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V

If you’re old enough to remember a time when there were no video games, then you’ll know that the first time you saw Pong it was a vision into a new place. Cyberspace is the place you look into when you look into a monitor, past the screen and into the game world. In there – out there – everything is possible. You can control events there.

In the real world, events control you.

I used to be a student. You don’t need to be a student to get into software. Most early coders – the ones on the frontier, the ones on the cutting edge – taught themselves. They had to. There were no landmarks. Now, you need qualifications and experience. I learned how to code from a ZX Spectrum, trying to write games that would make me a millionaire like Matthew Smith. You’d see pictures of him in computer magazines, this long-haired seventeen-year-old said to have a million-plus bank account. This was in the early eighties, when a million was big money. The computer magazines of the time used to have long listings of programs, endless pages of hopeless code for you to type in at the keyboard of your computer. They always contained typos. If you typed them in correctly, they failed to run. You had to interpret and debug the code. You’d spend days typing this stuff in, saving it to a C90 cassette every now and then. Saving took minutes in those days. You had to watch the tape run and listen to a high-pitched electronic squealing.

Sometimes, even now, I hear that sound as I fall asleep.

I corrected the code in magazines and got programs to run. I got jerky stick-men to stroll across the screen. I got fifty bad versions of Space Invaders to run. I got bad eyesight and pale skin.

I gave up on programming games. With games the cutting edge is always somewhere else. In computing the cutting edge is in all directions, and you can’t keep up with it. You have to find a wave and ride it. You have to pick a direction and head that way.

I learned computing by myself, and then couldn’t get a job. The first wave had gone. The second wave was coming up behind me, schools full of kids learning to program. I didn’t have a wave to go with, so I got stuck in the trough. I needed more experience. I had some money in my bank account, left to me thanks to helpful deaths on remote branches of the family tree. I invested it in myself and took a degree course at Borth College. That’s where I learned about other worlds. That’s where I learned that they’re bad places. And then, like all students, I forgot everything I’d learned.

VI

Dermot looked at the interior of the restaurant.

‘Look at the state of this place. Is this tacky or fucking what?’

A barman in an anonymous black suit watched us nervously. He looked too young to be behind a bar. He looked much too young to deal with Dermot.

‘We want beer,’ Dermot told him. ‘We need beer. We’ve been having a hard old time. I’ve been shifting commodities all morning and I’m thirsty. What have you got?’

The barman listed drinks; designer lagers made up most of the options.

‘Two pints of lager then,’ Dermot said. ‘Fizzy piss but you haven’t got anything else. You want to talk to the brewery about it. I have friends in catering. I could put a word in. Would you like me to do that? Would you like me to see what I can do?’

‘It’s not up to me,’ said the barman.

‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Dermot. ‘I’d imagine not. We’ll have two whiskies to go with them.’

‘I’m driving,’ I said.

‘I’ll drink them then. That’s two lagers, two whiskies, and have one yourself.’

‘I’m not really allowed to drink.’

‘But I want you to have one. I’ll be offended. I’d take it as a rebuff. Who says you can’t have one?’

‘It’s how it works.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t try. Don’t say I didn’t offer. Just the lagers and whiskies then, thanks. He’s paying.’

I checked my wallet. I didn’t know what the prices were like. The training people had paid for all of the meals until then. Which was fair enough as the training was costing thousands of pounds. I checked the room for clues about costs. There was a lot of flimsy wood panelling and acres of flat red cloth. Glass ashtrays the size of dustbin lids held mounds of smouldering butts. The waitresses were teenage girls with the facial expressions of expiring fish apart from one older woman who, on first inspection, appeared to be dead. They wore unmarked uniforms, somewhere between French maids and policewomen. Someone in procurements had overlapping fetishes.

Clusters of men wearing Armani suits they couldn’t quite afford or carry off talked about deals they were involved in. Dermot and I were easily the oldest people in the room if you discounted the older waitress. Which, as she seemed to be dead, you could.

‘School holidays, is it?’ asked Dermot. ‘Didn’t tell you, did I? The name’s Dermot. My mother was from Cork, so she used to say. Course she was off her head, she could have been from Mars for all I know. Didn’t know my father, he fucked off to Belgium before I turned up. Belgium! Who goes to Belgium?’ He had a drink and thought about it. ‘That’s my family history done. Who are you then?’

