New to Tidelands? Start at the Beginning
The Sheep had been the start of The Dreams. Which I would now gladly put down to my pubescent brain processing the hormonal mayhem coursing through my overwrought adolescent nervous system – were it not for everything else that was about to happen.
And besides, none of them appeared to “process” anything, and resulted in no useful outcome. For while Kekulé dreamt the ring structure of the benzene molecule, and Paul McCartney the melody to “Yesterday”, I was presented with a slew of unsettling and increasingly bizarre nighttime tableaux that served no other purpose than to leave me sweating and terrified, staring panicked into the darkness, and wondering whether I could wake my mother on the pretext that I thought I’d heard someone trying the back door.
And why “processing”, anyway? Computers, a by-product of the vogue for all things microchip; as if, not content with the overproduction of machines destined years hence to moulder away in attics, charity shops and landfills, we also had to repurpose their surplus terminology. At least our GP had the sense to phrase it in more human terms – if not more clearly.
“He’s just … working through some stuff, Mrs Lazenby. It’s his age.”
“And what about the sleepwalking?”
Ah, yes, I haven’t mentioned that, have I? One time she found me outside the shop at 3am, 32p clutched in my freezing fist, stood waiting for it to open in nothing but my PJs and slippers.
“Yes, that’s not … uncommon either, for a boy of his … May I ask?” Doctor Meredith fiddled with his click-top biro and his eyes flashed briefly toward me. “Is he …” Click. Click. “… active?”
“Well, I try to get him outside, but you know what these boys are like. TV. Computer games. Comics. It’s all they care about.”
Dr Meredith gave a pained smile. “Yes, yes, of course. But I meant, Mrs Lazenby, is he … has he…” Click. Click. “… as Hippocrates puts it, fiat amica manus?”
A piece of Latin which, judging by her expression, was as Greek to my mother as it was to me.
“Let the hand be a friend?” he translated. Then to himself, “Or was it Martial…?”
Good God, I think if a sinkhole had opened up beneath the three of us, none of us would have complained one bit – except perhaps to request a separate sinkhole each, for otherwise we’d all still be trapped in the same one, having the same nightmare conversation, while my doctor mined his classical education for a fitting euphemism for masturbation.
But the dreams continued.
Having exhausted The Sheep, they moved on to other motifs. In one sequence I was Spiderman, trapped by Madame Web (but wasn’t she supposed to be a goodie?), my tethered limbs splayed apart like a sacrificial victim, while an ominous but curiously lulling presence out in the shadows edged stealthily closer. In another, giant ants had invaded our house, and I was trying to protect my mother, ushering her up onto the dining room table (“But I’ve just cleaned it!”) while I fenced at their snapping mandibles armed only with a wooden spoon, and I would look down to see that I was kitted out in a kitsch little pink dress, my hair done up with a matching bow, which I couldn’t take off in front of my mother, obviously, but I couldn’t fight the ants dressed like this, and all the while the photo of my dead dad in the hallway shouting at me to be a man, and the snapping ants getting closer, until waking to find I’d wet the bed was almost a relief.
And then came the jazz mag.
After which, though I hadn’t thought it possible, The Dreams levelled up.
I was back at the park, behind the fenced-off tennis courts, determined to face The Thing In The Plastic Bag. It was nighttime, deserted, though I could see fine, for everything was suffused with a pale blue wash of moonlight, including the bag itself, which as it lay there more resembled something organic, a huge and weirdly shaped mushroom. Tentatively I opened it, and took out the magazine: and there she was, not-Ella-Fitzgerald, but not completely human either, for her invitingly parted legs had multiplied – were multiplying, before my eyes, interweaving and entwining, like the tangle of bramble in OMD’s garden brought to animated fleshy life, spreading across the pages as they unfolded by themselves, out and out, and the magazine spilling down and along the ground, driven on by some internal life of its own.
“Of course,” said Dr Meredith. “Exercise might help. Or even some sort of purposive activity.” Click. Click-click. “Have you thought of finding him a summer job?”
“It’s not fucking out yet, you imbecile.” If Jam had possessed email, I would long ago have been consigned to his spam folder. “And probably never will be.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Or if it does come out, it’ll be crap. Nothing can live up to that amount of hype.”
Now school had officially finished, I could pester him at my leisure. But maybe he was right. The buzz around Sabotage had been building for over a year, full-page ads in all the computer magazines across all platforms, but there was still no release date, nor even any real indication of what the game would be about, just a white page and the title in some intriguingly sci-fi-like font. And who were Arcosoft anyway? They hadn’t produced a single game to date, and Crash magazine had already bust a bollock trying to find out more about them, to no avail. But nothing sells like mystique; I was hooked. And with my mother offering to take me into town for “an ice cream or something?”, it didn’t hurt to check up on any news as to the game’s progress en route.
A car horn sounded from outside.
