Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

  This wasn’t difficult. The student bar had a lone barman, named Sid. He was older than the students and distant in manner. He would strive not to serve people. He would do his best to avoid talking to you.

  ‘Until he gets to know you,’ Olaf once said. ‘Then he still doesn’t talk to you. But at least he knows you.’

  Sid could take a long time to pour a simple pint and girls usually chose more complicated drinks. They’d want mixers and ice; that could take him all night. I sidled closer to Tina, whose name I didn’t know at the time.

  ‘Hello again,’ she said.

  I looked around. She was talking to me. What did she mean, ‘again’?

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Who’s that you’re with? Not one of your crowd. I thought you hung around with a livelier bunch.’

  She looked slightly quizzical. Her features managed to be both heavy and delicate; a neat trick, I thought. I didn’t know what had compelled me to talk to her. Olaf and drink, perhaps. My usual approach was more circumspect. Still, I did know that I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anyone who looked that good.

  ‘You must have me mixed up,’ I said.

  ‘That sounds about right. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘I’ll get you one.’

  ‘That’s a bit old fashioned, isn’t it? I’m allowed to buy the drinks. We’re in the eighties now, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you sure we haven’t met?’

  I said that I was. I’d have remembered her. It wasn’t as though I met many girls. Computers didn’t attract them.

  ‘I’m Tina,’ she said, ‘and as I don’t know you, you’ll need to tell me who you are.’

  ‘Mick Aston,’ I said.

  ‘Are you doing anything tomorrow evening, Mick Aston?’ she asked. I wasn’t. ‘Well, you are now,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  III

  The next night she took me to Aberystwyth to see a film. I was expecting something French and gloomy, but she chose a noisy extravaganza with car chases and guns. She seemed to be watching me as much as the film. Perhaps it was because she was a psychology student, I thought. On the way back to Borth on the night bus, she edged closer to me across the seat.

  ‘Do you think people always have hidden depths?’ she asked. ‘Or is what you see what you get?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you’ve got depths,’ she said. She visibly came to a decision and kissed me, as though she’d been wondering whether to or not. I’d already reached the same decision and left her to it.

  We had a brief affair, and ended up as friends. That’s as good as it gets, I think. Anything longer-term is based on a different emotion. It’s still called love, but it’s another flavour. Our little affair was all over in a month.

  It was obvious early on that we wanted different things from the relationship. I wanted everything. I saw her and became happy.

  She, on the other hand, saw some potential in me. She saw something under the surface. She could see a possible me, and it was him that she was after. He stayed hidden, however. She liked me, but not as much as she liked the version of me that I failed to become.

  She began to cool. I attempted to woo her. It wasn’t something I had a talent for.

  I tried to write poems for her, but they came out lifeless. I couldn’t get words to do anything good. We’d hold hands and walk the four-mile round trip to Borth and back. We slept together in my tiny student bed. I would find her crying from time to time. By the third week, that was all she was doing.

  She told me she was sorry, she’d like to be friends.

  We were friends. I didn’t have an easy time with that. But hope springs eternal, the vicious little bastard.

  IV

  Borth is really not much more than a road by the sea. You approach it by way of a long road that follows the estuary of the river Dyfi. The road winds past the college grounds, a thin strip of swampland, and a golf course. The road goes through the middle of the links, splitting the course into two and providing golfers and motorists alike with an extra hazard. A high sloping wall of grey concrete blocks the view out to sea. There are car parking spaces next to the sea wall. Inland, there are mountains and clouds.

  A large public toilet, which has won awards, stands between the sea wall and the town. The shops all sell the same things; buckets and spades, strange paperbacks, cheap tat. Behind the main road, reached by way of a track, is a church of dark stone. It’s not visible from the town. It’s as though they’re ashamed of it.

  A railway line runs behind the town and there’s a station which is not abandoned, despite appearances. Trains stop there at uncertain intervals. Once in a while, if the wind is in the right direction, you hear one clattering off along the estuary, upsetting the seagulls. The town is bookended by two small amusement arcades.

  I spent a lot of time in the amusement arcades.

  There are two chip shops and one general store. On a high promontory overlooking the town there is a war monument. From there, looking down, you can clearly see that Borth is a straight line of a town, that single road running dead level with the shore. Inland, a great expanse of featureless flat land stretches away to the mountains. It’s as though someone decided to try to build a resort on a salt marsh, just to see if it could be done. From this high viewpoint, you can also see the beach.

  To get to the beach you have to climb over the sea wall, which is just over six feet high. It’s triangular in cross-section, and slopes at about forty-five degrees to the vertical. There are steps, but most people scramble up the flanks. In the lee of the wall you notice a chilling wind. On the top of the wall, it does its level best to throw you miles inland. Families wrapped in flapping cagoules struggle with chip papers. The beach is of fist-sized pebbles that are uncomfortable to walk, lie, or fall on. Either the tide or the bored populace has arranged the pebbles into large steps. Scrambling inelegantly down them, you come to a foot-wide strip of sand and then the heaving grey sea. Someone’s dog will shake itself dry next to you. Screeching herring gulls flap out of the surf and are whisked away by the wind.

