Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 22

That’s why I don’t like mirrors. I don’t trust them. The small man might have been something I imagined, if Tina and Betts hadn’t seen him too. He might have come from the mountains, or the mist, and not the mirror at all. I didn’t care. It was mirrors that I became afraid of, and many years later Dermot had somehow picked up on that.

In the toilet of the club, Dermot let me off the hook.

‘More drinks,’ he said. ‘You need more drinks and less mirrors. Check out the decor in this place. Fucking wild. It’s like a Bronx alleyway down here. It’s like a working men’s club. They still have working men round here? Not that sort of city any more, is it. None of them are. Come on then.’

He led me back to the bar. ‘Now, drinks. What are we having?’

Pints and chasers, he decided. He saw a machine in a dark corner.

‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Bargain. That’s a Joust. Where have they been keeping that then? There are kids in here younger than that machine.’

He called the barman over and exchanged notes for coins.

‘I used to be good at this,’ he said, leading the way to the machine. ‘You’re a programmer, right? That’s what you said you did. Can you program things like this?’

‘I do business stuff,’ I said. ‘Databases.’

‘Fucking wild, that must be a riot. Well take the controls then, you’re that guy over there. That’s a life you’ve lost, put the fucking drinks down and pay attention.’

He was staring through the screen. I was reminded of the man who’d turned up from nowhere and ruined that experiment, but Dermot looked nothing like him. He didn’t feel like him, either. Dermot was merely cheerfully unbalanced, not alien.

He was a lot better at Joust than I was. I was in the low hand-eye co-ordination stage of drunkenness and I couldn’t focus properly.

‘Oi, watch that one. That fucking one,’ he’d say as I missed the bad guys completely. ‘You always this hopeless?’

I had to keep paying for extra lives just to keep up with him. His score was absurd, pinball-table high with half a yard of trailing zeroes. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking two drinks and he was still beating me.

‘King of video games, that’s me. Can’t play pool, can’t play darts, but give me one of these things and that’s me sorted.’

Finally he lost the last of his lives, and entered his name in the high-score table.

‘Right then. That’s that done. Now, let’s get ourselves something to eat, I’m fucking starving. They still have curries in Birmingham don’t they? Fucking must do. Cheers then boss,’ he said to the bouncers on the way out. They watched us make our way along Broad Street.

We couldn’t get a curry, because it was only four in the afternoon and nowhere was open. In the end we got lukewarm burgers at New Street station while I waited for a train that went my way. Commuters went the long way around us. The station concourse felt like a toilet, all grimy white tiles and headachy echoes. Dermot helped me onto the train when it turned up. The last I saw of him he was running along the platform, following the train as it pulled out, only stopping where the platform sloped down into the sooty Birmingham undergrowth alongside the tracks.