Execution Plan

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.