Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  ‘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.

  Perhaps it’s not that. Perhaps it’s a brain tumour pushing my eyeballs out of shape.

  I go to the doctor. I say I have spots on front of my eyes. He refers me to an optician. Opticians do eyes, he explains. Perhaps it’s eyestrain, he tells me.

  You didn’t think it was a brain tumour, did you? he asks.

  No, I tell him. Never even thought about it. Never even crossed my mind.

  He knows I’m lying. Everyone lies to him. We don’t make anything of it.

  I go to see the optician. He makes me read things I can’t read. He tries different lenses out.

  Suddenly I can read all of the rows on his chart.

  He tells me one eye has a focal length half the focal length of the other. One of them is round. The other is egg-shaped. That’ll need correcting. He can do that with lenses. That’s what he does.

  He does me a prescription for lenses. I choose some frames. It’s risky doing that before I can see properly, but I don’t have a choice. I don’t want computer programmer frames. I don’t want trainspotter frames. I want to choose good frames, right now.

  They’ll be ready in a week. In a week I go and get them. I put them on. I can see everything. I don’t look a lot like a computer programmer. I don’t look much like a trainspotter. I can get away with it. I can carry it off.

  I go outside and read things. I read road signs. I read everything, because now I can.

  I wonder how one eyeball got egg-shaped. What made it do that? Was it happier that way?

  I think about brain tumours. Perhaps a brain tumour has pushed one of my eyeballs out of shape.

  I have these spots in front of my eyes.

  And now I can see them really clearly.

  III

  I didn’t want bifocals. I could see things clearly without my specs if they were close to me. I could see everything within a few feet perfectly with my unaided eyes. I could see the monitor when I programmed or played games. With them on, I could see everything else. Switching from one to the other, just after I put them on or took them off, there would be a moment while my eyes readjusted and focussed. My left eye was more short-sighted than my right eye, and they had to get used to working together.

  Sometimes, in the moments while my eyes got their act together, I would see things. Dots crawling up the walls, shadows, nothing substantial. After I blinked once or twice, it’d be gone.

  Not long before the end of 1999, with autumn feeling very like winter and a freezing wind blowing through Dudley, getting in through the gaps between door and jamb, I was trying to finish a game I’d been playing. It was the first in what was to become a very successful series, and it had got me frustrated almost to the point of throwing the keyboard through the window.

  I kept killing off the lead character. Whatever I tried, she fell to death on one or another of what seemed to be a million sets of spikes. My reactions weren’t good enough for that sort of game any more. I turned off the PC two hours later than I’d planned to, having got nowhere. I put on my spectacles and looked out of the window, to give my poor battered eyes some relief.

  From the front window of my flat, there’s a view down Dudley High Street. I can see about half way down it, as far as Woolworth’s and one of the grisly butcher shops. It was about one in the morning and the market was empty. The red and white stripes of the awnings wouldn’t settle in my vision. A woman walked into view at the far end of the High Street. She was carrying a pair of guns, one in each hand. She looked cartoonish, and not all that well rendered. She looked a little like the character I’d been unwittingly dropping into spiked pits for the last few hours, but not enough like her to infringe anyone’s copyright. I had a very careful imagination, apparently.

  She wasn’t real. I knew that. She was some sort of hallucination. She walked under the awnings of the market, went out of sight for a moment, and then reappeared close to the statue of Duncan Edwards.

  Duncan Edwards was a footballer, and one of Dudley’s famous sons. There is a statue of him on the High Street, up on a pedestal, poised on the verge of kicking a metal football. There is a road named after him, too. On one side of the road is a sign saying:

  DUNCAN EDWARDS CLOSE.

  On the other side is a sign saying:

  NO BALL GAMES.

  The woman with the guns snuggled up to the statue, having suddenly leapt ten feet up to it from a standing start. Not something most people would be able to manage, but easy enough for a video-game character of course.

  She looked woodenly around and then clocked me.
She span around the pedestal and down to the floor, hitting the ground running. She was heading for my flat.

  My flat is on the second floor, two floors removed from Dudley. Completely removed from Dudley would have suited me fine just then. She vanished from my point of view, being too close to the front of the building for me to get a fix on her. She wasn’t real, I reminded myself. Something was going on. I wondered whether it was my eyes or my brain that had broken down.

