All of which is factual but doesn’t tell you anything about what makes him tick. “And?”
“And then”—he looks lost for a few seconds, then blinks rapidly—“my mother got lung cancer. Looked like a treatable one at first, but turned nasty—she ended up needing bleeding-edge immune system treatments that hadn’t been approved by NICE, so I paid for them. Sophie kicked in a little as well, but she and Bill had the kids to look after. For a time it looked as if Mum was in remission, but then she caught multidrug-resistant pneumonia, and that was it.”
He shudders a little as you mentally kick yourself for being a prying bitch: It’s not the explanation you were after, but it puts things in perspective. Change the subject, dammit. “Writing games pays that well?”
He stares at his glass. “It pays pretty well. I should consider myself lucky, that’s what Sophie—my sister—keeps telling me. It just doesn’t seem…” He takes another mouthful of beer. “Here, look. This glass. There’s about half a pint in it, right? An optimist: It’s half-full. The pessimist: It’s half-empty. Right now, for the past year, I’ve been looking at a half-empty glass. Then last week my employers poured piss in it. This morning, the fairy godmother at AlfaGuru just handed me a shot of single malt. I’d like to apologize in advance if I look a bit green about the gills, it’s been a hell of a roller-coaster ride.”
Shit. You choose your next words carefully: “The glass isn’t half-empty or half-full. What you’re looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods.”
Jack chuckles. “That’s the finance version, is it?”
“I think so.” You pause. “Is there an engineering one?”
“Let me see.” He stares at the glass. “Yes! It’s quite simple: That’s half a pint, all that’s wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”
“Right.” Your own glass is going down, you notice. “The reenactor’s version: The glass should be made of pigskin and the beer’s historically inauthentic.”
“The police officer’s version—” There’s a maniacal cackling noise from Jack’s pocket. “’Scuse me.” He pulls out his phone. “Yes? Who is—hello?” Pause. “Hello?” Pause. “This isn’t funny,” he says, in an odd tone of voice. “Who are you? What do you want?” Pause. “Hello? Hello?”
He puts the phone down carefully, as if he’s afraid it’ll bite him.
“What was that?” You ask.
“I don’t know.” He picks up his glass and chugs half the content straight down. “Number withheld. If it happens again, I think I need to talk to the police.”
“What?” You stare at him. “Have you got a stalker, or something?”
“I don’t know.” He looks puzzled, now. “It was—it sounded like a school playground, you know? Kids shouting, for about five seconds. Then a voice said, ‘Think of her children,’ and hung up.” Puzzlement is turning into perplexity on his face. Whatever the caller might have thought, Jack clearly doesn’t know what it’s all about. And neither do you, you realize, with a hollow feeling in your guts.
“Any ex-girlfriends?” you ask, trying to keep your tone light.
“Not since Mum got sick.” He twitches and you think, You poor bastard: There’s a nasty little story there, of that you can be sure, but now’s not the time to go digging. “Before you ask, no, I have never been married, and I don’t know any raging bampots of the first water who hang around playgrounds recording…voices…” He trails off.
“What is it?”
“Nah, can’t be happening,” he mumbles to himself. “Nobody’d be crazy enough to try to make me drop this job by threatening Elsie and Mary, would they? Sophie’s daughters,” he adds after a second. “They’d have to be nuts, wouldn’t they?”
You’re gripping the edge of the table way too tight, tense with unwelcome memories that he’s just summoned like spirits from the vasty deep. “I think you’d better report this to the police,” you hear yourself telling him, as if from the other end of a dark tunnel. “Just in case.” And hope to hell that’s all it is, a wrong number, a prank call. Because the alternative isn’t something you want to think about.
JACK: Designs on Your Dungeon
You don’t want to stay in the pub after the poison voice mail and the bitter memories it dredged up, but it’s too early to go home, and you don’t much want to be on your own with nothing else to think about. Besides which, while you’ve had a bellyful of hanging out with folks from work recently, Elaine is different. She’s pretty intimidating in a work context, but right now she seems to want company. She’s an odd mixture of spiky stand-offishness and—Well, maybe she just wants company because she’s suffering from new-city syndrome, right? But you’re inclined to go along with it anyway, for your own reasons.
Before you leave the pub you nervously call the Polis—but they’re deeply uninterested in a terribly bureaucratic kind of way. They take a detailed statement, asking you to spell your name, the name of the pub you were in, the people you were with, your cat’s name, and your mother’s blood group, then they promise to email the phone company a request for their call logs: but due to some quirk of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, as Amended, even though you routinely record all your calls, they can’t actually use it as evidence of anything. “I’ve got your complaint on the system, Mr. Reed, and if it happens again, you just text us on this number, citing this case reference…”
Bastards! Squeaks the mummy lobe, outraged at their unwillingness to enforce the full majesty of the law on your behalf. (After all, every time you’ve had a run-in with them before, they’ve had no trouble enforcing it against you, have they?)
After that, you move on by mutual consent to a less-foreboding venue, a city centre pub with HAPPY HOUR signs and a jukebox and loud after-office revellers getting it on. It’s not fun, exactly, but it beats the alternative. One pint is enough to calm you down again, but it also seems to be enough for Elaine, who is beginning to look twitchy. “Look, I need to be up tomorrow without a hang-over if I’m going to do the face thing with Hayek’s people. How about we call it an evening and you meet me at their offices at nine thirty sharp?” She beams you the address and you stick a push-pin in your phone’s map display.
“Okay, I’ll do that,” you say, stifling a groan at the idea of the up-with-the-larks timing. (It wasn’t like this at LupuSoft: breakfast at noon, so to speak.) “I’ll walk you back to the hotel.” You stand up and hold the door for her, and at the hotel she makes her awkward good-byes and strides through the door. Then the whole thing comes crashing down on your shoulders like a suit woven from slabs of slate. Jesus fuck. The panicky urge to phone Sophie is sudden and nearly irresistible—but then, what if you’re wrong? You don’t want to tear holes in the Potemkin village of her reality. So you decide to play games instead.
It’s zero dark o’clock and you’re coiled up on the futon in your living room like a basket case, goggles glued to your face by a mixture of sweat and determination. Your hands are twitching and spazzing from side to side, and you’re muttering under your breath like an old alkie communing with his invisible pink proboscidean. At least, that’s how it would look to a time-travelling intruder in your wee house who didn’t know what was actually going on—the body adrift in the grip of a weird compulsion while the mind decays inside it. A time-traveller from the 1980s or later might notice the winking LED status lights on the boxes under the flat-screen telly and guess at the significance of the glasses, and from the early nineties onwards they’d stand a good chance of understanding the muse whose arms you dance in: But to a visitor of Wellsian or earlier vintage, it would be wholly incomprehensible other than as some weird display of vile degeneracy.