldn’t face throwing any of it away.

‘You’re a hoarder,’ Dermot had said on one of his visits. ‘The fucking council will come in here with rubber clothes and a big fucking skip.’

Most of the space was full of my history. I didn’t want to look at any of that, I’d already had to live through it. There were hundreds of books and magazines, but nothing I wanted to read. Like Tina and Roger, I had stuck with the five terrestrial TV channels and there wasn’t anything on I wanted to watch. The BBC had limited their output to programmes about people who were:

Detectives.

Doctors.

Vets.

Detectives who were also vets or doctors.

The rest of it was worse. There was nothing to watch and the radio stations played generic dance music. If I sat and read I’d fidget and end up picking skin from around my fingers, which made me think of Betts, which upset me.

I hadn’t been in any serious relationships for years and I wasn’t in one then. I had no one to distract me.

Dermot had a theory about that.

V

‘Your problem is that you’re dragging all your ghosts around,’ he said. ‘You keep your history with you.’

We were in the Slipped Disc, a pub two miles from anywhere. It stood by itself on the long road between Kidderminster and Worcester and there was nothing else nearby. You had to drive there, so a significant proportion of the clientele was always reasonably sober. They did a good trade early in the evenings, mostly catering for unfussy families out for simple meals.

By nine thirty the place was all but deserted. From the outside it looked like a warehouse set in a vast car park. From the inside it looked like a hasty warehouse conversion. The tables seemed dwarfed by the high ceilings, and the small amount of lively atmosphere had a hard time filling the huge rooms. Dermot was delighted with it.

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