Enchantment (2 page)

He was really too old for these games, of course, but they spoke to him in a language he could enjoy. He had learned quickly, and he threw himself under the skin of all kinds of bizarre characters, living the exploits and complicated predicaments they created as they went along with even more gusto than the boys.

That had been part of the trouble. Because he studied the magazines devoted to this fantastic cult, Tim knew how the games should be played, with props like blood splashes and little plastic model mutants, and legendary dialogue to match, which Neil and Gareth and Sean thought was stupid.

Tim was twenty-three and they were about sixteen. He bought new adventure programmes for them, but they never really let him into their group. When they stopped meeting round Brian's kitchen table and arranged the games at Sean's or Gareth's place (Neil's mother would not let him bring friends home), they did not invite Tim unless they needed an extra, and so he had taken up games by mail, and sod the boys.

Dozens of unseen players might be involved in each play-by-mail game. You knew about them through their role names and could send messages to them through the office of C.P. Games, who master-minded each adventure. Even if you always sent in your entry sheets promptly, the C.P. office, or the post office, usually kept you waiting for the next round. C.P. stood for Carrier Pigeon. A real bird might have been quicker. Last month, the postmen had gone in for industrial inaction just when Blch/Tim had found his way into the noxious lair of Putressa the festerwoman and was desperate to know if he had slain her, or rescued the mummy's child, or escaped with wounds that would not heal.

Anticipation of the answer added excitement to life, but the higher you let your hopes go, the deeper the let-down, as with most things in life. This evening's empty rubber mat announced that great expectations brought great disappointments.

‘Expect the absolute bottom worst, then whatever you get is a bonus,' his sister Sarah had said, and she should know.

Tim opened two packets of crisps. He was very hungry. He was always hungry, but he never put on weight. He turned on the television and watched it for a while without the sound before he turned it off. He could hear Jack and Brian's voices raised from below. They didn't half go at each other sometimes, but they seemed to get on all right. One of them shouted and the other laughed. They weren't homos. Jack had a woman friend at work, and Tim had glimpsed Brian's girl friend once or twice at the house: no looker, but a great head of bright yellow hair. The men were just friends, who lived in this house together.

It would be difficult to have to cater to the moods and habits of another man. Tim was better off alone. But he was lonely. His flat was built under the roof of the house, so the side walls sloped to the ceiling, embellished by dormer windows at the front and back, with low wide sills. He sat on the front window-sill and watched the unremitting cars and vans and buses, and the people walking home to the high flats opposite, or taking out dogs, or jogging on the lighted cement paths of the little park.

If he had a dog … he would have to work only part time, or live with someone, or ask a neighbour to let the dog out. He would walk it in the dog-wrecked park at the side of the flats, wear a track suit, hurl sticks, throw out a matey remark to other people with dogs.

The telephone rang. He turned round quickly, as if the ring were a tap on the shoulder.

‘Yes?' His sister Val said his phone-answering voice sounded as if he were in hiding. ‘Oh – how are you, Mum?'

‘I'm all right.' She always said that, although she could do almost nothing now without a lot of pain. ‘It's how are
you
, I'm wondering about. You never ring us.'

‘I haven't had any news.'

‘Who wants news? I get too much of that already. Your father suspects you've had your phone cut off. So I'm ringing to prove him wrong.'

‘Well done, Mum.'

‘And to say I've got a lovely ham, so you must come and have a good dinner. Potatoes, corn, cauliflower cheese, sprouts. Bread and butter pudding or treacle tart?'

‘Both.'

‘Are you working this Saturday?'

‘Let's see, er –' He had every other Saturday off. This was one of them. ‘Yes, I'm afraid I am.' In the shopping centre in the maze of red brick streets behind this house, he had bumped into Gareth, buying cigarettes. Gareth's brief grunts had grudgingly indicated that they might be playing
Anarchy II
at his house. Might. Might not. It wasn't exactly an invitation, but he might not get another.

