Games Makers: A London Satire

by Andrew Calcutt

Tony’s at home in his flat near Tower Bridge. Fell asleep with the TV on. More restless than restful.

  Smoke. Dark. Can’t breathe. Is that a light at the far end of the tunnel? And where are the others?

  Y’know, the other people. Sitting in the carriage, how long ago?

  Tony moves forward, inch by inch, holding out his hands for something to hold on to. ‘I wanna hold your ha-a-a-and’. When he does touch something, his fingers recoil. What was that: snail, mouth, wound?

  In bed his legs are bicycling.

  Smoke. Dark. Coming out of the dark and the smoke.

  The train is lifted from under ground, just like that. Coming out of the tunnel, its movement begins to sound different even before the light changes.

  Now Tony is bathed in clear white light.

  All over now. No war no more. City streets decked with bunting. The children sit down at trestle tables. All sticky-out ears and crooked teeth and lovely smiles. The women are smiling, too. You,ve never seen so much smiling.

  ‘When you,re smiling...’

  That,s Tony,s grandmother, there. With the polka dot frock and hair like Jessie Matthews. Who was Jessie Matthews? We were supposed to have liked her during the War, his grandma always said, though I never heard of her till they kept having her on telly.

  But one of their bombers got away. We must blow him out of the sky or there will be children, dead on the ground. Limbless, headless, lifeless. Princes and princesses who will never take the throne.

  (4) Winners and losers