“Off you fuck, now, little sponge monkey,” Jam announced to the shop. “Mummy’s calling.”
I scowled and trudged out, past two sniggering boys playing Alex Higgins’ World of Snooker (Amsoft, 1984) on the new Amstrad CPC 464, and back into the car waiting outside.
“What’s the rush?” I asked her.
“Don’t want our ice creams to melt!”
The ones we hadn’t even bought yet.
We parked up by the pier, a doddery Victorian edifice of curlicued wrought iron and slimy wooden planks, bought two cornets of ice cream (“a 99 – but no flake,” for my mum – a pointless concession to Blubber Club – and pistachio, strawberry, flake, rainbow sprinkles, and caramel sauce for me), and we walked along the seafront.
“So did they have your game?”
“Not out yet.”
“They’re taking their time, aren’t they?”
She looked at her watch, as if this bore some indication of the delay.
“Mm.”
We ducked as two scrapping seagulls hurtled past like battling X-wing fighters, locked in combat over what might have been a rat carcass.
Her specific interest was surprising – she barely registered my enthusiasms, beyond their generic categories and the impact they had on her purse. In fact, it was her inattention – her assumption that it didn’t matter which particular comic she picked up on her way home from work – that had become a source of friction: an issue that culminated with Superman weakened by kryptonite at the mercy of Lex Luthor would be succeeded the next week by Conan the Cimmerian’s surly wanderings of the deserts of Luxur; and his magical enslavement at the hands of Akivasha the Vampire Queen would be followed by Bruce Banner hitch-hiking down the road, fleeing the scene of yet another Hulk rampage.
“It’s whatever Smiths have left by the time I get there, Freddy, I’m sorry.”
“But I can’t follow the stories!”
“Well, I wouldn’t call them that.”
We continued our stroll along the seafront, which the time (the morning of the first Monday of the school holidays) and the weather (already shaping up to be too hot, judging by my mother’s armpits) had made a stage for a slew of youthful activities: roller-skaters and bikers, kids in t-shirts and shorts, someone with a dog and a frisbee.
But something didn’t feel right.
“Can we get a dog?”
My mother looked at her watch again, then lifted her eyebrows and shrugged.
“We’ll see.”
And right then I was on full alert. She would never get a dog, not under any circumstances (“And who would look after it, Freddy? Who would feed it? Walk it? Pick up its … pick up after it? Not you, let me tell you!”). And the ice cream, its armageddon of toppings passing without comment, the accommodating visit to Jam-i-Soft, the weirdly specific sudden interest in my gaming life, all combined with the constant watch-monitoring and low-key urgency.
She was up to something.
And surely enough, at her ushering – “I’ve just got to drop something off” – we turned away from the promenade and crossed the road onto Carmine Street.
“What?”
“Mm?”
“What have you got to drop off?”
“Oh, just…”
We stopped before two large black iron gates, through which I could see a long, well-tended driveway sloping up to a large sandstone Georgian house. My mum pressed a switch on a little intercom.
“Mrs Lazenby?” she announced uncertainly.
At which there was a little click, and the gates purred open. Neat! At least, it would have been, were not my anxiety churning the ice cream in my stomach to a bilious gurgle.
“Mum? What is this?”
“Ooh, this is really nice, isn’t it? Are those…? Do you think they’re the original windows?”
Like I gave a fuck about architecture, then or now, but she was stalling, and next up was how lovely the geraniums looked, and should we get some geraniums for our garden, and what colour should they be. By which time we had arrived at the house itself, and were walking under the porticoed porch and into reception – for that’s what it was – past a standalone sign to the right of the doors which read Seaview Meadows Retirement Home.
“Ooh, what lovely wallpaper! Now I can see that in our hallway!”
At which point I was seriously contemplating a little redecorating myself, and wondering which patch of carpet would most benefit from a pistachio, strawberry, caramel and rainbow-sprinkle makeover.
For – my gut had realised – what she was dropping off was me.
Chemist Friedrich August Kekulé did in fact claim to have dreamt the ring-like structure of the benzene molecule, though there is some debate about whether he was serious.
Paul McCartney dreamt the melody to yesterday, and it was so familiar, that he was convinced he’d unconsciously plagiarised it.
“Fiat Amica Manus”: Although the Roman poet Martial had a lot to say about masturbation and other sexual activities, it seems that the phrase does not originate either with him or the Greek father of medicine Hippocrates, but with the anonymous Latin poem the Priapeia (where “friend” means “girlfriend”). But from here, it became a common medieval euphemism for the act of Onan. Snigger.
Sabotage (the Spectrum game) is loosely inspired by Psyclapse and Bandersnatch, two much hyped games by Imagine Software that never materialised (and the advertising costs for which would eventually bankrupt the company). The latter was (deliberately) also chosen for the interactive episode of Black Mirror. Anyway, if you fancy a rather entertaining cautionary tale about Imagine, and the whole debacle, check out this video.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.