  It all seemed to be over. I couldn’t see her.

  Then, making me jump about half a mile, she flew to the top of the nearest lamppost, appearing to spring from nowhere. She levelled both of her guns in my general direction and hurled herself at me in a tight somersault. She hit the window firing, her muzzle flashes lighting her but not the surrounding environment.

  As she came through the window, which failed to shatter, she lost integrity, becoming disassociated pixels and stray flashes of light. The pixels faded, the flashes went out. The last to go were the three pairs of pixels which had mapped the centres of her eyes, the barrels of her guns, and the tips of her pointed breasts. Then that strange new constellation also faded and she was gone.

  I felt unreal, which seemed unfair. She was the faux video-game character. I had spent too long at the keyboard, I thought. I’d have to give myself a day off. There was no point in overdoing it and risking my health. I took off my glasses and tried to think calmly. I squeezed the bridge of my nose between forefinger and thumb. I tried to be detached and rational.

  It was difficult. You can get hallucinations for several reasons. You can get them by taking the right – or the wrong – chemicals. Cheese is mildly hallucinogenic. Bram Stoker is said to have written Dracula after nightmares brought on by too much cheese. Which is apt, as modern vampires are overwhelmingly cheesy. Psylocybin mushrooms are well known for their psychotropic effects in some circles.

  The problem was that I didn’t do that sort of drug. I smoked the occasional joint, and that was all.

  Tiredness could make you see things. I had been tired, after too many late nights trying to finish games. That didn’t even feel like a good reason to be tired. It wasn’t as though I’d been searching for the cure for cancer. I didn’t think that I’d been tired enough to see things that weren’t there.

  The only other reason I could think of for having hallucinations was that my brain was misfiring. Perhaps some neurones were doing the wrong thing. Perhaps my visual cortex was dissolving. What were the symptoms of brain tumours? From my limited medical knowledge – gathered from all of those drama series about doctors that seemed to light up the lives of the BBC programme planners – there would be headaches and the illusionary smell of roses. I didn’t have headaches and the only thing I could smell was the fishmongers. And that was with the windows closed.

  I thought about BSE. The government of 1986 had done all that it could to get that as widespread as possible short of actually injecting it into people. I had eaten cheap beefburgers while I was a student. I’d had kebabs from vans that the UN would have sanctioned for breaching germ warfare regulations. I’d had curries from places the health inspectors only visited under duress.

  I didn’t know what the symptoms were, other than wobbly cows. I didn’t think it was that. Thinking about it, the kebabs and curries were more likely to contain domestic pets and rodents than farm animals.

  I didn’t feel dizzy or sick. I didn’t feel confused. I wasn’t suffering from mood swings. It was just that what appeared to be an anonymous video-game character had waltzed along Dudley market and thrown herself at my window, guns blazing.

  I wondered whether it might have been a trick, perhaps an image projected onto my window from somewhere. I rejected that theory. She’d stayed in scale with the background. That would have been close to impossible to code. Plus, she’d left a few pixels in my room, like coloured scales from the wings of a butterfly. More convincingly, she was how I’d imagined the character to look. She was my version of a popular myth, something I’d invented rather than something I’d seen.

  I put it down to tiredness. I decided to go to bed.

  I really didn’t feel like playing that game any more.

  IV

  I tried to keep videogaming to a minimum for a while. I had early nights and took vitamins. I read books instead of playing games. I called Dermot and Tina and arranged to go out as often as I could.

  The trouble with my flat was that it was boring. It wasn’t that there was nothing to look at. There was plenty of junk. There was everything I’d bought in the last twenty years because I couldn’t face throwing any of it away.

  ‘You’re a hoarder,’ Dermot had said on one of his visits. ‘The fucking council will come in here with rubber clothes and a big fucking skip.’

  Most of the space was full of my history. I didn’t want to look at any of that, I’d already had to live through it. There were hundreds of books and magazines, but nothing I wanted to read. Like Tina and Roger, I had stuck with the five terrestrial TV channels and there wasn’t anything on I wanted to watch. The BBC had limited their output to programmes about people who were:

  Detectives.

  Doctors.

  Vets.

