‘You’re happy like that?’ asked Tina, incredulous.
‘I can make worlds,’ I told her. ‘I can do without the missing bits of my personality. They’ll come with me. Of course I’m fucking happy like this. This is playtime, all the time. If I’m two-dimensional, so be it. Come on then, you two. I’ll sort a car out.’
‘So long as this one isn’t orange,’ said Dermot.
The thing shyly held my hand.
We left Tina and Roger in Borth college. I haven’t seen either of them since.
TWENTY-THREE
I
The car I created to go home in wasn’t orange. It was enormous and had some strange controls – microwave guns, radar, pulse laser – but it was a quiet shade of blue, and as we drove home it didn’t pick up any more attention than the Meriden 733t had.
‘Do you want to pick up your car?’ I asked Dermot.
‘I’ll go back for it,’ he said. ‘They won’t have touched it yet.’
He turned to look at the thing, which was sitting up in the back seat with its face against the glass.
‘You sure you want to take that back with us? Only it might not like the West Midlands. I mean, I don’t like them much myself. And I fucking live there.’
‘He’s been there before,’ I told him. ‘He lives there too.’
‘Oh?’
‘Oh.’
Of course he did. I should have known that. Where else would he have gone? Just created, and with my memories, where else would he have gone? He was unable to speak, true, but he could write. He’d have tried to hitch, and then have ended up sneaking rides on lorries.
He’d have followed the route I followed, that being the only way he’d have known. He’d have gone to Machynleth, then on back to Newtown. On the hill outside town, he’d have waited for a lorry heading back to the Midlands, and he’d have been standing next to the sign I’d seen from Dermot’s 733t on the way to Borth. The sign that read:
NEWTOWN
Twinned with
LES HERBIES
Like I said, he could write.
II
Did I want to live in a fantasy world? Yes, of course I did. Me and the rest of the world. The alternatives were worse. Here is one alternative, one that I don’t have a lot of trouble imagining:
Tina was understandably miffed that I’d – indirectly, as she thought – caused the death of Trish Newton. Tina and Roger were psychologists, and we know that psychology experiments are eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty.
So, what if they had been doing another experiment altogether? What if – for example, just for the sake of argument – they’d decided to kill me off in a way that’d give them a good case study?
In the mid eighties, cows began to have a bad time of it.
Tina used to cook meals for me.
Tina and Roger were always inviting me round, feeding me strange patés and pastes, freakish terrines, gristly pies.
A fantasy world is better than that version of things, which would also explain all of the known facts. Here is another version of reality: perhaps I’m now in a bed, unable to control my movements, unable to see or speak, inventing all of this as I go along. I could have been made that way by something composed of eight parts cruelty and two parts bluff.
I’ll stick with the fantasy world, thank you very much.
III
‘You’re older than you pretend to be,’ I told Dermot as we passed the Newtown sign on our way home. I saw him clock it, and knew that he’d worked out where our silent friend had got his name from.
‘How old would that be?’
‘The first song you ever heard was “Hobby For A Day”,’ I told him.
‘Good song,’ he said. ‘You can get it on CD, you know. It’s on a punk compilation.’
‘But that wasn’t the first time we met, was it?’
‘Nope. I came to your house when you were a kid. You made me up. You wanted a friend and pop, there I was. You made a kitten too. Didn’t look right.’
‘It was orange. I remember that.’
‘Then your mother comes home and you put us back inside your head. And it’s fucking untidy in there, I can tell you.’
‘And I didn’t see you again until I really wanted something. If I really want something, I can get it.’
‘You really wanted her not to be pregnant. You got drunk, you got upset, and you got me out of your head again and turned me loose.’
‘You got in the car with her.’
‘You told me to. You made me, then told me to get in the car and wait for her. You told me to make it look like an accident. It fucking hurt, I can tell you that. I’m not real in your sense of the word, but it was a mess in that car. I had to heal myself when I got out. And then you just forgot about me. Charming.’
‘I forgot about me, too. It was the guilt.’
‘That or the contents of half the bars on the fucking peninsula.’
‘Whatever.’
