‘Your choice,’ I tell her. Hol logs out.
I cut to the chase, quitting the feasting hall and dropping straight into the last place I got to in the Metalarque Quest. ‘This is how big a beast I am against these guys,’ I tell her ruefully. My avatar is standing in the gloom of a tunnel deep in a maze-mine hidden behind a waterfall. I kick open a door of pitted wood and rusting iron.
Usually in HeroSpace when you kick down a door the best technique is to charge straight in, before the splintered wreckage has a chance to bounce. I tried that here the last few times, though, and discovered you just get chomped by something on the other side you can’t even see (lanterns, even shielded ones, have long since blown out, all lamp filaments melt at the threshold and even luminosity coatings stop working). This time I step to one side and wait to see what might emerge.
Something piano-black and shiny that might owe a little to the alien in Alien – but with two extra, very long, toothy heads where the arms would be on anything remotely humanoid – comes tearing out of the darkness and immediately engages. I’m experimenting with a metal-mesh throw-net, and chuck that over the bastard. Amazingly, this seems to work, slowing it down long enough to give me a chance to skewer it with my longsword. Only I’m too slow, reaction times degraded, and I miss the opening as its heads and grapple-limbs thrash, and it gets me, biting off my sword arm at the elbow.
I hit pause, sigh, log out, sit back.
‘That is one mean motherfucker,’ Hol breathes. ‘Those things common?’
‘Unique to the gorge, far as I know, far as anyone’s telling,’ I tell her. ‘Which is kind of extra-daunting. Still; progress,’ I say. ‘Now I know the net works. Nobody’d mentioned that.’
‘Trade secret?’ Hol asks.
‘Yeah, I guess.’ The Metalarque Quest is, by the nature of the rumoured rewards as well as just the way the consecutive challenges are set up, strictly a solo affair. Only further rumours or outright – and unwise, or untrue – boasting gives you any idea how far others have got in the adventure, and what techniques they employed to get there.
‘Do you keep a note of stuff like that?’ Hol asks.
I nod. ‘I keep a log,’ I tell her, ‘though mostly it’s just a duplicate of what’s in my head.’ I pull open the drawer in the dressing table where I keep my notebook, then close it again, feeling foolish.
‘What, written down?’ Hol says, sounding amused, I think. Definitely smiling. ‘That’s very old school, isn’t it?’
It’s true; I keep a written log. I am almost superstitiously suspicious of storing anything so sensitive and valuable on the machine. Getting hacked is fairly unlikely – a lot of people Hol’s age seem to assume that as soon as you become proficient at games like HeroSpace, you somehow automatically become a brilliant computer hacker too (a bizarre leap I’ve never understood) – but you can’t be too careful, I reckon. The communities of hackers and dedicated Players certainly overlap a bit, and while it’s difficult to see how you could apportion enough time to do both to the required standard of excellence in either, it would take only one guy able and prepared to cheat like that to ruin or just steal what I’ve spent years building up.
‘Well, you know,’ I say, feeling awkward.
‘May I see it?’
‘Um …’
Hol touches me on the forearm. ‘I suspect I’m still at the stage where none of it will mean much to me, hon, if you’re worried that I’m going to cheat with it. But if you—’
‘No, no; it’s okay.’
I open the drawer, hand her the book. It’s A3 size; two hundred pages, lined feint. It’s mostly full. Hol leafs through it, eyes widening. ‘Blimey,’ she says. ‘This is … comprehensive.’ She smiles at me. ‘Wow. Detailed. Thorough.’
‘That’s Volume Two,’ I tell her, grinning despite myself.
‘Jesus.’ She riffles through the last half, the pages making a gentle noise like a stuttered sigh in the gently lit room. She hands the book back to me, putting her other hand to her mouth as she stifles a yawn.
‘Most of it’s just a log of what I’ve done,’ I tell her. ‘But there’s, um … some analysis.’ I have maps, on graph paper, too, which might seem like overkill, given that there’s an automatic mapping function in the game anyway, but sometimes I like to double-check; you never know. Anyway, I don’t show her those. They really are geeky.
‘Hon,’ Hol says, ‘you could teach this game.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say, and feel myself blush. I put the book back in its drawer.
