Execution Plan

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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