Guy stands, bending forward to rest on the Zimmer frame. I flush the toilet, to be rid of the sight, then, while his always skinny, now scrawny, legs quiver, I carefully wipe him down. Once you get over the simple unpleasantness of it – I suspect most people would gag, the first time – it is easier to wipe somebody else’s bum than it is your own, because you can see what you’re doing and use both hands at once if necessary. The whole process is much more efficient and uses no more toilet paper than is strictly required, so it’s better for the environment, too. If we were being really green we’d all have somebody else wipe our bums, though I can’t see it catching on.
‘Fucking portable prison,’ Guy mutters, and slaps at the Zimmer. Dad hates his walking aid, even though it helps him a lot. He can still move around fairly easily on the flat, even out in the garden, using his Zimmer frame and, on good days, just a single forearm crutch. On really good days he can get by with just a walking stick.
Guy starts coughing. He sits back down to do this. Probably wise; sometimes when he coughs really hard a little poo can come out. His cough makes it sound like his chest is full of Lego bricks. He stopped smoking five years ago, about twenty years too late. He’s taken it up again recently, reckoning there’s nothing left to lose, and also, I think, as an act of defiance. He’s shared a roll-up with Haze already this evening and I can smell the tobacco on his clothes.
After half a minute or so he stops coughing and goes back to just wheezing.
‘That you okay?’ I ask him.
‘Fucking never been better,’ he says. He hauls some phlegm up into his mouth, shuffles back a little further on the loo, and carefully spits between his spread legs. I choose not to follow the whole process. ‘Christ,’ he says, sitting back against the cistern and breathing hard, a noise of gurgling coming from his lungs, ‘knackers me just having a cough these days.’ He sighs, wipes his lips, looks at me. ‘I hope the shareholders of British American Tobacco are fucking grateful.’
‘Think we’re done?’ I ask him.
‘Done and dusted, kid,’ he tells me. ‘Done and dust-to-dusted.’
I flush a second time, strip off the gloves and dump them in the bin, help Guy on with his pants and trousers and run the taps, holding the towel ready while he rests his forearms on the Zimmer and washes his hands.
‘Okay, okay,’ he says. ‘I’m all right. Stop fussing.’
I don’t think I was fussing but I’ve learned there’s no point arguing.
I head back to the sitting room and hear him lock the loo door. He doesn’t like me to accompany him back into the room when we have guests, so making it obvious he needs help in the toilet. There are still proprieties – or at least little face-saving deceptions – you can observe even when you’re reduced to this level of helplessness.
And, of course, it’s only going to get worse, as we both know.
The whole thing about the smartphone is a bluff, by the way; I have one, though Guy doesn’t know about it. I bought it via Holly with money I made on HeroSpace.
I go back to the sitting room, hearing their voices from the hall. When I enter they fall silent. I suppose I wasn’t away long enough for them to talk through whatever it is they needed to talk about.
I know there’s something about a tape – an old audio-cassette tape or digital videotape, I think, from what I’ve gleaned over the years from a few partially overheard mentions, muttered between them during previous visits – but I also know there’s been talk about what will happen to me after the house is demolished and Guy is dead (or Guy dies and the house is demolished, though I’m not sure the order makes much difference).
Possibly, also, they might be talking about exactly who – and possibly even which one of them – is my mother.
That would be nice to know.
2
In a sense I don’t really live here. The place where I really live is HeroSpace.
Obviously I do live here; this is where my body and my brain are, where sleep happens and real food has to be consumed and bodily functions experienced and coped with, where other people and officialdom have to be encountered and managed and so on … But over the years that has all increasingly started to feel like the part of my existence that just has to be got through with the minimum of fuss so that I can get back to the really important part, which is my life on-line, and especially my life in HeroSpace.
It’s as though what we call reality is the boring motorway journey to the exciting place where you actually want to be – something to be borne, even suffered, so that you can get to the place where you can do the things you really want to do. Like going on holiday, in other words. Not that I’ve done that very much; I prefer staying at home.
I even stay home in HeroSpace sometimes, wandering my castle in the Moonwrack mountains. But that quickly becomes boring and I head out to seek quests, battles, honour and treasure.
I have played both Warhammer and World of Warcraft in my time, but HeroSpace is the game I’ve settled on, the one I find most satisfying and pleasurable. It’s a massively multi-player, on-line, role-playing game, rated number one by several forums and the more discerning on-line magazines, and, in its various incarnations and iterations, it has received every significant games industry award there is.
I’ve been playing it for four and a half years and have watched it grow from small beginnings and only a few thousand players to its current mind-boggling size, and many millions of players. I like to think I’ve grown too, in that time. I have certainly accrued status, power, combat experience, loot, respect and even comrades and friends over the years.
I love HeroSpace partly because it allows me to be myself, my true self, and because the rules, though many and complicated and gradually evolving, are definite and clear. Mostly, though, I love it because it’s just more vivid than real life, and much more exciting without being truly terrifying. You can have proper adventures, battle the forces of evil, and triumph – definitely, unambiguously – in ways that in reality are either life-threateningly dangerous, or almost unavailable.