‘Supper, then.' His mother's voice always sounded so light and hopeful, although she was half crippled with arthritis and married to a man known as Little Hitler to one and all at the Council offices. ‘We'll have it cold.'

‘What?'

‘The ham.' She paused. ‘Unless you've got something else planned, Tim?'

Actually I'm going out with this girl.

It was easy to lie, and pointless. The family either saw through it, or were not impressed anyway.

‘No, I'd like to come.'

‘Don't feel you've got to.' She was so undemanding, it killed you. ‘I mean I don't want you to get like Gwen Ingles. She pops in. It's awful having to leave the door open, but I can't get up quick enough to answer the bell.

‘“I'm worn out,” Gwen tells Sidney, “but I'd better look in on poor Annie.” And he says, “You never stop, do you Gwen, I don't know what the neighbourhood would do without you.”'

Tim laughed, to show he appreciated her imitation of David Ingles mumbling over his jigsaw.

‘He hates her secretly, you see.' His mother's voice speeded up with relish. She was getting into one of her sagas. ‘He spends five eighths of his day plotting how to get rid of her without being
caught. When that case was in the papers last week about the sleeping tablets, he got the idea of keeping Gwen up late, talking and worrying her about money, and then telling her, you see, that he was worried she was having bad nights.'

‘Ha ha. Oh, come on, Mum.' Ever since Tim could remember, her great indulgence had been to weave imaginary stories about people, known or unknown. As a child, he had loved it, much more than his sisters, and had joined in or even started her off.

‘See that man in the field, Mum? He's going to steal milk from the cows.'

‘Of course.' An eager swallow of saliva. ‘Because his wife has left him with all these children and she took the money that was stuffed inside the sofa cushion …'

Since he grew up, it had become harder to play her game. He pretended, because it was oxygen and calories to her, especially now that her life was so limited.

‘See you Saturday evening, then. Bye, Mum.'

‘I love you, son.'

He turned on his radio to see whether there was a voice he knew, and walked up and down the room with it, like kids did with bigger ones in the street.

Paces the room, they would say downstairs. Back and forth like a caged lion grieving for its mate.

He sat down with the radio in his lap, and looked at it dully, while it told him about a play on in London that nobody liked. Thanks for letting me know.

The radio was much more companionable than television, where the people were in their own world and speaking to the camera, not to you. When you saw people on television, it was obvious you didn't know them, but voices you heard on the radio, you could make up faces to go with them, and imagine that you knew them.

He recognized most of the news readers, who greeted him at different times of day. He liked Mary Gordon, the Scottish girl who read news in the evening and sometimes did interviews: ‘If I may just ask you this …', very gentle, smiling. She would have
soft, fleshy arms on either side of the studio microphone, rounded at the elbows.

Mary Gordon was one of the special people, men and women, that Tim collected to keep him going.

When his supper was ready at last, he heated a tin of beans – they prevented heart attacks in pigs, he had read – and poured another beer into a glass, because the German mug was too difficult when you were eating, and he was going to start working his way through a Willard Freeman book while he had his meal.

Willard Freeman was one of his current specials. He wrote brilliant solo adventure game books. This one was set in the fifteenth century, with a lot of antique period detail of clothes and food and weapons and whatever else Willard knew about, which was plenty, to catch you up in the feel of it. The reader played Varth the Vagabond, fighting and tricking his way through plagues and hooded assassins and mad monks and tidal waves and all the rest of it to reach the last secret chamber within a chamber within a chamber at the core of the giant nautilus shell, where snakes with fangs of wolves guarded the shimmering goblet of gold that would save the peasants from starvation.

Playing alone, you threw the dice to determine the character and powers of Varth, and the various magic spells and weapons that you would gain or lose as you charged and blundered through the murky medieval landscape.

The book was divided into brief numbered sections. Each gave you another set of choices: ‘If you think you will reach the ruined chapel by climbing the rocks, go to 114. If you'd rather swim the river, go to 8. If you want to fight the horned beasts, go to 263.'

