Games Makers: A London Satire

by Andrew Calcutt

At last, my boat comes in. I saw it first approaching, then leaving Greenland – no, not the barren island but the next Clipper stop, first one to the east of Canary Wharf. And now it’s crossing the river to the pier by the Four Seasons Hotel. Walking on water towards me; to save me. One on each side, two seagulls are its acolytes. What a heavenly boat!

  So close I can hear the onboard instructions: Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving at Canary Wharf. If you are leaving the Clipper, please disembark from the front of the boat. Please have your tickets ready for inspection.

  It scrapes softly along the side of the pier like a car tire riding the curb. Now they lower a tiny little bridge between the boat and the pier –

  ingenious, really. Half a dozen passengers get off and three of us get on. No, there’ll be a few more –

  a late influx of strong, silent types, running down the ramp, across the pier and onto the boat.

  The little bridge is pulled up right behind them. Just in time, lads.

  Short hair, clean cut. White, short-sleeved shirts, matching ties and chunky sports bags. Four of these guys; by the look of them, they’ve arrived direct screen from corporate America. Jocks not geeks, they might be a relay team. Of course, Dinky finally realises, they’ll be from Team USA, the much-heralded, widely-trumpeted, Games-Time occupants of my university campus.

  Sorry, my former university. Keep forgetting I’m not going back.

  So I’m making my way to the back of the boat, still carrying my laptop and that dynamite sports bag. No obstacles, no naked flames, nobody coming the other way. Even better – now I’ve got here, it looks like I’m going to have the rear deck to myself. Standing room and two rows of seats, open to the elements and empty of people. Perfect. Already we’re moving away from the pier. Canary Wharf skyscrapers, lovely old word from the 1920s New World, starting to look like a Mondrian. Docklands Boogie-Woogie. As soon as the boat’s midstream, I can sink the bag containing the acetone peroxide and its toxic ingredients, and drop the case with laptop and camera in it. Over the side, the whole lot. Only a few more seconds, and I shall be released.

  Just then a party of chittering Chinese tourists comes out of the saloon to take pictures of each other. Bloody Hell! I can’t let them see me chucking stuff over. And what if they use a flash? Could it set off the bomb in my bag? It’s not a naked flame, I wouldn’t have thought so. But I don’t fuckin’

  know...!

  Clickety-click, I’m still here, so I guess that’s the answer. They’ve posed and pushed buttons for each other, and now it looks like they’re going back into the saloon, thank God. Such a relief: the boat’s already slowing down to approach Tower Bridge, and normally the tourists can’t get enough of it. I thought I’d be stuck with them until the next stop, Tower, and there’s always a crowd to get on there.

  Wait a minute, through the glass in the saloon door I can see one of the American relay team has been beckoning to the Chinese, calling them back inside.

  I wonder what that’s all about.

  The Yanks are coming! Two doors into the saloon, one on each side of the boat, and there are two jocks bursting through each one. If this is part of their training, I don’t want to be part of it! I start to get up and go but one of them shouts at me in a clipped, Scottish accent: ‘Sit down. Don’t move’.

  Not quite American, then. Now I see that apart from the one doing the talking, shouting, the other three have got guns drawn, pointing at me.

  So they are a team; it’s just a different kind of relay.

  He says I mustn’t move. But I’ve got to do something to get my bag out of their firing line. If they fire, even if a gun goes off by accident, then the bag will blow up, and I don’t know whether it will take the whole boat with it. There’s a boatload of people

  – well, OK, the boat’s not actually loaded with people; but everyone on here, their lives are at risk, I’ve put them at risk, unless I manage to move my bag off the boat.

  But when I do move they are going to shoot me, aren’t they? And they are going to shoot me in the head, dead; because they think I’m a terrorist and they’ve been told that terrorists wear their explosives in vests round their chests. It’s the fashion. Wounding a suicide bomber may allow him to detonate his bomb, that’s what the Met Commissioner said. The policy is to take them out. Completely.

  This second, the split second it takes me to talk to you about the second splitting, does seem to be going on for a very long time. So it might be true, then, what they say about the drowning man. But no, they’re wrong. Truth is I am now looking inside myself and my past life is no longer churning around in there. Blessed relief! There is only this....

  (11) Aftermath