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?
Chapter Two
Brian and Jack were off walking in the Cotswolds on Saturday. Tim ventured down to their front door in the vain hope that his Domain of the Undead entry had got in with their letters, because the postman couldn’t be bothered to climb the wooden steps.
Brian, in his tweed breeches with little straps and buckles below the knee, and thick socks like red drainpipes, opened the door briskly.
‘No, sorry, old lad, nothing.’ His beard was mixed up with the neck of his rugged sweater. ‘Going to the Cotswolds,’ he said stoutly, as if it were Kathmandu. ‘Want to come with us?’
‘On no – no thanks.’ He must have asked only because he thought Tim would say no.
‘Got something better to do?’ Brian’s eyes were like pale wet pebbles. His eyebrows, which grew upwards instead of sideways, were made of the same thick, soft hair as his beard. ‘Another time, then.’
‘Thanks. I mean, thanks.’
Tim would never be able to keep up with them. Even in the doorway in his socks, Brian already exuded fresh air and racing clouds and great waxed boots that were in charge of feet rather than worn by them. When he shut the door, it was as if the inside of the house were outdoors, and Tim on the porch were shut stuffily indoors.
In the afternoon, Tim went round to Gareth’s house in Rydale Road that ran uphill to the modern Catholic church with a girder for a spire. The house was near the top, with a view of what was left of the old town, and the new blocks and the factory estate and the slate roofs feeding down in jumbled steps to the life-blood artery of the motorway.
Gareth opened the door, looking as if he had just got up from lying underneath his brother’s van. Tim regretted his clean sweater and jeans.
Gareth, who was taller and broader than Tim, scanned him with narrowed eyes. ‘We didn’t think you was coming.’
‘You said yesterday. You said you’d have a game this afternoon.’
‘Well, we didn’t think you’d come.’
The other two boys were already there, Sean tall and skinny with a raw red area round his mouth and nostrils, Neil squat and pasty, like one of the underground trolls he always brought into the games.
They were their usual uninspiring selves. Gareth was a bit sullen, biting his nails and eating crisps at the same time. To show them who was top dog, after the grudging welcome, Tim created for himself the character of a feared and fearful riot leader, sponsored by a mage. ‘Like Merlin and King Arthur,’ he explained to the blank faces which passed for cynicism with Gareth and Sean. Troglodyte Neil was under the table, looking for the dice. He ought to stay there.
The game was terrific. Chaos and anarchy ruled the world, as it spun dizzyingly out of sync with the galaxies, and cannoned into moons to cause avalanches and fountains of red-hot lava, like a Channel ferry restaurant-bar on a rough crossing.
Tim’s character Tohubo rampaged about the stricken landscape, destroying and terrorizing with his enchanted scimitar, before which
men and monsters quailed, Webster’s department store toppled, Mr D. collapsed into an empty bladder, and humanoids with the faces of Tim’s sister Valerie scuttled back into the yawning earthquake fissures that had spewed them.
‘I am thy inescapable fate,’ he told Gareth, who had put himself in the front row of the rock throwers on top of the cliff, just as he would be at a football match.
‘Who … are … you?’ droned Gareth, like a child reading its first book.
‘The imperishable Tohubo – come down, bastardly gullion! I challenge you to a duel of wits under the Carcadian rules.’
‘You what?’ Neil said, and Gareth tortured his brows and fingernails in what was supposed to be thinking. It was agony, waiting for them to figure out their next moves, but they were the only adventure players Tim knew, and you couldn’t exactly go up to people in the street and say, ‘I know this fascinating way of spending two or three hours.’
‘I bloody well drop this bloody rock on top of you,’ Gareth chanted, ‘an’ then, while your stupid head’s pinned down and squashed, I chop you with that axe I got.’
‘Can’t do that.’ Sean was referee. ‘You lost all your weapon points.’
‘Who says? I still gotta axe and a long butcher’s knife.’
‘The rules say.’
‘Sod the rules. I dismembered him.’ Gareth was into hack and slash. It was the only way he knew to play the game.
‘Perfidious swine!’ Tim was enjoying himself too much to be wiped out. ‘My spirit is unquelled!’
He saw himself, standing, head thrown back and legs apart, hurling a challenge at the sheer cliff, and all the voices of the great heroic ages rushing past him on the howling wind.
‘My magnetic field deflects your paltry rock, and I will live to see thee damned!’
‘Knock it off, for Christ’s sake.’ Gareth and Sean rolled their eyes. Neil was trying to puzzle out what he was supposed to be doing.
Gareth’s older brother, in full black leather, opened the door, said, ‘Jesus!’ and slammed out again.
Tim felt great, but the boys were fed up with him. They argued grumpily about whether Tim was dead or not, and when he proved by points that he still survived, Gareth said, ‘I’ve had enough of it anyway. Stupid kid’s game,’ and leaned his powerful torso over the table and messed up the papers, and the little dwarfs and gnomes that Neil had scattered about.
‘Why can’t we –’ Tim asked, as himself. As Tohubo, he would have been able to declare, ‘We’ll finish!’
‘Since you ask,’ Gareth said obligingly, ‘because you spoiled it.’
He jerked his chin at Tim and stuck out his lower lip. ‘You’re weird, you know. When I’m twenty-three, I won’t be doing this kind of stuff.’
‘No – you’ll be out hacking real people,’ Tim said brilliantly, and left.
Outside the front door, Gareth’s brother was doing something to the engine of his van. He straightened up and stared Tim out of the gate. Tim turned right and walked casually for a few yards, squaring his shoulders under Tohubo’s invincible armour, then sneaked a look back to see Gareth’s brother bent over the van again, and ran off down the hill.