The trick was to try to outguess the crafty Willard, who dragged you through a maze of false clues and bewildering decisions that could block your way or finish you off, so that you had to go back to the beginning and throw the dice again for a new version of Varth.

While his shepherd's pie cooled and his mouth was full of baked beans, Tim was variously hacked to death, drowned, pushed off a precipice, stricken with the Black Death.

‘Better luck next time,' commented the great Willard Freeman.

Tim finished the pie and ate an apple and a huge piece of cheese, after cutting off the green and black edges. Perhaps dying nobly for Willard was enough. He could not be bothered to keep starting the book again, but resourceful vagabond Varth, ragged and handsomely hirsute in the bold illustrations, had quite a hold on his spirit, so Tim let him cheat a bit, which a man of his rough background would do. He picked his own power numbers instead of rolling the dice, flipped through the book and marked and avoided all the sections that led to ‘Bad luck!' or ‘That's the end of you, chum!', won all the fights and thumping sessions illegally, and spiralled round the echoing caverns of the nautilus on his second mug of tea to slay the snakes and reach section 149: ‘O valiant Varth! The Goblet of Gold is yours!'

Saviour of my oppressed people. Tim shook himself out of Varth, the rough feel and the smell of him and the strong, flat belly muscles, and apologized to Willard Freeman.

‘Sorry about that.'

But Willard wouldn't mind. Everybody cheated over the game books. The quicker you got through them, the more you would buy.

It was nine thirty. On some desolate evenings, it would be too easy to crawl into the cave of sleep at a child's bedtime, so Tim had set a routine of not making his sofa into a bed until ten o'clock. Popping nuts and raisins into his mouth like a chimpanzee, he read some of the book his youngest sister Sarah had lent him. The rather ordinary person in it had a considerable sex life. Did Sarah think it would stimulate Tim into storming down to the pub to pick up a woman? Did she think it would make him feel that perhaps he too …?

What did it make him feel? He had not been with a girl for two years, and then it was only Kathy, and a bit of a mess, since what little they had managed to do had not been worth the chance of her husband finding out. What you haven't got, you don't miss. He certainly did not miss the worry and bother of it, and the lies. Not
good lies that enhanced life, but sneaky, silly lies that women forced on you.

Love me?

Why not Thursday?

Why can't we go there? No one will see us, and George would never believe it anyway.

Of you?

Or of you. Look, Tim, if you don't want to go on with it, just say so.

In the end, Kathy had said so. That left Tim with no one. Lusty Varth the Vagabond, if there had been any sex in Willard Freeman's adventure books, could have made away with any wench he wanted. Tim couldn't.

He put Sarah's book away in a drawer, and took the cover and cushions off his sofa bed. He put on his pyjamas, and stuffed his shirt and pants into the plastic bag at the bottom of the cupboard.

He would take his washing to his mother's machine on Saturday. No, he wouldn't. The book he had bought through an advertisement in one of his adventure game magazines told him that laundrettes were likely places to pick up girls. The laundrette in the shopping centre never seemed to have anyone but run-down widowers and overburdened mothers, but you should never abandon the search,
Pocket Pickups
said. ‘Try going at different times of day. Go at night if they're open late.'

In bed, he could not sleep. He lay on his back and made pictures in the narrow frame of street light on the ceiling, and worried about not being able to get up in time to allow for the buses being full. This spring, perhaps he would get a bike. Silver, with handlebars like ram's horns.
Pocket Pickups
said that a man with a bicycle was erotic. He would wear his cap back to front, and snake through the slow traffic. He would probably get killed.

He called on dreams to blot him out. He slept, but surfaced again, wide awake.

He got up. The heating was off. In the first hours after midnight, before the lorries started, Tim put out the light and sat on the
window-sill in the dark-blue dressing-gown that still smelled of his father, and spied on the few cars coming home from parties, late shifts, dinners, robberies, drug orgies: men and women passing below where he sat.

How did they know, driving so innocently down there on the road, that they were not passing through the sights of a rifle, resting on the sill?