Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 23

Of course, that wasn’t the last I saw of him. One Saturday a few weeks later I was at home filling in job applications. That wasn’t the most fun you could have on a Saturday, even in Dudley, but it was something I needed to do. I’d passed my training courses and I had gained new qualifications and I thought that my salary should reflect all that. I was working for a small software house with offices on the Merry Hill site. They thought that my salary was good enough, or at least as good as it was going to get.

This is why I was filling in job applications. I had qualifications and experience. I should have been able to get into a higher wage band. Perhaps I’d be able to afford to move out of Dudley.

I don’t know many people in Dudley. I got a flat there because it was cheap and there seemed to be a lot of programming jobs in the West Midlands, which had just caught on to the idea that making chains and nails wasn’t going to bring in much wealth. It was close enough to Birmingham to commute. I had a theory that local industry was going to renew itself, but it didn’t. It just got older and more tired. It managed to let go of thirteenth-century jobs – making nails and chains – but never managed to make the leap past the industrial revolution.

As I said, I don’t know many people in Dudley. I had friends in other places. I still saw Tina. She’d moved into a cottage in Bewdley, along with her husband Roger. I liked him, although I didn’t know him well. She’d kept her maiden name, which helped me to pretend that she was still single and therefore available. I’d go and see them once or twice a week and we’d have a meal or go to a pub.

I’d rather have been in a pub just then. The job application forms were giving me a bad time. I couldn’t see why they asked so many extraneous questions. Each form was the size of a first novel, too thick to skim through in case you missed anything but too thin to pay full whack for. They all wanted the answers hand-written so that they could get someone to analyse your script and make sure that you weren’t a rapist or a bed-wetter. They wanted to know what other interests you had. I only had other interests. I had no interest at all in filling in forms.

My attention was wandering. I had sworn an oath to myself not to switch my PC on and start playing games instead of doing anything useful.

I turned the PC on. Handwriting was something that had been left behind in the days of chain-making. I would have a quick game of something and then get back to work. I could cope with that. I had self-discipline. I also had writer’s cramp.

I had a shareware game called Wolfenstein 3D. In it, you played a prisoner in a Nazi castle. It was in 3D, as the name suggested. You looked down the barrel of a gun and walked around, and you killed everything that moved. If you sent off fifteen dollars, you’d get more of the game. I didn’t have any dollars. In Dudley they used pounds, or bartering.

I would just have a quick run through a level or two, I thought.

Two hours later, the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone, Dermot least of all. Still, it wasn’t entirely a surprise when I opened the door and found him there.

‘This your place then? Bit of a mess. What is all this shit? Are you going to get me a cup of tea or what?’

He was already past me and sitting on the sofa, shuffling my job applications to one side.

‘After another job? It’s all fucking go in the software world. What’s those magazines, porn?’

They were computer magazines, mostly about games but with a couple of grown-up ones thrown in.

‘You can’t get any good games on computers,’ he said. ‘You want to get a Megadrive or something. I’ve got a Megadrive, smashing thing. Where’s your computer then?’

It was in the bedroom, on a small table next to the bed. It was a 486DX, whizzy for the time. It was still running Wolfenstein 3D.

‘What’s this?’ Dermot asked.

‘It’s a 486,’ I told him.

‘Not the fucking computer you dickhead. What’s the game?’

‘Wolfenstein. It’s a free one.’

‘You’re fucking joking. They’re giving this away?’

‘Only the first part. You have to pay to get the rest of it.’

‘Where’ve you had it from?’

‘Off a magazine. They have disks on the covers.’

‘How do you work it? Where’s the controller?’

I showed him the keys to use and he took over. He was a little outfaced by the keyboard, but soon learned the game-player’s way around it: ignore all of the ones with letters on.

‘I haven’t seen that tea yet,’ he said. ‘Is this that virtual reality, then? Is this what it’s like?’

It would be another five years before it turned out that virtual reality hadn’t been the next big thing after all.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘In virtual reality you wear goggles. They project an image into each lens, and you see it in real 3D. And they use motion sensors, so when you move in real life you move in the virtual world.’

‘So this is what?’

‘There isn’t a name for it yet.’

‘They can name it after me then. Dermot reality. That’s what this is. I know it isn’t the real world. Because if it was the real world I’d have had a cup of fucking tea.’

I made him a cup of tea. He couldn’t control the game one-handed, so he looked around the flat while he drank it.

‘Fucking hell, mate,’ he said. ‘What is all this shit? Don’t you ever throw anything away?’

I didn’t, as it happened. The flat was crowded with old clothes, old magazines, books, CDs, and old vinyl albums. I didn’t like to throw anything away. I always had the feeling that it’d turn out to be useful sooner or later. I still listened to some of the records. I might reread some of the books.

‘I might have to get one of these. How much do they go for?’ he asked, back at the keyboard.

‘You’d get one for twelve hundred.’

‘Fucking hell, they’re paying you too much. I don’t know what you’re filling in job applications for. You’ve got a good enough job now. I can’t afford twelve hundred for a fucking computer. You coming out?’

‘Where?’

‘See the sights of Dudley. And bring a coat, it’s fucking cold out there.’