Games Makers: A London Satire

by Andrew Calcutt

‘Right, Dinky, here's the plan.’

  They are at the back, where there’s a roof over their heads but the sides of the boat are open to the elements. Still a maroon sky upriver, where the sun has not long gone down; city lights already twinkling in the darkening east.

  Thames Clipper commuter craft, Woolwich to Waterloo. 9.15pm when Dinky got on at Tower, nobody else there at the back but the two of them.

  Whoomph! And again, whoomph! No, not an explosion or anything like it; just their craft hitting the wash of another boat going the other way, throwing a delightfully cool spray into their hot faces.

  For just that second, it could all be all right.

  Dinky is looking tired now, and restless again. On the phone this afternoon he had sounded so settled, but there's not much left of his earlier resolve.

  Then again, he's having to listen to Tony in full flow. Maybe that's what's getting to him.

  ‘First thing, Dinky, is for you to set up an email account. Any name you like, so long as it sounds Muslim. Then you go to three different shops and you buy three of the essential ingredients for making a bomb: sulphuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, acetone.

  But you don’t buy them all at once from the same place, OK?

  Just a nod from Dinky. Meanwhile Tony’s gestures are getting bigger: ‘OK’ comes with a particularly demonstrative hand movement. Nice and swirly. He sees Dinky looking up at him and he reins in, lowers his voice.

  ‘You’ve got a laptop, right? And a camera?’ Another nod. ‘Well, sorry. They’ll have to be destroyed in the line of duty. But this will see you all right.’

  Tony has an off-white envelope in the palm of his hand. There’s a thousand quid in it.

  Better if no one walked in on them at just this moment, what with Tony handing over an envelope that’s just got to have money in it, or why would they be doing what they are doing and doing it here alone? So hurry up and take it from me, will you? On the other hand, Tony wants Dinky to know there’s a transaction taking place, a contract between them, of sorts, and you could just give me a little sign, girl, boy, whatever you are, to show you know.

  Dinky is quick to respond. ‘I get it,’ he says, looking up at Tony and pocketing the vanilla manila.

  Not to be obliging, mind, but to confirm that, yes, I am going through with it, whatever it is. I am the Dice Man, throwing in my lot with you.

  ‘So you’ve set up the email account, and you’ve got the ingredients. The next thing you do is place them at key sites around Canary Wharf. A different one in each of three places. And photograph them on location. No bomb-making, nothing incriminating like that, OK?’ Doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Don’t worry, baby!’, he declares.

  It actually occurs to Tony to pinch Dinky’s cheeks like people used to do to babies, until he thinks better of it; then he thinks better of thinking better and does it anyway. Dinky wriggles him away...

  ‘Anyway, I digress,’ continues Tony. ‘The next part of your contribution’ – he’s announcing, as if it were a further task in the Generation Game – ‘you upload the pictures from the camera onto your laptop and email them to me from your Fake Sheikh address.

  You can do that using the local wi-fi in Docklands.

  Your computer will roam around looking for the network, right? Wasn’t built in the last century?’

  Dinky nods for him to go on. ‘Then make your way to the jetty at Canary Wharf. Apologies for the tautology,’ he quips.

  Dinky doesn’t catch that one; Tony doesn’t stop for him.

  ‘You get on the Clipper when it comes in – going east or west, doesn’t matter, just get on the first one, and you go to the back where we are now, and when the boat’s midstream, you chuck your bits and pieces over the side – the camera, the computer, ingredients of the bomb that never was. You don’t keep anything that connects you with those pictures, OK?

  ‘Meanwhile, I’m head of the Cultural Olympiad and I’ve just received photographic evidence of bomb-making materials in the vicinity of Canary Wharf.

  Of course I must pass on these pictures to Scotland Yard, without a moment’s delay. And they will take me extremely seriously, because after all, I am the culture czar, and I even have a special password to let them know it is me when I say it is. But just as it is my civic duty to inform the authorities, so it is my public responsibility to communicate this information to the media. Quite legitimately, therefore, I will forward the pictures to you, Dinky Dutta, so that you are the one who gets to break the story.

  ‘In case you’re thinking that they will ask why I passed on these photographs to you, young Mr Dutta, I shall reply that I went quietly to someone relatively unknown in media circles because I didn’t want the pictures being in any way associated with my office. I knew you were highly capable, and as a young graduate in the midst of a youth unemployment crisis, I also thought this could be your big break.’

  Tony couldn’t resist acting out his speech to a putative policeman. ‘With good reason, officer, I can assure you. The young person to whom you refer, is a seriously talented young man who came looking for a job in my office. But it didn’t work out. A few days later, these pictures arrived in my email, and I felt that the public had a right to know about them.

  Well, I didn’t want to put out this material in my official capacity. Not the thing, really. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be accused of favoring any particular journalist by leaking it to one and not others. Then it occurred to me to forward the pictures to young Mr Dutta, and let him get them into the public domain. He knows how to use the new media, I thought. Now he can have his turn at making the Games.’