‘Mick Aston.’

‘Mick? That’s what you’d call a sheepdog. We can work with it though. Could be Mickey, could be Michael, could be Mike. You’re stuck with Aston, though. You not drinking that?’

He pointed at my whisky and I shook my head. He downed the drink.

‘Tell you what, tell you what I think. I think we need to get out of here. Out of this fucking business park. You up for it? We can go into town and have a real drink.’

‘I have a course to finish.’

‘Well finish it then. Finish it now. You can always do another course. You might not see me again. What have you got to lose?’

‘My job. My liver.’

‘There are other jobs out there. I can get you a job.’

‘Selling burgers?’

‘Not fucking likely. You don’t have the skill set. You don’t have the aptitude. We can use the van to get to town.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I’ve had a drink. There’s a difference. Having a drink is sociable. Getting drunk is disgraceful. I don’t get drunk.’

The barman eyed him warily.

‘I get rat-arsed,’ Dermot told him. I get arrested. Nice place, hope it takes off. You’re fucked if it doesn’t. You coming?’

Of course I was. I didn’t know what to make of him but it’d be an interesting night. You’d have thought that after Dr Morrison I’d know better, but after Dr Morrison I really didn’t know what I knew.

‘Good man. Fair play. We’ll take the van. You’ll need to be careful in there.’

‘Why? The fat fryer?’

‘No, fuck that. We can dump that. You’ll have to watch out for the mirrors. There are the wing mirrors, the driving mirror, might even be some shiny surfaces in there somewhere. I doubt it, it’s filthy. I honestly doubt it. But there might be some chrome or something.’

‘I don’t mind mirrors,’ I said. Dermot smiled evilly at the barman.

‘Oh yes he does,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like them at all. And now he doesn’t know whether he likes me or not, either. Confusing old world isn’t it? Come on then.’

I followed him.

TWO
I

That afternoon we got ridiculously drunk. I don’t remember much about it. I remember abandoning the burger van halfway down Broad Street in Birmingham. Dermot had, as he’d promised, dumped the deep-fat fryer on the pavement at the business park. We’d left it there, leaking grease and steaming.

‘Off we fucking go then,’ said Dermot, scampering gleefully off into the afternoon crowd. We had a few in the first open bar we came to.

After that my memory skips like a vinyl record. I remember a staircase leading down to some toilets far beneath a dingy club. I remember being brightly sick over a flashing fruit machine. I remember it paying out three jackpots in a row in response.

I remember being in a bathroom with a long mirror of polished metal, Dermot beside me, holding my hand out. His small hands were too strong to resist, like the rest of him.

‘You can touch it,’ he said, meaning the mirror. ‘You can touch it.’

Our blurred reflections looked back at us, mine terrified, his delighted.

‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Touch it.’

A pair of post-punk punks – all polychromatic hair dye and studded leather – arrived in time to hear that. They moved to flank us.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Dermot.

‘Pair of queers in the bog,’ said one. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘Where?’ asked Dermot, looking around theatrically.

Something about him made them leave. He looked for a moment like a werewolf, without any transformation. He was suddenly all violence. They backed off, hands up and palms forward. If they’d been dogs they’d have rolled over. The door dragged itself shut behind them.

‘Pair of cunts,’ he said. ‘Not going to touch the mirror, then? Come on. More drinks.’

We had more drinks. How do you become afraid of mirrors? Easily. Here’s how it happened for me.

II

In 1983 all sorts of things were changing. There were new sorts of amusement arcades and new sorts of amusements. We were living in the most immoral decade since records began. We were moving into the age of image.

I was moving into the final year of a three-year course in software engineering. This was at a tiny college two miles from Borth, which is a small town on the wet Welsh coast in the middle of nowhere. The campus held a few residential blocks, a blocky little student pub, and a three-storey H-block style building that held everything else. It had been built in the seventies, and designed by an architect with a fondness for the T-square and a big gap in his imagination. The computer rooms held out-of-date green-screen workstations linked to an ancient server. The server was tended by unspeaking drones in lab coats. They gave the impression of depthless knowledge; they never provided evidence of it. The server had its own room, locked with state-of-the-art locks for that time. Large windows with embedded wire mesh let you look in and see the server at work. It was the size of a pair of double wardrobes, with enormous switches and great tangles of cables. Banks of reel-to-reel recorders spooled miles of tape in all directions. The technicians would feed punched cards into slots, pull levers, and run for cover as processing began.

