Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  ‘You didn’t want to know,’ he said. ‘You’ve been that way ever since.’

  ‘You’ve been that way for years,’ said Tina. ‘You never ask us anything. You don’t want to know anything. We could have told you most of this.’

  I didn’t want to know anything, but it didn’t seem that I was getting a choice. Memories began to form.

  I remembered being very drunk, and asking Sid the reluctant barman for a series of absurd nameless cocktails – whisky, white rum, Cointreau and dry cider in a half-pint glass was the least unpleasant of them. The student bar had been crowded and I had been too drunk, falling into people. I had received bad news.

  The car crash hadn’t happened yet. That was waiting in the wings. This was different bad news.

  ‘Stop,’ I said to the room. It ignored me.

  ‘He’s getting there,’ said Dermot.

  ‘About time,’ said Roger. ‘He’ll feel better for it. Trust me. I’m a doctor.’

  I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust any of them. But the trip had done what it had been designed to do. I remembered everything.

  The past I’d got rid of came out of nowhere and swallowed me whole.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I

  Here we are then, back in the early eighties. The music in the charts is all soulless and polished, the clothes are all bright and awful, the idea of ethics is laughable. We can all be rich, and the people who can’t keep up can shut up and die.

  At college in Borth I tried to keep up with these and other new concepts, but computing was moving ahead so quickly that I couldn’t keep up with it. I was like a dog chasing a motorcycle.

  I started drinking. That was acceptable, then. Conspicuous consumption was absolutely required. I drank a lot, and spent a lot of time in the bar.

  I met Tina, but she was not my type at all. I got on with her, but there was nothing else to it. I was already in the process of falling for Trish Newton, who came from somewhere in Cornwall.

  I had a wide array of disreputable friends. We’d get drunk together, and go staggering along the beach at night, swearing at the seagulls. Trish used to hang around with us.

  Baz Patel, whose name wasn’t anything like Baz but liked to be called Baz ‘because it saves all you stupid white boys from mispronouncing my real name,’ took me to one side one night, while everyone else got on with the drinking games.

  ‘What are you hoping to get out of all this?’ he asked me.

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘All of this, man, this college thing and all. What are you in it for? Just for this, the drinks and that?’

  ‘That’s enough for now.’

  ‘How long does for now last for, man? You want to be doing this in three years’ time? There’s good things here if you want them. You’re going too far over, man. You’re just too drunk. This lot, these guys, they’re fun to be around. I see that. But they’re a short-term solution, you see what I’m saying?’

  ‘What, you’d prefer it if I was like Olaf and all those other sad fuckers from the computer courses?’

  ‘No. I like you drunk. You’re a funny guy. But that’s not enough. You can’t pass your course drunk, man. You can’t get a life.’

  That phrase – get a life – had only just begun to make an appearance. I’d encountered it several times already, and was usually on the receiving end.

  ‘I have a life already.’

  ‘You’re losing it. Out of all these people, which one is looking out for you?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘No, man. This is the only time I even try to help you. I’m not your guardian angel. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. This is my good deed, yeah? After this, you sort yourself out. But that Trish, man. She’s on your wavelength.’

  ‘Are you saying she fancies me?’ I asked. It wasn’t something I’d thought about. Trish Newton was always around, but she was far too sweet for me. I wasn’t in her league.

  ‘She’s wild about you, man. I tell you, I sometimes wonder how you white folk ever reproduce. What does she need to do, wave a flag or something? She’s mad about you. That’s something you can get out of all this, if you don’t lose all this by getting drunk all the time. That’s me done, lecture over. Sort it out yourself from there.’

  After that, I spent a couple of weeks keeping an eye on Trish. Of course Baz was right, she did fancy me, and it was obvious. I didn’t know how I hadn’t spotted it before.

  I asked her out, and she said yes.

  I was happy without being drunk, so I stopped drinking. Some of the friends I’d had until then stopped being friends. They only liked the drunk version of me, and he wasn’t around. He wasn’t even required.

  I was happy.

  We went through most of two years like that, going out, getting on. I paid attention, and that advancing wave of knowledge began to seem less likely to leave me completely washed up. Everything began to fall into place. I kept some of the less fickle friends, and the ones I didn’t keep had never been any good for me and so weren’t missed.

  I still got drunk, and Tina and Trish and I would go out plastered and play along the shore, or go shopping in the hopeless seaside shops. It was a different sort of drunkenness, though. It was closer to fun than the old sort. It stopped before you blacked out.

  Good times don’t last, of course. Good times get clubbed to death. People change.

  People change.

  II

  The eighties carried on. The first mobile phones, which were barely mobile and which couldn’t pick up a signal outside the City of London, made their appearance, hoisted by bright young men with bright new Porsche 911s. In the capital city, a different version of the same decade was underway, and all of the money was there.

  People began to feign a liking for sushi, which they didn’t like then and don’t like now. The soul dropped out of art. Art had only to sell. Everything had only to make money; there was no other reason for anything to be.

