The Fahrenheit Twins (20 page)

Time can now only be measured in the gradual dimming of the motorway lamps. A huge articulated lorry looms out of the distance, slows down, and stops for us just as the last of the motorway lights is petering out. We can’t quite believe it as the lorry approaches, a monstrous filthy thing crawling along in the slow lane with its grid of headlights on dazzling full beam. It comes to a standstill right next to us, a balm of heat and diesel radiating from its greasy undercarriage. The driver’s cabin is so high off the ground we can’t see anyone inside. For a few moments we stand staring.

‘Well, do you want a fucking lift or not?’ a hoarse male voice calls out.

I jolt into action, wresting the cabin door open, trying to lift Tess up onto a metal rung. She slips out of my grasp, climbing like a monkey, leaving me holding her carry bag. I scramble after her, banging a shin in my haste, in my fear that some unknown man is going to drive my daughter away into the dark.

As soon as we’re inside, before I’ve even slammed the door shut, we’re on the move.

‘Thanks,’ I say, suppressing a coughing fit in the thick haze of cigarette smoke.

‘No probs,’ says the driver. He is a giant of a man, like a bodybuilder gone to seed, ugly but mesmerising. His grey hair is slicked with oil, his shovel-shaped face is ruddy and bristled. He keeps his bloodshot eyes on the road as he speaks.

‘Get off of my gear stick,’ he says. Tessa moves her legs closer to mine. We squash together, father and daughter.

‘Where you going?’ he says, as he overtakes two unlit cars. I note that he flips on his indicators while doing this, as if light were in plentiful supply.

‘I … my daughter’s going home to her mother’s. In Keswick.’

‘Where the fuck’s that?’

‘It’s in Cumbria.’

‘I ain’t going to fucking Cumbria. I’m going to the depot.’

‘Where’s the depot?’

‘Carlisle.’

I don’t know what to say, so I say, ‘Fine.’ Carlisle is not a million miles away from where I’m trying to get to, except that I have no idea anymore where I should be heading for. My wife’s house may be hidden in pitch darkness by now. John’s house – my house – may be the same. All I want is to find a little oasis of light where I can get my daughter safely settled.

‘Do you think there’ll be light at the depot?’

‘There fucking better be.’

‘And if there’s not?’

‘I’ll soon get it sorted.’

His self-possession is inspirational, annoying, terrifying, sexy. I want to grab him by the sleeve and ask him to explain please, please, what the hell does he think is happening. But I’m afraid to ask, even politely, in case he says he doesn’t know, in case he suddenly starts weeping and wailing, this big strong man with his arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I want to leave his confidence unchallenged, surrender myself to his agenda, cling to the light he trusts in so blindly.

A wave of nausea passes over me and I realise that I haven’t slept in a long time. Instead, I’ve spent the weekend nights arguing in my lover’s bed, defending the right of humankind to propagate itself. Instead of snoozing the nights away, I’ve been propping my eyes open, begging for a forgiving kiss, inventing preposterous conspiracy theories as to why a perfectly good and popular play should be pulled off the stage after ten performances. If I make it as far as Heather’s house, she’s hardly likely to greet me with pillows and blankets. I tilt my head back and count to ten and beyond.

The driver seems more interested in Tessa than in me. Possibly he has a little daughter too, or happy memories of one.

‘Past your bedtime, eh?’ he smirks out of the side of his mouth.

‘It’s still early,’ says Tess. She is quite capable of reading the time on the glowing dashboard clock.

‘Right enough, right enough,’ says the driver. ‘Where you been, then?’

‘Visiting.’

‘Very good.’

‘My dad’s friend gave me a book.’

‘Very nice.’

‘Can I have the light on?’ she asks, pointing to the switch for the cabin bulb.

He shakes his head.

‘Not while I’m driving. It’s against the law. I could get done for it.’