HeroSpace is set in a future world where computers have developed to become Artificial Intelligences, but then departed for the stars. Humanity has been left behind to fend for itself, using the powers and gifts the machines have out-grown. On this future Earth, most people exist in giant hive cities, lying, dreaming comfortably, blandly, in pods, but those who wake up can wander the landscape beyond, where the degenerated descendants of the last generation of machines, those abandoned after the AI diaspora, are forever trying to destroy the hive cities and their brave defenders (that’ll be us game players), and find whatever assets and weaponry the long-departed AIs have either bequeathed, forgotten or just not been sufficiently bothered about to take with them.
(That’s my précis of the introduction to the generally accurate and fair Wikipedia entry, though personally I’ve never understood how a brilliantly clever AI ultra-computer can just ‘forget’ something … Or anything really. But then I didn’t invent the game. And that’s almost the only point I find particularly troubling, which puts it well ahead of anything else out there, believe me.)
I think part of HeroSpace’s appeal for gamers is the implication that it might just, somehow, at a stretch, be true; that the dreamed life the people in the hive cities are experiencing is basically our own life, this real life, right now, only they have to want to wake up from it and follow certain clues distributed throughout what appears to be reality so that they can truly awaken and thus enter the genuine real life of HeroSpace. (If this sounds a bit like the Matrix films, it may not be a coincidence; there was a legal dispute, a court case and a financial settlement – details undisclosed for reasons of commercial confidentiality – between the film and the game people.)
Not that I believe any of that at all, not even for a moment; what looks like reality is reality and HeroSpace, much though I love it and sometimes wish it was real, is just a game.
I do, though, make money from i
t, so it’s not all just about playing and having fun. Within the first year I was doing so well in single-combat confrontations, tactical skirmishes and even battle-sim choice spreads I’d accumulated more points than I knew what to do with. So I sold them. Because you can. There are internal markets in the game itself, using gelt, the game’s own currency, but there’s nothing to stop anyone building up points on any level and trading them with other people for real money, in the real world, using PayPal or direct bank transfers.
I was stupid at first and ran into problems with cheques bouncing but then Hol offered to help out. She’s always taken an interest in my game-playing (Guy treats it with contempt) and for the last four years she’s taken care of the money. I was too young to have a proper bank account when all this started and I didn’t want Dad to know about it so I needed some other adult to look after things. Now I’m eighteen I can handle my own financial affairs. One of the reasons Holly is here this weekend is to hand over control of the money I’ve made.
It’s not a serious fortune – about eleven or twelve thousand pounds, I estimate – but it’s mine, and I could easily make more. For the last two years, though, Hol has told me to have more fun in the game and be less single-minded about accumulating loot-points, or I’d go over some sort of threshold and have to start paying income tax back in reality, which might cause problems with Guy.
Anyway, I know from bitter past experience that most people find the whole subject of HeroSpace astoundingly boring, so I won’t go on about it. Suffice to say it’s where I’m happiest, even if some people think that is, in itself, sad.
I don’t care; happiness is happiness.
Hol and I are in the kitchen doing the washing up. Alison and Rob have gone to their room; the rest are still talking. It’s well past Guy’s usual bedtime but he’s excited and energised because there are other people here so he’s staying up late. He’s even swapped his Zimmer frame for his stick, which is both worrying and positive at the same time. I came through to stack the dishwasher and wash up and Holly came through to help.
I had to partially unstack the dishwasher first; Mrs Gunn has her own way of stacking it but it’s wrong. My method is more efficient and cleans both cutlery and crockery better.
For the hand-washing part, Hol is washing and I’m drying and putting away, because I know where everything goes, having recently rearranged things to be more logical.
‘What is this tape you’re looking for?’ I ask her. ‘I might be able to help. I know the house better than Guy does now. I know where most stuff is stored.’
Holly stares at the suds in the sink, then lifts out one yellow-gloved hand and takes up her wineglass, drinking. ‘Just an old videotape,’ she tells me. Her voice sounds sleepy, the words slightly slurred. ‘Something kind of embarrassing on it.’ She shrugs. ‘If it’s even still around.’ She looks at me. ‘An S-VHS-C; old format. Thick as a VHS cassette but about, I don’t know, a quarter of the size. Small enough to fit into a hand-held camera of the day but you could play it … Well, you could play them straight from the camera, but if you’ve got this’ – Holly is waving one gloved hand around, distributing foam – ‘mechanical sort of gizmo the size and shape of a VHS tape, then … you inserted it into that and then put the whole shebang into your standard VHS video player under your telly and played it from that.’ She blows out her cheeks and shakes her head, then uses the heel of her hand to push some hair back from her face. ‘All very complicated. Lot easier these days, just use your phone. Anyway.’
‘Would it be identifiable? The particular one?’ I ask. ‘I mean, if I find a whole box of them. Will it say anything on it to identify it?’
‘Can’t remember,’ Hol says, though after a very slight hesitation. Then she burps. Ah, that might have been the cause of the hesitation, not a pause to choose whether to tell the truth or not.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember ever seeing any of those, though there are boxes in some of the top bedrooms I’ve never investigated properly. And some in the outhouses. Though … No, the ones in the attic are empty, or just have packing material in them. We moved all the heavy ones.’