  Small wonder that love had a hard time of it.

  Trish had a room two floors up and three blocks along from mine, in that ridiculously expansive student housing. We used to use her room because she’d got it into order. Mine was full of rubbish, with posters for horror movies and bad bands. Hers had photographs, sketches, that bloody Pierrot picture that was everywhere you went for about three years. There were Roger Dean posters, which I liked at the time because they were hers. I liked everything she had, apart from that bloody poster of the bloody clown.

  She had a few records, picking up any old tat as she felt like it. She had stuff by Pink Floyd, New Order, Steeleye Span, Terry Jacks. Everything was on vinyl. The CD was not ubiquitous then. She used to put her albums in the wrong sleeves, in no sleeves, all in one sleeve.

  Like my room, hers had come equipped with a narrow bed and an uncomfortable wooden chair. Unlike mine, it had been enhanced. She’d got her parents to drop off another chair – along with a beanbag that lolled on the floor like an excised cyst – on one of their visits. She’d put a decorated cloth over the desk, and draped another over the shade of the bedside lamp.

  My room looked as though a monk from a fairly stringent order inhabited it. Hers looked human.

  I later came to recognize all of the trappings as only that, only trappings. She’d swiped ideas from everywhere, but then, who doesn’t?

  She was a petite girl, with an accent I could have listened to for weeks. It had a touch of Cornish in it, but wasn’t the usual one, thick as clotted cream. She had blonde hair and long nails. She had features that I still think of as perfect. No one else matches them. No one I’ve met since has meant what she did.

  This was head-over-heels stuff. We had pet names for each other. We had hundreds. After almost two years, we were still gaga. We irritated our friends, apart from Tina, who was delighted by the pair of us. She liked the way we lit one another up.

  One night, out of the blue, Trish asked me to pop round and see her. It was nothing too important, she sa
id. She just needed to talk to me.

  I had misgivings. Did she want me to meet her parents and turn respectable? Of course, I’d met them briefly when they came to take her away for the holidays, back home to her old life (and was I ever unhappy that she had another life? Wasn’t I just). Did she want us to cool off, or heat up? Were we going to go respectable?

  There were more possibilities than I could think of. I was something like nervous. I showed up early, because she didn’t like me being late.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said. She had the lamp on and the main light off. The record player was on, playing a Bob Dylan compilation tape that Tina had leant her months ago. Her favourite song that month was ‘Idiot Wind’. It was playing then.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said, and gave me a glass of white wine. I didn’t drink much wine in those days, not having met Roger and his wine attic. I took the glass, thinking that there was no point looking a gift horse in the mouth. She’d got the wine chilled.

  ‘What do you think about us?’ she asked me, dropping into the subject without any preamble.

  ‘I think it’s a good thing,’ I said. ‘I think we suit each other.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes.’ That was an easy one. That was the truth.

  ‘Would you love me whatever happened to me? What if I was changed? What if I was, well, different?’

  ‘I’d love you anyway. It’s you I love. However you are.’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  She wasn’t drinking anything, which should have set the alarm bells ringing. She looked pensive too. That wasn’t her style. I’d seen her in many moods – happy, sad, bloody furious – but seldom pensive. Did she have something nasty? Was she telling me she’d caught something awful?

  ‘I’ll love you whatever,’ I told her.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then we’re alright, aren’t we? Only I’m pregnant.’

  That wasn’t fair, I thought. Her questions had implied something more manageable: cancer, leprosy, anything but this. Her questions had been designed to trap me. She’d led me into a hole. I didn’t know what to say. She looked like a mouse, all bright eyes and hotwired nerves.

  ‘Mick?’ she said.

  ‘I need to think about it,’ I said, putting the wine glass on the desk. My aim was slightly off; the glass fell on its side, and the wine I’d left – not much – stained the cloth while the glass rolled off and fell to the floor. It didn’t break. That might have relieved the tension.

  I stood up.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

  She was crying then, and if I hadn’t walked out of her room, perhaps she wouldn’t have tried to drive to the station to get a train home and her car wouldn’t have hit a tree and flipped, killing her and whatever part of me she was carrying. All of me, it felt like.

  I didn’t know that. I walked out of her room.

  III

  There’s no need to apportion blame. I’ve already done that. I’ve given it all to me.

  IV

  She went to see Tina a few hours later, Tina told me on the night of our reunion, with the thing I’d conjured out of a mirror listening and nodding. She went to see Tina, and she’d been upset but not that terribly upset. She’d told Tina about the pregnancy, but naturally Tina had guessed about it weeks ago in any case. She told Tina that I had been no use at all. She was going to go home, and Tina could tell me when she saw me. I could call Trish at home, if I wanted to.

  She was going to get a train from Borth station, and Tina thought that perhaps she was doing that because she wanted to stand on a deserted platform, pregnant and abandoned. She was such a romantic, as we knew. She had such dreams.

  Off she went, upset but steady, driving calmly off. Tina went to look for me.

