Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

  I set out the board and symbols on the table. I planned to just have a look at the game, set up a few trial moves to pass the time and sharpen my skills. I was doing that for ten minutes, had the game set up against an imaginary opponent when the front door slammed. My brother entered the kitchen.

  VI

  Those few pints left me feeling dazed in the sunlight. I needed to go home and make myself a cup of coffee, that would clear my head. When I got into the kitchen Owl was kneeling on a chair at the table playing his game of Axis and Allies. With his baseball cap on his head and his face scrunched up in concentration he looked like some military tactician planning out some manoeuvre. I greeted him.

  ‘Hello, cunt.’

  ‘Hello, bollocks.’ He didn’t even raise his head.

  I plugged in the kettle and buttered a piece of bread. I was watching Owl playing the game, playing against himself, probably trying to perfect his skills. I marvelled at how easily he had taken to that game. It had been in our house a couple of years; Mom and Dad had given it to me for a Christmas present but I had never taken much interest in it till Owl started to play it. That was over two years ago and had really amazed me. One day I came in and he was sitting there at the table, same as now only younger, with the whole game set out before him, dice, symbols, atlas, charts, and IPCS – Industrial Production Certificates – all ready to go. It amazed me that he’d got even that far with it because this is one difficult mother of a game. Believe it or not, there are thirty-three large pages of rules and instructions to be read before you can start. That’s a fact, thirty-three pages and it’s still possible to come up against a situation not covered in the rules. What you do then is write away to some place in Massachusetts where the game is manufactured and someone there will give you arbitration after a couple of days. Can you believe that?

  Sometimes I hear something like that and I wonder, is the world off its fucking head or, more likely, did it ever have a head to begin with? Imagine, somewhere in Massachusetts there’s this dude with a load of qualifications the length of your arm, someone a lot smarter than you or me, and all he does is answer queries from young fucks like Owl the world over who are stalled and waiting patiently to hear from him because the very game he invented does not have a complete set of rules. My head goes into a spin thinking about things like that. I begin to wonder about the world’s sanity.

  Anyway the game’s difficulty didn’t stand in the way of Owl. In fact playing it seemed to be one of those times when he was in his element. I remember hearing a story once about one of those young composers who was brought to St Paul’s Cathedral and shown its massive organ. This organ was so complicated that young men had to undergo an apprenticeship to learn how to play it. But this young prodigy, who wasn’t yet ten years old, sat down and played away on it with an intuitive knowledge of how it worked. That was how it was with Owl and this game. When I came in that day he had the game set up, an achievement in itself, and he asked me to play with him. After he’d explained the basics he went on to beat the shit out of me in about ten minutes. He over-ran all my territories, captured London and Washington, my armies and IPCS before I could figure out what the hell was happening. He kept on beating me for a good time after that. It took me a few months to figure out the complexities of the game but gradually I got a clearer picture of how it worked. I became better at it and in these last few months I’ve clawed back most of his advantage. The last few games have dragged on for days, most of them ending in stalemate after both of us have negotiated and haggled and then settled the issue by carving up the whole world between us. We would be exhausted after these negotiations, negotiations that left neither of us satisfied because we were both back where we’d started. He would negotiate with real tenacity and quickness of mind, dodging and weaving and stalling, making me feel like the blunt instrument bludgeoning up the bright young kid. That was one of his craftiest tricks. He would stall and stonewall, feign indecision until I could take no more and lost my temper and stood up roaring and swearing and thumping the table while he sat there with a smug grin under the peak of his cap, gathering up the pieces because he knew then that he’d won a moral victory, a second-rate victory admittedly, but the only one possible in the circumstances. I wondered for a while, was this some plan of his to humiliate me, playing for a draw so that he could expose me like that? But I don’t think so. In the beginning, when he beat me at will, he had a choice of victories. Either an economic one, where he took all my IPCS and brought my armies to a halt because without industry I couldn’t keep it supplied or maintained. A good enough victory but not militarily comprehensive. Or a military victory, where he advanced his armies so far that he captured my two capital cities. This was the triumph that appealed most to his imagination. He usually ended his final move, when the game was obviously well won, in a manoeuvre that was totally superfluous, a piece of heel-grinding on an epic scale. When I had conceded defeat he would align together the separate components of his armies and deploy them simultaneously over the whole of my territory in a massive sweeping movement that left nothing in its wake but a landscape of crippled war machines and razed buildings. He did it with such loving elaboration you could only assume that the move was a tight paraphrase of awful, greater design in his head.

  The kettle boiled so I poured coffee and buttered a slice of bread. I took an apple from the fruit bowl and began eating it with a steak knife. Those few pints had me ravenous. Owl raised his head from the game and looked at me dully, with an almost languorous distaste. I wondered how someone his age could summon up such a depth of contempt. Kids are supposed to be simple beings, with simple passions like pain, pleasure, disappointment, hatred and so on. But contempt is no simple emotion. It is a complex feeling, a refinement of those base feelings of disappointment and hatred, an emotion that is the cool, clear distillate not of the heart but of the imagination. I was suddenly aware of just how gifted Owl really was. Even in his attitude towards me he was a genius. He was speaking now.