Borth college didn’t run many courses, and it didn’t attract many students. It didn’t attract any good ones. I went there because the entry requirements seemed to consist of turning up. This turned out to be true. It was all subsidised by government handouts and charitable donations, otherwise it would have closed down three weeks after it first opened.

The computer courses were run on the ground floor, and so all of the windows had to be barred. This was Wales in the early eighties and green-screen workstations could fetch a few pounds. On the middle floor they ran hairdressing courses. On the top floor the experimental psychologists watched mice run through mazes. In those days higher education took very little of your time and didn’t cost you all that much. I had a lot of spare time on my hands and nowhere to spend it. The campus was situated in a wet wasteland. What seemed to be huge distant mountains were actually small mountains, quite close by. It rained three days out of five. There was a single bus stop, and the bus went between the campus and Borth twice a day each way. If you went there at night you had to get a taxi back, and there were no taxis. Now there are no taxis anywhere in Wales. They were all removed. Now there are only tacsis. There’s lufli.

I made friends, out of necessity. There was nothing else to do. For three years there was only the company of other students. At night the lecturers drove home in Morris Minors and Volkswagens. The hairdressers vanished. You could try and date them, but you wouldn’t get anywhere. They were Welsh and miserably insolent. They were dark-haired, thin, a genotype. They looked like goths, without trying. None of the locals seemed to stay up after eight.

To pass the time, we would go to the student bar. Presumably the college funded it. It didn’t seem to do enough trade to stay afloat.

In the first term of my third year, I met Tina McAndrew. We had an affair that didn’t do either of us any good, but we got out of the wreckage with our friendship intact. That was just as well, as there were few other people there. You couldn’t afford to lose a friend. There were sixteen computer students, the unassailable hairdressers, and the psychologists. Tina was a psychology student. I remember looking out of a window while I was waiting for yet another Cobol program to compile. I saw her walk from one of the residential blocks, wearing one of the long coats that everyone had in those days. She was heavier than the girls I usually fancied. I liked them tiny, and she was my height. She looked as though she’d beat me at arm-wrestling. She had long hair and the Welsh weather was busily fucking it over. I watched her until she walked out of my line of sight.

A couple of nights later I saw her in the student bar and decided to talk to her. I was egged on by Olaf, one of the other computer students. Olaf came from a wealthy family, by early eighties standards. He had a sense of humour that only he understood. You had to decipher him. Olaf wasn’t his real name, obviously. His real name was Peter, but he called himself Olaf.

‘It’s short for “Oh, laugh, for fuck sake”,’ he once told me.

The night Tina turned up, he watched me watching her. I sometimes thought he should have been with the experimental psychologists. He liked observing. I sometimes wondered if he was an experimental psychologist, sneakily studying the computer students. I knew that was paranoid, which hopefully meant that I was sane.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Talk to the lady.’

There was no point ignoring him. After all, I wanted to talk to her. I managed to get to the bar before she was served.

This wasn’t difficult. The student bar had a lone barman, named Sid. He was older than the students and distant in manner. He would strive not to serve people. He would do his best to avoid talking to you.

‘Until he gets to know you,’ Olaf once said. ‘Then he still doesn’t talk to you. But at least he knows you.’

Sid could take a long time to pour a simple pint and girls usually chose more complicated drinks. They’d want mixers and ice; that could take him all night. I sidled closer to Tina, whose name I didn’t know at the time.

‘Hello again,’ she said.

I looked around. She was talking to me. What did she mean, ‘again’?

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Who’s that you’re with? Not one of your crowd. I thought you hung around with a livelier bunch.’

She looked slightly quizzical. Her features managed to be both heavy and delicate; a neat trick, I thought. I didn’t know what had compelled me to talk to her. Olaf and drink, perhaps. My usual approach was more circumspect. Still, I did know that I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anyone who looked that good.

‘You must have me mixed up,’ I said.

‘That sounds about right. Can I get you a drink?’

‘I’ll get you one.’

‘That’s a bit old fashioned, isn’t it? I’m allowed to buy the drinks. We’re in the eighties now, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Are you sure we haven’t met?’

