The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  But bloody hell – they’d been doing it now for like four whole years since they’d left England. Four. Years. It was basically anarchy, but it was still selling things. Yawn. One day they had just looked at each other, out there in California, and they had seen that they didn’t want to be doing this. They’d been fending off offers for the company since before day one. One Thursday, they utterly surprised someone who was making an idle offer by saying they were interested. The venture capitalists moved in, the lawyers moved in. The boys cashed in. All of a sudden they were back in London with their friend Martin, who they’d always known felt the same way that they did, and to everyone’s surprise, they had bought a games company with twenty employees in a warehouse in Hoxton. That was what they wanted to do: make games. And then play them.

  Raja bought a flat on the river at Vauxhall, in a building forty storeys high, from which you could see the Houses of Parliament, all of that. He liked pointing his finger at Big Ben and pretending to be an evil mastermind with a laser gun, going to take over the world once he’d blown it all up. The flat had four storeys, and Raja honestly didn’t know the name for that – duplex, triplex, but then, fuck knows. Quadruplex. Tetraplex. There was a floor of his flat he never really went into. There was stuff in it. You could see Omith’s house from the terrace of the flat, two white stucco houses in Pimlico next to each other. Omith had bought one, then a week after he’d made himself known, the neighbours on one side had put theirs on the market and he’d bought that too. Might as well. He’d knocked them together. ‘Didn’t want to live next to a brownie,’ Omith remarked of the pompous old couple, with what truth not even he knew. Martin had bought a Bengali supermarket in Brick Lane and pulled it down. He was keen on architecture: the house he was building on the site was based on unbuilt plans by Louis Kahn for a Connecticut villa, a luminous cube of polished concrete. All the light was going to pour in from above; the windowless cliff would face the street. In the meantime he was living in his mum’s house in Dulwich, the one with a Barbara Hepworth in the front garden. He’d given it to her for Christmas – the Barbara Hepworth, not the house. She hadn’t wanted to move from where she’d lived all her married life and, anyway, the Barbara Hepworth, to the rage of the planning authorities on the council, was as tall as the house. It had cost more, too.

  Perhaps they weren’t so crazy to flog it and come home with the money. The glitches in their original website, the ones they’d known all about from the start, did for it in the end when something much better came along. Of course the new owners had done a lot to try to fix it, but by that point Anybodys.com was a worldwide joke. You wouldn’t buy anything off it, so nobody did. Down in Hoxton the catalogue of games ticked away, selling nicely. It was an aficionados’ label, passionately enthused over by people who, like Raja and Omith, didn’t think they had done anything much other than play games for the last twenty years. Sqrrrxkl*briiii – that was theirs, you brilliantly couldn’t ask for it in WHSmith’s, and only the real obsessives (the DICSHONNARI you got to in the twenty-ninth level on the shelves of that abandoned pet-shop on the left) knew that the * in the name of the game was pronounced with the plop you made with a forefinger in your cheek ‘and the second r is silent’. Two years after the takeover, Fuck That was launched. (You couldn’t ask for that in WHSmith’s either, or at least you couldn’t at first). It was brilliant, profane, brutal, investigative, exploratory; it was set in a beautifully intricate African war zone. You could kill the tiger leaping at you or – with a complex series of actions – you could trap it, tame it, teach it to be dependent on you over the course of a dozen games, anaesthetize it once it had got to the point of loving you, curling its big head up in your lap – oh, and it’s bitten your cock off again. The tiger and your cock were only a collection of pixels. Still, that fucking hurt. Start again … and it’s curling its big head up in your lap, you’re anaesthetizing it, you’re taking revenge for the last game by castrating it, you’re letting it bleed to death, you’re selling the tiger penis to the punters in the brothel you’ve earlier taken over by main force, it’s the greatest aphrodisiac, and they’re queuing out the door, so …