  On bank holidays, people come from most of the Midlands to spend a grim couple of hours struggling along the shore. Children unsuccessfully try to spend their pocket money in the shops. At about five, the town empties. The tourists go home. The wind dies down. The pubs do a miserable trade. In the evening, there’s nothing to see in Borth.

  We used to go there in the evenings.

  V

  By midway through our final year, the student bar had lost any attraction it had once had. Instead, I took Tina to the Running Cow. The pubs in Borth were still pubs at the time, and families weren’t welcome. The choice of meals consisted of either cheese or ham baps, individually wrapped in cling film and left out on the bar to die. There was a choice of beer or lager and a small selection of shorts. Tina had half a lager. I had a pint.

  She was wearing black everything. Her hair had been crimped into crinkly submission. In other circumstances, I wouldn’t have found her attractive. In Borth she was the brightest thing around.

  We had decided to be friends. Well, she had decided. I was being friends in case it led back to being lovers, which it doesn’t. Twenty years later we’re still friends.

  ‘How are you for money?’ she asked.

  ‘I can afford a round or two.’

  ‘No, you moron. I mean generally.’

  Well enough, I thought. I was a little way into debt but not so far that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. By all accounts, computer programming would pay more money than I could handle. I’d be a tax exile inside a decade.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just that they’re paying people for research. They want two people.’

  ‘They? Who are they?’

  ‘Psychology. Dr Morrison is after two volunteers and he’s got a research grant. He’s paying a hundred apiece. I’ve volunteered. Which leaves one pl
ace free.’

  ‘What do we have to do?’

  ‘He won’t say. It’d prejudice the results.’

  ‘Maybe it’d prejudice the volunteers.’

  ‘Perhaps it would. Look, Mick, it’s not as though you have anything else to do.’

  ‘Just my course.’

  ‘And how much do you have on at the moment? This is a single afternoon. You won’t miss an afternoon. You can do programming in your sleep.’

  ‘One afternoon? And I get a hundred quid?’

  I didn’t know why I was quibbling. I had already decided to do it. A hundred would buy new games, with maybe some to spare for pens and paper. I could also buy a couple of floppies to save my work onto. The college computers used a variety of floppy disk that I never saw anywhere else, 7¾-inch things with hardly any capacity. Unlike modern floppy disks with their protective plastic covers, these were genuinely floppy. If you waved them in the air they flapped, and you lost all of your data.

  ‘Cash in hand. Money for next to nothing,’ said Tina, still under the impression that I needed persuading. The bar was quiet, as it always was. The locals went to other pubs if they went anywhere at all. Perhaps they all stayed in.

  ‘You’re doing it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll do it. But if he asks me about my mother I’m leaving.’

  She gave me a strange look.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?’ she asked.

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Any niggling worries? Anything on your mind?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ignoring the niggling worry about the ‘just friends’ business. I had got used to ignoring that. The only time it became difficult was when I was trying to go to sleep at night.

  ‘Should there be?’

  ‘Not if you don’t think so.’

  I didn’t think so. We drank our drinks and set out for the walk back to the campus. There was no one out, although I knew that if we scrambled up the sea wall there’d be a few people walking dogs along the hostile beach. There was always someone walking a dog along that beach.

  ‘Let’s walk on the sea wall,’ Tina said suddenly, already well on her way up.

  ‘What for? It’s windy up there.’

  ‘We’ll be able to see more.’

  ‘More Borth. Who wants to see more Borth?’

  ‘Oh come on,’ she said, grabbing my arm and hauling me up after her. ‘Look at the sea. Don’t you want to swim in it? Don’t you just want to throw yourself into the sea?’

  ‘Are you mad? It’s night and it’s cold. There are things in it.’

  ‘Well do you want to cut through the golf course then?’

  What was she getting at? She wasn’t planning to seduce me in a dark corner. We were just friends. We’d both agreed to that except for me.

  ‘What are you on about?’ I asked her.

  ‘Ask me again next week,’ she said, and then, as though it was just a throwaway line:. ‘Did I tell you I’d met somebody?’

  No, she hadn’t. That explained her peculiar mood.

  After that, we had a very quiet walk back.

  VI

  Although I had been at the college for almost three years, I had never been to the third floor until I turned up to earn my quick hundred quid. I had thought about it, and had decided that it couldn’t do any harm. I was surprised to see that the stairs continued on up past the third floor, through a locked grille. Presumably they led to an attic or loft. The doors were numbered. I was after 304. It was eleven in the morning and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Didn’t they have psychologists in Wales? With all of that research material going free? That seemed a terrible waste.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d turn up,’ said Tina, trundling round the corner with an armful of brown folders.

  ‘I’m getting paid for this. We are still getting paid, aren’t we?’

  ‘We are. Don’t worry about the money. Now, lets see if he’s in.’