  Detectives who were also vets or doctors.

  The rest of it was worse. There was nothing to watch and the radio stations played generic dance music. If I sat and read I’d fidget and end up picking skin from around my fingers, which made me think of Betts, which upset me.

  I hadn’t been in any serious relationships for years and I wasn’t in one then. I had no one to distract me.

  Dermot had a theory about that.

  V

  ‘Your problem is that you’re dragging all your ghosts around,’ he said. ‘You keep your history with you.’

  We were in the Slipped Disc, a pub two miles from anywhere. It stood by itself on the long road between Kidderminster and Worcester and there was nothing else nearby. You had to drive there, so a significant proportion of the clientele was always reasonably sober. They did a good trade early in the evenings, mostly catering for unfussy families out for simple meals.

  By nine thirty the place was all but deserted. From the outside it looked like a warehouse set in a vast car park. From the inside it looked like a hasty warehouse conversion. The tables seemed dwarfed by the high ceilings, and the small amount of lively atmosphere had a hard time filling the huge rooms. Dermot was delighted with it.

  ‘Fucking check this out,’ he said. ‘Look at this place. What’s the opposite of cosy? Because this is it. This is the worst building I’ve ever seen made into a pub. What fucking idiot thought this’d work? It’s brilliant.’

  He looked at the rows of tables, the families eating their lukewarm, undercooked main courses, the hard-boiled potatoes, the side salads used to fill in the surface area of the oval plates.

  ‘Fucking scampi,’ he said, examining a menu. ‘These poor bastards aren’t even middle class. Can you believe it? Middle class wannabees. Fucking hell. What sort of beer do they do here?’

  I followed him to the bar. The bar staff wore red shirts with the name of the pub on the breast pocket, and itchy-looking black trousers. They looked too young to be working in a pub. The bar was twenty yards long and deserted.

  ‘What whiskies have you got?’ he asked a youth with the sort of long hair that never seems to become fully unpopular in rural areas.

  ‘Not blended. Malts,’ he added.

  The boy he’d asked went to ask someone else.

  ‘Ten to one it’s Glenfiddich and Glenmorangie and that’s your fucking lot. Middle class enough to have malts, not middle class enough to have any interesting ones. Can you believe this place?’

  ‘I don’t know that drinking malt whisky is a middle class thing.’

  ‘Don’t you? It’s a fucking good job I’m here to help point these things out to you then. You know what this place is?’

  ‘Middle class?’

  ‘Everywhere’s middle c
lass. It’s just that not everyone knows about it. Someone designed this place. Someone wanted it to look like this. Someone thought that a big empty room would do nicely. This is somebody’s bright idea.’

  He looked back to the tables.

  ‘They’re all dressed up. Look at them. This is brilliant. This is fucking terrific. They’re all in their best fucking clothes sitting in this warehouse eating scampi and having a fucking awful time.’

  The barman brought back the list of whiskies. Dermot had been right about the available brands.

  ‘Two Glenmorangies then. Doubles. And two pints of Guinness.’

  When the drinks arrived he paid with a twenty-pound note and told the barman to have one himself.

  ‘We can’t accept drinks,’ said the youth.

  ‘Who says?’ asked Dermot.

  ‘We can take the money for a drink and then we share it out.’

  ‘Share it out? Between five of you? It’s a drink, not a fucking timeshare apartment. Just give me the change.’

  He led me away from the bar to a quiet table.

  ‘That’s corporations for you,’ he told me. ‘These minimum wage fuckers don’t get anything. Ten to one the manager skims half the tips and gives the rest to the prettiest barmaid. Doesn’t that piss you off?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘Nothing pisses you off. You’re just too fucking cool. Nothing bothers you.’

  Not much did. I was worried about my hallucination, but it had been an isolated one. It hadn’t happened again. I shook my head.

  ‘Back to you and your ghosts then. All of your friends are people you’ve known for years. Don’t you want to know anyone else? Don’t you ever see someone and want to spend some time with them?’

  ‘Did Tina tell you to say all this?’ I asked.

  ‘No she didn’t. Why would she?’

  ‘It’s the sort of thing she says. It’s the sort of thing she always says. Every time I see her I get all of this. There’s nothing wrong with my life. It’s got enough people in it.’