‘I haunt the HeroSpace forums, too, sometimes,’ Hol tells me. ‘Subtract the jealousy and sour grapes and there’s a lot of respect for you in there. You’re an expert in the field. World-renowned, Kit. Come on, now; no false modesty. You know this, you need to acknowledge it.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I say, blushing harder now. I’m glad the light is subdued in here. ‘Those forums are full of a lot of … stuff,’ I finish lamely, words failing me. Actually, it occurs to me, it’s more the other way round; me failing words. I touch some possibly imaginary dust off one of the joysticks.
I’m aware, from the corner of my eye, that Hol is looking at me.
‘I hope you haven’t given up completely on the idea of going to university,’ she says.
Hol has been gently pressuring me to think about tertiary education for the last four years at least, since I started getting good exam results (some good exam results – my record’s patchy).
‘Ah, you never know,’ I tell her.
‘Are you still thinking about it?’
‘I think about it occasionally,’ I confess.
‘You could do it,’ she says. ‘I bet you could. I know you could. I know you think it’s daunting, but … If you stayed around here, somewhere familiar … And Bewford would take you. Definitely. And you’d get support. You just have to not be shy about asking for it.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I say, and clear my throat. Actually there is a fair bit of dust in some of the folds of black rubber or whatever it is joining each of the joysticks’ handgrips to the main body.
‘I don’t know about that, sor,’ Hol says in a quiet, deep voice.
‘Thank you, Ra—’ I start to say, then correct myself. ‘No; that was Ted, wasn’t it?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Hol says.
‘Ah.’
‘Well, keep thinking about it,’ Hol tells me. ‘You got the grades, kid. Might be a waste not to.’
‘It’d be a lot of work,’ I say. ‘And we haven’t really got the money.’
‘You should have, though, shouldn’t you? From the house?’
‘Maybe. Guy still talks about debts that have to be settled first.’
‘Debts how big?’
‘He won’t say.’
‘It’s wrong he keeps you in the dark like that, Kit. He needs to tell you. He’s got an obligation. You’re his son, for God’s sake. You have enough to worry about, with him dying, without that sort of uncertainty too. God, he’s such a schmuck sometimes.’
I can hear the wind getting up, whispering round the edges of the house.
‘Yeah, well. That’s another thing, isn’t it? Our form’s not great in this family, finishing uni courses.’
I glance at her. I know she’s supposed to be plain, but she looks so beautiful in the soft light of the screen saver. My screen saver consists of a proliferating three-dimensional maze of pipes; they start from nothing at some random part of the screen, then gradually fill it before vanishing, to start all over again. This iteration happens to have gone with a yellow colour scheme, lighting Hol’s face with a golden glow a bit like you used to get from old-fashioned incandescent bulbs. I have to look away.
‘Yeah, but that’s Guy,’ Hol tells me softly. ‘You’re you. Guy’s just your dad. You don’t need to be like him.’
‘Might help if I knew who my mum was,’ I say, and feel my mouth go suddenly dry.
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘But maybe not. Come
on, Kit, you know how inheritance works; we’re never just a fifty-fifty mix of whatever our parents are like. Some people are the spitting image of one of their grandmothers, or are “just like” some great-uncle; most of us don’t differentiate out into some … parts list of attributes all traceable back to our immediate ancestors. It just doesn’t work like that. You’re your own man.’ She sighs, rubs my upper arm with one hand. ‘I know you want to know who your mum is, but … If and when you do find out, it probably won’t solve any problems, apart from the … the just not knowing. You need to realise that, hon.’
I smile as I glance at her and try to sound jokey as I say, ‘It’s not you, then?’
Whatever Hol’s next word was going to be catches in her throat. ‘Excuse me?’ she says, through a sort of brief, plosive laugh.
‘Yeah, didn’t think so!’ I say, probably a bit too heartily.
‘Oh, hon,’ Hol says, hand squeezing my arm. ‘You didn’t really …?’
‘Well,’ I say – and now I’m really blushing; I’m probably out-luminescing the screen saver – ‘it did occur to me as, you know, just a theoretical possibility.’