  V

  Tina didn’t find me that night, because I was elsewhere. After leaving Trish I went to the student bar and got Sid to knock up some of those lethal cocktails. I drank them one after another, and then went to my room and put on ‘Hobby For A Day’ by The Wall. It was my favourite record then – not just for the month, I had strong loyalties to my records. If not to people. It was a single, a vinyl seven-inch single, and every time it finished I put the needle back to the start and played it again.

  I don’t suppose it even exists now. When music got transferred to digital media, some music just got lost.

  I could sing it for you, if you wanted me to.

  I played it repeatedly, thinking about Trish Newton and feeling resentful. Would I love her whatever happened to her? Well, yes, but pregnancy was something else. That involved a third person, and I had a first person viewpoint. And was I ever unhappy that she had another life? Wasn’t I just.

  After the fifteenth? sixteenth? millionth? play of ‘Hobby For A Day’, I went out. I wasn’t going to the student bar. The people there knew me. I wanted to go where I wasn’t known.

  I walked into Borth, and I can’t work out the timing but it’s possible she was talking to Tina when I set out, and just starting on her way to town as I got there. She could have passed me. She could have picked me up.

  She never did, though, did she? The car got totalled, and she got subtracted.

  I got drunk in unfriendly pubs.

  VI

  I walked back across the marshes, full of drink and stone-cold sober, and ended up in the student bar where the police finally found me and rounded me up.

  VII

  I remembered putting something of myself aside that night, shutting something out. It was most of myself. I had fallen out with myself, and I became someone else.

  I forgot who I was.

  I did it deliberately. I no longer wanted to be the person who’d let her go in that state, and who’d got drunk while she was bleeding to death in the wreckage. I was much too drunk to think straight.

  I didn’t lose my memory so much as throw it away.

  The next week, I started to talk to the losers, people like Olaf and the other geeks. I steered clear of the people I’d known. I didn’t know them anymore.

  I had new friends. I had new interests.

  I was someone else.

  VIII

  So, Tina told me, she’d had a short affair with me in an attempt to snap me back to my senses, to bring me back to myself. They’d liked me before. They didn’t like the new, miserable me.

  ‘You just played video games,’ she said. ‘That’s all you did, talked to your computer friends and played video games. It was like most of you was gone. I just wanted you back, and so I pretended to be meeting you for the first time and pretended to fall for you. I’m sorry.’

  Like most of me was gone? Was that a big deal? All of Trish Newton was gone.

  ‘Tina came to me,’ said Roger. ‘She told me you’d gone through traumatic events and reacted to them by burying your personality, your memories. All of your Self, essentially. I’d been reading about this brilliant new technique using mirrors, and we chicaned you into being a test subject.

  ‘The only thing was that you had a talent we didn’t know about. I don’t think anyone knew about it. And instead of getting you in touch with yourself, you separated another part of yourself. You gave it a physical form. Then it ruined all of our mirrors and headed for the hills.’

  The thing in question looked contrite. Of course it had headed for the hills, I thought. Where else would it have headed? The nearest Harvester?

  ‘We couldn’t reach you,’ said Tina. ‘And then Dermot turned up. He said he was another one you’d produced, and that you’d instructed him not to tell you anything about it all. It was up to you to remember everything, when you were ready.’

  ‘I remember everything,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t kill her,’ said Tina. ‘You don’t need to be in pieces.’

  She indicated Dermot and my other progeny.

  ‘You can take them back,’ said Roger. ‘They’re parts of you. Without them you’re not complete. Without them, you�
��re missing chunks. You took them and sent them out of yourself. They’re you. They’re pieces of you.’

  I thought of Dermot, steering me towards my memories. He’d always said that he was the king of video games. He’d treated me like a character. He was looking gloomy, perhaps because he was set to vanish, back into my psyche.

  ‘What was the thing about video games?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s all you did,’ said Tina. ‘You became one of them. You behaved like them. You did whatever people did in video games. You didn’t have a real life. You were living in a fantasy world.’

  Video games, I thought; that explained a few things. It explained why I’d split myself three ways. In early video games, you got three lives to play with.

  ‘Now we can put you back together,’ said Tina.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No you can’t. I don’t want them back. I like them out there. Dermot’s fun out there. I’m happier with him out there. And this guy can be fun.’

  ‘He can’t speak,’ said Tina.

  ‘He can write,’ I said. The thing winked at me. Dermot, who had been looking pensive, was looking perkier.

  ‘Nice one,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to come back in there with you. I’m better looking than you are.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ I said.

  ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘In the circumstances.’

  ‘But we want you back,’ said Tina.

  ‘You can’t have me back. You can have me like this, with these two. Or you can’t have any of us.’

  ‘You don’t want to live like that,’ she said. ‘In a fantasy. In a dream, not even a whole person. How would you live like that?’

  ‘You’re living in a fantasy world yourself. Sitting in a sepia-toned cottage in Bewdley, drinking wine and eating crab cakes. You’re in a dream. So is everyone else, come to that. The country elected a cartoon Prime Minister, for fuck’s sake.’