She folds her arms across her chest, miffed. The three of us sit not speaking for a while, perched on top of the giant motor growling and vibrating through the floor. I look out the window. From my high vantage point, I have a good view of the countryside, especially now that the motorway lamps are all off. To my bewilderment, I can see that there are still houses and buildings, dotted here and there across the benighted landscape, in which lights are glowing just like normal. Every now and then, we drive close by a village or a town, and I can see beacons – a single functioning street light, an illuminated church clock, even a shop sign – shining mysteriously in the almost universal gloom. There seems no logic to it, no reason why.

Our driver is ready for another cigarette. He holds the steering wheel with his elbows while he attempts, unsuccessfully, to strike a match. I reach out my hand, offering to help him, and he shrugs me away. Three matches fall dead on the floor before he gives up and tosses the box over his shoulder. But there is a cigarette lighter in his dashboard, and he uses that. His cigarette tip glows fierce and bright as he sucks hard on the filter.

Tess is fidgeting, slumping, shoring herself up again, sinking towards unconsciousness. Gingerly she rests her cheek on the back of the seat and blinks into the invisible cargo hidden behind a veil of steel mesh.

‘What’s in the back?’ she says.

‘Stuff,’ the driver replies.

‘What stuff?’

‘It’s a secret.’

She sighs and goes to sleep. The driver catches my eye and winks. Then he stretches his back, gyrates his massive shoulders, cracks his knuckles, and settles down to drive us through the night.

MOUSE

He had just leapt through a burning inferno of fire, guns blazing, when the screen went blue. Not funny. Not funny at all. This game was mega difficult, and what it did not need was computer failure.

Manny threw himself backwards in his swivel chair, making it creak. He was hyped-up, sweaty. Playing
Runner
was a high-octane experience. And what was so frustrating about getting ejected like this was that you couldn’t re-start where you’d left off; the entire quest had to begin all over again.

The action figure in this game – the one you animated with your mouse-clicking fingers – was Lena, a beautiful girl trying to escape from a nameless hell-hole in the former Soviet bloc. Hordes of secret police, guard dogs, soldiers and freelance psychopaths did their utmost to stop her reaching freedom. If you took your eyes off the screen for just one second, BLAM! The programmers were total sadists, definitely on the side of evil. Not one of the 60,000 guys playing the game, from Canada to Korea, had ever managed to get Lena across the border.

The extra incentive of
Runner
was that every time Lena got attacked her skimpy clothing got more threadbare. Rips appeared in her T-shirt, shreds were stripped off her trousers. A close shave with a grenade could blow her outer layers right off, reducing her to bra and panties. Obviously, the holy grail was to see Lena butt-naked.

But this was where things got hard.
Runner
was not completely divorced from reality. Lena was athletic, sure, but not superhuman. She got tired, ran slower, got injured. If her brush with an ex-Commie commando or a flame-thrower was too close, she might lose her underwear, but she would also be dead. The challenge was to allow Lena to undergo enough mayhem to get seriously unclothed, but not so much that she was toast and a message came on the screen asking if you wanted to start again.

The best part of
Runner
for Manny was actually those rare quiet moments when Lena was having a rest. You laid her down and kept watch while she recouped energy points. A digital counter at the bottom of the screen would keep track of her robustifying health. She would breathe deep, her bosom rising and falling, her cleavage shiny with realistic sweat. Her big dark eyes would half-close … And then some mad fucker would jump out of nowhere with a bazooka. It was a good thing Lena was equipped with automatic weapons, knives, kung fu skills, and whatever else an Eastern European lassie needs to survive. Manny was getting the hang of her, the way she responded, how far she could leap, how to make her kick and jab. He was determined to get her to the border one day, because that would be the ultimate thrill, plus he would finally be free to do something else.

