Author’s note: I’ll probably tweak this one more time before adding it to the book but I feel more happy with this version.
GAME START!
Tired of the noise, John looked up from his screen and around the table. Everyone else was looking down. The food hung mid air. The flashes from the TV took back his attention. The presenters were discussing how to stop criminals using social media to plot disturbances and looting shops such as on Oxford Street. John looked to the left at his teenage daughter and immediately worried that she was being influenced by such people. Alice sat there, hunched over her bowl of whateverflakes, with a hand propping up her head as if she was studying a book but her other hand held her American-candybar-sized phone. He restrained himself from reminding her to close her mouth
whenever she was eating but she wasn’t even doing that, she wasn’t really doing anything, just staring at her phone; although her mouth was open, he wasn’t even sure if she was breathing. He thought about the cold glare he would get if he said anything, so he just tried to peek at what was so interesting on her screen. Her thumb swiped something away. As he continued to tilt his head to find a good angle, it was starting to become obvious, so he feigned stretching his neck, which attracted the attention of the other person at the table, his wife, Connie, who dismissed the silliness forthwith and went back to her business.
Further leaning left to a ridiculous degree in order to see what was on her phone, John almost fell off his chair, but he had managed to observe various things whizzing around on the screen. Perhaps that was a dragon, no it was a woman, no it was a man, no it was half human and… Alice could hear the questions in his brow. With a roll of the eyes and a kiss of her teeth, she sat up and pivoted the screen towards him to make sure he didn’t get another look. Then she realised she was facing him, and so, disgusted, she turned away and put the phone on the other side of the cereal bowl, and hunched over again. Meanwhile, John tried to deny everything, inconspicuously rotating his head in the other direction, lighthousing over to the missus, and then faux stretching to compound his innocence. He couldn’t help but pull a duck face, at the same time relieved that he hadn’t met a sub-zero gaze from the resident princess, and sighed through his nose. All this non-verbal expression was distracting, and so Connie had to look up again to check, understand and (pause here for emphasis) ignore, before returning furiously to her scrolling of kawaii kittens, child photos, friends posing in changing rooms and the other such stuff she found absolutely dreadful, but just had to keep up with.
With a few minutes left before having to leave for work, John couldn’t comprehend the gloom at the table, and as he sagely rubbed his unshaven chin, took it in as merely typical life, and accepted his boredom. Connie on the other hand looked radiant, was already tired and deeply unhappy. It was going to be another day of meetings with jittery high profile clients who could tank her career with one ill advised withdrawal of funds. Her phone was already bleating with work related notifications. “Ill advised, my fucking ass”, she muttered to herself, and nobody noticed. She took one last look at the spoon half-full of congealing cereal and reluctantly put it into her mouth. As she chewed and consumed, a croissant rotated in her mind’s eye: perfect, crispy, buttery, divine and yet, much like the devil’s sperm, it would just make her tummy balloon. She chewed; she swallowed that fucking muesli and tried not to grimace. She wanted to stab something, so instead retreated to the solace of scrolling through more automated content featuring baby animals.
With the softest of thuds, Alice put her phone down on the table, and with a finger of toast in a ‘perfect’ hand sign, resumed watching the main screen of the room, as the drone camera relayed footage of looters running from police. She wowed as an officer noticed the camera and moved his knee, pressing down into the shoulder of a struggling young man on the cracked grey pavement. John wiggled in his seat and could spy things continued to swarm and explode on the screen of her phone. This seemed a good opportunity to be helpful.
“It’s still on, Al”, he said, kindly and accidentally not condescendingly as possible.
“I know.” she curtly replied, as if the italics weren’t clear enough.
She sounded like a maths teacher that had just been informed by a pupil that that one plus one equals two. Fuck. Oh well, he thought, and then the familiar voice called out in his head with the letters all in gold sliding in from the left, with confetti and spotlights in the background:
“Here comes a new challenger!”
He just couldn’t resist, and prepared himself for the inevitable struggle.
“So what you up to these days?” He inquired, poking the bear. “A game, is it?”
Her eyes widened a little as the annoyance started to build. “Of course,” she replied, “it’s a game.”
Wait, he had wanted to ask about her life, not the game. Argh.
“Oh? But… you… are you playing it right now?” It was a fair question but it was still annoying because no teenager has time to explain things to parents who don’t understand anything in the first place. She inhaled through her nose.
“Yes, dad,” She replied, her left nasal passage a bit blocked, so the slow exhale through the right was fairly audible. “I’m playing it, it’s on auto.” She hoped this answer would be the end of it. On the contrary, the discussion had lit up an old fire, as he was, deep down in his heart, a gamer, not that he had touched anything since moving in with Connie. His eyes sparkled. An automatic game?