I can’t tell Hol that Guy told me she, Pris or Ali might be my mother, because I promised him I wouldn’t, but I reckon it’s plausible I might have thought of this myself. Having a reputation for obsessive-compulsive behaviour, Asperger’s and/or taking things too far can come in useful.
‘Could even have been any one of you, just in theory, like. You all went different ways after graduating. Didn’t all meet up again for a couple of years.’ I clear my throat again. ‘I looked all this up, Googled, Facebooked, so on.’
Outside, it has started raining again. There’s a damp rattling sound as a sudden gust throws drops against the main window of my room.
I glance at Hol. It looks like she has a sort of catch on the skin between her eyes, over the top of the nose, like it’s material that’s been snagged and pulled together. ‘You were in Voluntary Service Overseas in Kenya,’ I say. ‘Pris was doing a post-grad year at Starmer Christian Ecumenical University, Missouri, and Ali was …’ My voice trails off. My throat is quite dry.
‘On the pampas, twirling her bolas and herding cattle on some distant relation’s ranch,’ Hol says.
I cough. ‘Something like that. Supposed to be making a nature film but nobody’s ever seen it.’
‘Yeah,’ Hol says, after a moment, with a big, heavy sigh. ‘It was a good eighteen months … certainly at least a year, year and a bit, before we met up again, here. By which time you were indeed around. Guy’s bouncing baby millstone, as he described you.’
‘So. Just, like I say, in theory …’
‘One of us could have nipped back here and dropped you on Guy’s doorstep.’
‘Put like that …’
‘This was Guy, wasn’t it?’ Hol says, resting one elbow on the dressing table and settling her chin into her palm.
‘What?’
‘Guy suggested this. Guy said it might have been one of us.’
‘Why would he say something like that?’ I say. My voice has gone high, without me meaning it to. This is unbelievably annoying and embarrassing. I stare at the screen. The whole thing is full of yellow pipes. Oh shit, it’s going to—
The screen goes black. Well; that deep, dark grey that we call black on a screen and think is black, until we compare it to real blackness. A tiny squared-off worm of crimson starts squiggling round near the centre of the screen, quickly starting to build up a red-themed pipe maze like a demented Technicolor Etch-a-Sketch. My face is burning. I’m glad humans can’t see infrared.
‘What a shit that man can be,’ Hol says, through a sigh.
‘If he had said anything, um, like that, and I’m not saying he did,’ I say, already feeling miserable, ‘then he would have made me promise not to tell anybody. Um. I’d imagine. And so, well …’
Hol pats my arm. ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. You haven’t broken any promises, Kit.’
I have to clear my throat again. Maybe I’m coming down with a cold.
She sits back, folds her arms. ‘It’s none of us, Kit. I suppose, in theory, it would be possible, but it just isn’t. It certainly wasn’t me – it just wasn’t – and I know Pris and Ali too well. They couldn’t have kept that a secret; they were never that good at acting.’
‘Well,’ I say.
‘Guy,’ Hol says, ‘was the star of our films.’ She shrugs. ‘Amazingly, quite a gifted actor. Though, inevitably, he really wanted to direct. Thought he was by far the best director of all of us.’ She shakes her head. ‘Actually he was entirely the worst. Just mannered, pretentious … no touch, all gimmicky camera-work … Hopeless with actors.’ She taps me on the shoulder. ‘Definitely not me, and I’d bet anything it wasn’t Ali or Pris. Guy’s fucking with you, Kit. He should be ashamed. Arsehole.’ She looks away.
‘Please don’t say anything to him!’ I ask her.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Promise. But still. What a shit.’
‘Oh well,’ I say, cheerily, ‘maybe my mum is a countess or something after all.’ Again, I already feel I’m overdoing the breeziness, but I don’t know how to modulate this properly. Using the twin joysticks to turn, step back, parry a blow and counterstrike all at the same time is easy in comparison.
‘Told me it was a Traveller girl from Ireland,’ Hol says.
‘That’s one of the others,’ I confirm.
Hol is silent for a moment, and I listen to the noise of the rain, settling in now, growing heavier, then she says, almost as though just to herself, ‘I suppose we could all have DNA tests done. Still can’t believe it’d be either of them, though.’