  It could go on for ever, or so the awestruck players thought. The detail in the pixels – the texture of the bricks and the sand and the exploding flesh and blood and sinew and fat and skin and brains. There was a decrepit bookshop in one village in the game with exactly five books on its shelf for sale, novels. You could pluck the novels from the virtual shelf and open them, and you could actually read the five novels while fighting off the rebel forces outside. Omith had commissioned five novelists to write a novel each for the purpose. They’d done it for five thousand each. Worth it for the publicity when some player discovered that particular corner, and there were lots of particular corners. There was, too, the decision you could make to play or replay the game in FIRST PERSON (you see the world), SECOND PERSON (look, look, that’s you and I’m your companion who mustn’t die), THIRD PERSON (look at the little man running) – the huge comedy of it.

  ‘There aren’t any tigers in Africa,’ Omith said, several times a week during development, every single time they got to the tiger. Everyone would get to the tiger, it was on like the second level, except that they didn’t talk in like levels – that was like 1999 – it was cool, a word that always made the boys laugh with its self-disproof.

  ‘That’s what’s so wack,’ Raja said. ‘They won’t misunderstand us, you feel me? You put like a lion in and it’s, you know …’

  ‘Simba,’ Martin said.

  ‘Simba. They’re going to think that the people who made this and put a tiger in Africa, they’re American and thick and don’t give a shit about the rest of the world. The real rest of the world. Ruddy Nora, these people are thick as shit, there’s tigers in Africa in their ruddy game, good job they’ve got no real power, because for aye they would, you know –’

  ‘Just drop a bomb on it because, who the fuck knows, there’s probably like tigers there and that’s like really really dark, you know?’ Martin’s voice rose at the end like the girlfriends he’d got through in Palo Alto. They cracked up.

  ‘You’ve got to stop getting hung up on, like, stuff,’ Raja said to his twin. ‘Don’t you remember what Daddy said about Anybodys.com?’

  ‘“I can’t believe my sons don’t know where the apostrophe should go in the name of their business,”’ Omith quoted.

  ‘We all know where the apostrophe should go,’ Raja said. ‘Up yer bum.’

  ‘I saved your life once, you dickhead,’ Omith said.

  They liked going up to see Mummy and Daddy in Sheffield. They almost saw them more often than they saw Aisha, who only lived in Brixton in a handsome Regency house in an impossible setting – she was almost always away, out of the country, sorting out the education of women here and there. ‘She’s away getting burgled,’ Raja used to say to Omith. It made him laugh. It was one day in March that Omith mentioned it to Raja, and Raja told Martin that they’d be unavailable from Thursday night to Monday morning. This had happened before, but this time Martin said, ‘I’ve never met your mum and dad. Are they like old-school?’

  ‘What are you like?’ Raja said. ‘Old-school – you mean like saris and big beards and shit? Turbans, motherfucker? No way, bruv. They think it’s like totally appalling, what we do, but they’d be reassured if they met a nice boy like you.’

  ‘Man, that sounds epic,’ Martin said. ‘Let’s close down the office. Give the underlings some, like, holiday. Give them a hundred quid each and a first-class return ticket to Brighton. Five nice crisp purple twenties. They’ll like that.’

  ‘It sounds cool, bruv,’ Omith said, with contempt. ‘You do that, they’ll be wondering what you’re gonna do with their position when they come back on Monday, is it still there, you hear me?’

  ‘We’ll send them off to Brighton on the Friday and when they come back on Monday they’ll see that we’ve painted the office. How about that?’ said Raja.