  Another change of register:

  ‘At which point the story’s all yours, Dinky. Tweet it, blog it, go back to Canary Wharf to report on what the police are doing. You’ll know just where to see them looking, won’t you? Maybe you’ll end up writing a novel about it, who knows? In the meantime, London will have its big story: Police Foil Fiendish Plot. Londoners Keep Watch For Bombers In Their Midst. East London Student Scoops World Media. Multicultural London Saves The Games.’

  Dinky is nodding (he hasn’t been struck dumb, has he? Only you hear of stress doing strange things to people.) Then he gets up and stands by the rail on the starboard side of the boat. Looking back at the Tower of London, lit up like birthday cake. Even Tony must have thought it was a birthday party, or some similar occasion: he’s just snapped Dinky standing there. Tony and his camera phone, I ask you. Not that Dinky’s looking into the lens – don’t think he even knew the picture was being taken; but his profile is unmistakable.

  (11) Tony thinks about insurance 

  Our friend Tony, you will have noticed, is not blessed with the kind of personality that goes with thinking carefully and logically about a whole series actions and consequences. That level of forward thinking just doesn’t come readily to him.

  Making contact with one person, putting said person in contact with another person, and lining them up to participate in some project or other, preferably with Tony near the top of an unspoken hierarchy –

  being a broker is just fine for Tony. But the point about all that, is that there is no decisive point.

  No outright consequences, for good or ill. The project simply trundles on for as long people want it to, and then they invent a new one.

  But now, Dear Boy, what we are getting into now, is of a different order, isn’t it? People can get into big trouble just pretending to be terrorists. And if any of our people were to be caught at the wrong moment, when nobody knows it’s just make-believe, when the whole point of this game is that everybody else takes it for real -

  well, the consequences would be dire.

  Bet you don’t know exactly why you took the picture, Tony, but it’s good you’ve got that photo of Dinky on your phone. You might need some patter to go with it one day, perhaps along the following lines (somewhat different from the lines
you recently spelled out for Dinky’s benefit):

  ‘He’s been pestering me, officer. Couldn’t call it stalking, exactly, and I’m not the sort to bring charges unless absolutely necessary, but I snatched’ - no, too much - ‘I took this picture of him after he accosted me one evening on the Thames Clipper. I thought I ought to have...I considered it advisable to identify him after he pestered my secretary and tried to sell me a madcap scheme to dupe the media about an Olympic bomb scare.’

  OK, enough of the scriptwriting. Let’s get down to brass tacks. There are two people who know what’s been going on in your mind, Tony. One of them is Dinky: he’s bright, but could easily pass for strung out, unbalanced, even slightly deranged. You can’t trust him, but there’s no reason why anyone else would, either. Not difficult to cast doubt on anything he says. You can discredit him, if you need to.

  But the other person you’ve been speaking to recently is the person who arrived at this idea even before you did. Which means he knows your mind  better than you do; and if he suspects anything, his suspicions will carry much more weight.

  Supposing something happens more-or-less the way you and Pete were talking about it, he’ll know it’s you. Straightaway, he’ll know. But would he say?

  Will he tell on you and stitch you up? Probably not.

  But you don’t know for sure, do you?

  Seemed same as ever, Pete, but you never can tell.

  When the two of you were out on the town, there was plenty of performing going on, wasn’t there? And you don’t know diddly about the other performances that Pete is working on these days. Home, family, job. You can’t be sure what he’d do, Tony, unless you look him straight in the eye. And even then....

  Doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Better just get round there and speak to him, find a way to lean on him if you can.

  On the other hand, Tony, you could, you should leave it. Turn tail – no, it's not even that. All you have to do is walk away.

  You have a home. Okay, so right now the fridge is filthy and the cooker looks like it’s never left the showroom. But there is a life you can have. Someone will have your kids, Tony. Bear your children, O Patriarch. If you would only take the trouble to ask. Politely, affectionately, with all the love you are capable of.

  Not that Tony speaks to himself like this.

  He won’t, so we are having to do it for him.

  He knows, though. That there is a way out. That he could stop trying so desperately hard. Here he comes now, walking out of his office towards the minicab that’s waiting for him, his face tight with tension. So tight he’s waggling his jaw and gurning like a gargoyle. Not such a poster boy now, eh Tony?

  Never say never, but he never, never will.

  Tony’s whole life has hinged on him being the hinge. The centre of attraction. And, yes, Tony is as vain as that. But there is more to this than vanity; or, if that’s what you insist on calling it, then there is more to his vanity than mere self-regard.

  Tony wants, craves, he is addicted to being the point of articulation between people; but the further point is, many of them really would have remained inarticulate if he hadn’t performed for them. If he didn’t perform on their behalf. And he knows this. After so many years with their eyes turned towards him and their breath on his face, how could he not?

  Like a drunk with a story to tell. Another drink, another story, and they really are good, his stories, Tony Skance will keep coming back. The odds are impossible: one man against a whole architecture of small mindedness, and here's Tony (Heeeeeere’s Tony!), trying to construct the shared experience that will hold our lives together. That will hold us together in our lives. That will stop us all spilling out into...nothing much.

  Desperate, desperate man.

  (12) The sort of man Tony’s doing it for