Manny focused on the blue screen. It was decorated with the ugly white typewriting characteristic of error messages. Some of it said: ‘Generic host processes for win32 services encountered a problem and needed to close. BCCode: d5 BCP1: 00802edo BCP2: 00000002 BCP3: 00804edo OSVer : 5_1_2700 SP: 1_0 Product: 623_1’. Down the bottom there was a cryptic ‘detailed report’ consisting only of: ‘C:\WINDOWS\ Minidump\ Minio17304-01. dmp’. Manny rebooted, and a little box told him that the system had ‘recovered from a serious error’. He jabbed
Runner
’s icon irritably. This was happening far too often. Serious errors fifty times a day. If the system had really ‘recovered’, why couldn’t it just play the damn game?

The
Runner
menu blossomed onto his screen like the opening shot of a movie. Lena stood immobile, all alone in an Eastern-European-style street with cathedrals and monuments silhouetted against the polluted sky. Her Slavic features were impassive. A computerised loop of breeze fluttered the pixels of her glossy brown hair. She had all her clothes on: a bomber jacket, a simple olive-green T-shirt, a short leather skirt. He hadn’t seen her in a skirt before. Each time you played the game, she had different gear on. Her enemies were always different, too. One day you’d get a pack of ravenous wolves, the next a bunch of lesbian-looking stormtroopers with whips and acetylene torches.

READY 2 PLAY?
winked the option panel. He considered it, but was too worried about being interrupted again. Instead, he closed down the game and opened his email program. He dashed off an email to one of his gaming pals in Duluth, Minnesota, whom he’d never met.

hi varez
(he wrote)

help! im having pormblems with minidumps. ive got a 900mhz
amd cpu with 128 ram thats running win xp pro. my virus scanner is
up2date but last week
my firewall was off and i got the msblast. exe
virus. ive manged to get rid of the virus but its fucked up my xp. it
does a minidump 4 no reason, usaully right in the middle of runner.
one second im flying, next second with no warnming the screen goes
blue. i dont know what to do or how to fix it, ive re installed xp 3
times now but no joy. any ideas?

Manny suddenly felt very tired. It was only nine o’clock at night. He had eaten too much pizza maybe. There was no Coke left except the carbonless dregs in about a zillion bottles lying around the flat. An ambulance dragged its lonely siren through the streets outside his tenement building. He walked over to the living room window and looked down three storeys to the grocery store across the road. A Pakistani woman was putting more oranges on a display crate already piled high with oranges. The whole shopfront was like an art exhibition of fruits and vegetables. Manny liked to look at all the exotic colours and shapes, although he wouldn’t dream of buying anything that wasn’t in a packet or a take-away carton.

Manny went for a piss – in the dark, because the lightbulb in the bathroom had blown a while back. While he was standing in the mirrored gloom, hoping that his pee was landing inside the vague white blur of ceramic, he heard a scream.

It came from below, one of the flats on the lower floors. It didn’t sound like a horror movie scream, an axe-murderer-is-gonna-get-me scream. It was more like kind of a yelp. It was definitely female, though. Or maybe it was a child. He hadn’t thought there were any kids in the building.

He went and sat down in front of the computer again. Only a few minutes had passed, too few for Varez to have replied to his email. Even so, he checked. A fresh bunch of spammers offered him cheap meds, hot singles in his area, the latest war games, a surgically enhanced penis, a credit record wiped clean. There was one legitimate email, from Mike, a gaming pal somewhere in Asia. Mike was a dipshit, and ‘Mike’ wasn’t his real name. He pretended to be a serious gamer, but all he wanted was company, the loser. Midget spotty Korean with thick glasses, most likely. ‘
Greetings!
’ Greetings to you too, you sad wanker.

A weird ringing sound jolted Manny half out of his skin. He peered at the PC, wondering what new outrage Bill Gates had sprung on him. But the ringing sound was coming from the hallway. It was the doorbell, a sound he couldn’t recall ever hearing before.

He checked the front of his track suit pants to make sure there weren’t any damp patches, wiped his fuzzy jaw in case the pizza had left traces. Then he walked over and opened the door.