  So while all the underlings went off to Brighton with a return ticket and a hundred pounds each to be spent on lunch or slot machines or weed or anything, Martin drove Raja and Omith up to Sheffield. Martin was a restless, enthusiastic car buyer, and the car he turned up in was a Citroën DS, a beautiful grey lacquer over it, the great sweep of it somehow grand and suburban at the same time. The hydraulics, like a swan puffing itself up in mild menace, worked in a quiet, luxurious way; Martin had had the whole thing restored, and the upholstery replaced in brilliant yellow leather. French post-war cars were his thing, the more suburban the better: he had a 2CV with a hard-to-source original Atomkraft? Nein danke! sticker in the back, a heartbreaking turquoise Simca, a first-generation Renault 5 and other curious joys from the experimental designers’ studios. After a month it seemed to him that the 2CV was too immaculate. He took it out and drove it, quite gently, into a wall, after which it had quite a satisfyingly authentic dent in the front. Perfect. In the luxury line, he had one of the last of the Delahayes, kept like all the others in garages in Herne Hill: that was a beautiful monster, taken out very rarely for a cruise round the block on a Sunday morning. No one else had ever heard of Delahaye. Martin confided that the weight of the thing was enough to make you wonder whether it would ever get to the top of the hill. For most everyday purposes he had a Merc, like everyone else, but the trip up to Sheffield was a jaunt. He picked them up in the grey DS with the yellow interior.

  There was no one there to greet them when they arrived. Their father’s car was in the garage, suggesting that he was in the vicinity. Raja let them in with his spare key, calling out, and though the house was still warm with their presence – a newspaper tossed on the side table, a pair of plates and glasses wet in the sink tidy – it was empty. They hadn’t set the burglar alarm.

  ‘He’s probably just gone out for a walk,’ Raja said. ‘This is what produced the geniuses behind the hit games Fuck That and the sequels, Fuck That Shit and Fuck That For A Game Of Soldiers.’

  ‘We’re not calling it that,’ Martin said, not for the first time – the third issue in the series was a long way into development and still had no name. ‘Oh, my God, look at this!’

  He was on his knees by the fireplace, his hands lovingly over the line of twenty-five or thirty box sets of classical music. ‘Look at all this vinyl. God, I want to play with it. Whose is it? Has he just bought it all?’

  ‘It’s my dad’s,’ Omith said. ‘No, he’s had it for years, why?’

  ‘Look at this,’ Martin said. ‘This set! The youth orchestra I played the horn in when I was a kid, we played the Brahms third symphony. I’m not kidding, I’ve got to play this.’

  Like all their father’s acquired LP box sets, the one that Martin had settled on still had its layer of protective plastic on. He had half a dozen favourite LPs, had had them for years, playing one once a month, enjoying and always pointing out the same enjoyable moment in the first movement of the ‘Emperor’ Concerto. The box sets had crept into the house – had he been the member of a record club at one point that sent him such things? But he placed them on the shelves in their protective wrapper, proudly, a little shyly, and never opened them, never quite ventured away from his half-dozen favourites. The CD player, a Christmas present from Mummy ten or fifteen years ago, had a dozen CDs to choose from, but still it was the LPs and their short-winded vinyl burden that pleased their father, once a month.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Omith said. ‘That’s my dad’s.’

  Martin had torn off the plastic wrapper, and was now leafing through the records. ‘There’s no point in owning records if you’re never going to play them,’ he said. ‘This is a fantastic set – I don’t think you could get it any more.’ Omith went out to fetch the bags from the car.

  ‘He’s going to waste you,’ Raja said. ‘Those are his records – if he wants to keep them wrapped up in plastic and never play them, that’s his biz, bruv.’

  Martin was putting a record on the turntable. ‘This is the third symphony – it’s incredible, the way it starts. Listen to this.’

  ‘You’ll need to turn it on,’ Raja said. Martin had lowered the needle onto the disc, and the symphony began with a slow rising whoop.

  ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ Martin said.

  ‘My dad’s here,’ Omith called from the front door. They left Brahms behind and went outside. There was no sight of Sharif, but his voice could be heard, perhaps from twenty yards down the road behind an elm tree. It was raised.