“But you’re not- you- you don’t have to press any buttons?” the concept had indeed rendered him bewildered but he was excited to finally find something to reconnect with her. It had been a few years since they really talked and he just didn’t understand why.
“Dad,” she sighed, “you just set up your squad and press ‘go’.”
He felt like every time he spoke to her, he just revealed how ignorant he was, how he deserved to be shunned, the useless old man of the village who should volunteer to walk out into the dark night to die and save resources, he was the person the rescue boat would choose to leave behind. He used to be a gamer, all this should be obvious to him, but he was having difficulty accepting that his kid would know more than him about it. He didn’t want to argue, but surely he knew some things about gaming that he could share, that he could teach, so he could be cool again, in her eyes. Then again, she was new school. Who knows what had happened in the decade he had been away. At work, it was all about the graphical design, that was his focus, and while he had seen his colleagues show off games on their phones and share videos, he saw it as work, a way to pay the bills. His brain had cordoned off that part that played games and focused just on only making them. He would always turn down an offer to play games, it felt childish and a waste of time. When he got married to Connie, he had become a serious, dependable husband. But now the bills were under control, with salaries that provided enough to go on holiday to perhaps even outside of Europe. Life was ok, and there was a child, okay, a teenager, his disconnected teenager, ready to talk, maybe to play games with him. A new chapter of his beloved family life was potentially beginning.
“Yeah, so,” she said, as she stood up with a sarcastic surprised look on her face. “Gotta go, school, you know.”
He checked his watch.
Fuck.
“I’ll put the stuff in the dishwasher during break, K?” said Alice, in her mother’s direction. Connie looked upwards without actually being able to see her daughter shuffle away. “Alice,” she said, “that’s what you always say.”
Alice had already closed the door, but a muffled noise seemed to promise something, or pleaded, well, at least it didn’t sound negative. Meanwhile, John scrambled to get his stuff into his shoulder bag. Connie got back to scrolling, counting the number of notifications and wondering how many she would have before her day officially began. At least she didn’t have to go into work today.
John bent over to kiss his wife and as she kind of raised her head to give fifty percent of the required kissing area; they kind of smooched, but it was acceptable. They bid each other goodbye like half heartedly pumping a bicycle pump into the air.
He opened the front door of their small apartment in the tower block and stepped out under the new and bright LED corridor light above him. Five of the diodes were already dead. As the lights continued down the hallway, he noticed a small puddle of liquid, and decided to inquire no further. The red front door shut behind him and automatically locked.
Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he started walking. He was going to be late. He had to think of a way to catch up time or make a great excuse. A well known theme from a video game started playing in his head. His left arm tingled, for some reason. He shook it, patted it down, and kept on. In the elevator, there was another puddle of liquid, but he held his breath. This was another game, which would be over if more than two people called the lift on the way down. They lived on the 20th floor, and he had never won this game.
Walking out into the real sunlight, it was, of course, not as bright as the LEDs. The sky was grey, the pavement was grey, his jeans and blazer were grey, his t-shirt was green with a vintage faux damaged retro game logo on it but that was irrelevant as it’s all about conveying the vagueness of living in a swathe of a gentrified area, a sandwich of the dirt poor and the middle class, while the upper class chortled as they collected the rent or visited an art gallery.
As the fairly new yet already graffitied heavy metal train doors closed with a rubberised glomp, John was packed nicely between armpits, but in his head, he was alone with his thoughts. As the train moaned onwards into the oblivion of the tunnels, he suddenly felt annoyed. He tried to not sound like a salaryman about to go mental over a burger advertisement, but it suddenly struck him that while things were stable at home, he wasn’t doing anything particularly stretching with his leisure time, it was mostly watching series after series about relationships. He tried to avoid inhaling deeply to try to avoid the latest virus swirling around in the air. Well, he thought to himself, he wasn’t dead, he should be happy. No, he should be satisfied. His family was healthy and happy. He had sex every so often with a cheeky wank here and there. They were twenty percent through the mortgage. His blood pressure was just a little over average. Work didn’t ask for that much overtime. His network reputation was untarnished (nobody had dug up his past to fling dirt at him for stupid things he had done, yet). Life was ok. Just ok. He had stopped buying things he wanted a long time ago. That was the accepted social sign he was indeed a fortunate one. He should be grateful. But there was an itch, that fire that had never truly been extinguished. Games. Surely it was okay to start playing again. Yes, why yes it was! His eyes narrowed as he reached down inside himself to find something he wanted to play again. Actually, the first thing he would do was find out what Alice was playing and try to connect. Then they could be cool again, smiling, laughing again. Yes, that would be cool. He was looking forward to dinner.
Alice sneezed. Her teacher heard nothing as she was on mute, and as the online lesson dragged on, Alice tried to dwell on how to get out this fucking hellhole called life. However, a notification pulled her attention away to do another quest.