Execution Plan

‘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.