  ‘… was justly believed to be there. Of course everyone believed Saddam to be aiming at constructing WMDs. The intelligence was perfectly reasonable. It seems to be wrong, but it was entirely reasonable. No one should have refrained from action on the off-chance that it might not be correct.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ another voice, an older, posh English voice, said. It must be the retired doctor who lived next door. ‘If there was any possibility that it might not be correct, they should not have started invading another country. And the truth is they wanted to find a threat far too much. They’d always regretted not carrying on to Baghdad in 1990.’

  ‘Yes, that was a mistake,’ Sharif said. ‘If only we had carried on and defeated the tyrant.’

  ‘There are too many tyrants in the world,’ Dr Spinster was saying, and now they were coming into view, walking a few steps, pausing to harangue the other, walking a few steps more. Dr Spinster had a walking stick, but he did not seem to have very urgent need of it; he was using it to wave around and make a point, even to stab Sharif in the chest. ‘Sometimes you have to shrug and deplore and sit tight, or face the facts – there are millions of people out there who are going to suffer from your high moral stance, and are going to get on a boat and see if they can’t come and live in your country. Take your pick. Their lives are going to be dreadful either way. Look, it’s your boys. Hello, young man – where’s your brother?’

  ‘He’s here,’ Omith said limply.

  ‘Are you playing some music?’ Hilary said. ‘It sounds heavenly. We’ve been having a walk down to the post office and back – I saw your father leaving and asked him if he’d get me some stamps, but then I thought how very lazy of me, so I walked down with him. We’ve been putting the world to rights. Back from America for good, then? I’m ninety next year, you know. Fit as a flea. My successor Dr Khan inspected me from topknot to shoe sole last month, said he’d be out of a job if everyone was as fit as I am. He wouldn’t mind, though. I remember from my own days as a quack peddling magical thinking, all those middle-aged folk turning up and saying they were tired all the time. What a bally waste of everyone’s energy. I’m nearly ninety! I’m fit as a flea! When I get tired all the time, shoot me and put me out with the rubbish.’

  ‘We’ll see you later, Hilary,’ Sharif said, with resignation. He felt that he had not had the last word, and looked forward to bumping into the old man some time over the weekend. He wondered what that music was, and saw that somebody had opened a box set. He thought of saying something, but these were his sons, and their friend. He smiled, and sat down in the second-best armchair.

  Nazia came back around six. She was already complaining before she was through the door about the tenants in Wincobank that Aisha had persuaded her into. Why couldn’t she have stuck with students? It was all very well saying that new arrivals from the developing world were more in need of accommodation and Mummy had ten whole houses: why not let two of them to workers at a reasonable rate? It had sounded perfectly sensible, and Aisha’s friend Julie had been a great help in finding solid individuals, then impressing on them how lucky they were. She had given way to her children, yet again, and taken meek instruction from them. For three years it had gone perfectly: the Sylhetis and Afghans who had turned up were reasonably decent and clean. Something had gone wrong with the current mixture. Two of them had taken to importing into the house English girls, who came and went at their own pleasure. She had had to ask another one to leave when she found he w
as smoking heroin in the house. To her horror, today one of the quieter members of the house had phoned her to say, in distress, that his bed was broken. When she went round there, she found that it had been jumped on repeatedly until the frame shattered, and innocent Qasim in tears, blaming Shakur in the room next door – there had been fights in the past. She told Qasim, who worked nights in a chicken shop on Abbeydale Road, that his bed would be replaced in short order. The lavatory, she noticed, was in the state a pig would leave it in. Shakur’s days as a tenant were numbered. She never thought she would say it –

  – she said, coming through the front door of her house –

  – but this lot were more trouble than four student houses combined. Then she exclaimed. Her boys! Hadn’t she expected them? Well, yes, but it was nice to pretend to be surprised by her favourite boys, wasn’t it? The Wincobank saga could wait. And this must be Martin! She had no idea what she was going to do to entertain her sons’ rich friend. Perhaps they would enlist Hilary.