  She knocked on the door. On the lower floors, the doors had glass panels at head height. Even the door of the server room had one. Up here in the realms of the headshrinkers, the doors were of flimsy but unbroken wood and painted a matte white. She knocked again.

  ‘Come on in,’ said someone. Tina opened the door and bundled me in.

  ‘This is him,’ she said, meaning me.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man in the room. He was a young man, probably no older than twenty, and he was wearing a lab coat. He looked like he might be related or married (or both, this was Borth) to one of the computer technicians from the ground floor.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said in a nervous voice. He gave me a limp, sweaty handshake. It didn’t seem like the sort of contact he was used to. There was a good chance that he wasn’t used to any at all. He had the sort of sparse ginger hair that shows a lot of scalp without the need for total baldness. His eyebrows were invisible unless he stood at the right angle in strong light. His eyes were a watery blue and he did his best to keep them from looking directly at you. When he spoke, he sounded as though he might stutter. He never did, but there was the feeling that he might. He was always fidgeting with the skin around his fingernails, and from time to time he’d absently bite off a stray strip. To do this he’d bend an arm across his face, turning his hand to the necessary angle for auto-cannibalism.

  The top of a black tee-shirt was visible in the V-shaped opening at the throat of his lab coat. There was no writing on it.

  ‘I’m Betts,’ he said, letting go of my hand with evident relief. ‘I’m the technician. The lab technician, I mean. I’ll run you through what we’re about, then Dr Morrison will run through the experiment. It won’t take long. ‘I’ll give you some background first. If that’s alright?’

  We said that it was.

  He told us about some tricks you could do with mirrors.

  THREE

  I

  At the time, the technique was new. One or two progressive European clinics were using it. Dr Morrison was a fan of progressive European techniques.

  ‘What’s it a technique for?’ I asked.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Betts. ‘It can relax the mind. Sometimes it can provoke reactions. It’s all to do with self-image.’

  He went into a spiel about the Self while Tina and I sat at a desk. I didn’t want my Self getting any ideas so I looked out of the window until it was over. It was like being in a lecture, from what I could remember of them.

  ‘You can try this one,’ he said. ‘This one shows you what I mean. Here. Put your hand flat on the table. Palm down. Now, watch this.’

  I had my hand palm down. He ran his index finger along each of my fingers.

  ‘There, you can see what I’m doing and you can feel it. That makes sense to you. Now, keep your hand flat but hold it under the table.’

  I put my hand under the table. He continued to run his right index finger over my hand, but now he kept his left hand on the table, following his right hand. At first it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Someone was tickling my hand and a table. Then he got his hands synchronized. As he touched the back of my index finger – which was out of sight, under the table – with one hand, he touched the same place on the table with the other. Every time he touched me, he also touched the matching place on the table.

  My eyes decided that they knew best, and overrode everything else.

  I lost my hand.

  All of a sudden it wasn’t there. I could see my arm going under the table, but the sensations weren’t coming from there. They were coming from the table. The table felt as though it was part of me.

  ‘Ah,’ said Betts, reclaiming his own hands. ‘There. You’ve remapped. Your hand is mapped to the table. See how easy that was? That’s how it works.’

  ‘Let’s have your hands where we can see them,’ said Tina. I pulled my hand back into view. It didn’t feel quite right. It was numb. I patted it with the other hand and it was normal again.

  ‘It’s sight that doe
s it,’ said Betts. ‘If you mix the signals, give a visual stimulus that doesn’t match a physical stimulus, the body doesn’t know what to do. It can’t interpret the signals. You could see me copying what I was doing under the table with my other hand, and because you could only see that one you mapped the sensation of touch to match the vision. Dr Morrison uses mirrors.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Tina. ‘I could do with a mirror, the rain’s played havoc with my hair.’

  ‘How does this help?’ I asked.

  ‘It sets you apart from yourself,’ Betts explained. ‘It lets you see yourself in a different way, without the body getting in the way. I just went through all that. Weren’t you listening?’

  ‘No he wasn’t,’ said Tina. ‘He was looking out of the window and thinking about arcade games.’

  She was right, as usual.

  ‘It’s better with mirrors,’ said Betts. He became less nervous as he expanded on his subject. ‘We block your view of yourself, and let you see parts of your body reflected. You move your left hand, and see your right hand move. That’s the sort of thing. It disassociates you from yourself.’

  ‘And that’s all I do for the afternoon? And I get paid?’

  ‘It may be distressing. Some people react to it badly. We’re paying you because you might not enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Bring the mirrors on,’ I said.

  ‘Dr Morrison is setting things up. We have to get the line of sight right for your height.’

  ‘How do you know how tall I am?’

  ‘You’re about my height. Maybe a little taller. A touch less than six feet. Your eyes are level with mine. This isn’t rocket science.’

  It didn’t seem like any sort of science. We were going to stand and look at ourselves in strategically placed mirrors.

  ‘Isn’t there a control? You have control subjects in experiments.’

  ‘You’re both control subjects. You’re both going in there, and neither of you will know when you’re the control. It’ll switch between you.’