I said that I was. I’d have remembered her. It wasn’t as though I met many girls. Computers didn’t attract them.

‘I’m Tina,’ she said, ‘and as I don’t know you, you’ll need to tell me who you are.’

‘Mick Aston,’ I said.

‘Are you doing anything tomorrow evening, Mick Aston?’ she asked. I wasn’t. ‘Well, you are now,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

III

The next night she took me to Aberystwyth to see a film. I was expecting something French and gloomy, but she chose a noisy extravaganza with car chases and guns. She seemed to be watching me as much as the film. Perhaps it was because she was a psychology student, I thought. On the way back to Borth on the night bus, she edged closer to me across the seat.

‘Do you think people always have hidden depths?’ she asked. ‘Or is what you see what you get?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you’ve got depths,’ she said. She visibly came to a decision and kissed me, as though she’d been wondering whether to or not. I’d already reached the same decision and left her to it.

We had a brief affair, and ended up as friends. That’s as good as it gets, I think. Anything longer-term is based on a different emotion. It’s still called love, but it’s another flavour. Our little affair was all over in a month.

It was obvious early on that we wanted different things from the relationship. I wanted everything. I saw her and became happy.

She, on the other hand, saw some potential in me. She saw something under the surface. She could see a possible me, and it was him that she was after. He stayed hidden, however. She liked me, but not as much as she liked the version of me that I failed to become.

She began to cool. I attempted to woo her. It wasn’t something I had a talent for.

I tried to write poems for her, but they came out lifeless. I couldn’t get words to do anything good. We’d hold hands and walk the four-mile round trip to Borth and back. We slept together in my tiny student bed. I would find her crying from time to time. By the third week, that was all she was doing.

She told me she was sorry, she’d like to be friends.

We were friends. I didn’t have an easy time with that. But hope springs eternal, the vicious little bastard.

IV

Borth is really not much more than a road by the sea. You approach it by way of a long road that follows the estuary of the river Dyfi. The road winds past the college grounds, a thin strip of swampland, and a golf course. The road goes through the middle of the links, splitting the course into two and providing golfers and motorists alike with an extra hazard. A high sloping wall of grey concrete blocks the view out to sea. There are car parking spaces next to the sea wall. Inland, there are mountains and clouds.

A large public toilet, which has won awards, stands between the sea wall and the town. The shops all sell the same things; buckets and spades, strange paperbacks, cheap tat. Behind the main road, reached by way of a track, is a church of dark stone. It’s not visible from the town. It’s as though they’re ashamed of it.

A railway line runs behind the town and there’s a station which is not abandoned, despite appearances. Trains stop there at uncertain intervals. Once in a while, if the wind is in the right direction, you hear one clattering off along the estuary, upsetting the seagulls. The town is bookended by two small amusement arcades.

I spent a lot of time in the amusement arcades.

There are two chip shops and one general store. On a high promontory overlooking the town there is a war monument. From there, looking down, you can clearly see that Borth is a straight line of a town, that single road running dead level with the shore. Inland, a great expanse of featureless flat land stretches away to the mountains. It’s as though someone decided to try to build a resort on a salt marsh, just to see if it could be done. From this high viewpoint, you can also see the beach.

To get to the beach you have to climb over the sea wall, which is just over six feet high. It’s triangular in cross-section, and slopes at about forty-five degrees to the vertical. There are steps, but most people scramble up the flanks. In the lee of the wall you notice a chilling wind. On the top of the wall, it does its level best to throw you miles inland. Families wrapped in flapping cagoules struggle with chip papers. The beach is of fist-sized pebbles that are uncomfortable to walk, lie, or fall on. Either the tide or the bored populace has arranged the pebbles into large steps. Scrambling inelegantly down them, you come to a foot-wide strip of sand and then the heaving grey sea. Someone’s dog will shake itself dry next to you. Screeching herring gulls flap out of the surf and are whisked away by the wind.

On bank holidays, people come from most of the Midlands to spend a grim couple of hours struggling along the shore. Children unsuccessfully try to spend their pocket money in the shops. At about five, the town empties. The tourists go home. The wind dies down. The pubs do a miserable trade. In the evening, there’s nothing to see in Borth.

We used to go there in the evenings.