  ‘Are you going to stand there all day like a zombie or are you going to play me?’

  He had the whole game set up now, the board and symbols divided into two, his Allied army neatly ranked and ready to go. Sometimes we tossed to see who took which side – me, if I got the choice, preferring the Allied one. If he won he took the Allied side too simply because he knew that I wanted it. But in truth it never seemed to bother him which side he took, he didn’t see any difference between being head of the Allied forces powering east towards Berlin or Peking or commander of the Axis forces marching west on London and Washington. It was all the same to Owl which side he was on; right or wrong or politics or historical allegiance didn’t come into it. Whereas I preferred to be the Allied commander for reasons I was not too clear on, Owl found that his imagination was equally at home on either side.

  I left the coffee and food on the table, ready to play. I was going to beat him this time, I could feel it. You know those rare moments you have when you’re absolutely sure something is going to happen and the only surprise is when it happens exactly as you had anticipated. That’s how I felt just then and I knew I would go on the offensive straight away.

  ‘I suppose it’s right and fitting that you should take the Allied side, all those books you read and you knowing so much about explosives and that sort of thing.’ Despite my words I didn’t feel too coherent. That’s what comes from smoking and drinking on an empty stomach. I’d feel much better when I got the coffee inside me.

  ‘I know more than you which isn’t saying much. Are you going to play me or are you going to keep talking shite?’

  ‘OK, little man. Toss for start.’ He flicked the coin onto the back of his hand, calling heads, and heads it was. ‘I’m glad you got a head start you little fuck, you’re going to need it.’

  ‘I’ve never needed a head start playing you. Still, if you want to be foolish.’ He rattled and threw the die. ‘There’s a six to begin with.’

  VII

/>   So there he was, sitting at the table ready to take me on, my older bro, my smug protector of last night.

  He hadn’t hope of winning the game. I could smell the beer off him from across the table and I knew his concentration was shot to hell. He should’ve known it too, it’d happened before and I’d kicked his arse easily. But he never seems to learn. He was wearing that look on his face, that slightly doped look which told me he was neither drunk nor sober but somewhere in between. When it came his turn to move I could see it taking him that split second too long to focus on the board, that tiny delay telling me his brain is coming out of the starting blocks a split second too slow. He was probably trying to sober himself up before Mom and Dad got back but that coffee and apple weren’t going to do it.

  I was going for a military victory, a complete and utter humiliation of him, letting him know once and for all my complete superiority over him. When I had my armies massed I was going to move for it as quickly as possible, lure his forces out into the open and destroy them quickly and completely, leaving him in no doubt that I never wanted anything from him again, not his protection nor his constant moralizing nor his I-told-you-so silences nor, most especially, his you-are-my-brother-so-I-forgive-you arm around the shoulder that he was so quick with last night. I was thinking that I was smarter than he is, I was greater than he’d ever be, I knew things that he couldn’t even guess at. He was going to find all this out once and for all.

  This die was running real good for me. It was coming up fours, fives and sixes, attacking dice, giving him no option but to defend. But I was biding time for the moment, hoarding IPCS, building up wealth instead of going for an all-out attack. My plan was to develop special weaponry, long-range bombers, jet power, nuclear subs and so on. I was playing cagey soaking up his attacks and committing just enough forces to hold my positions. He hadn’t the brains to guess what I was up to. It was going to come as one big shock to him when I unleashed all this weaponry on him, when this blanket of ruin hit him. It was going to come at him from all sides and he’d be in no doubt that this finally was the end, the end of his smug moralizing, the end of his bitching, the end of his baiting, the end of his smartness, the end of his head, the end, the end, the end, the …

  VIII

  How did I let that happen?

  I’d been playing the game fairly well, as well as could be expected with Owl throwing such attacking dice – fours, fives and sixes time after time. Was this another side of his genius? Had he some influence even in the world of chance? Whatever about that, I was doing OK, holding his armies, riding out my bad luck till it turned. But it didn’t turn. My dice kept coming up defensive numbers, giving me no chance to take any kind of initiative. I began to wonder, was I missing something, was I playing the game to my best even within the limits of my desperate luck? I ran through all my possible options in so far as I could remember them. No, there was nothing else I could do. What was wrong with the die then, why was it so bad? I could see that Owl was biding his time also, playing cagey even with such good dice. That was sensible. It wouldn’t do so early in the game to try for the spectacular, not now when there was so little between us. This bad luck had to change some time.

  My mind began to wander. I began thinking about stupid things – throwing the dice and making the complex moves like a robot while all the time I was picturing Jamie lying on the ground as dead as a doornail with the bolt sticking from his eye and thinking how little it all meant to me and to Owl and to the world except to show again how death can stalk down even the most unsuspecting just to keep the rest of us on our toes. Jamie’s body, ‘the remains’, was probably at home now in one of the front rooms with the lid of the coffin tightly screwed down. He wouldn’t have an open one, not with one of his eyes gone. That was death grinding the heel, Jamie not even allowed to look his old man and lady in the face because he might only see half of them. My mind was wandering like that when suddenly I snapped to just in time to see Owl throw another six. My mind scrambled for focus, trying desperately to clarify what was going on.