It was too early to go to Rawley, where his parents lived. If he got there while it was still light, his father would expect him to go out to the workshop shed and hold the end of something, or sand a bit of boring wood. Tim went into the town and weaved his way through the shopping precinct, where women with double pushchairs charged him like charioteers, to the cathedral. It was a fairly famous Norman pile which attracted quite a few visitors, but not in the cold weather. It was almost as cold inside as out, because there were not enough winter visitors to justify heating it properly.
Pocket Pickups did not list cathedrals as places to meet girls. Tim made his traditional tour, with his hands in his pockets because he had left his gloves at home. Up the left side, behind the altar where the wedge-shaped chapels were fitted into the apse like pieces of cold pie, down the other aisle, to look into the ornate cage where Sir Leonard and his stone lady lay, side by side, both raised on one elbow as if they were expecting breakfast in bed. Then a side trip to the north-door transept, since it was not fair to come in here without at least acknowledging the eternal presence of the suffering Christ, waiting for the world to straighten itself out, so that He could come down from the cross and go about His business.
Tim sat down on the narrow bench opposite the mysterious figure, and relaxed the guard that he had put up against the knowledge of having made an idiot of himself at Gareth’s house. Weird, Gareth had said, with mean eyes, his fat, wet lip sucking what he thought was a moustache. But Tim was right and they were wrong. They were the idiots. Trouble was, they didn’t know it.
It was a very old and treasured crucifix: the wood paled to silver-grey and intriguingly worm-eaten, the mournful tilted face pitted like acne, the sad folds of the loincloth. He was always draped, on any crucifix. You could never see what He had. Did He suffer that little problem too, along with all his other burdens?
Tim spread his arms along the back of the bench, straightened out his legs and crossed his feet. He dropped his head and tried to feel the flaming agony of the wounds, the thrust of rusty nails through skin and flesh and ligament, crushing bone, and the dead weight of his body hanging there.
Footsteps came down the aisle behind him. He straightened up and put his hands in his lap, rubbing his palms to convince himself that he had felt the wounds. Two women walked past the end of the bench. One of them stopped and looked up at the crucifix, and the scarred wooden eyes looked blankly down at her. If Tim were up there on the cross, his living eyes would meet the woman’s upturned face, and she would nod to herself: Yes, that’s him.
She lowered her head. Turn it to the right, then, away from the pitted corpse, and see on the bench the living man. If he held out his hands and blood dripped from them, would she kneel in tears before the stigmata? She walked on after the other woman.
Tim got up and went to the back of the cathedral and out of the low exit beside the main door. Still a bit early, so he went into a coffee bar.
‘See the stunning blonde at the counter?’ In the world of Pocket Pickups, girls on their own were always stunning or smashing, although if they really were, they wouldn’t be alone. ‘The stool next to her is empty. Sit on it. Order what you want confidently (cappuccino is classy). Ask her to pass the sugar.’
There were no stools at the counter. Tim took his tea and Bath bun to an empty table. ‘She is sitting alone at a table for two. Ask her if she’s waiting for someone. If it’s no, you say, “Mind if I …” and sit opposite her. If she doesn’t look up, say something, anything, ask her about the book she’s reading.’ Pocket Pickups girls were always reading. Real girls were not, but if they were, it would take more nerve than Tim had to interrupt.
Read any good books lately? Read Pocket Pickups?
More people came in, and an elderly man with a wobbly mauve lump on his cheek brought his cup of tea to Tim’s table, slopping it over the biscuits in the saucer. Tim went to the counter and got him some more biscuits, the sort of gesture the man would not forget.
I met this delightful young man in the Coffeepot. Best sort of type. Pity they aren’t all like that.
Fetching the biscuits gave Tim the licence to talk. Because the man saw him as helpful, Tim told him that he was a psychiatric nurse in a London hospital, and elaborated briefly on the work and the dedication involved.
‘I admire that,’ the man said. ‘Couldn’t do it myself, but it takes all kinds.’
Tim felt restored. He forgot the eye-rolling and carping of Gareth and Sean, and remembered only the exhilaration of being Tohubo. It was like picking one coin up from a counter and leaving another behind. This was the great trick to life. He had the secret of the universe, if anyone cared to learn. Select your own memories. Throw away what hurts.
His mother was in the kitchen, waddling pluckily about among the preparations for
one of her enormous meals. Her knees had become silted up with arthritis, but her arms and hands were fully functioning. She stumped the awkward distances between stove and sink and refrigerator with her knees straight and her legs rather wide apart, like artificial ones, mashing potato and slicing vegetables and making rich gravy as zestfully as she had done all Tim’s life.
Tim’s sister Sarah was in the house, but she was up in her room, so he sat at the kitchen table with a beer, because his mother would not let him help. He told her about his week, with a few added attractions to stop her saying, ‘I worry about you,’ and she told him one of her tall tales about a deliveryman who she imagined was a disgraced financier.
Tim was happy to let it wash over him, but he could not be bothered to join in with her speculations about whether the man had escaped from prison and stolen the van, or was working to atone. When Tim was a child with no sense of himself, he had shared all this with her eagerly. Now her endless romances about other people were boring and irrelevant. Let people invent their own dramas and dreams. The true romances were only about the self.
The back door opened wide on the cold evening air, and remained open while Tim’s father bent over on the step and coughed as if he had swallowed a hedgehog.
‘Come in and shut the door,’ his wife said.
No one sympathized with Wallace’s cough, since he was not prepared to give up smoking just to please his family and the doctor. No one told Wallace Kendall what to do. In his powerful days as Clerk of the Works for the Town Council, he had told everybody else what to do. Why should he change with retirement?
He came into the kitchen and banged the door hard enough to bring one of Annie’s silly little texts off its nail. KISS THE COOK. It lay on the floor and he stepped over it.
Enchantment Page 2