Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 24

We went for a walk through Dudley. The market was doing a roaring trade despite not selling anything you’d want to buy. The Merry Hill centre had opened a few miles away, a shiny mall with all of the shops you needed. Dudley had competed by curling up and dying. The strange thing was, Dudley was still crowded on Saturdays. What shops there were, were packed. People gathered around the market stalls, picking up tea towels and misprinted greetings cards.

‘What are they all after?’ Dermot asked. ‘What do they come here for? I mean, I came here to see you and that’s hardly the most important thing I could be doing with my day.’

‘How did you know where I lived?’

‘You told me, you piss-head. You were drunk at the time. I said I’d come round. Are there any real shops here?’

‘Not as such. They’re all closing.’

‘So what are this lot buying? Scotch fucking mist?’

I shrugged.

‘We’ve got two choices then. As I see it. We can walk around looking at this fucking market all afternoon, or we can go to the pub. They still have pubs here don’t they? Or, third choice, we can go in the amusements. I’d like to see what amuses these weird fuckers. Public executions? Badger baiting? So, pub or amusements?’

‘It’s a bit early for the pubs.’

‘Oh, let’s not wake the poor sleepy fuckers up, shall we? It’s only half past eleven and they’re still in bed. Shipleys it is then. How much money have you got? Well there’s a cashpoint over there look, get yourself another twenty. Call it thirty. Amusements don’t come cheap these days.’

There was a small queue at the cashpoint, headed by a woman who didn’t know which way up her card went. The machine kept rejecting it. She’d look at it, and put it in the wrong way up again.

Dermot had long since got bored and gone into the amusement arcade by the time I got some money. I found him by the video games, which were at the back. There was a booth containing a middle-aged woman, who looked to be the same one that had been in the booth in Borth thirteen years earlier. There was a machine that gave change in exchange for coins and notes, except for all bank notes and most coins. Those it rejected.

There were rows of fruit machines, now mostly in software. One or two still only cost five pence a play and paid out in pocket money. Most took twenty pence pieces and had alleged jackpots around the fifteen pound mark. A handful of young men walked around the machines, clocking the reels, shaking handfuls of loose change. There were small tinfoil ashtrays resting on every level surface.

The video games were much larger than they used to be. They had appendages: steering wheels, guns, skis, periscopes.

You didn’t have to go out to play video games any more. You could play them at home. Video games had to do more work to get any attention at all, like old pop stars. Hence the guns and steering wheels.

‘Check them out,’ said Dermot. ‘See why they’re called Space Invaders? Because they’re taking up half the fucking space. Give it another six years and these fuckers will be playing each other.’

He picked on the machine with the largest gun.

‘Stick a couple of quid in then,’ he said. ‘Let’s mow down a few innocent bystanders.’