‘Well, anyway,’ I say, sitting forward and feeling keen to change the subject. ‘I might still go to uni. You never know. We’ll wait and see. Probably best to take a sort of gap year anyway. I won’t let Dad’s bad example put me off.’ I glance at Hol. Her face looks flushed now, lit by the increasing amount of red on the screen. ‘And I’ll definitely try not to get anybody pregnant.’
It’s supposed to be funny, but Hol isn’t laughing. In fact she isn’t even smiling.
‘Guy very nearly graduated, Kit,’ she tells me. ‘Came within a whisker. We all tried to help him. Even Ali, who was showing signs of advanced over-competitiveness, even then. We all did. And we almost succeeded. He almost succeeded.’
‘Ah. Not the impression he gives.’
‘I bet. Well; I know.’ She shakes her head. ‘Right at the end, after all those extra terms, those repeated years, those extensions upon extensions, those missed deadlines and those hilariously late essays, after all the times he was too stoned or too drunk or chasing after women, he was pretty much one viva away from a Desmond; really only had to turn up.’
‘One what away from a what?’
Hol smiles. ‘A viva; viva voce; an extended, formal, oral exam. I don’t know about now, but at the time even the most tooth-squeakingly modern bits of Bewford like the Film and Media Studies department felt they were somehow not treating the educational process with appropriate respect unless they used archaic Latin terms … Anyway, Guy was, despite his best … his worst efforts, very close to getting a Two-Two. Hardly a golden apple, or any sort of glittering prize, but at least it would have been a result of sorts; something to show for all that time and effort. Mostly the effort of others, but still.’
‘What happened? Did he forget to turn up?’
‘No,’ Hol says. ‘He just had other priorities, as it turned out.’ She nods. She’s frowning, and I think she’s pretending to indicate that this might even have seemed reasonable. ‘It took me a lot of convincing of his tutor just to get the bastard his appointment,’ she says, nodding, eyes wide, ‘but in the end …’ Her frown returns, deepens. ‘Actually, I can’t remember: he either buggered off to Orkney to watch a particularly fine display of the aurora borealis or he jumped into the hearse with his board to take advantage of some totally tubular Atlantic swells coming ashore
at Newquay. He told me both stories within a couple of weeks at the time and I never did find out which was the truth. If either. And absolutely the funniest part, he thought, was that when he got to wherever it was, he got drunk instead; missed the Northern Lights or the monster surf entirely.’ She looks at me, shrugs. ‘He wasn’t here or hereabouts; that was all I knew.’ She shakes her head. ‘Your dad’s a feckless waster, Kit. If they’d done courses in Applied Indolence or just How to be a Complete Twat he’d have strolled a First and Honours without even having to study. It’s no coincidence that the best thing that ever happened to him – that’d be you – was a mistake. He doesn’t deserve you. I mean, you don’t deserve him, either, but you deserve better; he doesn’t deserve you at all.’
‘I, well, that’s,’ I say, and then have to look away.
‘Sorry. I’ve embarrassed you,’ Hol says.
‘Well … But, thank you,’ I say, moistening a finger and wiping the folds of the joystick clean of yet more dust.
‘Okay,’ she says. She yawns again. ‘I really need to get to bed now. It’s …’ She looks at her watch. ‘Officially stupid-o’clock.’ She runs a hand through my hair, scratching the top of my head. When I turn to her she’s grinning. ‘Play your own game, Kit. Don’t do or not do anything just because of what Guy did or didn’t do.’
She stands, putting her hand to the small of her back and arching her spine, making her breasts suddenly prominent, outlined through the tautened material of her shirt. ‘Feel free to learn all the lessons life spent so long trying to teach him that he never bothered with, but don’t let him … shackle you. Okay?’ she says, relaxing again, letting her arms hang by her side.
I nod. ‘The opposite of lesson is moron,’ I tell her.
This makes her laugh. ‘Something like that.’
She leans down to kiss me on the forehead. I let her, then raise my head, look at her. I stand up, taller than her, put my arms round her, hug her gently. I can feel her arms round my back, her breasts pressing into the place between the top of my belly and the bottom of my chest.