‘Hmm,’ Hol says, twisting her empty wineglass in her hand and looking at it thoughtfully, then lowering it into the water and carefully washing it.
‘And then there’s the shed, and the garage,’ I add, after thinking about it. ‘And the old outhouses.’
‘There you are,’ Hol says, sounding tired. She hands me the glass.
I dry it, looking out the window to the darkness. The rain is back on, sprinkling the window with drops and streaks, making a sound oddly like a fire crackling in a grate. ‘We have a lot of junk,’ I say, realising. ‘I don’t know where it’s all going to go when we have to move out.’
‘Drop it over the back garden wall, into the quarry,’ Hol suggests. ‘Stuff you don’t need.’ Her glass was the last thing needing to be washed. She starts stripping off the yellow gloves. ‘Actually, why bother?’ She drapes the gloves over the taps. This is not where they go but I can wait before putting them where they are supposed to go (Mrs Gunn and I disagree about that, too). ‘Just leave it all in the house; end up in the bottom of the quarry anyway.’
‘What’s on it?’ I ask. ‘What’s on the tape?’
She shakes her head. ‘Embarrassing shit.’ She holds up one hand. ‘We made a lot of embarrassing shit. Embarrassing shit little mini-movies. They were shorts, nothing longer than half an hour, most less than that, but we dressed them up like they were features.’
‘I’ve seen them,’ I tell her.
‘Hmm? Yeah, yeah, course you have. Forgot. Yeah, like I said; embarrassing.’
They used to make short films, nearly twenty years ago, when they were all in the Film and Media Studies department at Bewford. The films were pastiches of proper films by famous directors; their Bergman was called Summer with Harmonica, their Kubrick was Full Dinner Jacket, their Chabrol Madame Ovary and their Landis An American Werewolf on Lithium. There were others.
They made these to amuse themselves and impress their fellow students rather than as part of their coursework. The films were made quickly, usually over a single weekend, and edited only in the sense that they would do multiple takes if they felt they really had to; the idea was to use just one tape and record everything sequentially on that, with no further transfer or re-editing allowed. (‘Fuck Dogme 95,’ Guy said once. ‘We were years ahead of those fuckers.’) Second takes were common because they were usually laughing so much during the first one, but third takes were relatively rare. They all took turns behind and in front of the camera; Guy was probably the most natural actor and least talented director.
‘I thought I’d seen all the films,’ I tell Hol.
She shrugs. ‘Well, I guess you missed seeing that one.’ Then she folds her arms, frowns at me. ‘Really? He showed them to you?’
‘He used to like showing them to people who came to visit, though not so much any more.’
‘Did he?’ Hol frowns. ‘Never showed them to us. Well, never showed them to me, not after we’d finished them. He show them to any of the others?’ she asks, glancing towards the door.
‘I don’t think so. But then you’d all already seen them.’
‘Huh. Maybe he was more proud of them than he pretended to be. He ever finish transferring them to digital? I’d have liked a copy, but … we kind of gave up asking.’
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘What’s it called?’ I ask. ‘The missing film?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not sure we gave it a title.’
‘Anyway, Dad stopped showing them to people.’
Hol nods, staring at the floor. ‘Age thing, maybe,’ she says, sighing. ‘Beginning to feel dismayed by the difference between how he looked then and how he looks now. Worse for him, I suppose, given how he’s … deteriorated over the last … whatever years.’ She smiles, slightly. ‘He used to claim he was ashamed by the amateurishness of the films. But they’re not that amate
urish, and I think what’s really happening is he looks at the young self captured on those chunky little tapes and sees somebody full of hope and fun and the joys of life, and can’t stand the contrast with what and who he’s become.’
‘Also,’ I say, ‘perhaps because the video player that could show them stopped working.’
Hol nods. ‘Yeah, that. That too. Like I said; he never did get them all transferred to digital.’ She makes a sort of small grunting noise. ‘Never exactly your go-to person when you were looking for a sense of urgency, our Guy.’
It was always strange seeing Guy looking so young in the films. They were made between 1992 and 1995 when he was only five years older than I am now – the others were only a couple of years older than I am now – so the fashions of the time, and the hairstyles and so on, are not too ridiculous (or, at least, not yet), but that still feels like a long time ago. Perhaps this is because I hadn’t been born, hadn’t even been conceived when they were made.
Back then they all looked young and fresh. You can see how they’ve changed from the people they were then to the people they are now, though I don’t know that you’d have been able to guess exactly how they would age; it’s more than just people getting more wrinkled. It’s like their bones change and their whole face alters. Maybe it’s not a bone thing. Maybe it’s muscles, and facial expressions that change. I’ve watched Guy when he’s asleep and his face is quite different when he’s in that closed-down, unconscious state. I suppose everything just relaxes, but it looks like more than that. It looks like the person is somebody else, or suddenly very old, or at least that you are getting to see how they will look when they become very old. Sometimes it looks like they’re dead.