New to Tidelands? Start at the Beginning
Jake arrived, his tousled hair still wet from Saturday morning swim practice, but with the two boys still hogging Chuckie Egg, and Jam’s hospitality reaching its miserly limit, we decamped to the Spar halfway down Jubilee Road for ice pops, and slurped and sucked our way back into town.
“So what will you do this summer?” It was an awkward opening. Four weeks is all it had taken to turn me into a tongue-tied stranger.
Morley afforded me a look of bewildered pity.
“Mapping Sabre Wulf. D&D. Jetpman trailer,” he spelled out with the exaggerated slowness reserved for inattentive toddlers or those at the other cusp of life, and to whom things had already been explained to the point of exhaustion.
Morely: always his surname, even to his parents. Our way of acknowledging his precociousness? The grown-up in him, who’d long put away childish things, never even picked them up, and levelled straight up to adulthood. Not that most adults would see it that way: just a geeky kid, obsessed with silly little sprites on a screen. But most adults didn’t realise what serious things games were.
“Jake?”
“Oh, St Moritz again, probably. Or Montreux. Folks haven’t decided.” The boy-band face crumpled in a look of genuine sadness – that he would rather be home gaming and hanging out with us than skiing – but it was a fleeting shadow, a fast moving cloud across the midday sun, and a moment later he was again his usual solar self.
We were an odd trio, a Venn diagram of overlapping interests and qualities, at the core of which was our mutual dedication to all things Spectrum, the unshared segments took us in disparate directions. In addition to gaming, Morely loved science – last I checked, he works at some CERN-type place. Small and ectomorphic, his beaked nose and hunched posture gave him the air of an imp or underworld creature, stooped with its burden of arcane knowledge and old before its time. The heatwave notwithstanding, he would indeed spend that summer mapping the amulet locations in Ultimate’s Sabre Wulf – only released that July – as well as playing D&D (not something I ever got into, though I tried), and chasing the mythical trailer (a rumoured Easter egg in Ultimate’s Lunar Jetman (1983), and one we now know was a mythic wild goose chase).
In contrast, Jake was athletic, without being bulky; bronzed, blue eyed and fair haired, his mind untroubled as a summer sky. Not that he was stupid or shallow – as with everything else, he excelled at his schoolwork without being prodigious. But I sometimes thought – without malice, but with a kind of wonder – that if scientists ever removed his brain for study, they’d find it completely smooth, without wrinkle or crevice. Everything came easily – sport, schoolwork, money, girls – and he charitably assumed this to be the natural state for everyone else. Though certainly not for me, and especially not poor Morely, Rumpelstiltskin to Jake’s prince, for whom every achievement was a battle, every victory won at great personal cost and attrition. But this naivety was part of Jake’s charm; if he weren’t such a nice guy, we’d both have hated his guts.
Jake’s isolated segment was sport, in which he was destined for high accolade – though, as I was later surprised to learn, not the highest. No Olympic medals or grand slams, no world records, just highly competent overachievement. But perhaps that’s not surprising: the oyster needs grit to make a pearl, and multi-talented though he was, his life had none.
And myself? Even now I struggle to pinpoint my uniqueness; I’ve always defined myself in relation to what I was not. Not as brainy as Morely, but not stupid either; in sport and looks, not as genetically distinguished as Jake, but more so than our gremlin-like companion. A medium, then, a mean. Something there to bridge the gap between otherwise irreconcilable extremes.
Between different worlds.
We bought pasties, cokes and sweets from Antonio’s at the bottom of Jubilee Road before heading into the shopping centre, where Jake went off to check out some Nikes, and Morely and I to see if this month’s Crash magazine was out. After which there remained only the final ritual of sitting on the steps to the mezzanine while we finished our sweets, as Jake basked unconsciously in the adulation of the various females that giggled, nudged and whispered in gaggles dotted around the periphery of the atrium, occasionally sending out scouts to inform him so-and-so fancied him, or someone else had ditched her boyfriend and was now a free agent again. How sweet and innocent all that now feels – or that’s how I choose to remember it, a twee antidote to sexting and lewds, dick pics and Snapchat – or whatever they have now. Not that Morely and I benefited from any overspill from all that attention – in fact, rather the opposite; stood either side of him, our genetic inadequacy casting his superiority in its best light, we were veg to his meat, sidecars to his motorbike, boosters to his rocket – whatever analogy you prefer. He didn’t contrive it that way – didn’t need to. And as I say, he was as artless as they come.
Just blindly following nature’s imperative, I guess.
I made it back to the car eight minutes past curfew – “If you’re late, you can get the bus home. I’m serious, this time!” (she wasn’t) – to find my mother deep in conversation with, it would turn out, some woman she knew from Blubber Club (as I secretly called it), and by the look of it, not doing her much good either.
An annoyed side-eye greeted my tardiness as I sidled into view, but she nonetheless continued chatting for another seven minutes and thirty-two seconds, by my digital stopwatch. Why was punctuality only a requirement for me?
“I’m not going to have chance, now,” she said with a meaningful glower – You’re kidding?! – “so you can drop these bits of shopping up to Old Mrs David when we get back.”
I considered highlighting her temporal hypocrisy, but even I knew better than to bite the hand that was driving me home, had just bought me (judging by the box on the back seat) new cringe-brand trainers she still couldn’t afford, and was about to cook me sausage and chips before heading off to work, so I merely nodded.
OMD lived next to the park – hence the saga of lost balls – in a house that was straight out of Stephen King. Structurally speaking, it was no different to any of the other bungalows that neighboured it, but had been transmogrified by a profusion of extravagant natural growth, and now, sat next to neatly edged lawns and primly trimmed box trees, was an alien infestation threatening to colonise the whole neighbourhood. I opened the rusted gate of ornate ironwork and edged through the riotous tangle of bramble, ivy and fern toward the front door, harried by flies, gnats and wasps. Perhaps she never got many visitors and so saw no reason to upgrade her door technology to anything so welcoming as a knocker or a bell, so I just rapped the peeling woodwork with my knuckles, which resounded dully into the empty-sounding space behind, and waited.
No response.
Was she deaf, now? I knocked again and stepped back, leaned this way and that, squinting through the jungle at the front windows on either side, but which were both veiled with opaque dark curtains.
I knocked again, harder. Waited.
Did I imagine it, or did one of the curtains twitch?
I eased back the age-stiffened hinge of the letter box with my thumb, which gave a begrudging inch, and called through the darkened slit.
“Shopping!”
On release, the letter box snapped back like an ill-tempered terrier.
Fuck this. Did my mother think Atic Atac was going to map itself? I laid the plastic shopping bag against the door, a placatory offering to a malevolent deity, or bait before some creature in its lair, and eerie unease sped my steps back down the path. Back on the street, the gate closed behind me, I chanced a look over my shoulder: the shopping had disappeared.
I hadn’t even heard the door open.
Sabre Wulf was another Ultimate game, as was Lunar Jetman, the sequel to Jetpac, which was their earliest game. The myth surrounding the “Jetpac trailer” was that there was a lunar trailer hidden somewhere in the game, but this was eventually scotched.
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