‘And then that pair of amateur shrinks tried to sort you out with their stupid modern techniques. And the cheeky fuckers thought I turned up later. I’m the original.’
He looked at Les, who was drooling slightly.
‘Which bit of you did he used to be?’
‘Sarcasm? Bad manners? I don’t know.’
‘I like him. We can use him to scare old ladies.’
‘We need him. He’s the only one of us in proper employment.’
‘His round then. Do they do a breakfast at the Slipped Disc?’
‘They do in my world.’
‘Breakfast it is then,’ he said. I put my foot down and Wales became a blur. We crossed back into England as the sun came up. Dermot cheered. Our silent friend put a hand between the seats and gave us a thumbs-up.
EPILOGUE:
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
I still live in Dudley, thanks for asking. I share a flat with Dermot and of course Les. Les now has columns in several dailies and one of the weekend glossies. He also ghosts columns for celebs who have columns but no vocab. He brings in a lot of money. Dermot does odd jobs for low wages. I don’t work. After all, two parts of me are working more or less full time. I did make some money, though. Those old Your Sinclair magazines turned out to be worth a lot after all. A collector wanted the full set, and I had the full set.
Dermot sometimes lets me use the PC.
Roger and Tina are – as far as I know – still living in their overpriced little pretend world, bathed in an amber glow, drinking middling-good wine and watching out for floods from Wales.
Betts left Bright Harvest under a cloud following a break-in by a group of protesters. Police caught the protesters and convinced them to explain all.
The protesters claimed that a month ago they’d been standing about, peacefully waving banners, doing no harm, and suddenly something had happened.
They were sketchy about the event. Some said they’d been hypnotised. Others said that they’d been gassed. They all agreed that they’d suffered the illusion that they were two-dimensional figures, projected onto plywood.
They’d gone to their various homes, alarmed and upset.
They’d been afraid, and that had led to anger.
They’d regrouped and, after a month of preparation, stormed the building.
The guards had tried to prevent them, using the very latest crowd-control methods, which were based on research carried out in the building.
Something had thrown a spanner in the works. The new methods were unsuccessful. Months of research were invalidated. Four guinea pigs were liberated.
Betts now works at a small college somewhere in Wales.
Greg, Bob, Grant and Spot now live in a nice little house by the seaside. The exact location is secret. They have plenty of hay and are well supplied with foodstuffs. They are still confused or alarmed by everything they encounter, but are nonetheless always chirpy and cheerful. Their owners look after them well, and every now and then they are visited by a cat, which is
very friendly, not quite in the right dimensions, and perhaps too bright a shade of orange.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: My agent, Annette Green; my editors, Sarah and Chris, for explaining to me how many days there were in a week (seven, by the way); and to everyone who reads this bit.
If you enjoyed Execution Plan, check out Seeing the Wires.
Blackly humorous first novel in Magnus Mills mode. Even in Dudley, ritual murder is frowned upon.
Sam Haynes is 30, but he’s lived a lot of life. Though you wouldn’t think so to look at him now. He works for the local council leading a team which doesn’t want to be led. And he only has one close friend – Jack, a man obsessed with body piercing. They drink the evenings by, discuss failed relationships, watch the puddles fill in the gutters outside. The usual existence in dynamic Dudley, West Midlands.
He and Jack have a shared history. Problem is, they don’t quite agree on what it is. One night, after a particularly drunken party, Jack tells Sam that ten years ago they murdered five people in some bizarre teenage ritual attempt to turn back time. Naturally Sam doesn’t believe him. He doesn’t remember any of this. How could he, if it never happened? He couldn’t even squash an ant without deep feelings of guilt, let alone cold-bloodedly kill someone. Let alone cold-bloodedly kill five!
He knows this as well as he knows the numbers of fingers on his own hands. Until the bones turn up at the bottom of the garden…
Buy the ebook here
About the Author
All his life, PATRICK THOMPSON has been inspired by the rolling landscape of tarmac, low-rise concrete slabs and bread queues that is Dudley. He has written for as long as he can remember. His first novel, Seeing the Wires, was published in 2002: Execution Plan is his second.
Also by the Author
Seeing the Wires
About the Publisher
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