  And then I saw it, the bastard, I saw what he was going to do. Here it was again, another of those military victories of his. His whole army was ranked and ready to move, armed beyond all recognition; one of those total manoeuvres that was going to overwhelm and crush me. And there was nothing I could do. He had duped me into deploying my armies to parts of the world that were of no consequence. I had Japanese naval and airforce units tied up in bloody side-shows in the Pacific, off the Aleutian islands, waiting to get devastated by Owl’s American forces limbering up off Midway, heavy aircraft carriers with escort and support weaponry. Already he had thrown to move out of the North African desert, across the Mediterranean into southern Europe; troop carriers and landing craft were already beaching in southern Italy and Normandy. My own forces, decimated and near ruin after a disastrous campaign on the eastern front, would never return in time to defend their backs. I was about to be destroyed. The whole disaster was shaping up on the board like an organic growth, a kind of cancerous flower which threatened to envelop everything. I was beginning to smother, a real tightness in my chest was making it impossible to breathe. I was reading Owl’s triumph in his face; those laugh lines around his mouth were an obscene end-of-world calligraphy that spoke nothing but the end and that were saying now, ‘Well, brother dear, it seems as though you lose yet again.’ He had thrown a six, his last die, enabling him to move all his forces at once. A tension snapped, I was unleashed. Through a blur of motion I saw my hand, the focus of my whole being, grab the steak knife and swoop across the table, the point splitting the air and landing up to the hilt in Owl’s neck, just to the left of his Adam’s apple. It seemed to hit something vital, the small wound immediately started to pump rich blood and flow stickily off the handle onto the table. Owl began clutching his throat, gurgling, his whole body jerking like the chair was electrified. One hand reached across the table and started clawing the air in front of my face. Was it a pleading gesture or was he trying to claw out my eyes? His own eyes showed nothing but blind panic, popping, just about to spring from their sockets. He didn’t seem to have the sense to pull out the knife and I remember thinking the crazy thought that this was no time for Owl’s brain to have deserted him. The board was now covered with blood, a huge puddle forming over the whole playing area, a heavy rivulet moving with the incline towards the edge of the table. With a thick groan Owl crashed forward, face down onto the table, twisting the knife in the wound with a terrible ripping sound.

  All was quiet then, a horrified silence except for a small ticking sound, blood trickling off the table and falling steadily into a pool on the floor. My mind filled up immediately with an unbelievable thought. I thought that if I was ever going to kill someone again I would use a knife without a serrated edge. A smooth blade next time. I don’t know how long I dwelt on this, turning it over in my mind – smooth edge serrated edge, smooth edge serrated edge. It seemed to give me some kind of comfort. I had the vague notion that I should get up and do something, make the room more presentable, tidy up or wipe away the blood. But that would have been pathetic, here was a disaster beyond any cleansing. I even had the insane idea that if I grabbed Owl I could shake some life back into him. I seemed to believe that his life had just retired into some deeper part of him and all it needed was a good shaking to bring it forth again. It is amazing how rubbish like this fills up your mind in a crisis. But I didn’t dare touch him. You don’t go prodding monsters, not even dead ones.

  Soon the kitchen was rank with the smell of death and shit. The blood was thickening to a black scum on the table. Owl’s baseball cap was still on his head, back to front, keeping his head out of the blood. I knew it would fit me, you just know these things. I pulled it quickly off his head, like I was snatching something hot, and his forehead popped into the blood. It fitted me snugly just like I knew it would. Not only did it fit but it seemed to belong there. Without it Owl looked naked, incomplete. Only in bed was h
e ever without this cap. I began thinking of Jamie then and Owl and our little town out here in the west of Ireland, out on the edge of the world, throwing up these two fresh corpses in the space of two days. It just goes to show you that even in this little town, where there are only ordinary people with ordinary lives and visions, here too there is time and place enough for death to be spectacular, for it to come with drama and fireworks and lay low two kids who by rights have no business knowing anything about it.

  The boy Jamie, apprentice to my brother Owl, explosives engineer and death angel, both dead. May they rest in peace.

  How long have I been staring across at Owl’s slumped body? I don’t know, I can’t seem to get a focus on the passage of time. I cannot seem to move either, some rictus has entered into my own body. I do know that for as long as Owl’s body is across the table from me I will be unable to move, I will be sitting here, rigid, gripping the table with both hands while rigor mortis stiffens out his limbs. If Owl were to be left there till the end of time, his corpse petrified, I would be here opposite him, staring at him without blinking, some sort of guardian over him, some sort of vigilant. Time would pass and the days would mount to eternity but I would still be here, I will always be here.

  Even in death he works his magic.

  Afterword

  These stories date from a time when I lived my life upside down.